Chinese Wisdom Alive : Vignettes of Life-Thinking [1 ed.] 9781617280214, 9781608768714

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Copyright © 2010. Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Chinese Wisdom Alive : Vignettes of Life-Thinking, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2010. Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Chinese Wisdom Alive : Vignettes of Life-Thinking, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

FOCUS ON CIVILIZATIONS AND CULTURES

CHINESE WISDOM ALIVE: VIGNETTES OF LIFE-THINKING

Copyright © 2010. Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

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Chinese Wisdom Alive : Vignettes of Life-Thinking, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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Chinese Wisdom Alive: Vignettes of LifeThinking Kuang-ming Wu 2010. ISBN: 978-1-60876-871-4 Cultural Understanding in EFL Reading in Argentina Melina Porto 2010. ISBN: 978-1-61668-318-4 Cultural Understanding in EFL Reading in Argentina Melina Porto 2010. ISBN: 978-1-61668-832-5 (E-book) A (Mis)reading of Kurt Vonnegut Said Mentak 2010. ISBN: 978-1-61668-595-9 A (Mis)reading of Kurt Vonnegut Said Mentak 2010. ISBN: 978-1-61728-087-0 (E-book)

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Chinese Wisdom Alive : Vignettes of Life-Thinking, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

FOCUS ON CIVILIZATIONS AND CULTURES

CHINESE WISDOM ALIVE: VIGNETTES OF LIFE-THINKING

Copyright © 2010. Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

KUANG-MING WU

Nova Science Publishers, Inc. New York

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Copyright © 2010 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means: electronic, electrostatic, magnetic, tape, mechanical photocopying, recording or otherwise without the written permission of the Publisher. For permission to use material from this book please contact us: Telephone 631-231-7269; Fax 631-231-8175 Web Site: http://www.novapublishers.com NOTICE TO THE READER The Publisher has taken reasonable care in the preparation of this book, but makes no expressed or implied warranty of any kind and assumes no responsibility for any errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for incidental or consequential damages in connection with or arising out of information contained in this book. The Publisher shall not be liable for any special, consequential, or exemplary damages resulting, in whole or in part, from the readers‘ use of, or reliance upon, this material. Any parts of this book based on government reports are so indicated and copyright is claimed for those parts to the extent applicable to compilations of such works.

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Independent verification should be sought for any data, advice or recommendations contained in this book. In addition, no responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage to persons or property arising from any methods, products, instructions, ideas or otherwise contained in this publication. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information with regard to the subject matter covered herein. It is sold with the clear understanding that the Publisher is not engaged in rendering legal or any other professional services. If legal or any other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent person should be sought. FROM A DECLARATION OF PARTICIPANTS JOINTLY ADOPTED BY A COMMITTEE OF THE AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION AND A COMMITTEE OF PUBLISHERS. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Wu, Kuang-ming. Chinese wisdom alive : vignettes of life-thinking / Kuang-ming Wu. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-1-61728-021-4 (Ebook) 1. Philosophy, Chinese. I. Title. B5231.W8158 2009 181'.11--dc22 2009051572

Published by Nova Science Publishers, Inc.  New York

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CONTENTS Abstract

ix

Preface

xi

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Part I: Dot-Vignettes in Cosmos-Pondering Chapter 1

Chinese Wisdom as Expressive

1

Chapter 2

Chinese Wisdom as Imperative

25

Chapter 3

Chinese Wisdom as Performative

35

Chapter 4

Chinese Wisdom as the Always 經, 常 Weighing 權, 衡 InterAdjusting

51

Chapter 5

Chinese Wisdom as Joy

65

Chapter 6

Chinese Wisdom in Sad Predicament

71

Chapter 7

Chinese Wisdom in Indirection

75

Chapter 8

Right-In-Situ (宜 I2) as Right (義 I4)

83

Chapter 9

Heaven in Chinese Wisdom

89

Chapter 10

Translation and Description in Chinese Wisdom

93

Chapter 11

Chinese Wisdom as Knowledge Subtle-Inexpressible

99

Chapter 12

Tao And Heaven in Chinese Wisdom

103

Part II: Story-Thinking in Music-Reasoning Chapter 13

Eight Cautions

119

Chapter 14

―Knowing‖ in China

131

Chapter 15

Web-Thinking

141

Chapter 16

China‘s Pivotal Classics, their Hermeneutics Today

153

Chapter 17

A Surprising Sketch of Confucianism

159

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Contents

vi Chapter 18

A Negative Example, What Our Elucidation is Not

163

Chapter 19

Kierkegaard and Chuang Tzu in the Comic

171

Chapter 20

Emptiness (Blank, Suffering, Common, Vulgar)

175

Chapter 21

Story-Literature the Classics

179

Chapter 22

Chinese Culture 文化 as Literature-and-History 文史

181

Chapter 23

Concrete Thinking

183

Chapter 24

Contradiction as Actuality-Trailing

199

Chapter 25

Clear Precision, Musical Flow

205

Chapter 26

Musical Reason: Its What, Its How

213

Chapter 27

Musical Reason, Understanding as Re-Creative Translation

221

Chapter 28

Religion, Chinese Religiosity

239

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Part III: History-Music in World-Intoning Chapter 29

Chinese Reasoning as Reverentially Musical

273

Chapter 30

Musical Reason in ―Unreason‖

283

Chapter 31

Translation

289

Chapter 32

Joy and Musical Reason

297

Chapter 33

Noun is Verb

301

Chapter 34

Interculture, Comparison

313

Chapter 35

Objectivity within Subjectivity

317

Chapter 36

Musical Reasoning and Poems

323

Chapter 37

Music as Morality

331

Chapter 38

Music in Dissonance

341

Chapter 39

―Validity‖ of Musical Reason

349

Chapter 40

―Clarity‖ and ―Distinctness‖ in China

353

Chapter 41

Musical Reason as Historical Reason

361

Chapter 42

Music, Management, Pan-Praxis

367

Chapter 43

Being Alive as Heart-Logical

375

Part IV: Ancient Wisdom Alive Today in Global Interculture Chapter 44

In General

389

Chapter 45

Some Specific Abiding Features

393

Chapter 46

Chinese Wisdom Alive, in Style

419

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Contents

vii

Chapter 47

Our Self-Reflection and China-West Contrast

429

Chapter 48

Chinese Wisdom Alive Today—A Wrap Up

443

Chapter 49

―Let Chinese Thinking be Chinese‖: Sine Qua Non to Globalization

451

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Index

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485

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ABSTRACT China deeply enters ―here now‖ to make sense of life‘s ongoing millennia fresh. China thinks as it tropes along myriad things in lifeworld, their opposites and levels interpenetrating. China thinks story-way to express all things inter-weaving into history, an ―open system‖ that keeps growing. Chinese wisdom is alive today millennia young. The West is objective; China is intersubjective. The West is logically systematic; China coherently story-thinks to compose history. Western philosophy is analytically abstract; Chinese wisdom is actually sensible. As existence is inter-existence, so China welcomes the West to interculture equally, globally. Filled with concrete stories in depth, this volume has four parts. Part I depicts Chinese wisdom as not prudence or theories but ―vignettes of life-thinking,‖ to present thinking in shifting actuality. Part II sketches heart-logic pulsing in seasons, to cyclonebreathe things as music-historic reason in Chinese Wisdom Alive. Part III depicts such story-thinking that musically includes all, melodious and dissonant, to undergo pain to comprehend all, factual, historical, futuristic, and imagined. Part IV shows how Chinese wisdom is alive today, rooted in its tradition millennia fresh, in ten abiding features cosmic-concrete, making sense intercultural. Such Chinese wisdom is so alive today as to be resiliently comical, chanting odes to the ultimate joy of heartbeat alive, thriving precisely on joys and bloody tragedies of days and ages. No usual logic can parse such ―musical reason‖ singing through pain and death through time, birthing without ceasing.

Chinese Wisdom Alive : Vignettes of Life-Thinking, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Copyright © 2010. Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Chinese Wisdom Alive : Vignettes of Life-Thinking, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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PREFACE Unique among world cultures, the historic Chinese wisdom is vigorously alive. It is cosmic-actual, coherent-sensible. China sings poetry of the living sense of all things in storyvignettes of dot-pragmatics, intoning in music-reason for millennia today fresh. This volume elucidates how China lives sensing thus in four parts, dot-vignettes, story-thinking in historywisdom, music-reasoning in world intoning, and today fresh in global interculture, each part overlapping all others. Likewise, some Chinese words are repeatedly cited not (just) to show China has those notions but to illustrate how those words shimmer in multifarious life-approaches, crisscrossing in peculiar ways to form a peculiar style of thinking, behaving, and living the world. Words in China are never isolated nouns but inter-involving verbs indicating directions to live; these words describe things‘ ways to bespeak the way we should live on, to harmonize all things in their ways of going. Such is Chinese wisdom alive. This volume walks a tightrope. The volume responsibly ―argues‖ to portray Chinese wisdom Chinese way, not flourish in slogans, yet its ―argument‖ avoids the West‘s categories and analyses, to concretely story-think in history. So, this volume may seem systemless to Western philosopher, and too argumentative to Chinese thinker, but patiently following through its elucidation will show to Western readers its ―coherence,‖ countoured to the dynamics of how things go, and Chinese readers will nod. We are thus unshered into sounds and sights of inter-existence so lucid, so warm, in the heartbeat, the lung-breathing rhythms of musical reason pulsing Heaven and Earth, through the vicissitudes of history. It is the vast portrayal of Chinese Wisdom Alive, breathtaking millennia young, today fresh refreshed into tomorrow. China is the tradition of the new. The pages below paint this self-cosmic panorama irresistible.

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PART I: DOT-VIGNETTES IN COSMOS-PONDERING

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INTRODUCTION A bold depiction of world cultures can be exciting; they are of two traditions, oral1 and written. Among the latter, pictogram cultures in Mesopotamia had died out, leaving IndoEuropean alphabetical ones. China alone has been thriving in pictographic depiction of things‘ senses, intoned as audiograms. It is millennia young, alive today, as an historic alternative to Western culture, ready to engage in inter-enrichment. Such depiction indicates the necessity of probing historic ―Chinese wisdom alive‖ today. Writing and thinking inter-influence, so China‘s audio-pictographs show its actualitythinking story-historical, distinct from Western alphabetical thinking, digital, abstract.2 The way we write ciphers the way we think, so alphabetical-digital thinking differs from audiopictographic thinking. How we write clues us into knowing how we think. As we write, so we think; alphabetical analysis-abstraction, literary story-thinking. As we think, so we write; philosophy ―logical,‖ history literary. Thus the West has logic-rationality; China has musicreason, shown by their respective ways of writing out their modes of thinking. Alphabet-mind unit-chops into philosophy over the concrete, so ―concrete philosophy‖ is oxymoronic, for thinking is not concrete, and things concrete are no thinking. Philosophy makes sense of things. China answers, that things shows sense of their own; things‘ sense is concrete, our sensing it is thinking, and engaging such ―concrete thinking‖ is wisdom that senses things.

1

Africa is called a ―dark continent‖ to depict how we are in the dark on this vast cultural treasure trove, for its cultures are predominantly oral—only fleetingly recorded, if any—without visible historical traditions. 2 They say that John Austin used Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in his Oxford classes to philosophize on ―how to do things with words.‖ Owen Barfield often based his reflections on words and thinking on OED. Heidegger is an extreme etymologist quite idiosyncratic, without rationale. Many etymological puns were made to explain words in China, as 何晏 did on 論語, 劉勰 did in 文心雕龍, and as 魯迅, 聞一多, 朱自清 did, etc. They were all silent on their rationale, and hardly quoted 許慎‘s etymological dictionary 說文解字 (and its massive 詁林) after it came out. Still, all this ―thinking based on word origins‖ displays the word-thinking intimacy.

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xiv

Kuang-ming Wu

Winds bend grass; in hill-dusk air fine, birds co-fly around.3 Here is nothing sayable, eyecatching, and their unsayable sense fulfills us. How could we deny sense all over, to sense it all over, concretely thought? We just describe what goes on, nature as it goes on—history4— with no senseless ―waste.‖ That is Chinese wisdom alive as nature. Our sensing sense of things is enabled by our personal pulsation. Impulses of heartbeat and lung-rhythm form feelings, to shape thinking into various thoughts, to mirror looms in nature that crisscross into stories 文, to weave out history 史 throughout Heaven and Earth. Such cosmic concrete thinking typifies Chinese wisdom alive. The West‘s clarity derives from indifferent distinctness of alphabetical elements; Chinese inevitability arises out of mirroring actuality. Sadly, most studies of China5 take ―thinking‖ as all of digital sort, to deaden Chinese wisdom alive for millennia. The pages below elucidate Chinese historical wisdom alive, often contrasted in the mirror of alphabetical culture of the West. Culture enshrines wisdom. We humans have since time immemorial been impressed with ―wisdom,‖ and loved and pursued it. The West came to have ―philosophy,‖ love of wisdom, but since Plato the word turns into love of arguments, even argument against argument. Western philosophy is thus a series of footnotes to Plato, logic-rational and analytical; ―philosophy‖ is digitally Western, not Chinese. In contrast, China keeps ―wisdom‖ as it originally is, admires and develops it continually, birthing unceasing. Chinese wisdom 智慧 perceives 洞察 the sense of living, of concrete things, of their importance. Wisdom is life‘s heart throbbing heart-logic, its lungs breathing in and out the world lung-logically, and its skin wrapping personal integrity to deal with the lifeworld in skin-logic; logic is rhythmic systematic gathering6 of all, singing life-logic alive for millennia today fresh. It is wisdom alive. Western philosophy is often contrasted with Chinese wisdom to bring out China‘s peculiar thinking-style, what popular scholarship calls ―Chinese philosophy,‖ but it tends mistakenly to lead us to think that China thinks just as Western philosophy does and so they are identical. Still, this epithet conveniently spotlights Chinese wisdom in active thinking, and so ―Chinese philosophy‖ is rendered ―Chinese wisdom as ‗philosophy‘‖; ―Chinese philosopher‖ would be rendered ―Chinese thinker.‖

3

Confucius‘ Analects 12/19 and T‘ao Yen-ming‘s 飲酒二十首, 共五 in 陶淵明集 (臺北市三民書局, 2004, p. 157) are informally cited and joined. 4 A distant parallel is Owen Barfield‘s History in English Words (1926, 1967), Barnes & Noble, 2009; it unfolds a panorama of Western history packed in common English words. It is not history of them. 5 Even Wing-tsit Chan succumbs to this mistake of taking ―thinking‖ as all analytical-digital, resulting in disasters. His admirably balanced and comprehensive A Source Book of Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963, still in print, separates literature from philosophy, cuts literary nances (as part of sense), decks up common terms into complex jargon, arbitrarily labels ―schools‖ with Western jargon, takes humanism as virture-supreme, overstresses Neo-Confucianism, takes Name-School 名家 as immature logicians, takes Confcius‘ ethical sentiment as on par with Aristotle‘s ethical system, elucidates ideas with flat shallow comments, to turn Chinese wisdom as immature and childish. 6 On ―logic‖ or ―logos‖ as gathering, see Kuang-ming Wu, On the “Logic” of togetherness (1998), pp. 162 and note 41, 334 and note 181, On Metaphoring (2001), pp. 10, note 23, and 54-58, both published by Leiden: Brill. Calvin O. Schrag, The Resources of Rationality, Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1992, p. 93. Martin Heidegger made a big splash out of logos as gathering, Introduction to Metaphysics, tr. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 131, 137-139, 180-181, 249, 251. See my Appendix I of Part III further on Heidegger.

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Dot-Vignettes in Cosmos-Pondering

xv

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A slight exaggeration may feature ―Chinese wisdom.‖ Wisdom is a strange thing. It seems to shoot breeze, touching on any theme in life, easy to understand. Surprisingly, the breeze soon breathes wheezing in rhythm, and we join to whistle. It is life-music Confucius and many sages sing.7 Mencius appeals to common events to show our common sense, that we are ok (our nature is good) sharing our joys of sex and money; we begin to breathe deep in regularity with Nature‘s cyclonic breathing, to grow Nature-vast. Thus wisdom in China shoots breeze to breathe life in rhythm, persuading us coherently to be ourselves; the rhythm-coherence is breathing lung-logic, and people outside China take this lung-logic as ―argument‖ and ―Chinese philosophy.‖ We nod and note how Chinese wisdom ―argues‖ with no formal argument; it is philosophical but not formal ―philosophy,‖ logical and reasonable without constrained by logic-rationality. ―Chinese wisdom‖ sounds palatable to Western readers used to ―wisdom,‖ and sounds familiar to Chinese readers steeped in ―Chinese‖ sayings. When you, my dear reader, meet spots8 in pages below too ―turgid‖ to trudge through, just be a squirrel to skip around the ―spooky.‖ Keep going. Soon, simple poetry of nature, story-told, will sing smiling spring. Poetry is music worded, in pages below repeatedly singing stories and sayings, connoting variously in various contexts. Kids grow dancing musical rounds of poetry, in repetitions each time new, as their hearts steady-throb each moment fresh, as a single theme grows through all vicissitudes of three movements in Walton‘s Violin Concerto.9 Repeated sayings rain dots all around nurturing, dot-pragmatics all over the pages. Music and poetry, dot-repeating growing, portray Chinese Wisdom Alive. Chinese wisdom soars as hawk into life‘s sky, out of the radar-range of Western ―logic,‖ while Chinese wisdom quivers as fish in history-water,10 caught by the West as a dead fish called ―Chinese philosophy,‖ codified as a crude part of Western philosophy. Now nothing ―Chinese‖ is new under the Western sun; ―nothing Chinese is new‖ is ―Chinese philosophy‖ fish-shaped dead, no longer Chinese wisdom jumping alive.11

7

Arthur Schopenhauer may be the only Western philosopher to take music with philosophical seriousness, not just as object of consideration or as useful (as Plato did). He joined music to number, inner nature, harmony, thinking, even the I Ching. See The World as Will and Representation, tr. E.F.J. Payne (1958), NY: Dover Publications, 1969, I: 258-266. Still, he stops short of saying that ideas must flow musically, otherwise they are not true. We take off from him. 8 These spots come as curiosity wades into complex corners, matted inter-involved. 9 William Walton‘s Violin Concerto was superbly played by Menuhin, 1969, composer Walton conducting London Symphony Orchestra, recorded as ―CD 48‖ in Yehudi Menuhin: The Great EMI Recordings, 2009. 10

―鳶飛戾天, 魚躍于淵‖ (詩經, ―旱麓‖) chants our future. Chuang Tzu reverses its hawk-then-fish 鳶-魚 to fishthen-bird 鯤-鵬, to throb China alive! China tells Plato, that his Heavens beyond sensory concretes have wisdom hawk soaring, fish jumping the deep; nature is too alive to go beyond. 11 ―Not many years ago, the study of China was divided between two quite separate camps. There were the historians and observers of China‘s interaction with the West, and there were the scholars who preferred to study China‘s ancient past,‖ began D. S. Nivison‘s Preface to The Life and Thought of Chang Hsüeh-ch’eng (1738-1801), CA: Stanford University Press, 1966. His book was written in response to this sad division. The separation is at least partially responsible for taking Chinese wisdom as an antiquated curiosity, ―Chinese Philosophy,‖ a dead fish. Sadly, Nivison still uses ―philosophy‖ throughout this book, and yet agrees with Arthur Wright that China has no ―philosophy‖ but ―thought,‖ something between philosophy and folk thinking. H. G. Creel, ed., Chinese Civilization in Liberal Education, University of Chicago Press, 1959, pp. 144, 135, 154, 159. My ―Chinese Wisdom Alive‖ responds to such a lethal trend.

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xvi

Kuang-ming Wu

Sadly, we have not yet seen a book on ―Chinese philosophy‖ that does not just sketch its surface shape, lifeless.12 China-fish alive has been cut apart by analysis-knife into metaphysics, cosmology, epistemology, socio-politics, and ethics, and turns tasty-dead to the Western palate, cut to death into Western categories, all found naïve, imbecile, lifeless. How could Chinese people have stood such dead stuff for so many millennia?13 Still, a dead fish is still—we hope—fish-shaped, and so the current volumes on ―Chinese philosophy‖ have the shape of China,14 still helpful but without pristine vitality, dead and unreal. As dead, it is edible, easy to shape into the West‘s thinking-mode, and ―Chinese philosophy‖ appears in vogue today, not at all Chinese wisdom alive. What is ―alive‖? ―Alive‖ describes being sinuously different, each moment and situation fresh and different from the others, even each differing from itself one moment after another. The fresh saying, ―Day [by] day new, [each] day new again,‖15 is several millennia old and is being rehearsed today, ―spanking fresh‖ as kids. Kids are angels we see, and the next moment we wonder, and must yield them to Mom. She knows how to love-handle them, knowing that kids are kids, always changing, fresh, always alive. Kids are the same kids because they change every time we turn around; they are same-different. That is why and how they are alive. We are all kids. As we get hungry everyday in a different way, so we eat and be up and doing every day different, from one occasion to another. We differ thus across time to make history, and all over space among friends. Nature is a kid, too. ―Nations broken; hills and rivers stay 國破山河在,‖ sighs a poet, and we see even these hills and rivers different every dawn, different every dusk, and different every season. Everyday I walk the same roads in the park, and each day the roads differ in hues, smell, sight, and sound—and they are always fresh and beautiful. ―Look, Dad! The same different car there!‖ my Baby Johnny shouted at a car, passing by us, of the same make as ours. That

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12

It horrifies Wu that speculations of ―Chinese philosophers‖ (Chinese, Western) are patterned after the West‘s logic-rational analysis, methodology. The depth vitality of China, its poetry in the ―Great Preface‖ to the Classic of Poetry was described, without dancing exultation of overflowing feelings, as a tract of public political orthodoxy, to which all forms of poetry were subject; Li Po who deviated from this orthodoxy was vilified with shady family, alcohol, and insanity. All this is touted as ―orthodoxy‖ in the august Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, ed. William H. Nienhauser, Jr., Taipei: SMC Publishing, 1988, pp. 59-74, with general Essays on Buddhist literature, drama, fiction, literary criticism, poetry, popular literature, prose, rhetoric, Taoist literature, women‘s literature, all Western classifications, to lose lively Chinese literature. Most depictions-translations of Chinese wisdom are cold, analytical, external; Confucius is a tiresome prattler of platitudes, a dead fish. True to its vague verbose title, Historical Truth, Historical Criticism, and Ideology: Chinese Historiography and Historical Culture from a New Comparative Perspective (eds. H. Schmidt-Glintzer, A. Mittag, and J. Rüsen, Brill, 2005) is a loose survey, packed with information and Germanic jargon. Often a mouse of gist slips out of mountains of rumbles. This is a Germanic peep at historical writings in China, with no ―comparative perspective‖ at all. (An oddly inserted essay by a Chinese historian is a dull loose report with a fancy title. It is not Germanic, not Chinese.) 13 Many Western scholars find such dead fish tasty, calling its feast ―Chinese philosophy.‖ Of course, dead fish is easily edible; fish alive in water is unmanageable. Still, tasty or not, China-as-dead-fish is dead, not China; it is so much the worse for ―enjoying‖ dead fish as ―China‖; see Wu‘s Autobiography in China-West Interculture: toward the Philosophy of World Integration: Essays on Wu Kuang-ming‘s Thinking, ed., Jay Goulding, NY: Global, 2008, pp. 3-32. It is hard to dispel such misguided fascination. This our volume tries softly to present Chinese wisdom alive; a whiff of ―moment of live truth‖ may collapse the Fortress of Falsehood. 14 Those books on ―Chinese philosophy‖ still keep its contour, its shell—unless analyzed out of the original shape, as some sadly have been. 15 This is an ancient vibrant saying, ―日日新, 又日新,‖ carved into the metal bathtub of Emperor T‘ang (1751-1739 BCE), recorded as the Great Learning 大學 begins.

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Dot-Vignettes in Cosmos-Pondering

xvii

same-different tension noted is alive as Baby Johnny responding to the baby-actual. The actual and the baby inter-shift, for both are alive, all too alive. It is ―To see a world in a grain of sand,‖ chanted Blake. China nods, and wisely adds that every world seen differs from every other with every different grain of sand seeing, and all these differences make up the same world, in family differences to form the same familiar family of our Heaven and Earth where we all live and have our being. The same-different seeing is Chinese wisdom alive as kids16; staid logic-rationality finds it hard to understand such ―being alive.‖ I said,17

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. . . we realize the ambiguous freshness of Chinese thinkers. We summed up Descartes more or less in a standard manner; there has been nothing new in what we said about him; what we said about him can be found in any standard textbook. In contrast, we had to extrapolate from Confucius and Chuang Tzu; we had to participate in their conversation, which can take an unexpected turn. No textbook has what is described above.

Their conversation is structured as follows. (i) They always call our attention to something trivial and ordinary, some daily happenings—birth, dream. (ii) Then in dwelling on the trivial and obvious, they evoke in us something profound. Confucius evoked reverence (to history and society, morality and religion); Chuang Tzu evoked roaming (in different identities without losing them). (iii) Finally, whatever they evoke is always something new and exciting. We cannot routinely report standard summaries of Confucius and Chuang Tzu, but have to say something nobody has said before, in order to bring out what they really want to say. No wonder, kids alive and active shout, ―You don‘t understand!‖ So does Chinese wisdom on these our pages, inevitably showing up in points quite unheard of in standard scholarship in the field. Whatever one may react to what follows, and it is guaranteed that there cannot help but be reactions,18 these pages are intended to restore life to Chinese wisdom, to let the reader understand—sensitively stand-under, undergo, experience—the vibrant life of Chinese wisdom, its exciting inner stirrings, each day different, each time coming out different, to live out life vibrating throughout the Heaven and Earth. ―Wisdom, sophia‖ in ancient Greece was mastery of practical skill-experience as it was prudence in the Old Testament, but Western ―philosophy,‖19 love of wisdom, later strangely

16

―Come on,‖ you shout, ―China is several millennia old. How can it shout like a young child?‖ Well, the Classics are eternally young, fresh as a newborn baby, new everyday, as long as you care for them, as classical harpsichordist Wanda Landowska said, ―Music grows old only if it is neglected—like a woman who is no longer loved. Take an interest in her, and she will become young again‖ (caption to the booklet to Bach: The Landowska Recordings, RCA Red Seal, 7-CD set, 2005). 17 Kuang-ming Wu, On the “Logic” of Togetherness: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1998, p. 310. 18 Some footnotes below, some rather long, respond to a typical Western expressions of shocks. 19 Actually ―cheh hsüeh 哲學‖ was Nishi Amané‘s 西周 coinage adapted from 周敤頤‘s ―希求賢哲.‖ On ―哲‖ or ―悊‖ as 知, 智, or 大智, 齊智, 知事, 知王, 多謀慮, i.e., 睿智, 明智, see 說文解字詁林正補合編, 臺北鼎文書局, 民72, 2:1158-1160, and 爾雅, 釋文. Nishi‘s coinage has mistaken Western objective, analytical, and argumentative penchant for Chinese life-discernment, Chinese wisdom alive. The two differ.

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changed to become ―love of reasoning‖20 in clash of ideas to result in the ephemeral victory of one over the other by eristic debates. In contrast, Chinese wisdom is neither practical prudence nor theoretical reasoning, but ―vignettes of life-thinking‖ as said in our title. This phrase has two components, ―vignettes‖ and ―life-thinking.‖ Both describe a total revolution of thinking-pattern in the West. ―Vignettes‖ in life is dot-pragmatics as leaves of the tree of daily life, soon to be considered. We now look into what ―life-thinking‖ is. For us humans, we live being self-aware of being alive, other-aware of living with people and things around, and ―aware‖ is thinking as we live human. So, for us to live is to life-think. Life-thinking is not ―lived thinking‖ or ―concrete thinking‖—as if thinking were separate in itself,21 qualified thus, but to think as living, to live as thinking. It is life itself thinking, a thinking life. Socrates caught it as ―self-examined life,‖ but life is more, a sensitive livingthrough understanding. So, all this is quite simple but important. We said A is B, B is C, so A is C, and we shorten the process as A-C; L is A, A is T, so L is T, shortened as L-T—that is, to live as human is to be aware, and to be aware is to think, and so to live for us is to think.22 We shorten and say, we life-think as we think-live. It is our understanding of life; it is ―Chinese wisdom.‖23

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20

Ulrich Wilckens and Georg Fohrer, ―sophía, sophós, sophízo,‖ Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (1964), ed. Gerhard Friedrich, Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1979, VIII: 465-528. (―Sophía‖ in Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996, pp. 1621-1622 is much less detailed.) ―The word philosophy means the love of wisdom, but what philosophers really love is reasoning. They formulate theories and marshal reasons to support them . . . ,‖ said Robert Nozick, The Nature of Rationality, Princeton University Press, 1993, p. xi. How such typically Western speculative argument came out of ancient Greek skill and prudence is a mystery. 21 Western philosophy under Plato‘s spell is wont to do so. 22 Don‘t separate life from thinking as Western philosophy is wont to do. 23 What is said here is so vast as to tempt us to ask what it is that is not life-thinking or Chinese wisdom (CW). How do we draw the line between what is and what is not CW? The answer is surprisingly slippery. First, ―speaking of CW‖ indicates something not not-CW, so a line exists between CW and not-CW. Otherwise, there would not be CW; yet the line cannot be drawn (visibly). Otherwise two things strange would happen: [a] There would be no-thinking life, no-life thinking, and life-thinking, as if life were a part of life, and [b] The line leads those inside CW to be as smug as claiming ―I am normal!‖ to turn abnormal. Life-naturalness of life-thinking is gone; life-thinking is destroyed. This point is not a nonessential methodological inconvenience; it cuts into the heart of the matter. Heidegger said that every thinker is a poet who has only one poem, itself uncomposed, out of which and of which all other poems speak (On the Way to Language, NY: Harper, 1971, p. 160). CW would nod and add that this is because, if this one poem ever gets composed, it would vanish at once with the poet, for this poem is the person, this self‘s personal authenticity, and self-consciousness commits suicide as Narcissus does. Beware Socrates! You are spared suicide, given death penalty instead by your parent the Athenian society for peddling dangerous Narcissus-like poison, self-knowledge in self-examination. Anything that touches the self must be meta-reflected-examined further, and then left alone. This is one radical critique by Taoism against Confucian obsession with self-cultivation. Never help growth (Mencius 2A2), much less self-help self-growth, for it is as risky as trying to run away from one‘s own shadow (Chuang Tzu 31/28-29). Wu pursued this point positively (On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 2001, pp. 196-200). Thus the line can only be lived to nod at, to feel inexpressibly. ―We are all potential philosophers; not everyone is a professional philosopher,‖ says the West. In China, everyone is wise and, yes, you, too, as long as you are willing to come; CW is personal. This consideration will be repeated soon. The route above is not inductive or deductive, but indirective and inexpressible, a via negativa. Is the whole book here a CW? Well, it is a CW-like appreciation of CW, and ―CW-like‖ is important. All this is slippery because life-thinking is lived and cannot be thought about, only nodded at.

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For Confucius, full sensitive human understanding comes by ―looking at one‘s wherewith, perceiving one‘s wherefrom, and observing one‘s wherein.‖24 Such is lifethinking in progressive intensity (wherewith via wherefrom to wherein) and extension (look via perceive to observe). Such ―human understanding‖ includes our lived knowledge of the whole lifeworld beyond the human world. All this life-thinking reveals life as meaning, the life-milieu sensed as sensible, where all casual ―birds flying, fishes jumping‖ are sensible, meaningful.25 Now, such lifeworld is so vast that it includes all that we are aware of, even potentially aware of, and also the ―nothing,‖ beyond our exhaustive, all-inclusive, and systematic description.26 We can never be aware of the ―whole wide world,‖ whatever it means.27 So we must ―see a world in a grain of sand, to hold eternity‖28 in a moment, in every different grain, at every different moment. It is the moments specific and various that reveal us and our lifeworld. These specific moments make life‘s vignettes, our dot of life-thinking, ―dot-pragmatics,‖ to introduce ―Chinese wisdom‖ that explains ―vignette‖ and ―dot-pragmatics.‖29 Both are naturally yet strangely intertwined. Chinese wisdom reflects on dot-vignettes of life.

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VIGNETTES AND DOT-PRAGMATICS AS TINY LEAVES AND UNIQUE MOMENTS First, we consider what living dots are. I asked my granddaughter Tessie, aged two and a half, ―Tessie, how come fish has no umbrella?‖ She proudly answered, ―‗Cause fish has no hands!‖ Wow! Here her ―logic‖ is surprising and invincible, for no-hand implies no-umbrella, but none but Tessie would have thought of it; a surprising quip of dot-pragmatics is here; it is unexpectedly and logically tight, i.e., poetic. Later, when she was five or so, I asked again the same question, and she answered, ―‗Cause fish live in water.‖ I said, ―It‘s ok; fish can still have umbrella in water, right?‖ She was silent. So I said, ―Isn‘t it because an umbrella keeps us out of water, but fish lives in 24 25

―視共所以, 觀共所由, 察共所安, 人焉廋哉, 人焉廋哉!‖ (Analects 2/10)

―鳶飛魚躍 Hawks flying, fishes jumping‖ is a famous phrase from ―鳶飛戾天, 魚躍于淵‖ in the Classic of Poetry 詩經, 大雅, 旱麓 (詩經讀本, 臺北三民書局, 民90, p. 787), and 中庸 ch. 12. The same sentiment on ―meaning‖ is differently routed in Kuang-ming Wu, The Butterfly as Companion, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990, pp. 364-373. 26 Western philosophy tries vainly to do so in ―metaphysics,‖ to commit human hubris. 27 Have we not, however, by saying we cannot cover the whole, covered the whole after all, as Hegel loved to say? Yes, but our vision is a horizon felt extending far beyond us, unsure of the total grasp of the Total. To confuse our felt pro-spect with the sure complete grasp is the human hubris of metaphysics, peculiar to Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Hegel. Don‘t they realize, besides, that the concrete particulars are each an embodiment of the Whole, and that this realization is just a promissory premonition, not an all-inclusive system? However great, we humans are ever a Moses looking far to the Promised Land beyond. 28 The phrase begins William Blake‘s celebrated ―Auguries of Innocence‖ that treads Lao Tzu‘s (73) Heaven-net (of retribution, Lao Tzu may have meant more), coarse-meshed, leaking nothing. I see all sorts of ―auguries‖ of the world, innocent or no, which expand beyond Blake as I walk. As I walk at my highest limit—I mean, limit—within my comfort zone, never push it (to ruin myself), I grow all by myself, unawares. Auguries of my environs grow likewise all by themselves, unawares, into ―the world.‖ 29 On ―vignette‖ see Wu, Dynamic Logic of Life, pp. 1-2 (yet to publish). On ―dot-pragmatics,‖ see Kuang-ming Wu, On Metaphoring, Leiden: Brill, 2001, pp. 387-398.

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water, so fish needs no umbrella to keep it out of water, right?‖ Back she snapped, ―That‘s what I told you!‖ Wow! Now I was silenced! She was impatient; she already told me what I just said. Her ―‗Cause fish is in water‖ already includes what I boringly said. Her short answer already includes my long explanation and this ―short inclusion‖ is dot-pragmatics pregnant, again, poetic. So, Tessie taught me dotpragmatics as poetic, logical and pregnant. Another kid points at a giraffe and says, ―Doggie!‖ That‘s kid‘s holophrastic ―whole phrase,‖ a poetic dot-pragmatics, Chinese wisdom. ―Doggie!,‖ ―‗Cause fish has no hand!,‖ ―‗Cause fish live in water!‖; they are whole phrases.30 Every whole phrase shimmers indefinitely with open-ended senses. These senses slowly emerge by being munched on through time, repeatedly. That‘s poetry; that‘s music. Kids love repetition; kids kidnapped me to watch movies, ―Doe, a deer, a female deer . . .‖ on ten evenings, ―Yellow brick road‖ on seven evenings. Kids thus grow, and I did with them. The same images and mini-stories are kids‘ whole phrases, repeated in the pages that follow, in manifold contexts. They surprise us with various senses, connotations, implications, and applications, as different winds daily blow on the same leaves that grow thereby. They are surprising variations growing repeatedly out of a handful of arresting tunes to enrich daily singing life. Chinese classics are such daily dots repeated alive; China has dotpragmatics kid-fresh, called ―Chinese wisdom.‖ Socrates was silent on how to self-reflect, but even such a conscientious Confucian as Tseng Tzu self-examined not all day but three times a day, and Confucius cautioned that we can just think twice before acting, no need for examining three times. 31 So, we cannot reflect always; daily thinking activities are by nature dot-pragmatics. Mind you. Poetic dots of life-vignettes connect. We cannot exhaust describing what we describe, for we cannot keep reflecting on our reflections; there is the so-called ―systematic elusiveness‖ about not only the I32 but our dream, inspection, examination, divination, knowledge, information, memory, judgment, government, organization, peddling, commerce, journalism, and so on. They are pragmatic dots inexhaustible, and ―inexhaustible‖ spells ―continuous.‖ Leaves of grass, leaves of a tree, trees of a forest, compose grass, tree, and forest. Raindrops are notes composing soothing music of life, and all compositions are com-posed of notes, musical fragments. All percussive instruments (the greatest being the piano) live on fragments of notes. Chopin is great master in this genre. Each tune is ―complete‖ and integral as itself, and as such many come and gather into a whole, which in turn gathers with other wholes into bigger wholes, and the process goes on into history continuous, and yet each age is complete in itself. ―Day, day, new, again, day new,‖ they ―birth, birthing, unceasing,‖ ―breath to breath interrelating‖ into a life-network ever open.

30

My ―whole phrase‖ is ―‖holophrase‖ in linguistics, compressed phrase that can mean a variety of senses when developed. My ―whole phrase‖ is ―holophrase‖ without adult-technical condescension to kid‘s supposedly undeveloped ability. 31 Analects 1/4, 5/20. 32 See on ―The Systematic Elusiveness of ‗I‘‖ in Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson, 1949, pp. 195-198, and Ian Ramsey, Christian Empiricism, ed. Jerry H. Gill, Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1974, pp. 17-31.

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―Journal‖ is life-journey‘s jottings, written fragments of half-baked ideas in our daily ongoing. They are daily Pensées for which Pascal, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Marcel, and Ortega, are noted, but actually all thinkers since Plato‘s dialogues show such daily jottings, as naturally as we live on day by day each day and each moment erupting afresh. Fragments are the continuous vitality of creativity ever afresh; all Chinese writings show this erupting vitality continuing in history. No thinker in the West has written about such continuous ―fragments of life‖; all Chinese writers practice them, consciously, continually, and historically, for millennia till today fresh. Dynasties are fragments, some long, some short, punctuated by ruptures of revolutions, to compose China‘s bloody music of history political and cultural. Mind you. Fragments are fragile; they come and they vanish. Their fragility redounds precisely to resilient continuity; the fragments‘ fragility strangely composes continuity through time. This is one reason why the evanescent words stand incorruptible 立言不朽 through history. Whitman‘s ―Leaves of Grass‖ is immortal literature with all Chinese classics, burnt, lost, and found again, to last forever. Thus ―princely people present words; small people present profits.‖33 Our daily activities are dotted and, as such, continuous. Our sleep at night continues to support our dotted days, and what we have eaten continues to sustain our stamina. Similarly, what we have reflected on and jotted down, somehow link together, one thought inspiring another. Thus we continue life-journals that record life-journeys,34 one inspiring another, and history is born. Journal in China is a notepad of dot-snapshots of life‘s daily journey. The pad has no frills, just essentials on a pin, for which China‘s dialogical ―ideograph-characters‖ are handy tools, for they are themselves snapshots. Word-sparing Confucius‘ Dialogues Lun Yü 論語, (Analects), are such a word-picture notepad, pocket-sized, of a sensitive sage smilingly alive. No wonder, this Pad is roaring popular, an all-time bestseller that everyone has been commenting on for millennia, even today. So is Lao Tzu‘s Tao Te Ching 道德經, an all-time Classic of the Cosmos35 of Individual persons in the world out of this world; it is by another sage sharp and pithy, so reclusive as to be wholly anonymous, ―Master said, 子曰‖ nowhere. These picture-dots are so penetrating they inflict mortal wounds on us unawares as they hit us. They gather a scattered poetry of absolute parsimony, intoning the world at large, intimate as the ―mysterious female gate‖ of every single thing and event, even today. So these journal-snapshots are irresistible, so loud voiceless. I see and hear more the more I keep staring at them. Then I realize. They show or tell nothing; Hegel was dumb-right in despising Confucius and Lao Tzu. They just enable me to see and hear. They are my inner

33

「君子相送以言，小人相送以財, says 史記 (滑稽列傳第六十六, 臺北市三民書局, 2008, 8:4974).

「君子贈人以軒[財]，不若以言, says 晏子春秋 (內篇雜上, 曾子將行晏子送之 etc., 臺北市三民書局, 民87, p.204). 荀子 (大略篇) also says, 「曾子行，晏子從於郊。 曰：嬰聞之，君子贈人以言， 庶人贈人以財。嬰貧無財，請假於君子，贈吾子以言。」 (三民書局, 民76, p. 387) 34 Journal and journey are etymological siblings; we keep our journals as we journey on in life. No wonder, Chinese wisdom as life-thinking is often written as journals. 35 The world at large is orderly cosmos of cosmic order (Tao) that is things‘ inner principle that guides and powers individual persons (Te).

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eyes and innate ears. They are ―classics‖; they are alive. That is why they are journalvignettes of life-thinking, Chinese wisdom alive. All this is what we might call a dot-systematic born of dot-pragmatics. Looking at these two sorts of dots together, dotty and systematic, we say we see life-vignettes of life-thinking. Thus life-thinking is both discreet life-activities in literary portrayal and thereby lifecontinuous in vicissitudes of history, both at once. This unity of literature and history 文史 constitutes Chinese wisdom. Dot-pragmatics shapes life-trees of tiny leaves swaying in winds back and forth, quite unpredictable. All this while, these idea-dots blow through hearts, one after another, shaking days to shape living. ―As the winds blow, the grass bends,‖ said Confucius (12/1); naturewinds blow outside to bend us, and innate winds inside with which we bend. Unlike tomes of theories staying put,36 writing is meant to raise eyebrows, to shock and provoke cyclones of life-revolutions, possible only with leaflets of insights alive. All classics in China are such idea-leaves, dotted and compact. Brief ones abound, the Analects, Tao Te Ching, prose-poems, poetic essays, and the list goes on. Longer ones are various collections of countless story-bits in dialogues, jottings, half-baked journals, flashing thoughts on life‘s wayside, rhythmic, heartfelt. These dot-miscellanies, seeds in seasonal winds, waft from heart to heart across the ages, penetrating readers, provoking them pondering, seeding life living better. Dot-pragmatics arouses revolutions at the root, all dotted with ideas; Chinese Wisdom is ever alive chanting the music of stories of such living unstoppable, renewing unceasing. These stories chant the music of poems to draw us in, and we begin to dance life‘s poetry. Thank God the world has poets! They sing with birds, and the world turns urbane, tender, bright, and warm. It does not matter if I do not understand their poems. The poems sing; I recite them, and the world swings alive at their poems. Poetic mantras intone the world, and it feels so balmy, embracing all with musical fragrance. Poems munch on words just right; they are magic to shine things up soft and fresh. Noise melts and forgets into hums and tunes, as poems sound through silence. Poems are birds humming the first morning of creation,37 even in midnight, dusk, and high noon. Things soften and twirl and twitter, in the birds of poems. Now, none of all this makes sense, does it? But somehow it drones on to soften and warm and enliven things around, doesn‘t it? ―But the world is awash in pain.‖ The world is of course stormy. Poets wail, and their laments at things tragically imbalanced balance things. How lamentations tame pain is beyond me, but they do. I‘ve told you; I don‘t understand poetry. Viktor Frankl wants meaning to heal insanity,38 while poets intone meaningless magic, for Socrates (Apology) asked them what they mean, and they didn‘t know how to answer, and in their ignorance they did the magic of living that I

36

No wonder, Chuang Tzu was against scum-writings in dead past, but wrote the objection down as dialogue-story of a Wheelwright (13/67-74). Socrates was also against writing that does not move, but apparently not averse to its dialogue written down (Phaedrus 274-275). Writing must wind-sway to penetrate. See Wu, On Metaphoring, Leiden: Brill, 2001, pp. 612-640, esp. 619-620 (note 13). 37 Auden wrote essays to prepare for poem-writing. See W. H. Auden: Prose Voume III: 1949-1955, Princeton University Press, 2008, p. xiii. I wonder how he did so. He is perhaps an exception. Usually poetry intones before essays develop poetry. 38 He calls it ―logotherapy.‖ Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, Boston: Beacon Press, 2006.

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do not understand. Socrates did not, either; no one does, not even poets themselves.39 But their magic works everywhere as long as we listen and sing their tunes, anytime. That is precisely Chinese wisdom alive, millennia young till today afresh. We can now provisionally answer an elusive question, ―What is not Chinese wisdom, if it is life-thinking of life that is anywhere anytime?‖ Our answer is twofold. One, as long as it is life-thinking and thinking does not sustain all day all the time, there is no explicit Chinese wisdom while we are not thinking. Two, as long as Chinese wisdom is life-thinking and life continues on to sustain thinking, Chinese wisdom continues as life does. Chinese wisdom is continuity in discontinuity, discontinuity in continuity—as life is.40 That is the twofold implication of dot-systematics. On surface, though, dot and system mix into a logic-rational contradiction, for how can a dot be a system? Still, days of our life are dots of days punctured by night-rest to form a lived coherence, a continuous life-system. What do such strange dot-systems look like? They form vignettes we now consider. Vignettes are little cartoon-like sketches of situations here and there as ―grains of sand‖ (Blake), of ―musical moments‖ (as Schubert made), that typify the situation for attention, and then stand aside, letting the reader in to move freely among various implications (Yip), in the moment-vignette in moving montage. This ―moving‖ is a living along, growing in perceptive insights to better and better ―understand‖ (Empson)41 what is pointed to in winks of vignettes and dots of moments, performative sketches of living on the go, ever getting coherent, making a living system. How does it go? Well, I am a grain of sand to see a world. Here is my dot-pragmatics to compose a vignette-systematics of the world. As I walked under the trees, I wondered why so many big trees have small leaves, not big ones like bananas or coconuts. The reason is obvious, I soon found. One big ―leaf‖ that covers the whole tree, however redesigned or re-grown and often, would have easily been torn to pieces by rain and wind. So, trees came to grow zillion tiny leaves to adapt freely to rain and wind, and to join themselves into specific shapes to cover and feature the tree.42 Two phenomena are here. One, each leaf is an occasion of inter-negotiations between the inner tree life and its ever changing situations, rain or shine, rain beating, wind blowing; each leaf is such an ecological occasion of the tree to grow. Each leaf is a moment at which to stretch from the situation now—of such inter-negotiation—to tomorrows beyond. Each leaf is such a moment adapting to each situation to grow up. At the same time, two, as these zillion tiny leaf-occasions live on, each leaf comes together with other leaves to form—naturally—the shape of a specific tree, this one living tree, then that one, and then another, and so on. 39

―Here, as everywhere in art, the concept is unproductive. The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand, just as a magnetic somnambulist gives information about things of which she has no conception when she is awake.‖ Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, tr. E.F.J. Payne (1958), NY: Dover Publications, 1969, I: 260. 40 On what this mouthful of expression means, see Appendix IV. 41 Wai-lim Yip, ed. & tr., Chinese Poetry: An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997, p. xiv. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), NY: New Directions, pp. 3, 18, 38, etc. 42 On Chinese appreciation of trees and leaves, see C. A. S. Williams, Outlines of Chinese Symbols & Art Motives (1941), NY: Dover Publications, 1976, pp. 406-408, and Mythology, ed. C. Scott Littleton, London: Duncan Baird, 2002, pp. 405, 414, 417, 419, and 686 (index, on world appreciation of trees).

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What is ―negotiation with nature‖? I walked in the pouring rain today in the park. The wind blew rain into my shirt; the rivulet under foot soaked into my shoes. I shouted in me, ―I‘m soaked in nature!‖ Mr. Cottonwood in me43 said, ―That‘s right, Kong-bêng.44 You‘re in nature, nature is in you.‖ So are trees, leaves, grass, and soil, everything here around. They are in nature naturing, birthing, birthing unceasing. Nature grows in time, in me and around me as I am in nature. Let us see the whole situation on a time-scale. Jesus came as Christ, only once in human history, Christianity says,45 but so did every event, such as Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, and many others, famous, infamous, and not-famous. Many squirrels and birds rushed to me one morning. On the next day I went back there with bread, and the day after that, and so on, and there has been no single animal at that spot. I realized then that that event was once-for-all, absolutely not repeatable. This uniqueness typifies personal integrity, as with the coming of Jesus, Socrates, Confucius, and Buddha, and all others. They all came only once and no more, and such uniqueness connotes something incomparable, and their incomparable feature leads to our sense of the ―best,‖ as Mom bragging her ―best kid in the world.‖ So we have the unique incomparable ―best‖ in addition to the compared numerical ―best.‖ This situation enriches the ―notion‖ of the ―best,‖ and we are on our natural way to spreading this insight to others—and a system of the world is born, a system alive. These phenomena join to compose a growing tree, living, lived, and growing system to join others in historic continuity. Every tree has leaves of its own shape, and one species of trees have leaves of roughly similar shapes. Every thinker is a tree; every culture is a species of tree-life, composed of tiny leaves, insights in daily life yielding each leaf-shape of a tree and leaf-shape of each species, a specific manner in which to react to those occasions and to be enriched by them. Such a living system of each tiny leaf of a tree, of a species of trees, and of the unique once-for-all life that joins others (other tiny leaves, other ―bests‖ numerically compared), differs from the one huge leaf-patch sort of ―system‖ contrived as a whole, which is apt to be torn to pieces by rains and winds of contingencies, however often and much these big leaves are re-grown, refined, and redesigned. The ―systems‖ of Western philosophy share the misfortune of ―one big leaf‖ for the whole tree. Vignettes and dots are in contrast many tiny leaves that can withstand unforeseen beatings of rains and winds, to adapt and survive to manifest living pragmatics of a system alive, to join others alive.46 43

How that magnificent Mr. Cottonwood came to be inside me will soon be told. ―Kong-bêng‖ is my given name in Taiwanese for ―Kuang-ming.‖ Mr. Cottonwood called me by my personal given name, and that gave me personal intimacy. 45 See Gustav Stählin, ―hápax, éphápax,‖ Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (1932), ed. Gerhard Kittel, Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eeardmans, 1964, etc., I:381-384. 46 Neville, perhaps joined by Santayana and Russell, raises a curious objection to ―concrete philosophy‖ as an organicism that ―will yield in the end‖ Hegelian totalism and political totalitarianism. ―Will yield in the end‖ betrays his bent to totalizing system. Concrescence of things needs not be totalistic systematic connection, but is bits of coherence here and there, as clusters of leaves, flowers, animals, gather to adumbrate contours of nature, of life. Each leaf, each flower, each animal, is so fragile, taking part in the groups of things. Such loose togetherness that adumbrates a nature-contour is one thing. Neville‘s tight connectedness that infers totalism is quite another, a temptation peculiar to his tendency to systematize, to be counterbalanced by his ―systematic thinking to come at things from many angles, relativizing any one perspective, and taking responsibility for not identifying any representation wholly with what it represents.‖ But here ―many,‖ ―relativizing,‖ and ―not 44

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These concrete sketches of vignettes are dot-moments, tiny leaves of a life-tree, to actually live the life, life-thinking, Chinese wisdom. We begin sketching and dotting vignettes, and then we realize how China takes all this as situational ―imperative‖ to grow into history. To think describes, which already thinks. Sayings by Confucius, Lao Tzu, and others are intoned and rhymed; they are musical poetry, alive. The following pages would be referenced to literature and poetry, with backbone of thinking life-sensitive. Chinese wisdom as life-thinking is no ebullient Emerson or Blake, but calm-gazing at mysterious depths of life, to be presented to be understood, on pain of not living human. This is no tall claim, for China has survived for so many millennia and is thriving today with such vigorous concrete wisdom. We shall proceed as follows. Chinese wisdom A. expresses living mirrored in thinking, in graphic characters, to B. re-flect, reenact, and re-live through into history, and the past becomes our paragon, an imperative of life in posterity that C. performs what is expressed, life human, cosmic, in time, and this is D. Chinese wisdom all too Chinese. Wisdom as thinking does ―argue‖ by E. the Always and the Weighing that inter-adjust toward the grand Harmony. F. Harmony spells happiness, and so Chinese wisdom is made of joy, but then we have to confess at once to G. its Sad Predicament, being unable to manage our weakness, to wit, knowing better to act worse. Still, Chinese wisdom offers insights into human life, such as H. Indirection, situationadjustment to be I. Right-in-situ that is ―Right.‖ It is to respond to Heaven. So we consider J. Heaven in Chinese wisdom. We can place all this in K. Translation and Description. Chinese wisdom is concerned with knowledge, so we consider L. Chinese Wisdom as Knowledge Subtle-Inexpressible, M. Tao and Heaven, to round up in Inconclusive Afterword: Chinese Wisdom Alive! ―Wow!‖ you say, ―This is quite a mouthful! This is a maze!‖ O, no. These sections are amazingly simple. Just play with them as vignettes of pebbles and leaves of a big Mr. Cottonwood, a Mr. Flower Power Tree. Look. My Baby Mark used to sit on the ground fascinated with pebbles. He picked a handful of them, piled one on top of another, then collapsed them, and put one beside the other, while mumbling a song he made up for his beloved pebbles, stroking each, singing to each. We have just picked a handful of pebbles of Chinese wisdom, and put one pebble beside another. As we did so, we mumbled, ―One pebble, one world,‖ that is, one China seen in one grain of sand. Each pebble is a vignette of China alive. Each vignette is a little leaf that somehow belongs, links, to another, and to the trunk of a tree alive. The tree soaks up the Heavenly sunshine as it is grounded and nourished in the mother Earth, in the middle of ―not even nowhere 無何有之鄉,‖ where we hug Mr. Cottonwood, dance ―ring around the roses‖ around Mr. Flower Tree (Is it one or two trees? Does it matter?), set under the tree our lunch, and then lull a nap like a Big Yak lovingly patted by Chuang Tzu as he ends his first chapter. identifying any representation wholly with what it represents‖ are descriptions contrary to systematization. Such ―relativized‖ systems are not a system that covers the totality. In the end, then, Neville has to join us here with many leaves that cluster into a tree, many trees that make a park, and many parks that make a loosely gathered city-community. Where is ―totalism‖ here? See Robert C. Neville‘s Foreword to Kuang-ming Wu, On Chinese Body Thinking, Leiden: Brill, 1997, p. xvi. For Russell, see his ―Dewey‘s New Logic,‖ The Philosophy of John Dewey, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp, NY: Tudor Publishing, 1951, pp. 135-156, where Santayana was quoted.

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Thus each section here is one pebble. One pebble is one world, and one world is one vignette of one leaf alive to a tree, all alive, and we realize suddenly, heartfelt, that we are as alive as this tree planted in the middle of nowhere in Heaven and Earth. You can pick any section, then, and it opens you into Wonderland of Chinese Alice wonderfully alive. This is life-thinking. This is Chinese wisdom. Shall we go in now?

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Chapter 1

CHINESE WISDOM AS EXPRESSIVE We must first distinguish describing in plain explicit words, from sensitively, tacitly expressing what is actually the case. Description often distorts if not misses actuality; only natural expression hits it, never casual or haphazard, but discerning as Mom strokes her baby the very best, for Mom lives her baby; her baby is her life.

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WHAT IS ACTUAL IS INDESCRIBABLE, AND CAN ONLY BE EXPRESSED SENSITIVELY ―All there is‖ is actual-concrete, just here now, self-so 自然, ―nature‖ naturing-natured, for nature is nascence daily born to self-renew, birthing, birthing unceasing.47 Every day is the first day of the rest of all things‘ lives, daily renewed. It is as simple as that, just ex-isting, standing-out new at every moment, natural, simple, and inexpressible. Never a tired slab, a newborn baby is a dew-sprinkled rose softly waving in spring breeze, announcing the first morning of creation, every day of our life watching her, at every moment, even while she is asleep. She is more firmly freshly af-firmed thus than anything else in the adult world. The baby exhibits the ―Child Heart,‖ Li Chih‘s (1527-1602) lifelong thesis48 that it is simply there at the heart of our being, the true heart that originates all genuine writings of whatever sort. Such ―being simply there‖ is elusive and cannot be said, for saying [a] says complexly, and so saying ―simply there‖ misses the ―simply there.‖ Does one plus one make two? The two beloveds laugh and point at their kids; gunpowder and a spark bang things to pieces. Saying also [b] fixes the elusively unfixable to distort it. ―I‘m natural‖ turns me unnatural; ―I‘m normal‖ shows me abnormal; ―I‘m humble‖ displays my pride.

47 48

日日新又日新 (大學 3), 生生 (書經, 盤庘中, 易經, 繫辭上), 生生不斷 (顏氏家訓, 歸心). See also Appendix III: Being as Self-So. ―童心說‖ in 李贄文集, 北京社會科學文獻出版社, 2000, 3:91-93. Cf. Mencius‘ (4B12) 「大人者不失共赤子之心者也」 and 司馬相如‘s (179-117 BCE) ―大人賦‖ describing 漢步帝‘s quest of 神仙 and 長生之藥 that are precisely children whose every moment is divinely immortal. (司馬相如集校注, 北京人民出版社, 1996, pp. 67-79)

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Tao Te Ching reasonably, elusively mirrors actuality elusive. ―Tao (the Way) can tao, not always-Tao 道可道, 非常道,‖49 gestures Lao Tzu. He can only say without saying, for he cannot assert, and this is no assertion but a contradiction. The way things are, once said as ―way,‖ loses what the way-always is, actual, natural, simply there. Western philosophy is forever saying, analytically, complexly. Trying to reach the simple natural, it falls astray in astonishingly obscure complexity. Phenomenologists try to go back to ―things themselves‖ and end up in incredible jargon-tangles. How have Heidegger awesomely contorted toward the simple ―Ground of beings‖! The more tried, the less natural; ―Tao can tao, not always-Tao.‖ Here is required not more shrewd skill but sensitive straight sensing; words must turn wording in silent gesture, to step aside to sense. How? Affirmation af-firms, negation abnegates all alternatives (―tired slab‖) to point at ―it‖ sensed, to let saying allude (―dewseeped rose‖) and meta-phor—ferry us over (―first morning of creation‖)—to wink at us to perceive ―it‖ at hand our ―baby‖ so precious in trees, stones, streets, and then tired slabs, and even deaths—all daily renewed.50 Thus Chinese wisdom at its expressive best perceptively performs life itself, quite naturally. Writers—poets, novelists—are sensitive to such palpitations of life, to present them as they are, alive. Chinese wisdom is inherently literary and thoughtful, with ―technical‖ philosophical features or no.

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THE TECHNICAL AS THE LITERARY Now, we must turn slightly technical, but not much. Human reason is a drunkard who, eager to mount a horse of truth, jumps to the other sides, to both other extremes. Reason tries to bend things right to make them ―over right‖ 矯枉過正. Eager to separate ―Chinese philosophy‖ from literature, some people cut the literary originative aspects of thinking off from the philosophically ―technical.‖51 These people are unaware that the life of the philosophically technical consists in literary sensitivity, and so the technical isolated from the literary empties the technical of life and of content. As a result, the ―technical‖ in China drifts into a philosophical net of vague Western sort. This net is so porous that the materials scooped out of China‘s vast writings prove

49

Given fluid Chinese syntax, 道可道非常道 can also be 道可, 道非, 常道, 道可道非, 常道, and the like, all quite self-contradictory. For simplicity‘s sake, only one most popular reading is cited above. 50 That Confucianism is as subtly actual as Taoism will soon be presented often. 51 A classical example is that of Chan (xi) and Moore (vii) in Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963. The same dichotomy is on the literary side, as the literary Chuang Tzu was isolated from the philosophical Chuang Tzu and the religious Chuang Tzu, as if the literary aspect could survive meaningfully without the philosophical and the religious, as if the great literary Chuang Tzu had nothing to do with his philosophical-religious depths. And then, innocently, the ―underlying intention‖ of Chuang Tzu‘s allegories is claimed to be in ―the exposition of ideas,‖ Chuang Tzu himself was compared to Socrates and Zeno, in whose frame two books were listed, Essays on Skepticism, Relativism, and Ethics in the “Zhuangzi” and Experimental Essays on Chuang-tzu, both listed in a Western philosophical framework in The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, Volume 2, ed. William H. Nienhauser, Jr., Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998, pp. 20-26.

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pitifully simplistic, a fertile turf for West-minded thinkers to thrive in incredible analytical complexity, to tout their complexity as ―Chinese philosophy.‖52 Assuredly, no comparable temptation, mutatis mutandis, is forthcoming for Western philosophy; it is unthinkable for ―traditional Chinese philosophers‖ to take advantage of complex Western systems and reinterpret them in Chinese terms that unify literary and philosophical. Therefore, the above phenomenon, China made complex the Western way, should be to the credit of Chinese ―generosity,‖ which is, mind you, an offshoot of Chinese wisdom, not its essence. The key requirement here is to keep in mind that the Chinese technicalities—whatever it is—derives from literary sensitivity to living; Chinese wisdom is indeed part of life historical and literary, where the philosophically technical is life-pragmatic, as viscerally expressed in literature and history. Chinese wisdom in all its technicalities is alive as life itself through time, and describing it requires lively literary and historical sensibility. ―Philosophical technicality‖ here should mean the literary made explicitly coherent and implicitly systematic, never an explicit selfenclosed system. This point is shown as follows.

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HOW CHINESE WISDOM EXPRESSES ITSELF We now detail what and how Chinese wisdom does to express the inexpressible concrete in our routine life, in six intertwined points on wording and argument-mode, sound and sight as sense, and wrapped up by the seventh, story-thinking. These seven features of Chinese expressions are comparable to straight propositions and arguments in the West yet distinctly Chinese in sense, sentiment, and procedure.53 Story-thinking works in storytelling, story-hearing, and story-adding, open to contingencies and coherent in comprehending them. ―Story‖ mirrors a ―heaven‘s net 天網‖ coarse-meshed, leaking nothing (Lao Tzu 73). Coarse-meshed, the story-net is coherent, so we can grasp and comprehend contingencies; leaking nothing, the story-net rhymes in all brutal contingencies overflowing logic-rationality, without rhyme or reason. This is no extravagance but life-necessity for, being human, we always yarn our daily living into a story to make sense; people are born story-makers to story-think. So we say, human persons are history-makers, open and coherent; ―open coherence‖ is an oxymoron to logic-rationality, yet distinctive of concrete Chinese dialogic, explained thus.

One: Demonstratives: Story-Words Con-Firming Every statement is issued and supported by the ―I,‖ who has an I-story to tell, each ―I‖ distinct. Two people can use the same word ―I‖ yet with different stories, one of ―Wu‖ in

52

See I. A. Richards, A. C. Graham, H. Fingarette, C. Hansen, almost all writers listed in the august Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy (ed. Antonio S. Cua, NY: Routledge, 2003), and the list goes on. 53 Here, Kuang-ming Wu‘s On Chinese Body Thinking, Leiden: Brill, 1997, pp. 22-79, ―Chinese Philosophy and Story-Thinking,‖ Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Summer 2005, pp. 217-234, and ―World

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USA of twenty-first century, another of ―Chuang Tzu‖ in China of fourth century BCE. We are surprised, for the same word should have the same story in it. We have not just ―I‖ but words of this sort, pronouns (you, she, he, they, it), ―now,‖ ―here,‖ etc., called ―demonstratives.‖54 On further thought, we are not just surprised at ―I‖; we are impressed with the importance of its strangeness, in four ways. One, what ―I‖ means is unclear till explained by its I-story, the story of the I-situation. Two, a saying always begins with ―I say that . . . ,‖ often understood. Every saying is so supported in meaning by ―I say that‖ that ―It‘s raining but I don‘t think so‖ is weirdly senseless, though its grammar is OK, for ―It‘s raining‖ is a shorthand for ―I think it‘s raining,‖ to clash ―It‘s raining but I don‘t think so‖; in the latter saying, what it says clashes the I-situation that supports it. Three, in general, then, a saying and even a word55 is made of its subject-who-says-it that differs as the I differs; as the I differs, so what I say differs. If ―I‖ is a demonstrative, all statements are, too. ―This stone is solid‖ is said by me; I was invited by the solidity of ―this stone‖ to test it and say so to sum up my story of how I came to this story. Saying so, I report it to you to try it as well. Mencius (1A7) responded to [a] a call from Duke Hsüan of Ch‘i‘s ―casual incident‖ of releasing an ox in mortal jitters, as it was dragged to sacrificial slaughter, to [b] elicit-confirm the essence of the incident, the ―heart of not bearing people‖ in pain that exists deep in the Duke‘s being. So, this ―heart,‖ this notion, has a story of inter-calls, a two-way con-firm-ation between the incident and Mencius‘ perceptive response. He then urged the Duke to hear his people‘s calls in pain, to continue the historic tradition of true rulership of mercy, the governance of unbearable sensitivity to people. Likewise, the Taoists are full of responses to calls from Nature to elicit the essence of beingnatural—the fish, the birds, the ox, the trees, the water, the child, even the tyrant, the criminal, and the insane, all beings in nature and society that call on us. Four, we now realize how the strangeness of demonstratives is not confined to specific words called ―demonstratives‖ but descriptive of a general feature of all concrete notions. ―Notion‖ is what is noted within the concrete situation; ―concept‖ is what is grasped out of the situation.56 Notions are notables China names as ―names.‖ Concepts are forceps abstracting something we want from actual things. ―Name‖ is a pivotal clue to the distinctness of China.57 In Western fourteenth century ―nominalism,‖ name-alone-ism, kicked out ―naïve realism‖ to proudly eviscerate actual reality from ―names‖ into mere convention. Now, names are simply stipulated as defined axioms, so ―primitive‖ as to be incapable of further defining and discussing. Names in nominalism are gloriously enwrapped in themselves, out of touch with actuality. Logic-rationality is mathematics, a huge mind-boggling lump of analytical tautology, trying to inductively apply to actuality into fabulous cosmology and cosmogony, Interculturalism: China Written in English,‖ Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, June 2005, pp. 1-42, are ―smoked‖ together into a fragrant whole. 54 So far we have followed the standard meaning of demonstratives (Demonstratives, ed. Palle Yourgrau, Oxford University Press, 1990). Now we go our way, to see all words as demonstratives. 55 And even a ―word‖ is an important saying, for a word is said as a saying is said—by the subject who is unclear to us till the subject‘s situation-story is told. 56 See Wu, On the “Logic” of Togetherness, Leiden: Brill, 1998, pp. 350-360. 57 In Chinese society, ―name‖ is ―face 面子‖ of the honor and dignity of personal identity, self-integrity.

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attached with awesome relativity, quantum mechanics, shoestring theory, big bang theory, big bounce theory, etc. Still, why ―1+1=2‖ is applicable to actuality at all remains a mystery. Besides, this astounding list of cosmos-explaining technicalities that goes on indefinitely would barely admit humans as its tiny insignificant part. Cosmology remains a vast cosmology, tautologically self-contained, and separate from socio-politics, much less normative ethics at all. This is the West where names are axiomatic, having nothing to do with actuality, cosmic or human. In contrast, ―names‖ in China are praxis personal, social, and cosmic. These names must be righted. They must be pondered on and practiced on, straightened and lived up to. ―Righting names 正名‖ is the praxis of politics 政, so managed as to let ―father be father, son be son,‖ so that ―ruler be ruler, subjects be subject‖58 as properly patterned after father-son relationship. ―Father, be father!‖ tells that name is verb, the what is the how; professing is behaving, what you profess-as-father must be how you behave-as-father. This ―must‖ is actually violated often, however, and so ―righting names 正名‖ must be administered, and the adjustment of actual behavior to fit the name the behavior professes, is socio-politics, to effectuate the triune harmony of Heaven, Earth, and Humanity. Name is verb, personal, social, and cosmic. This point cannot be repeated often enough. Fathers must behave as father for sons to behave as sons, and this family intimacy patterns the mutuality in the state where ruler must be ruler for ruled to be properly subject—for the state to pattern the family in turn. This family-state inter-patterning is ―righting names 正名‖ the state is authorized to administer, and the authorization is legitimated by the cosmos-human mutuality. The state is thus the family writ large and the cosmos writ small. Personal decency (ethics) derives from socio-politics to redound to it, both of which are based on the heavenearth harmony to make ecological impacts. Violating this cosmos-human concord invites disaster. Dissidence is dissonance to deaths all around; socio-ethical adjustments are cosmically incumbent on us, called ―righting names.‖ ―Righting names‖ is incumbent on us humanity ubiquitously. As Western science verifies (rights) hypotheses (names), so Chinese socio-ethics demands us to practice (righting) what we profess (names). Righting names harmonizes our subjective life-expressions with allembracing actuality throughout Heaven and Earth. All this amounts to names being verbs intentional, acting out as named. Profess it, we must practice it; ―father‖ claimed, fatherly behaved. Description prescribes to accomplish as described, and this ―as‖ is an active name-righting. ―Names‖ thus ―righted‖ spread among persons, throughout Heaven and Earth. Names are righted in cosmic contagion, historical and normative. Now, let us unpack all this further. ―Name is verb‖ means that ―logic‖ is a socio-ethical imperative; logical analysis is one with interpersonal ethics and sociopolitical management.59 This oneness mirrors what myriad things are as they are 所以然 as how they ought to be 所當然. The existential what is its how;

58 59

Confucius said so (12/11). All Name-Scholars 名家, such as 尹文子, 鄧析子, 公孫龍子, 惠施子, and so on, logically endeavor to effect Confucius‘ passion for politics as righting names, as we will soon see.

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cosmology backs socio-ethics.60 Thus cosmically compelling is this what-how oneness, this is-ought unity. Such a powerful oneness in righting-name is Chinese wisdom alive across time and space, in history and cosmos, for millennia. Naturally, Chinese wisdom has no concept, only ―names‖; Western philosophy has no names, only ―concepts.‖ China has no Western logic-rational probes into conceptual relations abstracted from actuality. Chinese wisdom has instead name-righting 正名, to become what we profess to be, and this becoming-正 and making-政 is the ―righting‖ China is quite intent on. We cannot understand these notions China intent on till attached with concrete stories. Being ―kind‖ means, is to, be kin-hearted, to kin-behave, to ―‗old‘ (as verb) my olds to ‗old‘ people‘s olds; to ‗young‘ my youngs to ‗young‘ people‘s youngs,‖61 behave as kinsfolk to anyone we meet. Nor did Confucius define ―filial love in general‖ but cited concrete situations that tell stories of such love.62 ―Filiality‖ is a life-verb with its situation-stories to convey—af-firm— what it means to us, and by doing so urges us to behave likewise. The stories of kindness and filial love are expanded names; they are demonstratives situation-sensitive, not ―demonstratives‖ but normative affirmatives active and interactive.

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Two: Affirmatives: Confirmation Af-Firmed Therefore, this is an important offshoot from demonstratives as story-notions. Since all notions are stories of mutual con-firm-ation, situation and subject mutually con-firm, to act out inter-confirmation. An affirming of the situation is performed in its ―naming,‖ says Hsün Tzu (22), without which not a thing can even exist. How so? A concrete story explains. I asked my boy of three, ―Peter, bring me the watch on my desk.‖ ―OK, Dad . . . It‘s not there, Dad.‖ ―That‘s funny; I just put it on the desk. Go find it, Peter.‖ ―OK, Dad. . . . I cannot find it, Dad.‖ ―That‘s funny.‖ I went in with Peter. ―Here it is, Peter! Can‘t you see?‖ ―O, I didn‘t know that was a watch.‖ The incident jolted me into seeing that the watch did not exist until co-named as ―watch,‖ and recognized as a watch, by us-both.63 Existence depends on co-naming, affirming what we co-say truthfully about the subject and the subject-matter, for we must say things truthfully

60

In the West, mathematical logic strives to apply to actuality as ―induction‖ guided by common sense the extralogical vague cosmology, and results in the revolution of our understanding of the cosmos in ―relativity,‖ ―quantum mechanics,‖ ―shoe-string theory,‖ ―big bang theory,‖ ―big bounce theory,‖ etc., of cosmology and cosmogony. Robert Gilmore (Alice in Quantumland, Spring-Verlag New York, 1995) tells how inscrutably playful the world at large is as Alice at play, overflowing math to enrich it beyond it, as do Stephen Hawking (Brief History of Time and the Universe in a Nutshell, NY: Random House, 2001), Michio Kaku (Hyperspace, Oxford University Press, 1994), and Gary Zukav (The Dancing Wu Li Masters, NY: Bantam, 1980) among quite many other popularizing books on incredible dancing wonders of the universe. In all these applications of logic-rationality to actuality, however, none of these Western excitements is yet to take cosmology as guide and support of human socio-ethical management (only Zukav barely touches on human participation at the end of his book). 61 Mencius 1A7; this is one salient example of righting names toward ubiquitous compassion. 62 E.g., Analects 1/11, 2/5, 6, 7, 8, etc. 63 Wu, On Chinese Body Thinking, Leiden: Brill, 1997, pp. 35-36.

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for things truly to come out existing for us both. Fidelity is at the base of affirmatives, naming. Inter-truthfulness manifests truth. Imagine each of your words must be carved on stone, as it was the custom in ancient China. Would you not think and choose each word with extreme care and caution? Mustn‘t you af-firm each word as carefully as you affirm yourself under oath to your integrity? That is what ―affirmation‖ used to mean in classical China, what ―saying‖ meant, with the weight of your whole person. Now, please do not take all this as a dated custom of ancient alien land. Their point deserves a hearing, i.e., ―Never be a chatterbox to expose yourself as trash-spewer and yourself as trash, as the world today is a throwaway culture of trash.‖ My tiny Corina carved each word into her loving note to me, toddling corrections all over, meaning her every word. The point is reenacted in a classic, The Elements of Style,64 saying, ―Say what is meant; mean every word; unclutter.‖ China goes on insisting, (1) mean your say, and (2) stand by it—to (1) correct affirmatives (―correct names 正名‖) and (2) attain fidelity (信) that affirmatives (言) cover. ―Correcting names 正名‖ corrects the named as named, i.e., (1) to call a spade a spade, a Hitler a crook (name things as they are) and (2) to be your name, e.g., fathers be father, sellers sell what they advertise, not sell dog meat as ―mutton.‖ This is, among others, to record the event exactly as it happened, to which some ancient historians dared to give their lives. Their life-commitment to fidelity is laconically recorded in the Tso Chuan 左傳, China‘s oldest narrative history, saying,65

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Grand Historian wrote, ―Ts‘ui Chu assassinated his ruler 崔杼弒其君.‖ Ts‘ui killed him. His younger-brother continued and wrote so, and the dead were two. His younger-brother wrote [so] again. [Ts‘ui] then let it [stand as written]. South Historian, having heard those historians were dead, was on his way [there] with all his tablets, when [he] heard [it] wasalready written, and went back. I must stand by what I write with my life; it is sociopolitically critical. Asked what politics is, Confucius said (12/11), ―Ruler [be] ruler, subject, subject, father, father, son, son,‖ otherwise people would ―not even know how to move hands or feet,‖ quite a disaster.66 Thus communally to right names 正名 is 政, true politics, the state‘s home-economics. As a family stands firm on correct family relations among its members, so socio-politics is af-firmed only by family-like relations among its societal members. Obviously, without standing by one‘s words, without seriously existentially affirming what one says, all business deals vanish into thin air. Our affirming should spell ―fidelity‖ that Chinese people depict as ―信,‖ a person 人 standing by words 言 to set up words-as-statues. Said Confucius (2/22), ―I don‘t know how one is viable without standing-by-words 信. Big cart without yoke-bar, small cart without collar-bar, with what can one drive them?‖ How 64

William Strunk and E. B. White, The Elements of Style (1935), NY: Penguin Books, 2005. This small classic is highly praised by William Zinsser as he begins another classic, On Writing Well (1976), NY: Harper Collins, 2006. 65 左傳, 襄公二十五年 (548 BC), (臺北市三民書局, 2002, p. 1097). (The Tso chuan: Selections from China’s Oldest Narrative History, tr. Burton Watson, NY: Columbia University Press, 1989, pp. 143-148, esp. 147, with mistakes.) Greatest parsimony (no Grand Historians‘ names!) makes the story so captivating! 66 Confucius elaborates on it—in strongly negative disastrous terms—in 13/3.

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I affirm shows who and what I am67; all human matters operate by this handle-bar, i.e., personal integrity affirmed in words. In short, to affirm aptly 正名 is so personally and interpersonally crucial that all disciplines on writing focus on how to affirm what I mean. The Elements of Style and On Writing Well tell how and show how, as both volumes are cleanly written. Saying yea as yea, nay as nay, this ―saying‖—not dazzling, not touting—is to affirm. Such affirmation is at the core of human existence; to come out existing human is to so affirm. Affirmatives then link the situation to subjects-and-audience, and so affirming manages affirmation, and correcting affirmatives 正名 manages the situation, and in the end the cosmos; nothing is more crucial a life-practice than this, to harmonize saying and living so as to harmonize sayer, saying, and said, humanity with Heaven and Earth.

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Three: Negatives: Affirmatives Stressed Now, did you notice the last statement above, ―nothing is more crucial than this‖? It is an affirmation, isn‘t it, saying ―this is the most crucial,‖ but much stronger. ―Are you a kitty cat, Tommy?‖ ―No!‖ Tommy snapped angrily. ―But you look like a kitty.‖ ―But I‘m not a cat!‖ ―Are you your toy machine, then?‖ ―No! I‘m not my ‗machine gun‘!‖ Tommy is wiser than Skinner taking us as pigeons, wiser than Turing thinking we are computers68; Tommy asserts, in his negatives in the strongest possible way, that he is he, human. His ―No!‖ is his humanity triumphantly affirmed. So, negatives are affirmatives attached with stories of their negations negated, affirmatives with double negatives to reinforce them. Negatives are affirmatives stressed. Chinese people have long practiced negatives affirmatively; examples abound. Confucius‘ terse Analects begin with three short chanting sighs, rhymed, each ending with a negative, ―not also 不亦,‖ i.e., ―not rather,‖ to culminate in the final sigh that seems an anti-climax, in three negatives, ―People not knowing, and is-not vexed, is not the one also princely?‖ On a closer look, we realize quite to the contrary. ―People not knowing‖ is brutal social rejection69; ―not vexed‖ depicts ―mind not moved 不動心,‖ unperturbed composure admired by Russell70; ―not also‖ is ―not rather,‖ a strong affirmation. Thus this last negative sigh chants the strongest possible affirmation of the ultimate human ideal, ―princely person 君子‖ in steady virtue, unmoved in uncertainties—in a threefold negative. The Book of Mencius is full of clinching ―not doing A, B, C, to care for people and not be an ideal ruler—history never has such case.‖

67

―Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject-matter being written about, but who he or she is.‖ William Zinsser, On Writing Well (1976), NY: HarperCollins, 2006, p. 5. 68 Wu, On Metaphoring, Leiden: Brill, 2001, p. 265. 69 Jesus says on the Last Day of Judgment, ―I never knew you; depart from me.‖ (Matthew 7:23, NASB) No harsher rejection than this can we imagine. 70 Bertrand Russell, The Problem of China, 1922.

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Again, ―no do, wu wei 無為‖ but be and behave without ado; without acting, it is so alluring, powerful.71 Asked how old he was, a little boy said, ―I don‘t know.‖ ―What‘s your name?‖ ―I forget. Mom know!‖ His big brother, standing by, then said, ―O, he don‘t know not‘in‘!‖ The boy looked up at him in admiration, as if to say, ―Wow! He knows how to say such complex stuff!‖ Then both boys joined hands and ran away, hopping. I stood there, awestruck. Such irresistible ―no act‖!72 No wonder, Mencius sighed, ―The Great Adults 大人 are those who lose no heart of their ‗baby‘!‖73—in two negatives, ―baby‖ (no adult) and ―lose no‖; the Baby and the Great Adult join in the ―no act‖ of natural being and behaving. Tommy shouts, ―I don‘t wanna sleep!‖ Now, Mom knows he is ready for a nap. So she says, ―OK, Tommy. I‘ll just read you your favorite story. Just sit here beside your pillow but don‘t sleep, OK?‖ Tommy nods. ―Once upon a time . . . ‖—and Tommy hits the pillow. Mom does not push Tommy around but joins her Baby Tom—in ―no act‖ of both, Mom not telling him to sleep but just reading his favorite story, for Tommy to fulfill his wish of ―not wanting to sleep‖—to sleep. Both are happy in the negatives of naturalness, love in ―no do,‖ no acting. Confucius describes such naturalness as ―quick to act, cautious in words,‖ and ―halting speech, quick acting.‖74 Leaning on understatement and hugging silence make the great music, as in life that is cosmic music. Mencius says of ―no act 無為‖ as no ―helping growth 助長‖ of nature. Trees are ―no do‖ incarnate, covering us, nurturing us silently, as if nothing were the matter. So are birds, morning haze, spring mist, even, says Christianity, disasters such as the most shameful painful death on the cross. In any case, nature is ―no act,‖ says the Taoists, expressed in ―cannot help but 不得已‖ of naturalness of things and human living and behaving.75 Naturalness comes in negatives. ―Forgetting‖ self and others, ―losing‖ both, Tommy gazes at his pet. In ―un-feeling,‖ we are unperturbed, composed; in ―no words,‖ silence expresses; ―no-humane‖ is unsentimental; ―no knowledge‖ is uncluttered; ―no desire‖ is not swayed by desires; ―no use‖76 is not obsessed with use, and so on—all describing in negatives how natural we are, invincibly, irresistibly. Nature in naturalness is expressible only in negatives, for naturalness comes only in negating interference.

71

Confucius was also fond of ―no-do, wu wei,‖ noted in Roger T. Ames, The Art of Rulership: A Study in Ancient Chinese Political Thought, Honolulu: The University of Hawaii Press, 1983, pp. 23-64. On Taoist wu wei, see Wu, Chuang Tzu: World Philosopher at Play, Crossroad-Scholars Presses, 1982, pp. 61-114. 72 Wu, On Chinese Body Thinking, Leiden: Brill, 1997, p. 20. 73 Mencius 4B12. This is in quite a contrast to Jean Piaget‘s external observation of how the imperfect child develops and grows up to the adult‘s mature intelligence, the observation in the preset schema of heredity, biology, environment, and adult intelligence. 74 Mencius 2A2, Analects 1/14, 4/24. D. C Lau couples both passages, The Analects, Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1992, p. 7. 75 Chuang Tzu 4/30, 42, 53; 6/15, 18; 11/13, 51; 12/13; 14/2; 15/11; 18/10; 22/32-33; 23/71, 79; 28/26; 33/45. This urgency of naturalness 不得已 is intimately related to natural forgetting 忘, another self-story.

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Four: The Metaphoric: Affirmatives Unpacked China has three more ways of expression that unpack demonstratives, affirmatives, and negatives: the metaphorical, the compact, and the ironic. We usually call such unpacking ―arguing‖-in-China, different from the West‘s argumentation that goes the way of mathematical logic. Let us see the metaphoric expression first. How Metaphor Works77: When a child shows and tells at school, she shows by telling, saying ―doggie‖ to show that the fluffy thing she hugs is her dog. Telling affirms, affirmatives ferry us over from her sounding-―doggie‖-here to that fluffy-thing-there as doggie, and to ―ferry-over‖ is to ―meta-phor.‖ Saying-affirming this here points to that there, with thisfamiliar to ―ferry us over‖—to understand—that-unfamiliar. Affirmatives perform metaphors. The ―here‖ above shows ―I‖ who says, the ―there‖ shows another ―I‖ who gets it (these two ―I‖‘s may be the same ―I‖ now changed), and such ―showing‖ indicates that demonstratives (―I‖ shows, gets) are at work metaphoring by saying (affirmatives). Demonstratives work in metaphors. Metaphors thus join demonstratives to affirmatives. For example, perception metaphors perceiving-I to perceived-things. Affirmatives vanish when deprived of demonstrative-I; a Dr. P (in Sacks‘ story) who has lost his sense of the ―I‖ cannot see ―five pouches connected to a big pouch‖ as ―a glove.‖78 With the demonstrative, ―I,‖ as its base, metaphor does two sorts of work, to and fro. First, metaphor uses familiar knowledge to know unfamiliar things and turns them into part of familiar knowledge, as Confucius said (2/11), ―those who warm up the old to know the new deserve to be teachers.‖ Then, metaphor turns around to make us know the old familiar better—enrich it—by warming up the new-familiar-made-from-unfamiliar. For example, the historian turns our familiar series of bloody incidents into ―French Revolution‖ (now), now a new handle (new familiar) we can use, as a new ―whole‖ to learn more about ―revolution‖ (old familiar, enriched). It is thus that metaphor familiarizes the new with old familiar, and then enriches old familiar with the new-turned-familiar. All this supports—demonstrates, proves, exhibits—an incredible truth, that ―I‖ am ready to launch through metaphor perceiving things, and to say things I perceive, to show things I know, and in this way to widen my knowledge and show my knowledge to others, to share. Human community is a web of metaphors enlivened. Metaphoric-as-lived: We actually live by metaphors,79 in the world made of metaphors. Chinese wisdom extensively exploits this pervasive fact of metaphor in all its thinking, 76

忘己, 喪我, 相忘, 無情, 無言, 無知, 無欲, 無用, are all Chuang Tzu‘s favorites; 不仁 is Lao Tzu‘s (5, 18, 19, 38). On self-losing see Wu, The Butterfly as Companion, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990, p. 505, indexes on ―self,‖ and ―self loss.‖ 77 The metaphoric is bottomless, yet it is easy to use and understand; in fact, all understanding is basically metaphorical, as Ernst Cassirer also insists. Wu barely scratched its surface in Butterfly, op. cit., p. 501 (index on metaphor), Body Thinking, op. cit., pp. 42-54, 488-489 (index on metaphoric), Togetherness, op. cit., p. 466 (index on metaphor), and entire Metaphoring, op. cit., 672 pages. 78 Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, NY: Summit Books, 1970, pp. 13-19. 79 George Lakeoff and Mark Johnson noticed the truth of metaphor (Metaphors We Live By, University of Chicago Press, 1980) by pure examination of our use of language. They have never thought of how rooted metaphorthrust is in the ―I,‖ how it structures our very perception of things and saying of anything, therefore how deeply ―metaphor‖ pervades our life and the world. They have no ―therefore.‖ Their very title, ―metaphor we

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expressing, and ―arguing.‖80 Chinese wisdom argues metaphor way (not mathematical or logic-rational), as did Mencius, Hsün Tzu, Han Fei Tzu, Lieh Tzu, Huai Nan Tzu, Chuang Tzu, and all subsequent Chinese thinkers. China is full of metaphors to point people to ―truths.‖ We just cite again quite a famous story from Mencius: He (1A7) noted a casual incident of a dictator releasing an ox in mortal jitters, to point to the origin of release, his heart of not bearing people in pain, thereby to urge him to ‗old‘ our olds to reach ‗old‘ people‘s olds, and point out that that is the invincible governance, ever, of people-sensitivity.81 Does metaphors-all-over do us any good? To our question, ―What do you mean?‖ or ―What‘s your point?‖ fresh metaphors are so constantly offered, in the maze of continuously metaphoring metaphors, ad infinitum, that we end up not knowing what is going on. Besides, urging a point by a metaphor can be opposed by urging a contrary point by a contrary metaphor, and, metaphor for metaphor, we have no way to judge between them. We can abandon metaphor-way here and appeal to sober logic-rational discernment, as Wu once did, or to Plato-Aristotle‘s all-inclusive Being Itself as the matrix of all metaphors, as Tillich did.82 Both are ways of the West that take metaphor as an aid to the main business of thinking, not as thinking itself. Suppose we take the metaphor-way as the way we live by, how would we stick our metaphor-neck out to the bitter end? Fascinatingly, Chinese thinkers keep thinking in metaphors. Such pan-metaphor-ism is not ―wayward‖ or ―indecisive‖ but is metaphor of no metaphor. It is a ―metaphor‖ because it is all over; it is ―no metaphor‖ because it so spreads all over that it has nowhere to be called so, nowhere to fall and fail as metaphor. ―All metaphors‖ interact, inter-transforming all over. Neville‘s words recur; his ―perspective‖ is our ―metaphor.‖83 The famous image of the butterfly dreaming to be Chuang Tzu, or maybe Chuang Tzu dreaming to be a butterfly, makes the weird point: reality is always for-a-perspective; and that point is for-a-perspective; the perspectives perceive one another as incommensurate; and the perspectives subtly and often without notice are transformed into one another so as to manifest the truly catholic nature of perspectives, which is not a perspective at all. The transformation is the thing, like the butterfly whose being is transformation. Metaphor-everywhere has three interactive features intertwined. One, all metaphors intersupport and inter-complement, to inter-enliven. E.g., Mencius‘ water-metaphor is to be supported by Lao Tzu‘s metaphors, valley and mother.84 This inter-metaphoring never

live by,‖ was adapted (without acknowledging so) from Frost‘s sayings in 1930 in ―Education by Poetry: A Meditative Monologue,‖ Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays, NY: The Library of America, 1995, pp. 720, 724, etc. Frost‘s essay is quite deep, concrete, and multifaceted. 80 And also in living, as we all live in metaphor and by metaphor. 81 See Togetherness, op. cit., pp. 329-332 for more detail. 82 Wu, Togetherness, op. cit., pp. 337-338. The Theology of Paul Tillich, eds. Charles W. Kegley and Robert W. Bretall, NY: Macmillan, 1961, p. 334. Tillich‘s ―symbol‖ is our ―metaphor‖ here. See also Royce‘s allinclusive Being as a way out of ―error,‖ to become the base of his metaphysics, in ―The Possibility of Error‖ in Josiah Royce, The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885), NY: Harper Torchbook, 1958, pp. 384-435. This was the point that developed into two volumes of The World and the Individual (1899), NY: Dover Publications, 1959. 83 This is Robert Cummings Neville‘s Foreword to Wu, Butterfly, op. cit., p. xi. Can we die in a dream? Well, it doesn‘t matter if dreaming and awakening inter-penetrate. 84 Mencius 6A1-5 nods at Tao Te Ching 6, 15, 28, 32, 41, 66; 1, 25, 52; 6, 55, 61, etc.

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mutually cuts down, for inter-lethal metaphors do not last, as organized crime does not; when even your friends guard against you, you are done for. Metaphors that last are those we live by, by embracing even evil and metaphors of evil. Socrates accepted his beloved evil Athenians; Jesus accepted his beloved evil establishment to point to world redemption; and Chuang Tzu positively learned precious life-truths from evildoers.85 They all radically inter-accept to spread joy all over. Two, diverse situations demand many metaphors, all at one in relevance. Relevance is right, situationally right (宜), and so is truth; truth is pan-metaphors of one truth relevant to many situation-truths. On one proposal, Confucius restrained one student, prompted another, under the different situation of one from the other (11/20); he depicted many ways to fulfill same filiality under different situations (2/5-8).86 Three, metaphor of truth as ―one in many‖ silently let each hearer differently discern meanings, even let them invent new metaphors to carry on the point often ineffable. In the world of all-metaphors, contentions vanish into considered discourse 論說 of reasonable talk 倫理 to please 悅.87 Metaphors point to what really convinces, as what is really the case. These metaphors are naturally compact for the hearer to unpack. This is the Compact mode of Chinese wisdom.

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Five: The Compact, to be Unpacked Metaphor links knowledge, going from old known to know new unknown, and back from new known to enrich old known. Metaphor then hooks on to people, going from its author to its hearer, and back to enrich its author, and the shuttling goes on. Confucius the teacher typifies this activity, to learn. He said (2/11) ―[I] warm up the old to know the new‖ as teacher, but then (5/9, 7/8) ―[I] raise one‖ for people to ―return‖ with ―two, three,‖ even ―ten.‖ He told them what has gone on and they knew what is to come (1/15), to delight one another. Going through interenrichment of teaching-as-earning must be compact for hearers to unpack. Besides, the shuttle is not confined to interpersonal relations but extends to meeting life vicissitudes. Examples are unlimited, but let us pick only three, first on disasters, second, on how best to live, and third, how China expresses both in ―characters‖ the pictograms of sense of life. First, on Disasters: Impressed with a compact story of Uncle Fort in ―Counsels among People 人間訓‖ in the Huai Nan Tzu 淮南子, we stop and think. Disasters strike often. We can take one of two attitudes. One is to persist in moping, demanding cosmic justice under the Divine Beyond, as a Job of tragic hero for the will-o‘-the-wisp of ―justice.‖ The Divine would 85

Socrates‘ Apology and Crito can be seen as describing, not cowardly yielding to the enormous powers that be, but courageous acceptance of them. Jesus‘ submission to unjust judgment and death penalty is proverbial. Chuang Tzu keeps learning from evildoers in 4/, 10/10-15, 23/75-79, and 29/, among many others. Actually, ―honor among thieves‖ in Socrates (Republic 1.351) echoes Chuang Tzu‘s (10/10-15). 86 Equality is one, variously individuated. Justice is one (blind), applied to many situations. Notions are various ―one in many.‖ 87

All this will be rehearsed in ―style as validity‖ in Part IV below. See 文心雕龍, 論說第十八, 臺北市三民書局, 民83, pp. 179-190, on 論說 as 倫理 to 悅人以兌, etc.

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swoop down in whirlwind of more disasters to keep us in place, a speck at a spot, to stop tragic hero‘s moping (Job 38). Another attitude is Uncle Fort‘s at the edge of town, with an art of counting-days. His horse went lost beyond the city-gate. Comforted by friends, he said, ―How can this not make happiness?‖ Months later, the horse came back with a stallion. Congratulated, he said, ―How can this not do havoc?‖ His son mounted the horse, fell and broke a leg. Comforted, he said, ―How can this not do happiness?‖ Later, a battle broke out and most young folks fought and died, while his limping son was spared. The rest is history. Lao Tzu said (58), ―O, woe, where weal leans! O, weal, where woe lies!‖ No divine, no justice, we have just a ―natural law‖ on what is coming. Is ―all that is‖ weal or woe? No one can tell. It is both but not quite; we do not smile in sad tears. Only the time-mind can get it to move on in our days. All this says, disasters are for us to look forward to as weather forecast. ―Everyone complains about the weather but does nothing about it,‖ said Mark Twain. Well, Uncle Fort did—forecasting, he just grabs and goes, weal or woe, both being the same horse to mount. Of course, Job would say, ―That‘s what I was told the Divine is (Job 38).‖ Well, all right. Blessing on you, Job! Second, on how to live: The above reflections on Uncle Fort make us think of our lifetask, on how to live our life. Life is made of two kinds of things, things urgent and things important. Things urgent are daily routines, making money, and the like, without which we cannot survive; they are what we daily engage in. People think our life is made of things urgent and nothing else. Medical doctors say we need not go see them unless we need them; they are repairmen of ―things urgent,‖ not usually our health enhancers. Things important are important. They are what make you ―you,‖ i.e., ―your thing,‖ your passion, what no one else can do but you. They are important to you because you taste no real life without them, what you live in, live for, live on, what you enjoy life with, your life itself. We cannot live on without things urgent, but we lose ―we‖ if we live on urgent things alone. We cannot survive without handling things urgent, but those who handle things urgent alone are not human, for losing things important to just live on, we are mere thin hard coins, not human. Things urgent allow us to go on; things important make us be ourselves. Each of us must find out ―my thing,‖ what is important for each person personally. Do your thing! Live your thing! This is the way to live your life. Sadly, we always risk letting urgent things crowd out important things, and lose our ―self.‖ Of course both things urgent and things important can and should be combined, doing one through doing the other. Zen and all religions say so. Our life-mission is to have both. Here is how, says China in all its practical wisdom. Chuang Tzu proposed (2/38-40) ―double walk 兩行.‖ How could we walk both ways at once? He tells a strangely simple story. Uncle Monkey told a crowd of monkeys, ―Morning, three [nuts], evening, four,‖ and they were furious. ―All right, then. Morning, four, evening, three,‖ and they were happy. Uncle Monkey managed to walk ―morning three‖ and ―morning four,‖ conforming to monkeys‘ desires and his intention, both at once, for 3+4 is 4+3, so choosing one chooses the other!88 If Frost ―took the one‖ road and ―has made all the difference,‖89 Uncle Monkey‘s 88

―兩行‖ can mean 兩者俱行, that is, 兩個都可以 ―both are OK,‖ in Chinese colloquial expression. Is it just walking with both legs extended to living both ways?

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choice of both must have made even double the difference! Life‘s happiness is here, to choose both for them and for us, as in commerce to benefit seller and buyer. We now can eat the cake and have it as well. All this brings us back to Uncle Fort. We are Uncle Fort at the edge of daily life, Ms. or Mr. Border in space and in time, for we had better be good at counting days as Uncle Fort, asking ―How can this not do its reverse?‖ and be ready. Our survival depends on this preparedness, on leaning forward, peeping beyond the Border of status quo, ready on tiptoe for what comes next, weal or woe, weal and woe. What sort of life is this? Surprisingly, Confucius answers, this way. His Analects begins by intoning tersely, ―Master says, ‗Learn and timely practice it, O, not also pleasing! Have alumni-friends from afar come, O, not also enjoyable! People not know [you] and not upset, O, not also Princely One!‖ This whole bit compactly shows— demonstrates—Confucius happy learning, convivial, and patient through it all, weal and woe. The ―I‖ is nowhere explicit but clearly present here. The ―I‖ is an ―I‖-story, a basic demonstrative, a compact story, for without the ―I‖-story we would not know what ―I‖ is. This ―I‖-story, mind you, is a life-story that had better be like Confucius‘, happily growing in learning to become convivial and vivacious while patiently resilient. Now, citing and talking about these mini-stories above show us two points. One, these stories are compact, not longer than about three lines or less in original Chinese, yet they all evoke all sorts of thoughts on our part, and we still feel we have barely scratched the surface; they are bottomless, quite deep and vast. Two, they mirror living, as simple, short, compact, and deep as life itself, to show us, or rather evoke us to think on how to live. The saying, ―Life is giving,‖ for example, provokes so many thoughts, every ―today.‖90 Life needs not many words to live on; one nudge, one hint, is enough to spark the fire of life to burn on. In short, without bare compact stories, curious enough to incite interest, we would not have easily noticed deep implications for life in those ―casual incidents‖ in our daily routine, and it takes years of watchful living to come up with those simple stories. Third, on Chinese characters: Let us now see Chinese characters. As night glides unawares into morning and then turns into afternoon, blocks of vignettes emerge to make up life. Life is such blocks of pictures entwined in space, to get moving in time, to make history. Chinese thinking—Chinese wisdom—is most sensitive to this montage of vignettes of life; Chinese characters most conveniently express such montages.91 Two points deserve noting here. 1, Chinese character is a com-plex dot of sound, sight, and smell of a scene expressing the sense of life-vignettes. 2, the gliding-turning of time is expressed by piling a vignette on top of another into metaphors of storytelling, and this sensetransition argues. Both points are linked, for each character exudes the sense of sight and sound of a vignette, which in turn is a compact story of the time-flow. Both points, 1 and 2, are detailed as follows. 89

―The Road Not Taken,‖ in Robert Frost, op. cit., p. 103. To think of it, the title (as the poem) hankers after the road not taken while describing the road taken. Does Frost walk two roads as well? 90 On ―giving,‖ just during the last week of June and first week of July 2006 alone, we see ―Give and Make‖ (The Economist, June 24th-30th, p. 12), ―‖Billanthropy‖ (The Economist, July 1st-7th, p. 9), and ―To Give, Divine‖ (Time, July 10, p. 16). ―Giving‖ is a one-word story spread out in three articles. 91 What follows is an expansion in a new way what is in Wu, History, Thinking and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991, pp. 125-173, and Wu, On Metaphoring, op. cit., pp. 422-434.

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1. Characters are Dots of Sense-Scene(s): China is the only thriving culture today that uses characters, pictograms, writing ―money‖ not as ―m-o-n-e-y‖ in alphabet but as ―$¢,‖ ―dollars and cents,‖92 but more colorful and resounding, ―with voices, with colors,‖ as Chinese people say.93 One character is already a short story that says much, such as ―i, 易‖ a gliding story of life-seasons chameleon turning, ―tao, 道‖ the way things walk forward to come to pass, ―jen, 仁,‖ two (二) persons (人) the inter-human, all too humane, ―hsin, 信‖ of a person standing by words in fidelity, ―wang, 忘‖ that forgets, oblivious 亡 to the self‘s uneasy selfconsciousness 心, and so on. The Classic of Changes 易經 has a striking sentence, ―The shen-神, power-stretching-allover,94 is what ‗subtle‘s‘ myriad things 妙萬物,‖ quite untranslatable. A commentator said, ―It [―subtle‘s‖, 妙] means myriad things are primary, to which the force adheres.‖ Chu Tzuch‘ing said that ―subtle‖ here is a verb presenting what cannot be said.95 All these are striking thoughts. Two-character phrases sum up memorable stories such as ―Yin-Yang, 陰陽‖ that exhibits how positives and negatives inter-cut to inter-support, Mencius‘ ―help growth 助長‖ of the silly farmer pulling at seedlings to help them grow, ―not do 無為‖ that refrains from interference, and even ―learn and, 學而,‖ evoking many an idea, a portion of Confucius‘ first saying as a chapter heading (the first) to his Analects, as is the custom of Chinese writings through time.96 Three-character phrases caption, say, Chuang Tzu‘s rich stories into one pack after another, such as ―roving and rambling, 逍遙遊‖ his first bunch, ―things, theories—sorting, 齊物論‖ his second, etc. Four-character phrases are China‘s favorites. ―Uncle Fort losing horse, 塞翁失馬‖ reminds us of how to pose for what‘s coming as Uncle Fort, ―flood-vast breath-vitality, 浩然之氣‖ wants us to become cosmically vast in our every breathing everyday. Such characters and phrases pack mini-stories to lug around and spread in life.97 Since ancient phrases become unintelligible by and by, scholars come to describe what the originative situation was, and their description is called exposition (hsün, 訓); they smooth out the ancient-today differences in sense, called exegesis (ku, 詁).98 Such expositions and exegeses came to make up commentarial ―common sense‖ in China.

92

The closest in the West is ―Good to the last drop‖ that spreads coffee fragrance. ―有聲有色‖ is a common colorful four-character phrase in China. 94 On 神 as the power that universally stretches see Wu, Butterfly, op. cit., p. 482, index on ―shen.‖ 93 95

―神也者, 妙萬物而為言者也.‖ 易經, 卦說第四章. The famous commentator is Japanese 本田濟, in his 易學, 朝日文庫, 1978, 1990, pp. 357-358. See ―「好」與「妙」,‖ 朱自清古关文學專集(上), 臺北: 宏業書局, 民72, pp. 125-141. All this is quite astonishing to our common sense today. 96 Cf. a listing of many indefinite ways in which chapter captions were made out of phrases in the chapters, 附釋音毛詩注疏卷第一, 影印阮刻十三經注疏, 臺北文化圖書公司, 民國五十九年, p. 269. 97 春秋, 戰國策, 晏子春秋, 論語, 莊子, 列子, etc., are all full of short stories, exempla. Cf. Wu, ―Aesthetics‖ in Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy, ed. Antonio S. Cua, NY: Routledge, 2003, pp. 1-5. 98 This is a summary of explanations of ―訓‖ and ―詁,‖ ibid.

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Chinese people use their ―common sense‖ to investigate ancient texts, to understand phrases and mini-stories so as to apply them to actual living today. How? By metaphor, ―as this, so that; as that, so this,‖ they understand these counsels on how to live, adjusting them then appropriately to the situations ―now,‖ and in doing so, they enrich the Chinese funds of common sense. Importantly, all this is made possible by Chinese characters being pictograms,99 difficult if not impossible to do with alphabets. In the West, slogans and especially commercials are beginning to adopt such crisp colorful expressions, quite attention-catching; such is a constant practice in China since time immemorial.100 Now we see that Chinese characters 文字 are alive as ―pictograms‖ to mirror our living, raw, in flesh and blood. The characters paint not things but their senses.101 Let us take a simple example. A huge ball dazzling all around paints the sun. The character 日 paints the sense-of-the-sun, the Yang light of day, the heavenly splendor of rising power. 日 now paints and points out a shining awesome atmosphere of regal virtue in the august Heaven, and the sun-sense opens out a tradition of whole host of meanings. Mind you. Chinese characters paint things‘ sense to form a peculiar tradition of hermeneutics, and those are lost who bypass this Chinese tradition to interpret Chinese characters on their own, as Ernest F. Fenollosa and Ezra Pound unwittingly did and got lost in gobbledygook of their own. Then a ―lizardly‖102-serpentine character 易, classified under 日,103 has a vast variety of connotations104 as proposed by all respectable writers of all ages, from lizard to sun-and-

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99

Lin Yutang and James Liu are firmly opposed to taking characters as pure pictograms, for characters form ―bisyllabic words,‖ as Sirén fails to see (Lin), characters are not straightly ―words,‖ as Fenollosa fails to distinguish (Liu). Indeed, Ezra Pound‘s translations of three of Confucian Four Books and Classic of Poetry are all miserably off. So Lin and Liu have a point. Still, Lin and Liu may have barked up the wrong tree. ―Bisyllabic words‖ in China, different from individual characters, also differ from alphabetical words. Sirén, Fenollosa, and Pound thought they can tell Chinese characters by visualizing nature, but nature is nature-seen, and characters mirror nature-seen-by-China. Their fault lies in missing Chinese ―common sense,‖ the Chinese mode of exegesis (訓詁) in 說文解字 (許慎), what dictates how to see pictograms, not to see characters as raw Western photographs. See Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, Washington, DC: Square Dollar Series, 1935; Lin Yutang, The Chinese Theory of Art: Translations from the Masters of Chinese Art, NY: G. P. Putnam, 1967, pp. 3-5; James J. Y. Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry, The University of Chicago Press, 1962, pp. 5-7; Ezra Pound, The Confucian Odes, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954; Ezra Pound, Confucius: The Unwobbling Pivot, The Great Digest, The Analects, NY: New Directions, 1969. 100 Alan Watts shrewdly noted how fitting Chinese characters are to presenting the immediate situation, in Tao: The Watercourse Way, NY: Pantheon Books, 1975, pp. 2-17. ―Advertisement-like pithiness characterizes Chinese wisdom (CW)‖ is to say, not ―all CW is advertisements,‖ but both share pithy persuasiveness. We distinguish the two by contents—what CW says is important, what others say may or may not be. Campaign against tobacco was a commercial and a CW. But then is every commercial for worthy cause a CW? Commercials are philosophical in China as Socrates was in the marketplace, selling his wares (self-examination, no pretense to knowledge) as merchants did theirs in the same marketplace. That was why he was caught as ―selling poison‖ to the youth to stop respecting social convention. He was prosecuted for peddling foul knowledge much as another merchant would have been for peddling foul goat milk, for both corrupt the youth. Both are equally bad merchants, though the West may say (later) Socrates is special for peddling true knowledge of honest noknowledge, which was cognitive prejudice at the time. Now how does Socrates differ from merchants? They are inexpressibly distinct, right? China‘s is life-thinking, life as thinking and thinking as living, as Socrates‘ is. 101 See Wen I-do‘s punchy insistence on this point in his ―字與畫,‖ 聞一多全集, 步漢: 湖北人民出版社, 2004, 2:205-207. We take off from him. 102 English language does have a word ―lizardly‖ though now rarely used. See The Oxford English Dictionary, Secondly Edition, 2001, VIII:1061.

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moon together, a mere handful of which are mentioned by the Wilhelms.105 We are on a sacred and slippery ground of timeless China here; its mathematical poetry demands our utmost hermeneutical caution. Sadly, some common English phrases have lost their etymological vigor. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable is now a dated curiosity, and even it has no etymology of ―once upon a time,‖ nor does the OED.106 All English professors I asked gently brushed aside an alien imbecile me, with ―It‘s a linguistic convention, you know‖; none said what ―it‖ is that made that strange convention of ―upon‖ and ―a time.‖ Even ―will-o‘-the-wisp‖ came out of ―William the wisp,‖ and, crucially, in contrast to such a silly wise William,107 China‘s story, ―morning, three,‖ is easy to grasp and to recall, and bottomless in meaning. Chinese language is alive in an instructive way. The celebrated ―Great Preface‖ to the Classic of Poetry puts it well,108

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Poetry is where intention arrives. Within our heart makes our intention, issued in words to make poetry. Felt-moved at our core (chung 中), and [we] shape into words. Wording it, not enough, so [we] sigh-groan it. Sighing-groaning it, not enough, so [we] chant-sing it. Chanting-singing it, not enough, so hands dance, feet stamp unawares. Feeling issues in voices, voices form sayings (wen 文), called intones (yin 音). . . .

That is life in writings-in-China in the pristine dance of life, poetically throbbing, welling up from the depths of our being, as kids romping and playing in response to ―hawks soaring, fishes jumping.‖109 2. Sense-Transition Argues for A Point—by metaphor-storytelling: It is thus that every character was originally a sense-picture, a short story, then two characters made up a scene, a story-bit, and then, soon enough, a tiny story-bit here, another story-bit there, came up, and often these story-bits were compressed into four-character phrases to lug around, quite picturesque, to make this point and that, and spicy poems and lively conversations, and ―debates,‖ were born to call people‘s attention. Recorded and written down, these poems, talks, and compressions made up a journal, an impressionistic essay, and a collection of such essays came about as a ―book,‖ and then another one. Some of them purposely made points, clustering into a style, and we call them ―Chinese philosophy of this person‖ or ―this school‖; some others were heartfelt expressions 103

易 is classified under 日 lexicographically, as on top of 月 moon, but not etymologically. Cf. 易經讀本, 臺北市三民書局, 民85, and 諸橋轍次著, 大漢和辭关, 東京大眾館出版社, 昭和三十五年, V: 714-715 (on 日), V:787-788 (on 易). 105 Hellmut Wilhelm and Richard Wilhelm, Understanding the I Ching, Princeton University Press, 1995. 106 Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, 15th Edition , NY: HarperCollins, 1995. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Second Edition, 20 volumes, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2001. 107 ―Care‖ originally meant ―bed of trouble or sickness,‖ and used to mean ―mental suffering, sorrow, grief, trouble,‖ says OED, and traces out its caring concern (II: 893). This etymology significantly resonates with Mencius‘ ―視民如傷, regarding people as if injured, as if injured with people (4B20)‖ and ―不忍人之心, the heart of not bearing people (in pain), (1A7)‖, but who cares about such etymology and such connection? 108 詩大序 in 十三經注疏, op. cit., pp. 269-273. Expositions-exegeses there deserve close reading. Related to this are exciting tracings of ―music‖ in ancient China preserved in Mr. Lü’s Chronicles, 5:2, 3, 4, 5, and 6:2, 3, 4, 5. 呂氏春秋, 仲夏紀第五, 二曰大樂, 三曰侈樂, 四曰和樂, 五曰古樂; 季夏紀第六, 二曰音律, 三曰音初, 四曰制樂, 五曰明理. 104

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―鳶飛魚躍 Hawks flying, fishes jumping‖ is a famous phrase from ―鳶飛戾天, 魚躍于淵‖ in the Classic of Poetry 詩經, 大雅, 旱麓, as has been cited to begin these pages, to mirror life.

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of sense, scene, and sentiment, and we call them ―literature, poetry, analects, essays, fictions‖; yet some others described what happened and we call them ―chronicles and history.‖ Actually these writings are all history, jotting down vignettes of sense-scenes memorable, pointing to points—more or less explicitly as ―wisdom,‖ implicitly as ―counsels,‖ or appealing to readers for points to appear later in their readings. Thus these descriptions and expressions of actual scenes (sometimes imagined ―actual scenes‖) serve as metaphors to carry us—writers and readers alike—to the points pregnant in scenes, and this carry-to process is the way of Chinese wisdom. Socrates argued story-wise in his self-defense recorded in the Apology, ―arguing‖ against false accusations by describing—telling a story of—how things happened in his life.110 Autobiography is a powerful argument, and Augustine, Newman, Rousseau, Collingwood, and many others followed Socrates. All Chinese writings show autobiographies, jotting down impressions in their lives. Argument, metaphor, description, self-portrayal—all are rolled into one actuality, called Chinese wisdom alive that mirrors actuality. Thus the above examples show China how to think on how best to handle disasters, how best to live, by expressing life in picturesque ―characters.‖ We have in all these cases seen how compactly China expresses things worth expressing, to call our attention to unpack them and make us think deeply and live accordingly.

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Six: The Ironic, to Indirect to let be:111 Irony negates what is affirmed, packing negatives in affirmatives. ―Isn‘t this move a contradiction we should not commit?‖ Well, irony does do it, and China keeps doing it—for a point. The best we can do to understand such a strange practice is to tell a mini-story that is ironic. Mencius (2A2) said a farmer came back home claiming he was tired spending the whole day pulling at the seedlings to help them grow. Alarmed, his son rushed to the field, and lo, all seedlings were wilted. Does it say that the father had been pulling at the son-seedling to ―help growth 助長‖? But why does his son come out here? Is the son meant to be taught by his father‘s silly behavior? How is the son taught? The point seems to be this. ―Help‖ and ―growth‖ are good positive affirmatives, but once combined, and Voila!—―help growth‖ is now a silly negative. Still we ―do‖ it amazingly often—as perhaps that silly father112 may have done to his son his precious seedling. So, ―do not,‖ says Lao Tzu, and that is another irony, for how can we do ―do not‖? How do we do nodo? ―Well, be natural, then,‖ someone says, but that is again ―funny,‖ as we say, as if we were unnatural, for how can we be unnatural if we mean by ―natural‖ what we already are? Thus the counsel ―Be natural‖ is as silly as helping growth, urging us to be what we already

110

This story-as-argument aspect is sadly absent in otherwise exhaustive argumentative ―commentary‖ by C.D.C. Reeve in his Socrates in the Apology: An Essay on Plato’s Apology of Socrates, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1989. 111 See Wu, Chinese Body Thinking, op. cit., pp. 58-79, 221-225. This is its new version, much smoothed. 112 That farmer is supposedly from Sung 宋, the land of the silly.

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are; it is needlessly silly. Besides, urging ―no do‖ does, so the very urging opposes what is urged113; again, it is silly. Luckily, the Taoists do not urge us to be natural, but just describe how things in nature naturally are, as if we did not know that, e.g., water cleans, and fish swim together, forgetting one another, in rivers and lakes of abundant water.114 Pointing to and describing what we know already is still silly but less silly; it is just redundant, playacting as a clown. Have we noticed, though (another irony!), how strange description itself is? No description is true, for no Polaroid or digital picture, however life-like, satisfies us who have been there at the actual scene. All descriptions tell lies, straightly says Sartre,115

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While you live, nothing happens. . . There are no beginnings [but] interminable and monotonous additions. . . But when you tell about a life, everything changes; . . . events take place in one direction, and we tell about them in the opposite direction . . . I might as well try to catch time by the tail.

Now, the Taoists actually say so, even explicitly describe so, and then they go ahead describing the scenes anyway! ―Great Tao does not declare,‖ ―Tao tao-able, not Always Tao,‖116 they say. But then, having said thus, this saying is now no-Tao, then, and yet they keep saying it anyway. This saying, saying the no-sayings, is the irony. ―What‘s going on here? We are too busy for silly nonsense like this!‖ someone shouts. Well, all this irony has some cash value. Irony is meant to tell us how much of nonsense we all are. Let me explain. First off, irony just performs metaphor that we do everyday, using what we know to understand something new that we don‘t know. Irony says that (=not-this) to alert us to this (=unsayable), and this is what is close to us, important to us, yet we are not aware. ―Help growth‖ is actually our that to correct us, what we did not realize being until now—to our true-this unsayable, our authenticity, what we have been missing being. To go the other way, ―The world won‘t collapse if I did,‖ say I, so ―I can collapse‖ say I to myself; and then I don‘t, and I keep going, this time as truly myself. This is Lao Tzu‘s (40) law of ―going reverse is Tao‘s move.‖117 Here is another mini-story. A man strutting with a placard, ―I‘m normal,‖ shows he is not normal, for to insist ―I‘m normal‖ is abnormal. Should we then say, ―I‘m abnormal‖? That won‘t do, either. What can we say, then? We can say neither ―I‘m normal‖ nor ―I‘m abnormal,‖ so we can only say either—it doesn‘t matter which, for either cannot be said anyway—and wink, leave, to let the hearer alone to think. They would then realize, ―Aha! This ‗alone‘ is what is meant but cannot be said.‖ That is irony at work, packing negative into affirmative, and get away with such contradiction. It is a dangerous practice. Socrates perished by practicing it. A Chinese writer 113

―Do not 無為‖ is being naturally ―self-so 自然‖; urging them makes a contradiction as silly as the farmer, for how can we do no-do, urging us to be what we cannot but be naturally? 114 Lao Tzu loves water (8, 78) as Chuang Tzu loves fish (6/73, 17/88-90, 26/48). 115 Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, tr. Lloyd Alexander, NY: New Directions, 1964, pp. 56-59. Cf. Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, tr. G. s. Fraser, Chicago: Regnery/Gateway, 1960, I: 192-194. 116 ―大道不稱‖ (Chuang Tzu 2/59). ―道可道, 非常道,‖ begins Lao Tzu‘s Tao Te Ching 道德經. 117 Alan Watts calls it ―the law of reversed effort‖ on which he writes The Wisdom of Insecurity, NY: Random House, 1951. Sadly, the book itself is not too good.

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Sung Yü 宋玉 was more subtly ironic, when presenting an alluring ―Prose-Poem on the Wind 風賦‖ to King Hsiang 楚襄王 of extravagance. The prose-poem praised the ―gorgeous Yang wind‖ blowing through his palaces in contrast to the ―decrepit Yin wind‖ among his povertystricken people. Thus lavish praise warns lavish extravagance. Praise has its ironic sibling in humor. Astute, conscientious, and courageous clown entertainers at the royal court join today‘s shrewd cartoonists to collapse pretenders on high to preserves social sanity, and personal integrity. Abundant examples of humor are omitted here,118 but the point is clear. The world is taken—and cleansed—with two grains of salt, praise and humor, packing affirmative with negatives .119

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Seven: Story-Thinking, Life-Thinking:120 We have seen six ways in which we think concretely, and we are now to see it as so many ways of story-thinking. Our life glides (in six ways) from one bunch of story-bits to another to cluster into mini-story bunches, where the that-unknown is often closer, real-er, and righter than the this-known silly, and the that-unknown is often inexpressible, and can only be said by the this-known and then stop in the this-known. In other words, often negatives are used to affirm and affirmatives are used to negate, saying something so trite as to need no saying, or saying something false to present what is true. ―You are a red, red rose‖ is obviously false yet aptly expresses love of an aggressive beauty adored. How could falsehood express truth more truthfully than truth-saying? But that‘s what happens in story-thinking that ex-presses. ―Confucius [has] molded Chinese civilization [and] established the pattern of later Chinese philosophical development.‖121 Why is it so? He was just an obscure man of frustrated failures,122 and all we have are his Analects, brief, common, scant, yet they are packed, parsimonious, and memorable, even contradictory as life is. Life is not much in itself but points at us to provoke thinking. His words are a nuclear power exploding inside to let us explode into our true self. Confucius‘ stories charm us to live things common uncommonly, to live fuller. Simple depth of life-reading makes Confucius great. This feature typifies other classical sages. Here is a shortest story I‘ve invented. ―Hi, Charlie, we stay friends. Here is my email address. Stay in touch, ok? Bye!‖ It is clear in intent (textual scrutiny); it is a bubbling young 118

William Zinsser, On Writing Well (1976), NY: HarperCollins, 2006, pp. 207-227, esp. 212. For 宋玉‘s ―風賦,‖ see [昭明]文選, under 物色, 卷十三, 臺北藝文印書館, 民國六十年, pp. 195-196. For one of many descriptions of the power of royal clown entertainers in ancient China, see 佚名, 笑林廣記, 臺北金楓出版社, 1988, 導讀 by 龔鵬程, pp. 1-26. For further examples see 史記, 滑稽列傳第六十六 (2008, 8:4939-4984) and 文心雕龍, 諧讔第十五 (民83, pp. 143-151), both published by 臺北市三民書局. On today‘s humor, on how powerful the clowning cartoonists are in bringing down proud silly USA, see Zinsser, Writing Well, op. cit., pp. 207-227. 120 For more detailed and diverse approaches to story-thinking, see Kuang-ming Wu, Chinese Body Thinking, op. cit., pp. 22-79, 108-113, 441, On Metaphoring, op. cit., pp. 670-671 (indexes on ―story‖ and ―story-notions‖), ―Chinese Philosophy and Story-Thinking,‖ Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Summer 2005, pp. 217-234, ―Distinctive Features of Chinese Hermeneutics,‖ Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, June 2004, pp. 233-247. In fact, all Wu‘s writings meander to tell stories and proceeds story-thinking way. 121 Chan, Source Book, op. cit., p. 14. 122 See Raymond Dawson, Confucius, Oxford University Press, 1981. 119

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lady‘s conversation with a Charlie (exegesis). This is the level of storytelling. Hearing the story, we see that the story is on a young lady dumping Charlie (expository), and it wants us to be kind, even when dumping trash (hermeneutical). Thus what the story means is revealed and deepened by how and how much the storyreceiver gets it, and so storytelling needs story-reading, as obviously story-reading cannot exist without storytelling. Storytelling needs textual scrutiny, and its exegesis, to affirm itself, while story-hearing engages in understanding its meaning (expository aspect) and interpreting its deep sense (hermeneutical)—to participate in the story. Heartfelt hearing supports the telling of the story. Odysseus confessed to the humble swineherd Eumaios so heartily as to ―trouble the spirit in‖ Eumaios. As Siddhartha told his story of life, the obscure ferryman Vasudeva listened with great attention; he heard all about his origin and childhood, about his studies, his seekings, his pleasures and needs. It was one of the ferryman‘s greatest virtues that, like few people, he knew how to listen. Without his saying a word, the speaker felt that Vasudeva took in every word, quietly, expectantly, that he missed nothing. He did not await anything with impatience and gave neither praise nor blame—he only listened. [T]he ferryman listened with doubled attention, completely absorbed, his eyes closed. In China, heartfelt stories (such as the Introduction to Ssu-ma Ch‘ien‘s magnum opus, The Record of History, and his letter of confession to his friend, Jen-an Shao-ch‘ing123) were entrusted in essays and journals for later Eumaios‘s and Vasudevas to respond. The sigh, ―I hear you . . . ,‖ silently echoes124 through generations of readers of ancient Classics in China. Mencius‘ ―help growth,‖ for example, softly ferries us to our selfexamination, thereby to another school of thinking, Taoism that cherishes being natural, noninterfering, and so on. Thus Chinese Classics is historically unfinished, ever on the way to self-enrichment, thanks to later thoughtful generations who keep coming to keep reading them. This is story-thinking in storytelling and story-hearing—making, understanding, and living stories. All this is no formal disputation. This process of weaving stories back and forth—between story-tellers and receivers, through time—would make a point, a history; making point is ―arguing,‖ again distinct from formal argumentation, which is in fact one form of storytelling, a logic-rational one. Socrates wove out his life-story to powerfully argue against false accusations, recorded as his Apology, as Ssu-ma Ch‘ien 司馬遷 devoted 14 years125 to weave the monumental Record of History 史記, to vindicate his innocence, to indict his age and his royal court. Both make history, where we live and add. 123

Odyssey, 14:185, 360, in The Odyssey of Homer, tr., Richmond Lattimore, NY: Harper & Row, 1967, pp. 215, 219. Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, NY: Bantam Books, 1971, p. 104. On Ssu-ma Ch‘ien‘s 司馬遷 letter to Jenan Shao-ch‘ing 任安尐卿, see 報任安書 (5:703-718), also see the magnificent 史記卷一百三十, 太史公自序第七十, in 史記, 臺灣中和市建宏出版社, 1995, 5:646-702. (The versions in 古文觀止 are less full and less good.) 124 Such historical echoes would have pleased R. G. Collingwood who proposed history as ―re-enactment of ideas,‖ in the sense of performing the dramatic dialogue of experience, past answering-responding to questionschallenges of the present. (The Idea of History [1946, 1993] and The Principles of History [1999], both from Oxford University Press) 125 Its writing began in 104BCE and was completed in 91BCE, when he wrote the poignant letter 報任安書 with the résumé of 史記 identical with what we have now. See 導讀 in 史記 (臺北市三民書局, 2008) by 韓兆崎, pp. 2-3.

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ROMANCE OF LIFE These seven features above make up the ―romance of life‖ that is Chinese wisdom. We need not go far. Confucius and Lao Tzu are ―life-romances‖ enough. Let us go to Confucius first. Confucius‘ pithy sayings in unrhymed rhyme are still waiting to be rendered into apt English. His sayings weave out an irresistible tapestry, vignettes of dot-pragmatics of lifestory, simply told to show him, but not showy. His life-story was told by his sayings, all story-bits of his life, jumping fresh. Unlike other paragons (Buddha, Socrates, Jesus), his words have nothing provocative, deep, or unusual, yet these unpretentious sayings come to tell—without meaning to tell—stories of a life of decency so attracted Liu Hsieh, who dreamed and yearned to follow it, producing a shining gem of literary-critical insights, Literary Heart Dragon Carved.126 Confucius unites desires with social rules, reveres throbbing orderliness of Heaven and Earth, and is awestruck at legendary Three Rulers and Five Emperors, the legendary Cosmic Concord. No wonder, he was admired and yearned after beyond death, as movingly depicted by Ssu-ma Ch‘ien, till today, as aptly said by Chan.127 Lao Tzu is even more elusive. ―It cannot be said,‖ said he, as he said all the way, the Way of Heaven and Earth as they go on, and the way of life of us and things around, not to push, not to bother, but just be and behave this ―not.‖ All power-that-is resides in this ―not,‖ this letting, as—and he looks around—bland water, coarse wood, hidden valley, powerfulpowerless infants, and taken-for-granted mother. They are all ―nothings‖ producing things. Ineffable, hidden, and silent, self-less not-bothering pervades to support—bear up—the actualizing of the actuality of things. Negatives are thus the only true positive power that breeds the positive, unspeakably beautiful. All this said here, however, has to be ambiguous—goes-around in sense—because the meaning-of-being cannot be said but it captivates us into living it ineffably. All later thinkers in China revolve around both these types of life-thinking, Confucius‘ and Lao Tzu‘s, both so alive and beautifully unobtrusive.

SYSTEM OF NO SYSTEM Now, is there any ―system‖ here? Yes, for we would have no beauty if we had no system. But this system of beauty is on-the-go, growing as leaves on trees to form a specific treeshape, vignettes and dot-pragmatics, seeing a world in a grain of sand, hearing eternity in a moment, to sense concrete specifics as concentrates of the universe. Such perceiving of dots as vignettes of wholes amounts to shaping a system of no tight system, to spread to draw in the fascinated readers and their lives, and all these dots then cohere in shared lived time to make sense. Making sense by themselves shows a spontaneous system ever in the making, ever unfinished. All this describes Chinese wisdom in classics and the commentarial tradition.

126 127

This moving story is told by 劉勰 in his 文心雕龍, 序志第五十, 臺北市三民書局, 民83, p. 483. 史記, 孔子世家第十七, 臺北市三民書局, 2008, 5:2341-2411. Chan, Source Book, op. cit., p. 14.

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So, China has no systematic development of Western natural science. This fact gives us pause. Joseph Needham‘s multivolume Science and Civilization in China has gadgetry (no ―theories‖ the despised ―superstitions‖), and prominent scientific achievements (from the Western perspective) are secretive and sporadic (alchemy, paper, gunpowder, medicine, etc.), not much bettered over the centuries. The Treatise on Medicinal Herbs 本草綱目 is a nonsystematic collection of plants; all treatises on human physiology and medicine are more holistic and intuitive than systematic organizations. And so on. Naturally, the question of why China has no ―natural science‖ has been tenaciously asked.128 Of course, China has no Western ―natural sciences.‖ China is China. All above depiction shows Western logico-analytical perspective. On the whole, China‘s interest in Nature differs from the West‘s since time immemorial, shown in the Classic of Change 易經, the Huai Nan Tzu 淮南子, Wang Ch‘ung‘s Balanced Critiques 王充, 論衡,

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Chou Tun-i‘s Treatise on the Diagram of the Great Ultimate 周敤頤, 太極圖說, and so on. The West tends to be objective, analytical, and surveying, while China is more cosmic, historical, and humanistic. As a result, China has no explicit tightly systematic inquiries into how things go, to produce visible achievements of ―science and technology.‖ Instead, China‘s eyes have been glued to the unity of the entire heaven and earth with humanity their organic ingredient, as admirably summed up in Chang Tsai‘s Western Inscription 張載, 西銘, that poetically, powerfully, impresses on us the harmony of all things, with humans, as one cosmic family.129 Thus, while learning much from the West on the systematic details of natural science and technology, China should caution the West not to forget130 the whole cosmic perspective, ecological and humane. This is China‘s mission in the field of world science and technology. At the same time, China should use Western technology to clean up China‘s own shameful pollution of land and Mumbo Jumbos of astrological and alchemical speculations. Now, have you noticed that the word ―should‖ has naturally appeared above? We are here reminded that innocent straight description of nature and our relation to it naturally comes to carry its own eco-ethical obligation that goes beyond socio-politics. Such an obligation is humanistic-and-cosmic. To this important theme in China we turn.

128

Cf. Kuang-ming Wu, On Chinese Body Thinking, Leiden: Brill, 1997, pp. 397-399. Chan‘s accurate rendering of this short essay (Source Book, op. cit., p. 497-500) sadly robs it of its crucial poetic punch, though his comments are helpful. 130 Heidegger also warned of forgetting Being that is equivalent to Tao. See his compact Introduction to Metaphysics, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. See also my Appendix I in Part IV below, 129

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Chapter 2

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CHINESE WISDOM AS IMPERATIVE We have described how China describes things from the root of subject-affirming (demonstratives), in a two-way con-firmation of both ―I‖ and thing-situation (affirmatives), stressing it (negatives). We have explained all this by ―arguing‖ in the metaphoric mode (affirming this to explain that), the compact (unpacking affirmatives), the ironic (extending the negatives beyond negation), and realize that all this amounts to many ways to tell stories in sight and sound and hear them in a re-creative way. Now, we expect the situation thus described to continue into the future. The future is literally what is to be yet,131 as expected; this ―is to‖ expects to be brought out by our performing it. This expectant ―is to‖ is an imperative. In ―is‖ as ―is to be,‖ description has prescription toward the future; what is described as it ―is‖ prescribes performing it as it ―ought‖ to become as described. The future thus commands us to so perform that what we mean, i.e., name, we must bring out as the name says it is; affirmative is a performative toward future. To affirm a name today is to realize tomorrow as named; 命名 is 正名. Now, we look into how Chinese wisdom is an imperative in all its description, natural and spontaneous. Does all above sound spooky? Listen to Mencius as he began the book of Mencius warning the despot on disasters harvested by petty greed Mencius called ―profiteering 利,‖ big fish grabbing small fish. Mencius touted, in its stead, ―humane rightness 仁義‖ (1A2-6), to share pleasures with all people. To explain thus is itself to urge af-firming it, telling the ruler to rule accordingly. Mencius‘ description probing the human root prescribes at human root. His explanation ―corrects‖ actual government into its true ―name,‖ the ―governance [of heart] unbearable to people‖ in pain 不忍人之政. His persuasion elucidates the root of ―humane rightness‖ in the fact-demonstrative, the ―heart of not bearing people 不忍人之心‖ in pain (1A7) shown in a spontaneous release of an ox. Involvement of explanation with ethical command comes from names 名 as replicas (象) of things named, so that we should act to con-form 正 to the things named. ―This is a book‖ tells how we should act to conform to it as named, i.e., it is to be opened and read, not to be licked, thrown, or torn up, as Tommy would do without name, ―book.‖ 131

―Future‖ is ―將來, about to come‖ in China and ―about to be‖ in English.

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When we visited a family, a little missy timidly asked my daughter Mary, ―Are you a kid?‖ Mary said, ―I guess so.‖ ―Then, can we play?‖ So they did heartily. That little girl may have given up on us ―adults‖ for having lost the name, ―kid‖ who can ―play.‖ Life plays; hardened life cannot play, being ready to stiffen and die. ―Are you kids?‖ she is still asking, challenging us. ―The Great Adults are those who lose no heart of their ‗baby‘ [in them],‖ sighs Mencius (4B12). Taoists do not actively con-form as Confucians but nod in name-recognition, to allow things to be as they are recognized as named, while admitting that our naming may be an imposition of our prejudice (pre-judging the case), and so we empty ourselves to con-form toward things, making room for them.132 Thus the Is inevitably leads to the Is-to; Confucians stress the Is-to as Taoists urge emptying ourselves to let the Is in.

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TIMELINESS If Western philosophy is ―a series of footnotes to Plato‖ (Whitehead), then Chinese wisdom is a series of life-commentaries to Confucius and Lao Tzu, and the series operates in time, in ―history‖; history is ideas reenacted and relived continually in literature, a series of vignettes connected by musical moments of lives, birthing, ever birthing unceasing. China‘s ―life thinking‖ is history the breathtaking literature. ―I‘m awestruck at those born later,‖ sighed Confucius. ―I stand in attention before young folks as I do before history that throbs through me to them, as waters. O, how they flow day and night without ceasing! Water! O, Water! Time! O, Time!‖ Such flow of history! So Confucius was dubbed ―Time-ly Sage 時聖.‖133 All this is Chinese wisdom, where history teaches a sober lesson of timeliness. Cleverness has its weasel jump into death-trap, while clumsy uselessness 不材 saves a tree and kills a duck; honesty is ―the best policy,‖ they say, but ―honesty always‖ folds business. So, we live on not on consistency but on constant change appropriate to each situation, now dragon-soar, now snake-slither, ever measured by being apposite to time, in harmony of timeliness, says Chuang Tzu.134 We thus trail the self-so 自然; as the wise so love waters, the humane so love hills, so Confucius grows up to follow the heart‘s desires without overstepping the lines, in nature and in society. No-nonsense Realpolitik of Realism-Legalism then comes along to warn of ―reverse scales‖ under the ruler-dragon, lest we touch them to die. Meanwhile, history no less warns the ruler of ―reverse scales‖ under his people lest he touch them to perish, as Mencius kept warning the rulers, as Tu Mu135 lamented over the 132

Chapters 2, 3, and 4 of the Chuang Tzu are noteworthy in this regard. Combined here are Analects 9/23, 9/17, 10/21, and Mencius 4B18, 5B1. 134 Chuang Tzu 1/44-45, 20/1-7. Cf. Wu, On Metaphoring, Leiden: Brill, 2001, pp. 136-160. 133 135

―Reverse scales 逆鱗‖ in 韓非子, 說難, 臺北三民書局, 1996, p. 117 (and 史記,,老子韓非列傳第三, 臺北縣中和市建宏出版社, 1995, III.617) are conveniently translated by Arthur Waley in Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China (1939), CA: Stanford University Press, 1982, pp. 184-188. The entire Mencius repeats the ancient warnings in the Classic of History 書經. Tu Mu‘s blood-dripping laments appear in his ―Prose-Poem on E-p‘ang Palace‖ that the First Emperor of Ch‘in 秦始皇 built, only to be destroyed soon after by his own people, 杜牧, ―阿房宮賦,‖ 古文觀止, 臺南麗文文化公司, 1994, pp. 604-610.

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tragic demise of Six States and Ch‘in Dynasty, and still later the royal tragedy has been repeated countless times in bloody history the world over. Mind you. The ―reverse scales‖ do not exist out there; they are our creation by offending the self-so and its timeliness. The best is never to offend timeliness of the self-so, royal and popular, which shifts, to create disastrous ―reverse scales‖ to ourselves; ―self-wrought woe, cannot live,‖ Mencius repeated twice what the ancient Classic of History warned.136 Actually, neither Confucius nor Lao Tzu died martyrdom as Socrates and Jesus did. Both Chinese sages died natural deaths to show what Chuang Tzu tells us, that being in-time requires being in place-useless, that is, being nowhere, out of the way, in the Village of Not Even Anything, the Field Vast, Deserted.137

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RELATIVISM AND LIFE-RELATIVISM ―Doesn‘t such being in-time, and in-place, spell wayward relativism, though?‖ Well, sensitive relativism of timely relevance in-place138 is one thing, while spineless relativism, as scattering leaves in the wind, is quite another. Our life, our human survival, hangs on this distinction. How do we envisage such a distinction, however?139 Well, do you remember Captain von Tratz‘s unyielding opposition—to the overwhelming Nazi occupation of Austria (in the movie, The Sound of Music)—that somehow smuggled him and his big family out to Switzerland? It is this ―somehow‖ that portrays situational relativism with tenacious moral backbone. The movie The Sound of Music performs the thrilling music of this timely opposition, of the tough moral opposition that situationally succeeded in sinuous survival. They faced and ―climbed every mountain‖ of risks beyond climbing, ―now dragonsoaring high‖ away, ―now snake-slithering down through‖140 close encounters with deadly disasters, always tenaciously keeping to the high spirit, to survive it all, head up, in timely relativism. Such ―Sound of Music‖ of life resounds throughout Chinese wisdom, toughing it out through several disastrous millennia so far and is still going strong, singing. In contrast, Hitler‘s demise came in bloodbaths, due to lack of timely relativism morally backed. All rascals in history came against time, perished against time; that is why they are all so bloody. Now, what sort of relativism does this ―sound of music‖ of humanity mean? Lithe relativism with nimble moral backbone, both persistent and penetrating, is the ―way‖ to live on, free, uncertain, yet decisive, and is brimful of inexhaustible resourcefulness. 136

137 138

The dire warning, ―自作孽, 不可活,‖ appears twice in Mencius 2A4, 4A8. On Mencius‘ quotation from the History Classic 尚書 (or 書經), see D. C. Lau, Mencius, Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1984, I: 65 (note 17), and I: 145 (note 8). Here are two inimitable phrases, ―無何有之鄉, 廣莫之野,‖ in Chuang Tzu 1/46.

The Chinese moral sentiment of timely situationism is expressed, first, as ―義者, 宜也‖ (中庸 20), ―義者, 事之宜也‖ (鹽鐵論, 刑德), and then, the morally-proper (義 i4) as the situationally-appropriate (宜 i2). 宜 should be everywhere; ―宜兄宜弟‖ (大學 10), ―宜莫若舜,‖ ―宜若登天然‖ (孟子 5A5, 7A41), etc. And then 宜 is 時, as in ―時措之宜 (中庸 25),‖ ―使民以時,‖ ―不時不食,‖ ―時然後言,‖ (論語 1/5, 10/6, 14/13), ―待時,‖ ―此時為然,‖ ―孔子聖之時者也‖ (孟子 2A1, 2A1, 5B1). Etc. 139 Here is Wu‘s rethinking on relativism considered in On Metaphoring, op. cit., p. 669 (index). 140

The first quote is from the movie; the second is adapted from Chuang Tzu 20/6-7, ―一龍一蛇, 與時俱化, 而無肯專為, 一上一下, 以和為量.‖

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Chuang Tzu said casually, ―Way walks it and forms.‖141 At least ten points below are in this dictum to tell us that life‘s Way 道 is a bombshell exploding within us into ―Tao 道‖ visceral and cosmic, and so life-actual and eco-imperative. One: A way is to walk ―it‖ to exist; ―it‖ is yet in the future to form. Two: The formed existence of a way depends on ―walking,‖ perhaps by us humans as well as by others existing. Three: ―How does walking ‗form‘ what Way?‖ It is an exciting question. Tao walks it and forms a view, a doctrine (in Confucius), a saying (Mencius), a jade-grain 理 of things (Chu Hsi) called the Yin-Yang, Five Walks 五行 of things, and sixty-four Hexagrams 64卦, in the Family of Heaven, Earth, and Humanity. Jesus tells an interesting story on what all this amounts to; it is the fourth way.142 Someone walked-down143 the road144 from Jerusalem (our ideal) to Jericho (worldly destination); it was a free walk of relativism. It was then walked by three more people, and four ways were formed. The first three men walked unthinkingly, as leaves blown-indulged in winds of desires, to fall into the victim-way (―someone‖), the violence way (thugs), and the way of safe indifference (moralistic priest and Levite). Four: The fourth way walked formed the neighborly-way (Jesus-Samaritan) and the family-way (China). The roadside victim beaten half-dead broke a Samaritan‘s heart, and spontaneously bandaged, oiled, brought the victim on his own animal to an inn, cared for him all night, and left the next morning, with two silvers to the innkeeper for further cares. These specific caring acts show the neighborly way of situational sensitivity to the victim; it is relevance in situ, situational relativism of conscientious steps. Five: This free neighborly way stems from being ―heart-broken‖ at the scene, literally ―viscera-broken,‖145 in NT to begin describing Jesus‘ acts of heartfelt mercy. Mencius tirelessly harped on it as the ―heart of not bearing people‖ in pain, at our core of being; China habitually calls it the ―heart torn to pieces,‖ our ―fellow human feeling.‖146 Six: Thus we see two sorts of ―way,‖ both free and situationally relative. The way walked out by three sorts of people—victim, thugs, moralists—describes relativism of blowing winds of desires. Another way walked out by the unknown Samaritan is also relativism of desires 141

Chuang Tzu 2/33, ―道行之而成,‖ jolts us who are used to taking 道 as Something objective and eternal out there for us to conform to. Chuang Tzu says we are an active part of 道-formation; this is why Tao cannot ―tao‖ as we cannot ―we,‖ for Tao is ―systematically elusive‖ as we. Gilbert Ryle (The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson, 1949, pp. 195-198) and Ian Ramsey (Christian Empiricism, Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1974, pp. 17-31) noted ―the systematic elusiveness of the ‗I‘,‖ but neither noted the systematic elusiveness of cosmic Tao as Lao Tzu did, much less gave reason for it as Chuang Tzu did. 142 Luke 10:30-37. Mencius is explicit in 1A7. Both stories will be juxtaposed. 143 Luke 10:30, ―katébainen,‖ is literally ―walked-down.‖ 144 ―Wasn‘t the road already there from Jericho to Jerusalem, though? How could Tao walk it and form?‖ Well, that road had been walked out by previous walkers. The four people in Jesus‘ story re-walked what history had walked out; they reenacted history, say Chinese wisdom and Chinese people. 145 ―Splagchnizesthai‖ is formed out of ―splagchna‖ the noble viscera of heart, lungs, liver, and intestines. See William Barclay, New Testament Words (1964), Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1974, pp. 276-280, and Helmut Köster, ―splagchnon, etc.‖ in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (1964), ed. Gerhard Friedrich, Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1971, VII: 548-559. ―Splagchnizesthai‖ appears significantly only 12 times in the New Testament, all in the Gospels of Matthew (5 times), Mark (4 times) and Luke (3 times), all related to Jesus‘ acts or to his parables. 146 ―不忍人之心‖ (Mencius 1A7, etc.), ―斷腸之心,‖ and ―同胞情 (literally, feelings of sharing the same womb of humanity)‖ are all common phrases in China. Professor Huang Chun-chieh 黃俊傑, a Buddhist and a Mencius scholar, admits that these phrases are so closely reminiscent of Jesus‘ heartfelt ―viscera-broken‖ mercy.

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but desires deeply rooted in viscera, what we ―cannot help,‖ not a self-indulged ―Tao can tao,‖ wayward, inconstant.147 Seven: Those in history who walked the latter neighborly way are our paradigms. Confucius was reserved, admitting to his unperturbed attitude when ignored by people, continuing silently to live on urging everyone to live the neighborly way of humane interliving. Socrates confessed that he devoted his life to caring for the Athenians—to death, by being done in by his beloved Athenians, exactly as Jesus was and died. Buddha cared in ―karuna, krpa, sorrowful pity 慈悲‖ for all beings sentient.148 Eight: Those who freely walked such neighborly way of life are mere traces in the sand of time; they walked, vanished, yet remembered, as American Indians say, ―we will be known forever by the tracks we leave.‖ The tracks remind me of a tall cottonwood, died of rootdisturbance when a road was built; it was cut, ground, vanished—it took the crew three days—leaving a small patch of soft turf. I stood there, in tears, enwrapped in its fragrance all around; I went back to the tree today after a week. There, its fragrance seeped into me all over, saying, ―I go with you wherever you go, ok?‖ I nodded, walked away, fulfilled. From then on, I began to feel, slowly, that I turn less and less tired, both physically and of living. Mr. Cottonwood is my tree of life, rooted out, cut down, ground into soft turf, and then comes back alive in me. This is fragrance tracing itself, a Chinese immortality. Looking around, China sees that Socrates and Jesus were also ground up and vanished, with their paragon-fragrance in us. They now walk with us, for our latecomers to walk human with us with them. This is history-walking out the Way, freely, in human relativism of visceral sensitivity that is Chinese wisdom. Basho in Japan peeked at a path, ―This road—/ no one goes down it,/ autumn evening.‖ Frost in America answered, ―Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, . . ./ I took the one less traveled by,/ And that has made all the difference.‖ The Way Chuang Tzu in China pointed to is indeed often peeked at, Basho‘s solitary autumn way, than walked on, while Frost‘s walk makes the difference; these three poets have now walked out historic traces—in China, Japan, and West149—that have made all the human difference for us all. Nine: Hsün Tzu complains, ―All this promotes Mencius‘ ‗human nature as born good.‘ Haven‘t you seen how young folks in hunger grabbed foods from their old folks? Human nature is innately bad!‖ We can then overhear Mencius softly replying, ―Yes, my friend, but such incident occurs in situations of scarcity that strips humanity off us.‖ 147

Chuang Tzu (23/71-79) made much of this ―cannot help 不得已‖ exhibited, of all persons, in convicts on deathrow, identifying them as the sages! ―Tao can tao 道可道‖ is what Lao Tzu takes as not the ―always-Tao‖; this is how he begins his Tao Te Ching 道德經. 148 Analects 1/1, etc. Plato‘s Apology. On karuna and krpa as 悲, etc., see William Edward Soothill and Lewis Hodous, A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms (with Sanskrit and English Equivalents), Taipei: Ch‘engwen Publishing Co., 1969, p. 371. Four Paradigmatic Individuals cited by Jaspers are thus covered. See Karl Jaspers, Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus: The Paradigmatic Individuals (1957), ed. Hannah Arendt, San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1990. See also Wu‘s On Metaphoring, op. cit., pp. 411-422, on ―paragonprinciple.‖ 149 My memory ―traces‖ say that 蘇軾‘s poem has such a line, quoted in my History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy somewhere (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991). Basho‘s poem appears in The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa, ed. Robert Hass, Hopewell, NJ: The Ecco Press, 1994, p. 11. Frost‘s lines are from his beloved ―The Road Not Taken,‖ Robert Frost: op. cit., p. 103. Frost was much fond of haiku; Basho simply loved Chuang Tzu. All three ―walked it and formed‖ the Way (Chuang Tzu 2/33).

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Mencius continues, ―‗Clothing, foods, sufficient, and then know humane rightness‘; clothes and foods are such integral parts of human nature that losing foods loses humaneness.150 Besides, isn‘t your sense of ‗good‘ and ‗bad‘ itself good, right? Where else do you have it but in you, in your inborn nature?‖151 Ten: Now, where else is ethics, moral imperative, but in the history of such paradigmatic individuals who actually acted out of sensitivity unbearably visceral, heartfelt fellowhumanity to fellow humans met, whoever, wherever, whenever? Ethical imperative is thus an actualized (by paradigmatic individuals) actualizing (by us, by latecomers) humanity at our shared viscera, in ubiquity. We all act out of our shared viscera, all free, all related to time (history, future) and space (neighborly acts the world over). This is Chinese wisdom, situational relativism with humane backbone, nodding to all the world‘s paragons making history, to all historic individuals walking out the human way, lived, living tough through disasters. In short, ―Tao can tao,‖ helpless leaves in the desire-winds, ―is not always-Tao.‖ Instead, ―Tao walks it‖ as did paradigmatic individuals, ―and forms‖ itself in all-free situational relativism; our viscera in all their freedom cannot help but walk ourselves out into the Way, the Tao, of cosmic fellow-humanity.

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THE HUMAN AS THE COSMIC ―How could fellow-humanity turn ‗cosmic‘?‖ I noticed that they pick up trash in the park and left the leaves that the trees ―trashed.‖ Why? Leaves feed, trash does not. That‘s why. I was once stunned at flower-petals strewn all over on the road in my way, a road carpeted with flowers that the trees ―trashed‖; even the shed flowers fed me in awe. Again, money does not grow on trees, they say, but suppose it does, and in fact it does, as the ecologists keep telling us. And then we still need to cultivate the trees; tree-cultivation will be after our desires. ―After our desires‖ is quite an important notion, as natural and innate as it is incumbent on us to live well, as the norm ethical, cosmic. To describe how we desire by nature is then to prescribe how we should live as we are and do. Mencius said (6A4), ―Appetites, culinary and sexual, are our nature.‖ It is a mystery as to why we need not be taught about eating and sexing as pleasant, not pain to us. All we need is to begin here—to eat and to sex—as we want, and share both pleasures to as many people as we can, as Mencius (1B5) urged rulers of his day to share their desired pleasures with their people.

150

Hsün Tzu: Basic Writings, tr. Burton Watson, NY: Columbia University Press, 1963, pp. 159-160 (from 荀子, 性惡篇). Mencius says in so many words (3B9) how essential clothes and foods are to humanity. 151 It is best to avoid the following move: Hsün Tzu‘s advocacy of ―teaching‖ indicates human teachability that is a bud of good innate nature (cf. Mencius‘ ―four buds 四端, 2A6,‖ ―牛山, 6A8‖). Hsün Tzu can easily reverse Mencius, saying that our possible evil deeds indicate human propensity that is a bud of bad innate nature. Such an argument from possibility tempts an illicit slippery slope toward either good or bad potentiality to lead to innateness either way. Significantly, Chinese history consigns Hsün Tzu and its aftermath, Legalism, to the wayside, and enshrines the Confucian view of innately good human nature as officially correct, despite constant despotism and interviolence. What this historical path means—innate human goodness as orthodox, coupled with despotism and violence—remains to be explored.

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What we need to add to ―after our desires‖ is to realize that to ―share‖ what we all desire is after our pleasure, and hoarding (against sharing) is against our desire, for exclusion is actually impossible if not against our innate desire. To hoard and indulge in one‘s own desires ―infinitely and alone‖ is impossible, practically and innately. Hoarding that excludes others is impossible because it is counterproductive; it harvests diminishing returns, and in the end harms hoarders themselves. History tirelessly records that, wanton killing as one wishes, indulging in ―infinite seduction,‖ ―infinite money-making,‖ and the like, simply produce self-destruction. We see, on a deep level, that much admired billionaire-giving is actually simply human, acting according to our natural tendency. Giving is more blessed than grabbing, and we are simply ―far happier giving than getting,‖152 for giving is more natural. ―Become as you are‖ spells ―give as you desire.‖ If our appetite is for food and sex, our further appetite is for sharing food and sex, as well, for sharing gives us pleasure. Mencius (1A7 and many other places, in fact, in most Mencius) told the rulers of his days—those who grabbed most—how to give and share, and how most naturally to do so, in the name of their own innate ―heart of not bearing people‖ in pain. We simply enjoy interfeeding—by nature, for nature as such does so. Chuang Tzu says (14/6) that brutal tigers and wolves are ―humane,‖ for they are ―intimate among parents and cubs,‖ and we feel it as a matter of course. We meet here a cynic‘s grin. From ―appetites, culinary and sexual, are our nature,‖ and satisfaction of such appetites are pleasant, Confucians and Taoists develop what is right-in (宜)153 the situation, to get to what is right (義). ―Now, if the right-in-situ is pleasant, why do we need to urge it? Why is it hard to fulfill ‗duty‘ derived from natural pleasure?‖ We respond. Perhaps it is because, as human, we need to choose to be pleasantly satisfied—we must choose what to eat, whom to marry—and ―choosing‖ is open to making mistakes that include not fulfilling our ―pleasant duty‖ of sharing pleasant appetites. It is still comical, however, to see how Confucius had to struggle till 70 to do as he pleased without overstepping the line, and the Taoist beckoning us to come home to our original nature. ―Why do we need homecoming? Why do we need to struggle for the duty of fulfilling desires? Isn‘t the phrase, ‗duty of fulfilling desires‘ a self-contradiction? No animal or plant is comical this way; they just follow themselves. Why ‗become as we are‘? Is ethics a human irony, if not its laughing stock?‖ We do not know the answer, but we know one thing. Following this cynic‘s objection paves the way either to brutally objective social legislation (as Legalist Realpolitik) or total anarchy (political anarchism) nonexistent in animal kingdom. Laughable or not, such natureethics as proposed by Mencius and Chuang Tzu is after our nature to inter-thrive. In other words, our fellow-humanity is cosmic, or as people usually say, in Chan‘s memorable words,154 If one word could characterize the entire history of Chinese philosophy, that word would be humanism—not the humanism that denies or slights a Supreme Power, but one that 152 153

Acts 20:35, the Message. Cf. ―君子宜之,” and “唯共時矣,” in Classic of Poetry 詩經, 小雅裳裳者華第四章, and 詩經,

小雅魚麗第六章; both were quoted in Hsün Tzu 荀子, 不茍篇 (who a Confucian advocated constant principles). 154 See Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963, p. 3. Chinese Wisdom Alive : Vignettes of Life-Thinking, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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professes the unity of man and Heaven. In this sense, humanism has dominated Chinese thought from the dawn of its history. Remember the West. Descartes155 began at my Cogito, continued in Kant‘s critical philosophy on the transcendental ego, Berkeley‘s ―to be is to be perceived‖ by me, Schopenhauer‘s ―world‖ my ―representation,‖ Royce‘s ―world‖ correlate of the ―individual‖ self, C. I. Lewis‘ ―world order‖ on the individual ―mind,‖156 etc. The West‘s self-centrality results in individualism as its cultural basis of sociality. Plato writes polity with the individual‘s tripartite health; Aristotle‘s Nicomachean Ethics develops Politics. Royce‘s ―loyalty‖ is an individual‘s loyalty.157 Individualism breeds people-power (democracy) opposed to rulership, revolution as means to reform. Individualism spells isolation that breeds analysis to isolate objects and cut them into smaller and smaller parts. This act is touted as ―science,‖ knowledge of nature toward a-toms too small to divide, and then they are divided further, all in digital logic. Division and separation are the rule of knowledge, science. In contrast, China‘s harmony-posture breeds ―family‖ whose member I am, social management is political family cared for by the ruler the father-mother officer 父母官,158 nature is the tripartite Family of Heaven, Earth, and Humanity, the human is Sibling of myriad existents, and cosmic history is Yin-Yang dynamics of things internecine as internascent and vice versa,159 all in family-musical deals and negotiations. I am inter-human 人, intrinsically social; everything begins here, in togetherness.160 Humanism in China is thus radically correlative interpersonal, familial, and cosmic, and the implication of this harmony of all with all is stunningly far-reaching; metaphysics is socio-ethics! ―Chinese humanism‖ means that, the way myriad things happen, ―cosmology,‖ indicates human responsibilities for proper management toward all-happiness of all; we are responsible for family-ethical and sociopolitical managements among humans, and then among the species. Let us tarry here for a while. 155

Actually, the ego-individualistic trend goes all the way back to Homer‘s Odyssey at least. The word, ―odyssey,‖ describes a lone individual‘s long wandering through many changes of fortune. 156 Descartes, Kant, and Berkeley need no citation. See Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (2 vols), Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual (2 vols), and Clarence Irving Lewis, Mind and the World Order, all reissued by NY: Dover Publications. Martin Buber‘s I and Thou is revolutionary in view of this ego-centered perspective of the West. 157 Martin Buber (I and Thou [1958], NY: Scribner Classics, 1986, Between Man and Man, NY: Macmillan, 1965) and Alfred Schutz (The Phenomenology of the Social World, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967) are exceptions to this individualism in the West. Karl Marx could be seen as a bridge from individuality to sociality in the West. (cf. Bernard Susser, Existence and Utopia: The Social and Political Thought of MARTIN BUBER, East Brunswick: NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1981. I wish he punched out clearer on the radical centrality of the inter-human in Buber.) 158 Authority of rulership is such; rationale for revolution is such. 159 All this is much more complex and involved than Martin Heidegger‘s Being (and Logos) over things to simply gather things in conflict. (Introduction to Metaphysics, Yale University Press, 2000, p. 142) 160 「人」 as the heart of Heaven and Earth indicates intimate companionship 人偶 (as 注 to 中庸‘s words, 「人者仁也」 says). See 說文解字詁林, 臺北鼎文書局, 民72, 1:790, 7:1-9. 藤堂明保著, 漢字語源辭关, 東京學燈社, 1965, p. 762. 「人」 easily combines into 人間世 the human world, or 人間 the inter-human as the person (in Japan, see 和辻哲郎著, 人間の學としての倫理學 [1934], 東京岩波全書, 1966). See Wu, The “Logic” of Togetherness, Leiden: Brill, 1998. When the world goes wrong, Chinese writers would write on floating life, as 沈復 did 浮生六記 (臺南嘉鴻書局, 民73). Lin Yutang, so moved, translated it as ―Six Chapters of a Floating Life‖ (The Wisdom of China and India, NY: Random House, 1942, pp. 964-1050).

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Chinese metaphysics called ―meso-physics (actual structures among things)‖161 impregnates ethical nature-imperative and shows its how. We must repeat: the actual (what is situationally right 宜) is its actual must (what is right 義). China is the region of ―ethical culture‖ as its proper cosmology. As to affirm is to af-firm oneself (remember?), so to affirm the skies and the field accurately—in natural science—is to care for them properly and appropriately. Ecology is ecological ethics. ―Have you not noted ‗nature red in tooth and claw‘? Lions take even delicious infant rabbits.‖ Have you also noted the two facts in nature, my friend? [1] Only old and clumsy young who run too slowly are eaten, and [2] having been fed, lions stop pursuing foodanimals. Nature-symbiosis includes ―eating‖ toward species eugenics. Is this perhaps why China has no sustained notion of ―cruelty of nature‖? We must repeat. All of this knowledge spells our responsibilities to care for Nature, our ecological ethics. We cannot be more concretely ethical, down to earth and this-worldly for maximum profit for us all, than this know-care unity in China.

161

所以然 is 所當然, 形上學 is 形中學. 徐復觀, 中國思想史論集, 台北台灣學生書局, 1975, p. 243, 註。 He replaced ―形上學 metaphysics‖ in the I Ching‘s (繫辭上十二) with his ―形中學 meso-physics‖ (Wu‘s rendering). Actually, ―meta‖ means ―between‖ while ―meso‖ means ―middle.‖ See H. G. Liddell & R. S. Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 1107-1109.

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Chapter 3

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CHINESE WISDOM AS PERFORMATIVE We cannot repeat this point too often. Describing Chinese wisdom as expressive, beautiful, and imperative, implies how life-performative this wisdom is. Chinese wisdom storytelling life-experience amounts to confessing to one‘s life, and reading life-stories is to devote lifetime to take part to reenact them to make history. Confucius‘ threefold sigh is inviting us to enjoy learning how to practice living, to enjoy gathering to further learn, and to ride astride social ignoring with composure. Russell the outsider was impressed with China‘s ―understatements.‖ I met one day in Peking a middle-aged man who told me he was academically interested in the theory of politics; being new to the country, I took his statement at its face value, but I afterwards discovered that he had been governor of a province, and had been for many years a very prominent politician. In Chinese poetry there is an apparent absence of passion which is due to the same practice of understatement. They consider that a wise man should always remain calm, and though they have their passionate moments (being in fact a very excitable race), they do not wish to perpetuate them in art, because they think ill of them. Our romantic movement, which led people to like vehemence, has, so far as I know, no analogue in their literature. Their old music, some of which is very beautiful, makes so little noise that one can only just hear it. In art they aim at being exquisite, and in life at being reasonable. Moreover, though he did not say so, to silently bear up sufferings, without complaint, is to live the ―understatements‖ of their words.162 [Confucius‘ ethical system] has certainly succeeded in producing a whole nation possessed of exquisite manners and perfect courtesy. Nor is Chinese courtesy merely conventional; it is quite as reliable in situations for which no precedent has been provided. And it is not confined to one class; it exists even in the humblest coolie. It is humiliating to watch the brutal insolence of white men received by the Chinese with a quiet dignity which cannot demean itself to answer rudeness with rudeness. Europeans often regard this as 162

Bertrand Russell, The Problem of China, London: Allen & Unwin, 1922, quoted in The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell: 1903-1959, eds. Robert E. Egner and Lester E. Denonn, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1961, pp. 549, 550. Not knowing Chinese language, he relied on secondhand materials to despise Chinese history, classics, Confucius, and family system, with no appreciation of China‘s aesthetic depths much touted by Lin Yutang. In view of all this, his appreciation of China is all the more remarkable, thanks to his sharp sensitivity in daily raw contacts while in China; he saw astute composure in decadent China, ―problem of China.‖ He wrote only on China, though he also lectured in Russia, Japan, and USA.

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weakness, but it is really strength, the strength by which the Chinese have hitherto conquered all their conquerors. ―How did Chinese people come to live their revered sages‘ way of life?‖ Do you remember what Uncle Monkey proposed? He said, ―Morning, three‖ is better, as in making understatements, but ―morning, four‖ is OK, too, as clamored by crowds of the Wall Street monkeys, only beware. ―Morning, four‖ will somehow result in ―evening, three,‖ less than ―evening, four.‖ This is because things will even out eventually; what goes up will come down as the Wall Street curve. Uncle Monkey can ―walk both‖ ways because to him ―morning, three‖ or not―morning, three‖ matters little; he just pleases himself to freely ―walk double‖ to please the monkeys. Uncle Monkey does not join the monkeys, but just follows along, and then he can flex with them, pro and con, both ways. That is how he pleased the monkeys. Likewise, be prepared as Uncle Fort, who always asks, ―How could this—whatever it is—not make its opposite?‖ All applications of Confucian wisdom by Hsün Tzu, Mo Tzu, Han Fei Tzu, and later Chu Hsi and Wang Yang-ming, etc., have occurred by reading earlier sagely stories, thereby enriched the old wisdom with their own forward-looking pointers, for us to perform our lives. These later wise writers propose ―counsels among people 人間訓,‖ as Huai Nan Tzu 淮南子 put it—and this is why they are all important.163 We all love things fresh but shrink from things new, for the novel threatens, the fresh refreshes. Ancient wisdom turns daunting tomorrow into refreshing today, to tame to create, to sing the world, for Chinese wisdom is ancient enough to have been honed, distilled, by diverse reenactments for several millennia. Now it turns situation-apt as water to fish, sky to hawks, to turn any future from being threatening to refreshing. Three cautions are here, however. ONE, China‘s various sages give conflicting proposals as actual world is. China has various genres of wisdom, such as historical Tso Chuan 左傳 (Mr. Tso‘s commentary on history) and Shih Chi 史記 (record of history), literary Wen Hsüan 文選 (selected literature), Ku-wen Kuan-chih 古文觀止 (best of ancient writings), Wen Fu 文賦 (prose-poem on literature), and Wen-hsin Tiao-lung 文心雕龍 (literary heart dragon carved). In addition, China has encyclopedic collections, Kuan Tzu 管子 (Mr. Kuan Chung), Lüshish Ch’un-ch’iu 呂氏春秋 (Mr. Lü Pu-wei‘s chronicles) and Ch’un-ch’iu Fan-lu 春秋繁露 (diverse dews in chronicles),164 as well as an abundance of fictions, and the list goes on, in the vast ocean of Chinese literature of all sorts imaginable. We latecomers today, blessed with confusingly diverse funds of wisdom, must read as many as we can, and choose some to try on our own now. Besides, such diversity prevents us 163

This point can dissolve Wing-tsit Chan‘s spontaneous contradiction, when he complained that people take ―later Confucianism‖ as ―but a footnote to the Confucian Classics or at best a de luxe edition of them,‖ and then explained ―Neo-Confucianism‖ as ―itself an outgrowth of ancient Confucianism, modified by Taoism and Buddhism.‖ (A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, op. cit. p. ix.) Here is no room for complaint, for later Confucianism is footnote and development of earlier one, as later European philosophy is both a series of footnotes to Plato (Whitehead) and developments of his thinking. 164 The phrase, ―ch‘un ch‘iu 春秋 spring and autumn,‖ shows Chinese moderation, choosing not vehement summer and winter but incipient gentle seasons of spring and autumn to represent the four seasons, and in China ―time‖ is seasonal. See Wu, On the “Logic” of Togetherness, op. cit., pp. 342-385.

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from blindly following any one trend of thought. They can help us only if we are ourselves enough to stand on our own to taste the excellence of each tradition. TWO, you can discern how my description shows my preference with a specific range, excluding pure logic-rational approach or pure literary approach. Here in Chinese wisdom, ―pure‖ anything that excludes all others is no Chinese. THREE, free historical catholicity in China spells no ―anything goes.‖ Chinese wisdom has its own reasonableness, but not Western logic-rationality, set, inspective, with the set rules. Logic-rationality is a grammar of thinking that follows our natural way of thinking, persistent, consistent, and coherent in world history. History judges an argument, not absolute and timeless canons of logic-rationality, whatever that means. Here is compelling rationale for historical logic of life, different from set formal logicrationality. The vague, ambiguous, invalid, and contradictory are ―interesting‖ to life on the go, as the Wall Street and political ups and downs, not to be chased out of ―clear thinking‖ in logic-rationality. Our life is an uncertain gamble to take advantage of; ―injustices‖ helps growth. What is important in life is what is interesting and challenging, however ―irrational‖ it seems, not correctness or lack of contradiction. ―Isn‘t such a view wishy-washy situationism, historicism, and relativism?‖ We won‘t rehearse previous considerations, except to say that the stability of world history warrants that such history-logic, if you will, is not arbitrary though un-computable. ―It is the heavenly history-Way, to be studied with care, on pain of your demise,‖ counsel all Chinese historians. Here we are not to adapt to the times but by adapting adapt the times to our advantage, the advantage of us all and all things in Nature. Let‘s be specific. To make money is for spending it, and spending money for us all takes as shrewd a planning and management as it does to make money. Such money-making and moneyspending should be extrapolated-learned from accumulated ancient wisdom of China. This is why Chinese people are the world‘s best merchants and astute politicians.165 ―Politics as beauty‖ is, however, an oxymoron in Western politics, in theory and in practice, constantly in dirty conflict. China‘s ideal of ―politics beautiful,‖ on its part, breeds lofty ideals and bloody tragedies; this beauty has concrete performative bites into life, as beauty and politics unite in China, even tragically.

BEAUTY AS LIFE-PRAGMATIC IN POLITICS ―Beauty‖ is a performative harmony of togetherness, a paradigm of politico-sociality. Chinese character ―politics‖ 政 says it rightly 正 handles ㄆ affairs toward social harmony. All this is an imperative to thriving survival, for life is harmony, and political togetherness is an existential beauty of harmony. Three steps are here. A. all five classical thinkers in China, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Mencius, Chuang Tzu, and Sun Tzu, express this existential unity of life in the exigent imperative of ―beauty-harmony of politics.‖ B. It self-refers and self-expands into geo-political poetics, C.

165

Cf. 鹽鐵論, 臺北市三民書局, 2006. It is China‘s historic report of the first National Congress in mid-Western Han period (81 BCE) discussing the political management of national economy.

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which sadly makes tragedies that we must repair with experience, examination, and history lessons.

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A. FIVE CLASSICAL THINKERS IN CHINA Confucius’ Analects begins with three communal chants, to set the tone of what follows. ―To learn and time-ly practice it—not pleasant indeed? Having classmates come from afar— not delightful indeed? Ignored166 by people yet not vexed—not a princely person indeed?‖167 ―Indeed,‖ literally ―not also 不亦,‖ is a refrain of robust rejoicing in inter-learning with teachers and classmates, and composed when ignored by society, as of ―princely person 君子,‖ ―an ideal ruler,‖ Plato‘s ―philosopher king.‖ Thus in three chants Confucius expresses his delight, admiration, and ideal, all social; You Tzu then describes filiality (e.g., to teacher) and brotherhood (of classmates) 孝悌 at the root of humanness 仁之本 toward humane-family politics 仁政.168 The joy of inter-learning together is political, untouched by life vicissitudes. These poetic expressions are couched in a rhythm-pathos of noble joy over brutal social milieu. So compressed, all this defies apt English rendering. He says (12/19), ―Winds over grass; winds of virtue-ruler blow and commoner-grass bends.‖ Nothing political is more natural! It is a family; ―Ruler, ruler, subject, subject, father, father, child, child,‖ he said (12/11). Such compact beauty! The nation is one family, and everyone is its member, behaving accordingly. That is the right family-politics Confucius tersely tirelessly presents, on pain of bloodbath. Pithy persuasion is punchy literature the Analects. Confucian politics are beautiful to fit politics beautiful. Lao Tzu radicalizes Confucius‘ princely ―people-ignored, and vex not‖ in a daring poetry of nonchalant ―live and let live,‖ rooming anyone in life. We live in the ―small State, few people‖169 in spirit and landscape, with nothing to attract invasion. If people want to come, come, if they want to leave, leave, with nothing to take or leave. All this is political and poetic. Thus Lao Tzu is not vague and uncertain but bold and pithy on how we gather naturally, self-lessly—tasteless, pervasive, and essential as water. In self-cultivation and rulership in Tao Te Ching, each is in the other; the self cultivates to meet one another and comport inter-beneficially, and ideal rulership mirrors nonchalant individuality. Lao Tzu‘s two, the cosmic Way 道 and its personal-power 德, are one in two, two in one, in one operation, interpersonal and cosmic, strong-tough in soft-weak, advance in return, increase in decrease, life in death, empty in full, nothing-doing nothing-not-done. All this amounts to individuality in socio-politics. Humane socio-politics concerns natural water, woodblock, valley, seasons, paradigms of innate inter-humanity, poetic corroborations of family-sociality, i.e., ―politics.‖ Nature-human interrelation is not melting mysticism but politics as geo-poetics. Humanity is maternally

166

To ―i-gnore‖ translates ―not know 不知‖ of the original. Ignoring can be cruel, as in Matthew 7:23. All translations from Chinese originals are Wu‘s unless otherwise noted. 168 Analects 1/2, which is in the milieu of family-politics, immediately follows 1/1. 169 小國寡民, Tao Te Ching 81, the clinching last chapter. 167

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nurtured in the flexible Web of the Heaven and Earth, and our acts unite in politics to have cosmic repercussion, felt in the least of our acts. Here the how unites the what. Lao Tzu presents in pithy beauty so irresistible that his Tao Te Ching is the world‘s most translated Classic next to the Bible. His words are social contagion; how they say draws us into how individuality is cool sociality as his selfreferential beauty is packed powerful, homo-cosmic. Lao Tzu is crisp and involved, and ―involved‖ is beauty sociopolitical. Mencius tells unforgettable stories with gripping phrases in his style socio-politically cogent. Asked by a tyrant how to be more powerful, Mencius reminded him that his recent release of a bull from sacrificial slaughter was from his heartfelt pain at its mortal jitters, or, Mencius-distinct, in ―the heart unbearable to people,‖ to sear into us. Then Mencius pushed vividly, we must ―‗old‘ our olds to reach people‘s olds; ‗young‘ our youngs to reach people‘s youngs,‖ again aptly, rhythmic. Here we must not ―help growth‖ but ―nurture vitality‖ till ―vast cyclonic.‖170 Thus we tread body171-sensitivity to make a ―family‖ of politics toward families of cosmos. This poetic vision was musically developed; every note of an individual needs, and is needed, in the music of a family; it is the Chinese ideal government.172 Chuang Tzu is so poetic as to supply beauty of politics five ways, ―age-world of ultimate virtue,‖ ―in the middle of turbid mixture,‖ ―village of its Way and its virtue,‖ ―state that builds virtue,‖ and ―state of vast wilderness,‖173 in arresting allusive stories. Here people swarm as insects, keep promises and inter-help, know no fidelity or inter-gifting, do without doing, and let go of one another. They change with time, gather not together mumbling nowords, not talking, not silent, nor silenced. They handle tyrants as handling tigers as tigers till tiger-tyrants fawn on them; they carefully-casually play with them, ―do not, spoil not,‖ just join without joining, inter-deal no deal, keeping dirty hands off politics, lest it turns dirty. They do politics with fish in ponds, birds on branches, and deer and snakes on grass. They talk with them wordless, listen and swarm as insects. This is politics of no politics, joy of no joy in the vast wild. Nature poetry is social; nature and people live together. Isn‘t it political? Presenting this fact irresistibly performs it, one life to another; beauty self-refers to otherexpand as politics; beauty is politics in self-enrichment. Beauty is sociality politics infused with poetics, personal and cosmic. ―But nationalism today is cutthroat contentious, no fooling around with animals.‖ In line with no-contention, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu would agree, and say they also contend, their own way. Contending uses powers, push and pull. Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu would power-push itself away, and pull us all in, pulling in to melt enmity; their pull-in contention dissolves

170

不忍人之心, 老吾老, 以及人之老, 幼吾幼,以及人之幼, 助長, 浩然之氣, Mencius 1A7, 2A2, all are so famously familiar, Mencius-distinctly simple and striking,. 171 踐形, Mencius 7A38. 172 ―Government by music‖ and ―government as family‖ were in vogue in classical China. 孔子, 孟子, 荀子: 樂論, 吉聯抗譯注, 1963, 兩漢論樂文字輯譯, 吉聯抗譯注, 1980, and 呂氏春秋中的音樂史料, 吉聯抗譯注, 1963. Sadly, these ideals have been more preached than practiced. 173

至德之世, 混芒之中, 道德之鄉, 建德之國, 大莫之國 in Chuang Tzu 9/7-12, 10/29-32, 12/80-83, 16/5-7, 20/928.

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contention; their ―contention‖ is invincible. Sun Tzu has the selfsame art of soldiery 兰法 that wins more than winning, winning over the entire enemy‘s hearts intact. Hard push-power of coercion is contained in soft pull-power of attraction, Yin absorbing Yang, absolutely effective in political-military internationalism, since millennia till today. This is no romantic dream. Joseph S. Nye‘s ―soft power‖ is the power to attract, not coerce (hard power), similar to Taoism, quite uncanny, but he never quotes Taoism. It is joined with ―hard power‖ into ―smart power,‖ by ―contextual intelligence,‖ with soft power at the base as context for ―coercion, payment, and persuasion‖ to move others.174 Nye‘s soft-hard blend of powers is a Ying-Yang ―smart power.‖ Nye does not see how the blend is itself in tension, internecine as they are inter-nascent, though he does catch this combination as situational ―contextual intelligence,‖ circumstantial knack. In Nye unawares, ancient Chinese Wisdom alive today is at work in international-cultural strategies hotly debated now. Ancient Sun Tzu has already radicalized it, saying, ―Victory is no devastation of enemy but dissolution of enmity.‖ Nye‘s blend shows in Sun Tzu‘s dissimulation (soft power) and showing off (hard) overpowering military force (hard) and beautiful wording (soft). Sun Tzu’s is the Art of Soldiery 兰法‖ of waging peace showing military might to vanquish enmity, to political concord with enemies. ―How?‖ Well, first, ―Knowing us, knowing them, 100 wars, 100 wins 知己知彼, 百戰百勝.‖ They in their objectivity we lack cannot be all correct, nor can they be all wrong. So we must listen to them, to decide ourselves. But we must first listen. Decision without listening fails, guaranteed; listen-and-decide succeeds, without following them. The reason is simple. Decision without listening to enemies fixates in recklessness of George W. Bush‘s low IQ that cannot flex to augur stiff death, defeat. In contrast, listening to enemy shows nimble flexing to adapt to opposition and take advantage of the situation toward victory. We must listen to the enemy to know us and know them!175 And then in thirteen terse chapters, Sun Tzu exploits his techniques to trail the situation (enemy‘s, in space, in time) to nimbly befit in situ, and face enemy with subtle masquerade. Our aim is to capture their hearts with dissimulation, without damage to us or them. We want them alive, with all their hearts. Drop ―bombs‖ of building schools, hospitals, foods, city substructure, and banking system, so that Mr. bin Laden our enemy comes to our Mayo Clinic for care, and contribute to our Appalachian Project. The enemy are now in our hearts as ours are in theirs, and we serve people on both sides. Everyone wins. Nothing is more beautifully complete a victory than this! This is what capturing enemy‘s hearts consists in, vanquishing enmity to let ―enemies‖ vanish! Nothing conquers like heart-capture, achieved by captivating masquerade, an art of beauty176 to capture all hearts. It is art, then, that shakes our hearts to conquer enmity, as

174

He conveniently sums up his view in Foreign Affairs, July/August 2009, pp. 160-163. This must be part of what Jesus‘ ―love the enemy‖ (Matthew 5:44) to free us from self-obsession to freely pose ourselves to freely flex with the situation. 176 Remember Plato‘s and Aristotle‘s doctrine of beauty as imitation? 175

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Mozart sings ―Magic Flute,‖ as ancient clown-entertainers changed the hearts of Chinese dictators.177 So, Sun Tzu has five points. (1) Military might is to win, not to fight, it (2) destroys no enemy but captures their hearts (3) by the art of dissimulation, (4) which is beauty, and so ―beauty‖ uses soldiery to conclusive victory. (5) His wording is sharply compelling as his thesis is disarmingly invincible. His beautiful medium is his military message, a performative heart-mutuality to make us smile, all in artistic dissimulation of the military Art of Soldiery 兰法 (not of war, as his manual is constantly mistranslated).

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B. VIRTUE-POLITICS, GEOPOLITICS, GEO-POETICS All this indissoluble unity of beauty and politics, inter-enhancing in China, in tyranny, in military campaign, so gripped later thinkers that they elaborated on the unity as kindred spirits. Five implications follow. One, living together is politico-historical in life-beauty; engaging enemies engages performative art. Politics is geo-poetics together to geopolitics in cosmic history. Politics, togetherness, history, and beauty are one, their spearhead is politics. Two, Chinese ideas are ―beauty‖ rhythmic, concrete and effective. Beauty is heartfelt harmony, politics is public harmony; we gather viscerally, on pain of bloodbath. The beauty of reality, political togetherness, is our co-existential imperative. Three, politics as beautiful is pragmatic. One nation raises one point to induce returns of three from another, threading them into ―one,‖ and each ―one‖ threaded differs from others among the nations. This is politics as Confucius‘ teaching, echoing student to follow student as shadow178; co-political imperative is pedagogical. Four, we are friends inter-accepting, shadowing and echoing one another to interinfluence, as Chinese ―shadow-echo 影響‖ means ―influence.‖ Five, we do so despising not, revering not, just being a live turtle dragging tail in worldly mud, no dead Turtle on the temple alcove.179 Thus beauty communal is self-referential, in politics self-expansive. Confucius‘ virtuepolitics is history-ritual-politics, paradigm-politics, the poetic wind to bend people-grass, for the ―people‖ to expand to World Concord. ―Chinese wisdom‖ is dialogical-political, literarybeautiful, in Humanity with Heaven and Earth. Now, politics is a concrete performance of Chinese wisdom alive beautifully literary, for such philosophical beauty is not just logic-rational but universally dialogical. ―Logic‖ is logein, to gather; thinking gathers things into an order180; thinking as logicizing must gather various logics, a dialogic. So, thinking is logical as dialogical, an interflow, inter-influence, of modes of thinking,181 to shake assumptions to inter-shape thinking, a revolution. 177

For a moving description of such delightful situation, see 龔鵬程‘s carefully documented 導讀 to 笑林廣記, 台北市金楓出版社, 1988, pp. 1-26, 史記, 滑稽列傳第六十六, and 文心雕龍, 諧讔第十五. 178 So Chuang Tzu (11/63-64) echoes Confucius. 179 Chuang Tzu 11/63-64, 17/81-84, 18/32-35, 19/72-75. 180 See Wu, On the “Logic” of Togetherness, 1998, p. 162 and note 41, p. 334 and note 181, On Metaphoring, 2001, p. 10 (note 23), pp. 54-58, both from Leiden: Brill. 181 Cf. Tulio Maranhao, ed., The Interpretation of Dialogue, University of Chicago Press, 1990.

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Western philosophers later turned dialogical inter-midwifery, inter-shaping assumptions, into logical debates. To think in China is to discuss 論議. The character lun, 論, is made of three elements, 言, 八, and 冊; 冊 pictures collecting, 八 their arrangement, and 言 is its wording. Together, as 論, expresses thinking 思 in co-consulting discussion 議,182 to interenrich across space among friends as teacher-students, across time with ancients, and with situations in Yin-Yang interactions.

C. TRAGEDIES, THREE RESOLUTIONS

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Sadly, however, beauty often comes in dirges. China‘s ―all world in one family 天下一家‖ seeds nepotism into ―my family over my world 家天下,‖ family dictatorship of national egoism. Mao in our age controlled all arts in the name of the state. Conflict-originated, Hobbes, Locke, Jefferson, and Paine had democracy, people-power (demos-kratia) against ruling power. Yet inexperienced people-in-power unchecked make unchecked disaster.183 Raw power needs three leitmotifs to make musical sense, specialists‘ expertise,184 regular self-examination, learning from history.185 One, experienced rulership is made of ―delegation of specialists,‖186 whose wisdom is given to people by the Internet, advertisement, and television. Two, self-examination is made by advisor-scholars to restrain and historians to record.187 Three, learning from history,188 Confucius dreams of unperturbed composure, the first-fruit of princely happy geopolitics in beautiful geo-poetics—in vicissitudes. He is with us today for us to admire and pattern ourselves. All this is a modern elaboration of ancient Chinese ―correction of name 正名,‖ politics, to its true meaning, back to reality. We must admit. Such sociopolitical performance of beauty, the pragmatic techniques of togetherness in making politics a family-economics has traditionally failed in China. Despite 182

On 論 as 思 and 議, see 說文解字詁林, 臺北市鼎文書局, 民72, 3-506. On 論 as 冊 picturing collection of things and 八 as their orderly arrangement, see Fujido Akiyasu 藤堂明保著, 漢字語源辭关, 東京都學燈社, 1965, pp. 687, 689. 183 Fareed Zakaria, ―The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,‖ Foreign Affairs, November/December 1997, pp. 22-43, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, NY: W. W. Norton, 2003, and From Wealth to Power: The Unusual Origins of America’s World Role, Princeton University Press, 1998. His thesis is strongest in the earliest publication, then turns; others seem weaker. 184 Alan Blinder (―Is Government Too Politicized?‖ Foreign Affairs, November/December 1997) argues for meritocracy or technocracy of a sort. 185

186

A Westerner is shocked. ―Politics confrontational makes no musical harmony; musical politics is no politics!‖ Yes, this ―politics‖ is Western since Hobbes, but not one since Plato who patterned politics after health-harmony. In any case, Chinese wisdom has ―government by music‖; it is China‘s common sense, its hypocritical dream, but dreams die hard.

Fareed Zakaria (The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, NY: W. W. Norton, 2003, pp. 248, 250, 252-254) argues zestfully for a delegation of specialists in a scattered manner. 187 Lin Yutang detailed all this in his pivotal treatise unjustly neglected, A History of the Press and Public Opinion in China, University of Chicago Press, 1936. 188 司馬遷 laments in his magnificent literary 史記 (to conclude 項羽本紀第七) that 項羽 so ignored the lessons of history as to fall. 杜牧 in his ―阿房宮賦‖ laments people‘s laments over 秦 and 六國 without reflecting 鑑 on their shared historical cause (not loving people) to perish. 杜牧 laments people‘s lack of reflection over the lessons of history, to end up repeating it (Santayana) in disasters.

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the Confucians‘ valiant persistent efforts through millennia, politics was not Confucianized, the Confucian dreams failed; Confucianism was politicized into dictators‘ arm. Still, the technical ideal of managing world beauty is too appealing to discard. We can try today what Japan has been trying, a family-style—not family-oriented—management of corporation, and expand it into cross-national multi-cultural mega-corporations worldwide, and then perhaps such management would be too big for national nepotism to crop up.189 And Japanese family-style management—taken from the Sino-Japanese family-centered commercialism—could join the West‘s no-nonsense management of individual responsibility legally controlled. The joining is beauty together. Chinese wisdom can merge with the world at large to perform communal beauty, not to merge China away but to energize it, as Chinese wisdom envisions, modernized, made vastly worldwide. Constant life-failures of beauty sociopolitical may make us wonder if beauty is workable, if not worthwhile. To respond, let us ask another question: Are dictators, in China and elsewhere, ―beautiful‖ as attended with untold pain and sorrows? Well, they produce dirges, lamentations, throughout history; they remain beauty in life. Beauty has its own order, joyous and sorrowful, uplifting and disastrous. A sort of ―decency‖ thus attends beauty but not morality. History adjudicates survival, judges what lasts and what not. Beauty and history are mysterious ―orders in disasters,‖ bewildering to us, to clue life as worth living, however horrendous. Beauty is our ultimate refuge in this world to enhance religion. Beauty is our this-worldly ultimate, our world beyond this tragic world, our Wonderland not fantastic yet so fantastic. In this Wonderland we can claim to be the Great Adults who lose none of their baby Alice‘s hearts, those whom Mencius praised and admired. We are an Alice in this Wonderland this world. Are we happy? Well, we are now, while in pain of this world. Where is Chinese wisdom in all this? Well, remember the ―Great Preface‖ to the Classic of Poetry?190 Here is the quotation again: Poetry is where intention arrives. Within our heart makes our intention, issued in words to make poetry. Felt-moved at our core (chung 中), and [we] shape [it] into words. Wording it, not enough, so [we] sigh-groan it. Sighing groaning it, not enough, so [we] chant-sing it. Chant-sing it, not enough, [so] hands dance, feet stamp unawares. Feeling issues in voices, voices form sayings (wen 文), called intones (yin 音). . . . We must take note of one thing perhaps few noticed. The ―intention‖ of our ―heart‖ that overflows into ―intones‖ of dancing-hands and stamping-feet includes sorrows as well as joys. Later in the Preface are listed both joys of sociopolitical concord and pain of disastrous misrule, demonstrated in paeans‘ shouts of joy and groaning dirges, collected into Classic of Poetry. When in pain, dance it out! When in joy, dance it in and out! 189

―Deplorable working conditions persist in China, Japan, everywhere; no such economic wonderland is possible.‖ Well, Japan has practiced family-style corporations, though nepotism-infested. We have had popand-mom corner-stores. The world today may not have it worldwide, yet. Chinese wisdom, a die-hard, is still dreaming. 190 詩大序 in 十三經注疏, op. cit., pp. 269-270. Expositions-exegeses there deserve close reading. Related to this are exciting tracings of ―music‖ in ancient China preserved in Mr. Lü’s Chronicles, 5:2, 3, 4, 5, and 6:2, 3, 4, 5. 呂氏春秋, 仲夏紀第五, 二曰大樂, 三曰侈樂, 四曰和樂, 五曰古樂; 季夏紀第六, 二曰音律, 三曰音初, 四曰制樂, 五曰明理. China has many more such praises of musicality in life. E.g., on ―government by music,‖ see 禮記 (樂記), 荀子 (樂論篇), 呂氏春秋 (大樂, 古樂, 音律, 樂成), and 蔣義斌‘s ―的禮樂合論,‖ 東方宗教研究, October 1991, pp. 73-107, etc.

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Beware, however! Proper music alone is life-therapy. If sorrow issues in sad music, lewd music prostitutes the state to ruin. Sagely advisor Ian Tzu 晏子, on hearing his lord captivated by a foreign musician Yü 虞, put him under house arrest. Enraged, the lord told Ian Tzu not to touch such frivolous matter as music. With historical precedents, Ian Tzu admonished, ―Music perishes and rituals follow, rituals perish and politics follows, politics perishes and the state follows.‖191 Clouds, buildings, squirrels, trees, grass, trash, writing, eating, washing, all things are ―music visible in space‖ I see and hear everywhere. I make my own music as I manage them. I engage routines each moment to compose my good music away from depressing music, as I listen to my Menuhin playing Walton‘s Sonata, Viola Concerto, and Violin Concerto,192 as I keep me busy making my own music out of clouds, trees, and squirrels. Life makes music that is my life my musical reason.

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D. CHINESE WISDOM AS CHINESE Now, what is ―distinctly Chinese‖ of Chinese wisdom still needs be brought out, by comparing Chinese mindset with the West‘s. We will now do so under four headings, one, China that joins and follows vs. the West analytical and opposing; two, situational-flexuous China vs. the universal-systematic West; three, our shared need to join; so as four, to see what Chinese wisdom is in the joined whole. ONE: Joining-following China vs. the analyzing-opposing West: The Chinese mind tends to join in and follow; the West tends to stand off and set one thing against another. This is because China enters the matter while the West stays out to objectively observe. Let us first see joining vs. splitting, and then following vs. opposing. Joining vs. standing-off: Chuang Tzu took Confucius in three ways: an historical personage ―K‘ung Ch‘iu 孔丘,‖ someone wrong, ―K‘ung Tzu孔子,‖ scolded by Lao Tzu, and ―Chung Ni 仲尼‖ advocating true Tao.193 Later, the Confucians, while opposing Taoism and Buddhism, were enriched by both; Neo-Confucians took on their appreciating of the as-is. By the same token, China took an historical attitude to the West, was initially critical of it, and then digested it in China‘s own way,194 as Russian Communism taken into Chinese Communism, is now busily being capitalized into new China. All this shows how China ―joins in.‖

191

「夫樂亡而禮從之，禮亡而政從之，政亡而國從之。」 Rituals 禮 are all state regulations, religious social, and legal. See 晏子春秋, 景公夜聽新樂而晏諫第六, 臺北市三民書局, 民87, p. 15. Neither Arthur Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Representation, two vols., NY: Dover, 1966) nor Yehudi Menuhin (The Music of Man, Toronto: Methuen, 1979, a gem), despite their deep reflections on music, has ―lewd music‖ that prostitutes human nature to corrupt politics. This theme died out in the West after Plato. 192 William Walton‘s Violin Sonata played in 1950 (with Louis Kentner), Viola Concerto in 1968 (Walton conducting) and Violin Concerto in 1969 (Walton conducting) are collected as CDs Nos. 24 and 48 in Yehudi Menuhin: The Great EMI Recordings, 2009 (on tenth anniversary of his death). 193 See Wu‘s Butterfly, op. cit., p. 400, note 10. 194 See, e.g., 蘇輿編, 翼教叢編, 臺北市中央研究院, 民94, on the vigorous debates among 張之洞, 王先謙, 康有為, 梁啟超, and others, over how properly to respond to the West‘s brutal incursions into China, political, military, economic, and cultural.

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In contrast, the West stands off, observes, and analyzes whatever it meets, often as alien and ―wrong,‖ seldom admitting how much it eventually influences the West; such approach is fair, objective, and ―scientific.‖ Seldom did the West try to understand Buddhism in its own terms, Hesse‘s Siddhartha195 perhaps an exception that yet tries to see it in Western human terms. The West never realizes, much less admits, that the existence of the hip generation196 or hobos may be due to Oriental influence unawares. The Westerners always portray a ―city‖ with its population, geography, history, weather, industry, socioeconomics, and politics, and seldom refer to how it feels to live in that city. Many journalists compete to ―report back to homeland‖ China‘s political trends today, its management of popular affairs, its socioeconomics, as reporting any foreign species of animals and their region, not China itself, much less how it feels to think, feel, and live as China-men do that differs from Western. ―Chinese wisdom‖ is another culture, analyzable in Western categories, ―its data‖ thinkable in Western thought-pattern, its thinking taken as a version of the West‘s formal logic-rationality, and whatever that cannot be classified under such ―universal categories,‖ whatever differs from such, is ―cultural,‖ ―literary,‖ even ―underdeveloped.‖ Following vs. opposition: China sees weal and woe, joys and sorrows, as mutually following, and so Chinese people eagerly wish to discern the trend of the times—so they love fortunetelling—and ride on the crest of its wave, to take advantage of what comes, in fact, whatever comes, for whatever benefit they can get. Being apt and behave aptly in a situation is a cherished ideal of ―prudence.‖ All this while, Mencius expanded on our shared root-desires and urged the rulers to begin at home—―Charity begins at home‖—by ―‗old‘-ing my olds to reach people‘s olds, ‗younging‘ my youngs to reach people‘s youngs,‖ until the whole world under heaven becomes one big family. Chuang Tzu suggests self-forgetful naturalness, mutually forgetting, in the ultimate nonchalant joy. In contrast, the West sets things opposed—individuals against community, private against public, people-power (demos-kratia) against rulership, responsibility against freedom, fate against destiny—to manage properly, omitting no grievance, covering all into a seamless total system of universal impersonal justice. Things must be handled above board in mathematical necessity; to ―7+5‖ must be given ―12,‖ no matter where, when and by whom. Justice must be blind to things other than itself, no preference. This ―system‖ of impersonal, universal, and necessary justice has no room for ―kindness‖ kin-hearted; it is private preference, nepotism. ―Help‖ is beyond question, much less ―heartfelt stretching of a helping hand beyond the call of duty.‖ The West would have been shocked to hear Confucius saying (13/18) that in his village a ―straight fellow‖ hides his father‘s misdeeds.197 Two: Situational-flexuous China vs. the universal-systematic West: Chinese wisdom is alive; Chinese people melt thinking in their living, melt living in their thinking, and this ―in‖ is in situ, situational, what is alive in Chinese wisdom. Do we take ―morning, three‖? It‘s all 195

Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, NY: Bantam Books, 1971. Alan Watts may be the most distinctive among them, totally steeped in Taoism. 197 China is keen on flexible expediency 權 under constant principles 常 (Huai Nan Tzu, Chapter 13, 淮南子, 氾論, Han Fei Tzu, Five Worms, 韓非子, 五蠹, Mr. Lü’s Chronicles 呂氏春秋, and many others). Here it seems that love of parents is the root of all public justice. This theme will be considered soon. 196

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right to do so. Or do we take ―morning, four‖? Fine, too. Both are all right, we can walk both ways, OK in OK, not-OK in not-OK, all depends on the situation.198 Being situational spells being flexuous as changing situations, and ―flexuous as‖ means being in ―lived coherence‖ as we live through ups and downs of what comes. Here is something strange. To ―go‖ is not to ―stand,‖ but when put into ―under-‖ they join, to ―undergo‖ what goes on, and we come to ―understand‖ the situation. This is how we understand what Northrop means by ―concepts by intuition.‖ Northrop then opposes them to ―concepts by postulation‖199 in whose set-stable perspective such intuitive approach is that of ―anything goes,‖ quite like dead leaves in the wind, for ―concepts by postulation‖ is concepts pre-assumed, gathered into a stable formal system we can manipulate at will. Thus, the concepts postulated are universal, necessary, valid everywhere, every-when, for ―postulation‖ is contrived beforehand, ready to apply anywhere anytime to anything, for they exist nowhere, no-where except in the mind of their creator pure rational agent, impersonal, nowhere. All this contrast leads us to our need to join China to the West. THREE: our shared need to join: Let us first consider the West‘s need to join China. Concepts by postulation are universal, logicizing, mathematical, seeing from nowhere, and so ―existing‖ everywhere. These concepts are usually those of formal logic, mathematically quantify-able, quantifying everything. ―Yellow‖ is certain light-vibrations of a certain wavelength, making, as early as 1903, G. E. Moore to complain that that is not ―yellow‖ we experience.200 Color vanishes when translated into mathematical concepts by postulation; all things we know vanish when translated into electrical vibrations. Postulation wraps concepts in themselves, sees things from nowhere, and things disappear into nowhere. Psychology today suffers most from concepts by postulation.201 Psychology-as-science tries hard to arrange and archive all data researched with statistical precision, and systematically pin down and classify all mental disorders under the categories in the DSM, the august Bible to the practicing psychologists. Where is, then, ―this problem‖ of this client? Where is the art of listening?202 Not a single person exists here now. As the client vanishes, caring psychology self-destructs. All this disaster is not academic but quite real and imminent. The spirit—mindset—of abstract system is precisely the spirit of proud totalism that imposes itself on things to their demise, an attitude of objective science in technological industry to destroy Nature and all

198

兩行 (Chuang Tzu 2/40). 可乎可, 不可乎不可 (2/33). 方可方不可, 方不可方可 (2/28). F. S. C. Northrop, ―The Possible Concepts by Intuition and Concepts by Postulation as a Basic Terminology for Comparative Philosophy,‖ The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities, Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1959, pp. 77-101. This essay has been influential among comparative philosophers, though quite insufficient in the area of the Orient. We do our best here to interpret his contrastive concepts. 200 G. E. Moore, Pincipia Ethica, Cambridge University Press, 1903, p. 10. 201 See Appendix II: Counselor s Poetic Pediatrician-Mother in Part IV below. 202 Rex B. Kline, Principles and Practice of Structural Equation Modeling, Second Edition, NY: The Guilford Press, 2005. DSM-IV-TR: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Association, 2000. Erich From, The Art of Listening, NY: Continuum, 1994; this is his last, posthumous work. 199

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cultures including the West. Worst of all, we do all this in perfectly good conscience. Conscientious mathematician, Western Russell, already saw the danger back in 1922,203 [T]he tolerance of the Chinese is in excess of anything that Europeans can imagine from their experience at home. We imagine ourselves tolerant, because we are more so than our ancestors. But we still practise political and social persecution, and what is more, we are firmly persuaded that our civilization and our way of life are immeasurably better than any other, so that when we come across a nation like the Chinese, we are convinced that the kindest thing we can do to them is to make them like ourselves. I believe this to be a profound mistake. It seemed to me that the average Chinaman, even if he is miserably poor, is happier than the average Englishman, and is happier because the nation is built upon a more humane and civilized outlook than our own. Restlessness and pugnacity not only cause obvious evils, but fill our lives with discontent, incapacitate us for the enjoyment of beauty, and make us almost incapable of the contemplative virtues. Still, Russell may not have realized that the seriousness of the problem stems from the very root of the outlook of the West. ―Restlessness and pugnacity‖ actually stem from the spirit of analytical precision Russell himself champions. This fastidious spirit excludes any little thing imprecise, to destroy things other than our ―precise truth.‖ ―Precision‖ breeds totalism of truth to breed restless pugnacity, into miseries all over, including those with proud precision. Russell quotes in contrast Confucius‘ spirit of noncontention,204 The true gentleman is never contentious. If a spirit of rivalry is anywhere unavoidable, it is at a shooting-match. Yet even here he courteously salutes his opponents before taking up his position, and again when, having lost, he retires to drink the forfeit-cup. So that even when competing he remains a true gentleman. And then Russell sighed,205 In our own day, under the influence of competitive industrialism, the slightest approach to non-resistance is despised, and men are expected to be able to keep their end up. In practice, our effective morality is that of material success achieved by means of our struggle; and this applies to nations as well as to individuals. Anything else seems to us soft and foolish.

Now, how do we return home to Chinese non-contention to cure the West‘s ―well meant‖ spirit of total precision? Russell‘s ―contemplative virtues‖ reinterpreted could help. Suddenly, he quoted H. G. Wells‘ Time Machine (1895), intuitively seeing our need to go to past history to learn. Besides, the way back to history is Western, by a ―machine‖; Russell proposed an actual travel geographically to cultures less progressed—more ancient—than USA or Britain. Westerners are machinists in space and time. In contrast, Chinese people need no machines, in fact, Chuang Tzu warns us against the machinating mind 機心, implying that the mind that contrives machines machinates 203

The Problem of China (1922), quoted in The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell: 1903-1959, eds. Robert E. Egner and Lester E. Denonn, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1961, p. 554. 204 This is a quote from Lionel Giles‘ Sayings of Confucius (3/7, cf. 3/16) in Russell‘s Sceptical Essays (1928), quoted in The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, ibid., p. 556; ―losing the match‖ is perhaps Giles‘, but is a precious addition. 205 Ibid., p. 558.

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maximum profit out of minimum input; the contriving spirit damages our self. Chinese people consult instead with what the ancient sages left us in print, where they bared their hearts, and contemplate on their lessons. Perhaps such time travel is Chinese ―contemplative virtues‖ Russell mentioned. Actually, however, we must be alerted that ―contemplative virtues‖ are unstable with unstable life inside and out. Emerson calls such instability ―truth,‖ perhaps the truth of authenticity, when he said,206

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God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take what you please— you can never have both. Between them as a pendulum, man oscillates. He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party, he meets—most likely his father‘s. He gets rest, commodity and reputation: but he shuts the door of truth. He in whom the love of truth predominates will keep himself aloof from all moorings, and afloat. He will abstain from dogmatism, and recognizes all the opposite negations between which, as walls, his being is swung. He submits to the inconveniences of suspense and imperfect opinions, but he is a candidate for truth, as the other is not, and respects the highest law of his being.

It is in this milieu of contemplative learning from the past paragons—and only here—that the West‘s spirit of precise efficiency comes in to help Chinese people. Says Russell wisely,207 They may learn from us the indispensable minimum of practical efficiency, and we may learn from them something of that contemplative wisdom which has enabled them to persist while all the other nations of antiquity have perished. . . . But those who value wisdom or beauty, or even the simple enjoyment of life, will find more of these things in China than in the distracted and turbulent West, and will be happy to live where such things are valued. The West‘s efficiency of precise handling helps China perhaps in improving on sanitation system, education, banking, road-building, etc. For, sadly, eager to implement the communal ideals, China has harvested disasters in history. The recent examples are Mao‘s Cultural Revolution that devastated cultural legacies, and the grand building of the dam in the great Rivers for Great Leap Forward in economy, to end up upsetting ecological balance. Sober scientific technological investigations of the West could have averted these overzealous blunders in polity. Two hopeful signs are here. One, China is learning from the West on technological matters, slowly but surely. This is because, two, China accommodates outside influence, flexible in adapting to the situation—more so than the West‘s well-meant imposition of its own policies. China loves and does ―walk double‖ ways, its own ways that incorporate ways from outside. FOUR: Chinese wisdom as Chinese: We can now easily see how peculiarly Chinese China‘s wisdom is. As the single world culture that is graphic and concrete thriving, the mind and heart of China exploits its graphic means of description, audio-pictograms graphically expressing senses of life, con-fessing to what has been going on, from one generation to another. 206

―Intellect,‖ in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson, NY: The Modern Library, 2000, p. 271. Cf. Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity, NY: Random House, 1951. 207 The Problem of China, quoted in The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, op. cit., p. 554. Chinese Wisdom Alive : Vignettes of Life-Thinking, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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Such jottings down of living journey make up heartfelt journals autobiographical, consciously or no, to cluster into stories of various genres—chronicles, poems, essays, critical insights, fictions, and the list goes on. These stories, actual and imagined, descriptive and critical, are read and reread by posterity to understand, touch on, and retell in their own manner to undergo the ancient lives, their own ways today. Why does posterity bother to do so? Because in doing so, they learn, I mean really learn as if they were there in person themselves, from the ancients confessing to their failures and successes—so as to relive the life better and fuller, and these latter-day readers would in turn jot down what they gained out of their intense studies and practice, as failures and successes. And the tradition of handing down the wisdom of how best to live goes on, to make up ―history.‖ So, graphic life-description produces heartfelt ex-pression of living, and thinking goes into living, living goes into thinking, in ancient days, to make ―paragons‖ of living out of honest records of ancient lives—autobiographical confessions—called the Classics by posterity. So, description turns in admiration into prescription for living well, and the techniques to live aptly become the time-honored ―art‖ of living, the beauty of human life through history. It is to Russell‘s credit to note knowledge by acquaintance (KA) distinct from knowledge by description (KD), yet he confined KA to raw reception of sense-data alone, took KD as more complete, which is ironically completed by means of KA.208 We appreciate his discovery and discern his Western preference to separate. Russell just followed the West‘s empirical tradition of Locke and Hume in taking our direct acquaintance as with sense-data alone, and built KD by means of KA with sense-data. Russell‘s separation of knowledge into two sorts, and separation of concrete knowledge from abstract buildup of ―knowledge,‖ is typical of the West. In contrast, in concrete China, KD on historical records is digested by KA in life, for KD is acquired as KA, KA expressed. In China, KD is KA, via graphic writing as autobiographical confessions and as historical reliving and reenacting, year after year, generation after generation. Heartfelt history threads KA into KD into a coherent organic whole alive, called Chinese wisdom. Our lifeworld is obviously the world of time ceaselessly changing, joys following sorrows and sorrows following joys, as Uncle Fort is well aware to live it through. Here constant principles 常 weave into expediencies 權209 as the situation shifts, to weave the tapestry of Heaven-earth and history called ―the world.‖ Such natural and historical tapestry is vaster, concrete, coherent, convincing yet surprising, than any formal logical system humanly contrived. Still, life-tapestry is riskier than ―reliable‖ formal logic, for facts are stranger than fiction. Horatio said, ―O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!‖ Hamlet sighed, ―There are more things in heaven and earth,

208

The Problems of Philosophy (1912), quoted in Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, ibid;, pp. 217-224. In fact, all his epistemology is built on this basis, as the editors correctly saw. 209 Actually, China‘s ―ch‘üan 權 as weighing‖ echoes but does not equal ―expediency‖ in the West, as we will realize soon in the next section.

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Horatio,/ Than are dreamt of in our philosophy.‖210 Thus we wish wonder attends our days, to live well. Chinese wisdom is the Always in Weighing.

210

Hamlet, I.1.166-170, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1988, p. 662.

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Chapter 4

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CHINESE WISDOM AS THE ALWAYS 經, 常 WEIGHING 權, 衡 INTER-ADJUSTING Life-unity of the Always Weighing is music, exhibited, among others, in my Jewish idol performing a British composition. In Walton‘s Violin Concerto, Menuhin‘s violin sings211 the inner principle through personal integrity, the Always, going through turbulent ups and downs of waves, soaring as the Always grows signing vast, as it shifts enriched, penetrating all over. Here the musical Always throbs marching on, Weighing through vicissitudes. Now we enter China‘s music of the Always Weighing. Three subsections are here, in general, in specifics, and the concrete related to grand Harmony of all. Subsection One explains how concrete Chinese wisdom is in contrast to Western philosophy. Subsection Two asks how the Always derives from factual contingencies, to Weigh them to adjust to ourselves. Subsection Three goes to how the Always is surprisingly derived from the concrete, following which inevitably lead us to the grand Harmony of all. In General: Chinese wisdom does think and ―argue,‖ but completely alive in lived situations, one after another. Philosophy in the West also handles how principles apply to concrete situations, by taking ―principles,‖ rules governing all matters, as ―prima facie obligations‖ to accommodate exceptions that require expediencies in a special situation, e.g., ―no lying, unless‖ life-saving obligations suspending this principle. Such a ―governing principle‖ is replaced in China with ―the Always-usual 常,‖ often described as things‘ Way (Tao 道), the Grain that runs through the jade of things (Li 理); without things there would have been no ―always Grain‖ of things. The West‘s extenuating circumstances, demanding expediency to maneuver through, are replaced in China with the Weighing 權 of the situation and the Weighing of actual views 論衡. Moreover, these two, the Always and the Weighing, mutual adjust. Thus things in concrete situations are primary, for the Always to appear, to explain things‘ changes 易 with Five Performances 五行 to produce their 64 patterns-of-change 卦, the spiritual power-pervading as subtle-ing things 神者妙萬物而為言者也, as ―things‘ Grain

211

Listen to the incomparable performance of Walton‘s Violin Concerto in Yehudi Menuhin (1916-1999): The Great EMI Recordings, 2009, CD No. 48.

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is one, diversified variously 理一分殊.‖ Here is no constant overarching principle of the West governing from beyond. The Weighing 權 of situation is conducted in the changing situation, in fact, Weighing is part of human situation that discerns, not Western external temporary expediency, logicrationally calculated to accommodate the principle of primary importance. The Weighing of views, argument, or theories 論衡 is not conducted according to preset principles beyond matters of fact, but in the light of the Always that has been the case, and adjusted by the current situation, always weighed. Thus the Always and the Weighing inter-adjust and inter-shape in situ, no one-sided priority of principle presiding with ―prima facie‖ authority. Besides, such inter-adjustment is naturally conducted by telling stories of concrete cases, historical (factual precedents), legendary (likely, reputed since of old), and imagined (fictive, invented, often hilarious). Here is no abstract argument. Finally, all inter-shaping in situation originating in the core of our being is expressed irresistibly in the Great Preface to the Classic of Poetry (詩大序) cited a while ago. That heartfelt dancing hand-waving, foot-tapping, is at the base of the Thirteen Classics,212 the official Ideal of China. It is the existential pristine heart of humanity that vibrantly stretched as spirit 神, subtly-mysteriously 妙, throughout myriad things, portrayed in the Classic of Changes, the first one in the Thirteen Classics. ―But then, what is the Always (常) if it is not the unchanging principle beyond all?‖ Well, the Always is the passing of events and things, or rather, what we humans are aware of as the

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passing (歷) to pick and record (史), namely, history (歷史), the story of the passage of things, as something Always there, such as rivers going into the ocean, or seasonal shifts, all that is ―self-so 自然,‖ Nature. Baby Mary pulled at Mom‘s blanket at dawn and shouted, ―Mom, I‘m hungry! I wanna bre‘kfast and a toast!‖ Well, Mary can eat toast, not breakfast. Breakfast is related to but different from toast. The well-known Chinese divine painter Wu Tao-tzu 吳道子 painted not beauty but a flower, and beauty appeared through the flower he painted; beauty is an adjective. A road, Tao 道, is not there, but walks it and becomes; Tao is a verb.213 Descriptions of Tao are verbs transitive. Tao tao-ed as noun is no Tao. This is why the Tao is often compared with God beyond all things, enabling things to be things, not things as such. The Always is the Tao, how things always have been, come to be, are, and will be, not ―a Thing.‖ Such Always is how we should live and behave, our Norm, the Way 道 of our power-tobe 德, our morality (道德), without which we perish. The Always of things passing is always mixed with surprises, however, and so we must weigh ourselves and things to adapt (權)—to harmonize the Always with our Weighing selves. This Harmony (和) is the appropriate (宜), the proper (義) that makes life worth living.

212

The Thirteen Classics 十三經 consist of 周易 (易經), 尚書 (書經), 毛詩 (詩經), 周禮, 儀禮, 禮記, 春秋左傳, 春秋公羊傳, 春秋穀梁傳, 論語, 孝經, 爾雅, and 孟子. 213 ―道行之而成,‖ says Chuang Tzu (2/33). Chinese Wisdom Alive : Vignettes of Life-Thinking, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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After all, the point of living is not to resolve problems, much less solve them, but to live with them as they come, as Uncle Fort asks, ―How could this not make—turn into—its opposite?‖ and is always prepared, come what may, to turn us adept at weighing the situation to live in it. Life-nourishment 養生, life-cultivation修身, and Tao-cultivation 修道 consist in nurturing life-stamina to live with problems. That is the secret of full life, our envy of all sages and all religions. This is where Always-―principle‖ and Weighing-flexibility unite as one, to live, really live. All this is like ―situation ethics‖ yet more thoroughly situational than tinkering with situations, like ―virtue ethics‖ yet more interpersonal than personal, like ―life-boat ethics‖ but the ―boat‖ is the cosmos and its history, and like ―metaphysics‖ but is not behind but among things, and their ―principles‖ are themselves moving, moving unceasing as ―meso-physics.‖ Chinese wisdom is life-ethics in life-meso-physics within things, comprehensively expressing things as they are alive, changing. ―You cannot say Chinese wisdom is illogical, though. There must be some logic that applies universally all the way through such describing and weighing,‖ you say. Well, incredibly, China treats even logic as something to be indirectly performed, and so, Yes, China is logical, and yet No, China is not baldly logical. Yes, Chinese wisdom is logical with logical bones in things‘ lived bodies of flesh and sinews moving, as we see moral backbones in a person, but No, it is not ―baldly logical‖ because these bones are never skeletal movement. Now visible, now not, logical bones are seen moving by the way the concrete flesh of examples—actual stories—is moved to make a point, but not themselves exposed as bare bones. If exposed, logic the bones must be set surgically back (by literature?) into the flesh of actual stories, history. This is because logic is, to change metaphor, grammar of living; without living there would not be logic its grammar. To gaze at the grammar without its living language is impossible, or counterproductive, falsifying the whole reasonableness of life. Chuang Tzu‘s story (17/79-81) about a child trying to learn the noble Han Tan gait 邯鄲行, ending up losing even his own walk, and had to crawl all the way home, was told to Kung-sun Lung 公孫龍 the logician who probes ―pure logic‖ without living it. ―One and one make two everywhere,‖ do you say? Well, it all depends on what ―ones,‖ how ―and,‖ and how ―make‖ you mean. One ―apple and‖ another do make two apples, but one ―spouse and‖ another ―make‖ one (not two) family of ―two,‖ ―three,‖ or more members, and as mathematical logician Whitehead said,214 ―gunpowder and a spark make‖ an exploded zero and many. Thus, ―1+1=2‖ cuts a sorry logical figure. If ―1+1‖ is an analytical deduction, its conclusion ―2‖ would be ―compelling,‖ coming from just stipulating ―1‖ and ―+‖ in a specific exclusive digital way, unchanging throughout. Deductive compulsion comes from stipulation of meanings of words separate from actual matters of the actual world. So ―1+1=2‖ has nothing to do with facts, and its universal application to the actual world is an illusion, yet the operation happens to apply to facts, though not indiscriminately. What we should do, then, is to observe that ―1+1=2‖ often applied in the past in some cases, so it probably do now and later, in some cases. 214

―Immortality‖ in The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp, La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1941, 1951, p. 699. ―One and one make two‖ is Whitehead‘s example.

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The possibility of actual application of ―1+1=2‖ belongs to the realm of probable induction, and inductive probability is strengthened by the frequency of applications by specifying relevant facts, and ―relevance‖ cannot be deductively predetermined. Each case must be individually experimented—weighed—on. Mathematician Whitehead‘s surprising conclusion, ―The exactness is a fake,‖ now makes sense; it perhaps means, the exactitude of a single stipulated definition that universally applies to facts is a fake, but he stops short of saying if ―true exactitude‖ exists, much less what it is. Does his silence imply the cul-de-sac of formal logicism, that any philosophy that follows such formalism is ―a fake‖? Chinese wisdom would say, this ―all depends‖ is the flesh and blood of the actual situational weighing, can be told of by a story to make history, and understood by our common sense,215 the historical ―sense‖ that is our shared reasonableness to weigh the situation. We are already in a danger zone of bare abstraction, however, and so the best is to take concrete instances—stories—from Chinese writings themselves. In Specifics: Let us first consider Tao 道 the Way of the world of things. Remarkably, it is described identically in all Chinese writings, whether Confucian or Taoist or Encyclopedist. They all claim Tao is inscrutable if taken as a Thing, for it is inscrutably (adverb) fresh (adjective) as kids‘ Way of doing-living, ever beginning (verb) their being and behaving, ever vibrating as their being-behaving. Tao is adverb, adjective, and verb—but not noun—all rolled into one, at the root of things, so natural beyond words. All descriptions of Tao befit mysteries of the dawn, the dusk, and the dawn again, so ordinary, so fresh, and so Always surprising in its ups and downs of circumstances. All this sounds inscrutable until we see it as the soft warp of the fabric 經 of the universe, the major artery or meridian of energy, flexuous and subtly alive, that runs through myriad things in unforeseen contingencies. No wonder, the Always 常 is often coupled with 經 as 經常, often meaning ―usual.‖ Tao as the Always is alive and usual. Tao vibrates things of Heaven and Earth into music; ―music‖ as theme and as style often naturally appears in Chinese writings on Tao. Tao is the music of the spheres of this world, echoing today‘s scientific description of things as regular vibration of electronic energies. All Chinese writings vibrate in the music of Tao of Nature, in the self, inter-selves, and imbuing them all with all things in Heaven and Earth, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Naturally we began this section with violinist Menuhin playing. We must ask how China has reached such view of things of the world that the West, or any one else, has not seen. To ask, consider, and answer this how-question enters Chinese wisdom. We are all aware that the world is in flux, so the question for China is how China 215

Whitehead said common sense enables 1+1=2 to properly apply to actuality. ―But unfortunately there is no adequate analysis of common sense, because it involves our relation to the infinity of the Universe.‖ That is, applying 1+1=2 needs common sense that 1+1=2 cannot compute. Russell said, ―If you know nothing about human growth, you might infer by induction that he [a growing boy] would continue to grow at this rate until his head strikes the stars. . . . The conclusion is that scientific inference demands certain extra-logical postulates of which induction is not one.‖ That is, we must ―know human growth‖ to accurately apply induction to human growth, this knowledge is our common sense outside induction. The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, ed. Paul A. Schilpp, La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1951, p. 699. The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell 1903-1959, eds. R. E. Egner and L. E. Denonn, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1961, p. 155. Both Whitehead and his student Russell were great mathematical logicians.

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that stresses changes in situation gets to the Always 常, the Tao 道, and its attendant morality 道德. Well, if Tao is a verb, the Always of the Tao must be its ―speed,‖ its ―rate‖ of acceleration and deceleration, its tendency 勢. The situational tendency can roughly be typified, as the Great Ultimate (T‘ai Chi 太極), the Yin-Yang, the Five Goings (wu hsing 五行), the 64 hexagrams, and so on, as proposed in the history of China,216 and the most crucial is the history itself. We must study history217 to live on. Such is the constant counsel given by all sages in China. Now, history is the ―wisdom of the thousand years,‖ unassailable ―argument-theory now through ancient,‖ and so ―any statements that do not fit in with former royal [sayings] cannot be taken as Tao.‖218 History is the honest—deadly219 honest—record of ―bloody mess‖ through time, and is the object lesson to our living. History is the fact-collection as Norm, value to living, all living through time, and is as alive as the lived living it records. All acts are perpetrated on integrity and intrigue, honorable and horrendous, ugly and beautiful, and all acts in between, to make an indescribable mess called ―history,‖ the treasure trove of wisdom. This factual mess, however, takes discernment to see through, to realize what has been going on as inter-involvement of the Always and Weighed flexibility, constant and expedient, and their Harmony (he 和) expressed in sages, explained, judged by history, which is Chinese wisdom at work. How does it do? Chinese wisdom keeps telling stories to draw a point, to describe and explain what is going on, the Always inter-involved with Weighing changes, their harmony or its failure, in personal life, in inter-personal dealing, and in sociopolitical management, and in military campaign, all often seen as performing music that is life. The Always, the grand Harmony: Now, let us go back to our original question. How did the Chinese historians see through the bewildering facts to draw ―one‖ Warp, the Always, running through them all? How did Confucius, for example, see from history his One ―Tao‖ that skewers them all? Besides—to put it differently—this One does not necessarily make sociopolitical success. Nor is it an accident that Chinese people consistently admire the historic tragic heroes such as Confucius, Ch‘ü Yüan 屈原, Yüeh Fei 岳飛, all social failures. Here is something beyond mere situational expediency. What is it? 216

Wang Ch‘ung‘s 王充 massive Lun Heng 論衡 (it took him over 30 years to write) can be taken as sober critical weighing to balance 衡 away excesses of theories and interpretations that have occurred and clogged the history of China. 217 ―But we are considering ideas, not history,‖ you say. Well, history as events are made of human ideas responding to the challenges of the situation, and so ―all history is history of ideas,‖ as Collingwood said. Sadly, he took ―ideas‖ to be cognitive as Pythagorean Theorem, staying in Western intellection. ―Ideas‖ in history are instead lived, existential, and our relived and reenacted appreciation of past struggles. 218

History is ―千歲之知, 今古之論‖ Huai Nan Tzu, T‘ai Tzu, 淮南子, 泰族, (臺北三民書局, 民86, p. 1134), so ―言不合乎先王者, 不可以為道‖ (ibid., p. 1140). Although few people realize it, the Huai Nan Tzu is a rare Taoist volume that tries to synthesize Confucianism and Taoism, succeeded or not. The book derives points (gnomically expressed) from facts and historical precedents, and stresses the Always 常 involving the Weighing 權; the first half of the book shows how the Always involves the Weighing, the second how the Weighing involves the Always. This practice is typical of Chinese wisdom and the Huai Nan Tzu excels in it. Thus this volume often quotes it. 219 History was taken so seriously that many official historians sacrificed their lives to guard and ensure the accuracy of their records. This fact will be mentioned again soon.

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―No robbing, for begging is better; no begging, for working is best,‖ says our common sense. Why? It is because robbing robs the dignity of both robber and robbed. Begging respects the dignity of the begged one, thus mendicant monks exist. Still, a beggar would refuse even your gift of foods, life necessity, if you kick him (Mencius 6A10). Human dignity is not negotiable, which working on my own fulfills, manifesting the princely nobility of nonvexed calm (praised Confucius 1/1) when ignored by people. Such nobility can soar incredibly high. The Tso Chuan 左傳 has three brothers, all official historians, who defied executions to defend their record, ―Our lord assassinated his lord.‖220 Ssu-ma Ch‘ien bravely indicted the royal power that be, by devoting 14 years to his masterpiece of all time, the Record of History, 史記 to record such brave heroes.221 All these sociopolitical rejects have always been admired as the Norm, the Always Warp of paragons, throughout the ages. The Always we admire as what we should embody and live up to, yet it is not a summary of what goes on but often opposes what goes on. This strange situation sharpen our two questions. Question One: History has something contrary to ongoing situation, human nature defying its bio-physical instincts. What is this strange ―something‖? Question Two: If Chinese wisdom comes from concrete situation, and if this strange thing is countersituational, how does Chinese wisdom derive this strange thing? Question One can be answered straightly. It is a fact that in defying the existing situation contrary to life-ideal, brave persons managed to live up to their ideals, to deeply satisfy their heart of being, and this deep satisfaction reverberates through time. These concrete facts— braving the unsatisfactory situation, managing to live up to the ideal, life-satisfaction, and its spread—make the history of brave ideals well performed beyond existing situation, successful or not; these facts command our heartfelt admiration. What the ideal is may change as time shifts, but the passion for the ideal, braving lives to attain it, and deep satisfaction in doing so, do not change—they are the classical Always that make up humanity, beyond animality, as the Essential of the cosmos, the ―Spirit of myriad things 萬物之靈.‖ But then, how—and this is our Question Two—did sages and historians derive the noble Always, as above described, out of bewildering collections of ignoble facts, often horrendous, bloody? How did they derive the human values from the inhuman facts, morality from immoral history, or judgment on history from history itself? This is the question peculiar to Chinese wisdom intent on concrete facts, nothing but facts. Turning the question around, we see the question amounts to probing into how the Always is alive precisely in the inscrutable and unfavorable concrete. From this point one, we see how the Always always Weighs the unpredictable ongoing to turn nimble and alive in lifeworld. This is exciting, unheard of in Western philosophy where staid principles rule above concrete things and events. Huai Nan Tzu said222 that fish and birds have an uncanny ability to respond to natural disasters before they occur and hide in appropriate places; likewise, sages know whatever 220

左傳, 襄公二十五年 (左傳讀本, 臺北三民書局, 2002, p. 1097, Burton Watson, tr., The Tso chuan, NY:

Columbia University Press, 1989, pp. 143-148). See 司馬遷, 史記, 伯夷列傳第一 (3:587-593), 屈原賈生列傳第二十四 (4:326-348), 游俠列傳第六十四 (5:491-503), etc., in 史記, 中和市建宏出版社, 1995. See also 漢書, 賈誼傳. 222 淮南子, 泰族, in op. cit., p. 1080. 221

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disaster would strike before it happens by discerning auguries in nature. By the same token, sages and heroes see auguries of ideals, the dawn of the glorious future of the grand Harmony among Heaven Earth and Humanity, and beckon everyone to try their hardest to follow the lure of the invisible Ideal—at all cost! Sages are ―weathermen‖ not only of natural disasters but of moral, sociopolitical, and cosmic ones, and that not only as informants but as leaders and implementers of our reforms to fit and adjust the situation. What is crucial here is ―before,‖ before anything visibly occurs; so when sagely heroes shout and act out on their precognition and premonition, they often seem contrary to the status quo, opposing usual calculations of immediate profit, even sacrificing all cherished treasures, including sacrificing lives. Huai Nan Tzu describes such sagely actions as ―to embrace the heart of Heaven . . . to move and change all under Heaven,‖ due to ―heaven-human mutual penetration.‖ Thus as the sages keep firmly to their central conviction at the core of their being, divine transformation takes place everywhere.223 How does all this proceed? Two points can be made. First, following (yin 因) the water‘s flow, dams224 can be built to lead the waterflow; following the land‘s contour, military campaign is made successful. Likewise, following people‘s natural desires as they are (yin min chih yü, yin ch‘i jan, yin ch‘i hsing 因民之欲, 因共然, 因共性), what people must properly behave in Five Human Relations 五倫 are instituted, and what are proper to read are promulgated as the Classics. Huai Nan Tzu put it in detail.225 The sages govern all under heaven not by changing people‘s nature but by straighteningpromoting them by following along with what they have. Emperor Yü could let rivers flow naturally into the ocean by basing his works on water‘s flow. Hou-chi cultivated wilderness to grow crops by basing his works on the land‘s tendency. T‘ang won over oppressions of people by basing his campaigns on people‘s desires. With things‘ as-is, popular affairs can be managed. We must follow what they are as they are. People are naturally fond of sex, so we have great marital rites. They are by nature fond of foods, so there are friendly rites of feasts; fond of joys, hence sounds of bells, drums, strings; naturally tend to sorrow, hence rhythms of weeping, dancing. Thus former rulers governed people by basing on what people were fond of to set up regulations. Basing their fondness of sex to institute the marital rites, to have male-female distinction; basing their love of sounds to regulate musical voices, to stop custom going loose; basing their peaceful home and enjoying wife and children to teach them filial love, to have parent-child intimacy; etc., so as to institute orderly social relations. These are what people have by nature, what sages mold to complete society. . . . Basing on what they take as good to encourage going toward good, basing on what they hate to forbid evil, and the laws need not be used to punish to have social order as water flowing. [Similarly ancient rulers instituted law and order by basing 223

Ibid., p. 1084. But no one can dam up the flow and survive its over-flooding disaster. People loudly complained of Duke Li 厲王‘s tyranny; he then silenced them with threat of death. His adviser 邵公 remonstrated with the Duke, saying that stopping people‘s mouths is more ominous than damming the river; as damming river-flow invites lethal disaster, so stopping people‘s mouths lead to royal downfall. The advice was not heeded, and three years later, people exiled the Duke. The story was recorded as the third in the 國語, 邵公諫厲王弭謗 (臺北市三民書局, 2006, p. 7) ; it is the records of important Words of the States. 225 All these are from ibid., pp. 1091-2, 1095-6, 1099. How the Classics also similarly came about by basing themselves on nature is in p. 1101, which is not translated here; it would have been too lengthy. 224

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them on the ways nature changes and lands are ordered. All this is to follow what is fitting among myriad things.] The Classics and morality (義 i4) are thus what bases on (yin 因) Nature, what is right-in (宜 i2) Nature. This is why, when the heart of one sage is in harmony with Nature, people follow and they are transformed.226 To manage the self the best is to cultivate the spirit, then the body; to manage the state, the best is to cultivate heart-transformation, then ―right‖ the regulations. Spirit, clean, intention, peaceful, then all bone-joints would go smoothly, such is the root of cultivation of human nature. Fattening meat, filling stomach, supplying for desires, such are branches of cultivation of living. People mutually yield, compete to occupy lowly positions, entrust benefits to other, compete to receive less, strive to serve, compete to labor, daily transform toward doing good and do not know why so, such describe the root of managing the state. Reward with benefits to encourage good deeds, fear punishment and not do evil, all laws are just above and people obey below, such describe the branches of managing the state. The ancient cultivate the root and the recent serve the branches, this is why world concord has not emerged. . . . Unify the hearts to come home to the same root, turn backs on greed and the despicable to head toward the humane and right, then to transform people is as wind shaking grass and trees, there would be nothing that is not waved by it. Thus the Always comes about by following nature, to be the Always, the Norm, of human living beyond mere routines. To base acts on (yin 因) nature results in fitting in (shih 適) nature, thereby to be ―right-in (宜 i2)‖ the situation, and comes to be doing the ―right (義 i4).‖ Chinese wisdom derives morality from facts of human nature in physical Nature, by learning from history. Secondly, we must note that Nature is not one-seasoned; its four seasons are diversified (異 i-differentiated), diversely changed (化 hua) in Five Ways (五行 wu hsing), the ways of fire, water, wood, metal, and soil, and they often come unexpectedly. We cannot but do our very best to respond to such changes, sudden, often unexpected. Extraordinary times demand extraordinary measures, diverse and many (多端 tuo tuan), some stooping low, some bending awry, some others seemingly crooked, all purported to come out eventually high and straight in the highway of the great Tao. ―All is well that ends well‖ is also a familiar dictum in China. Ingenious measures ever changing describe the Weighing of the sages who see and do ahead of the times. Sages follow and fit in before eventuality occurs, and respond to call forth Harmony between the Always and the Weighing—before things happen. Animals are aware of nature‘s disaster before it comes and seek their hiding places. The sages anticipate happy situation after disaster; it is the Great Harmony of Heaven with Humans. They take this situation as moral necessity described by the Classics. And then they adjust the situation-now to follow through in line with the envisioned happiness to come. They adapt the present to that Ideal, and call us to work to fulfil that Happy Ideal, never worrying about the inevitable destruction of their careers and their own lives, now. We latecomers, admiringly call their radical adjustment of the present situation, even disregarding their safety, to the future ideal, ―氣節 ch‘i chieh,‖ personal backbone breathing 226

These are quotations from ibid., pp. 1110, 1112, 1118.

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integrity. We reverently enshrine their biographies in our historical records as ―the historic heroes and heroines‖ worthy of emulation all through the ages. As of now, we humanity have not succeeded in Harmony, small or great. History is the record of such human efforts; Chinese wisdom is its explanation that is part of history, split in two. Confucianism says people have consistently failed, and must continue striving to attain this Harmony, despite all disasters of hegemony of selfishness. Taoism says it is we who have messed it all up, and are still messing it up by resisting the natural way. Trying to attain the already existing Harmony of Nature is a counterproductive resistance worsening confusion and disharmony. Busybody does good to needlessly add to pain of disharmony. Our ―effort‖ if any should be in daily decrease, in no-do 無為. Thus the debate goes on, and this going-on and this mess is ―history.‖ Chinese wisdom wants us to carefully listen to this story of messy incessant debates and decide on our own. Perhaps Confucianism and Taoism are both correct, and our problem, a big historic one, is on how to harmonize them. Why is harmony so hard to attain? It is hard because the grand Harmony of all with all is alive as the child without dull moment, whose complaint ―Nothing to do!‖ is deadly. We must watch for two points expressed in Mencius‘ terse saying (2B1),227 ―Heavenly timing, earthly positioning, inter-human harmonizing, and the last is pivotal.‖ The first point here is that harmony begins and ends with the human, for the human is how and where harmony begins to take place. The second point is that timing is heavenly, that is, primary, that decides how we position ourselves in earthly situation. The third point is, we must learn from ―time‖-process—history—on how to behave in all this timing and positioning to result in harmony. How do we do so? For inter-human harmonizing we must self-adjust to the Always Weighing to fit into contingencies. The Always in the Grand Harmony; the Weighing manages unforeseen contingencies toward the Harmony, which is not achieved as a conscious target, but comes unawares while we constantly time and position ourselves. In all, we have considered how we adjust to follow (因 yin) and fit (適 shih) into Nature in three ways—to follow the Always (常 ch‘ang), our Weighed (權 ch‘üan) changes to contingencies, and the future grand Harmony among brave persons (烈士, 烈女lieh shih, lieh nü). Such lining up with (宜 i2) nature makes for the grand Harmony, and Humanity, and the Harmony is right (義 i4). The grand ―Harmony 和‖ is alive, visibly acted on by humanity, invisibly supported by Heaven and Earth; it is never a noun but a verb ―sinuous,‖ in three ways. One, the Weighing 權 fits changing situations to make us fit, now bending, now going around ―right‖ paths, to enter the great Always 常 Harmony. Two, Tao of Harmony is the Warp (經), Thread-measure (繩)228 flexing to wrap all things with humanity. It is Lao Tzu‘s Net of Heaven leaking nothing, Confucius‘ One threading Tao.

227

―天時不如地利, 地利不如人和 Heavenly timing is less than earthly advantage, earthly advantage is less than human harmony,‖ is what Mencius actually said in 2B1. 228 The Norm of Heaven and Earth as the flexuous all-enwrapping Thread-Measure (準繩) is quite important, mentioned by Huai Nan Tzu, ibid., pp. 641, 666, 821, 841, etc., and Kuan Tzu 管子, 宙合 (臺北三民書局, 民84, p. 194). This critical notion will return at the end to conclude this section.

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It is the Great One (太一) coming out as one yet specifically, differently, as Ch‘eng I 程頤 (伊川) said, ―one jade-Grain of things, diversifying separately (li i fen shu 理一分殊),‖229 itself invisible, seen in human activities based on (yin 因) and conforming to (hsün 循) heavenly timing, earthly propensity, and human harmony 天時, 地利, 人和. Three, the above two features of Harmony begin at us the human living. Concretely, every sociopolitical management begins at self-cultivation. A typical Huai Nan Tzu passage, among many others (some already quoted above), says,230

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[Prophet] Chan He 詹何 said, ―I have not heard of anyone who is self-governed and his state in confusion, nor have I heard of anyone who is confused himself and his state governed.‖ The square not right cannot square things; the compass not right cannot round things. One‘s self is the square-compass of affairs. I have not heard of anyone, oneself bent, who can right others.

Originating in what Heaven decrees, one governs one‘s heartfelt maneuvers, manages likes and dislikes, adjusts feelings and tendencies, and then the Tao of governing goes through. [Managing these matters of oneself,] then one‘s acting and being calm follow the grain-of-things . . . All these seek not outside, seek no help in others; one turns to oneself and obtain them. Every apt management of matters, big and small, originates in the right self-management in self-cultivation. Confucians and Taoists insist on self-cultivation as staying in the right position, at the right timing,231 responding and conforming to the Great One (t‘ai i 太一), while following and adapting to the situation. Confucians insist on moral training and striving. Taoists tacitly persuade us to follow our own naturalness and the tendency of the situation, acting always based on the ―thus‖ of things, acting on the ―self so 自然‖ of matters, ourselves included, always positioned at the right place in the right timing. Finally, to wrap up all these three activities—human Weighing-changing, cosmic Thread flexing all over to enwrap myriad things, and ourselves initiating and effecting both—are themselves the activities, invisible and visible, of the grand Harmony of all in all, among Heaven, Earth, and Humanity. In all this, the Always is always our point of reference, for the Always seems to mean the unchanging while our actual world is always in flux, but in Chinese wisdom such is not the case. In the inter-involvement of the Always and our Weighed changes, the actual flux is king. How does the Always fare in this flux-situation, then? The Always for Lao Tzu (73) is the Heaven‘s Net 天網, coarse-meshed to contain all surprises cropping up daily, yet leaking nothing in its comprehensive netting—and the net is made of weaving of Warp-Threads, but the One is a soft ―thread‖ (sheng 繩) twisting to bind all situations, a Warp 經 flexing to bundle them all up, one by one, as they arise day by day.

229

230

Huai Nan Tzu, op. cit., p. 718, Analects 4/15, 15/3, Tao Te Ching 73. 程頤 in ―答楊時論西銘書‖ says, ―明理一而分殊.‖ ―問理與氣, 曰, 伊川說得好, 曰, 理一分殊.‖ (性理大全, 理氣, 總論)

Huai Nan Tzu, op. cit., p. 723. 231 Stories are told on right timing in 呂氏春秋, 首時 (691-700), 遇合 (731-740), 三民書局, 民84. Etc. Chinese Wisdom Alive : Vignettes of Life-Thinking, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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The thread itself results from our actively following nature the Always, threading out of silkworms we cultivate with mulberry leaves we cultivate, all according to seasonal changes. Our Norm is such a concrete Thread quite flexuous with the situations in flux. Huai Nan Tzu shrewdly said of this Thread-as-Standard (chun-sheng 準繩),232 The thread can function as the measure of things because, having been curled up to put away stored, it can again pull out, straighten to gaze at to measure things. Thus the sage embodies it to live by it, becoming as long and not crooked, as short and not short-witted, as straight and not stiff, using it for long and not forgetting it. Enabling us to live thus is alone the virtue of thread-as-standard. A flexible line as the standard rule is in contrast to Western ―canon,‖ a stiff ―staff, rod,‖ to straighten the recalcitrant situation. ―How does a flexuous thread correct the situation?‖ The line233 flexes to fit the situation that is natural to begin with. All the line does is to protect it from cancerous weed-deviations, to allow it to grow as it would; the rule-thread performs medical horticulture to the situation. And then Huai Nan Tzu rehearsed a fascinating litany of how the sage is himself flexible and situational as the thread that measures things. Such is the Always-Warp, flexuous as the Thread, and as normative within the situation in constant flux, always surprising us, often unpleasantly.234 This extrapolation is not at all arbitrary if we note how bodily, measuring is in China. The short ―Chinese foot 尺‖ pictures a palm stretched from where pulses are felt to finger-tips, about ―ten finger-inches 十寸,‖ 22.5 cm; so 尺 is medically significant,235 as 尺脈. The palmruler 尺 goes contract-and-stretch, contract-and-stretch, ^, ^, ^, one inchworm-move at a time.236 Does the palm measure as the heart pulses? We would not be surprised. The ruler pulsing bodily is perhaps unheard of in the West. Could the Always, however, be so flexing with the situation as to risk changing itself? Considering this question and answering it would lead us into the Secret of being in the grand Harmony. This is because any consideration of the Always or the Weighing-changes 權變 inevitably leads us into their interrelation, which is the grand Harmony. Does the sky change? Does the ocean change? They do at each dawn and dusk, and during and after every storm. They show themselves differently at each moment. But do they really change? No, they do not, for the sky remains high, as the ocean remains as it is, neither 232

Huai Nan Tzu, 淮南子, 氾論, op. cit., p. 666. Liddell and Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996, p. 875. The cultural significance of this contrast is enormous. 233 My classicist friend, Dr. David Schenker, emailed me (8/13/08) on the kanon. ―The earliest uses seem to be as a straight rod or bar, and from that come the various senses of measuring, or use as a straight edge. But as early as Euripides, the word is used for the carpenter‘s string that is stretched out to make a line in red, or laid out as a boundary. And Aristotle seems to emphasize the flexibility of that sort of kanon in two places, but I haven‘t checked them carefully. But I can!‖ The ―line‖ meaning rule or standard exists in the West, but few think of how it relates to the stiff ―canon,‖ much less how stiff rod kanon is related to flexuous string or line. China‘s standard is a string, 準繩. 234 Thus, we are advised to ―可淺可深, 可浮可沈, 可曲可直, 可言可默. 天不一時, 地不一利, 人不一事‖ by 管子, 宙合 (台北三民書局, 民84, p. 195). 235 In fact, the Chinese inch 寸 as verb can also mean taking the pulse. See the next note. 236

This is a comprehensive summary of 說文解字詁林正補合編, 臺北市鼎文書局, 民72, 7:641-644, 3:11531155, 藤堂明保著, 漢字語源辭关, 東京都學燈社, 1965, pp, 333, 335, 349, 690, 692, and 諸橋轍次著, 大漢和辭关, 東京都大眾館出版社, 昭和三十五年, 4:1, 4:126-127.

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flowing nor staying. Rivers do always flow, and flow into the ocean, yet they also stay as they are. They are all the same and different, silently. How do we understand this strange unity of change and no-change? A sick person noisily thrashes about; he wastes energies trying to dodge the pain that keeps coming up, all to no avail. He is a noisy machine ready to break down, idling on nothing, and people shy away. Likewise, a man full of pep, ever ready to strike back at once at a slightest provocation, is jittery and inefficient, quite sick. In contrast, the healthy person is calm, centered, and self-possessed, and so she can afford quietly to discern the situation and freely respond in kind, not immediately but at the right time. So is Chuang Tzu‘s divine ―cock,‖ (19/47-49) quite slow to respond to challenges from all quarters, and all fighting cocks, daunted, run away. So is a tuned-up machine whirling quietly to function efficiently; the machine is there, calm, stable and quite powerful. Here is change in no-change, ―health‖ in every sense. It is thus that, paradoxical as it may sound, to calm down centered is to be powerful and active, to slow down is to go fast, and to stay put allows free appropriate strikes—in a word, not to change enables change. That is the Secret of the Always calm as the central Pivot of bewildering Weighing transformations of myriad things. Those who position themselves in the skies, in the ocean, and in the rivers—and in the winter—will be as constant, as changing, and as alive as nature, the way things go. This ―as‖ repeated here is the grand Harmony of Heaven and Earth. The cycles of four seasons are the sky and the ocean in time. These cycles are always embodied, called in China ―春秋 ch‘un ch‘iu, spring and autumn,‖ the Always that is humanly alive. We call nature‘s SpringandAutumn ―history,‖237 as alive, as Always. For Collingwood, history is a ―re-enactment of past ideas,‖ but he did not say that it is reenactment of lived ideas, that is, conscious living relived; much less did he realize that this sort of living-lived reenactment, ―history,‖ is the river-in-time that is ourselves changing in not-changing. History is the human Always mirroring the spring-and-autumn of human-incosmic seasons. Happy and blessed—pleasant or no—are those who are ―in season,‖ changing without changing. Actually, the health of the centered calm, poised to resonate and respond, is the Always that is already the grand Harmony, pervading the skies and the ocean into which rivers quietly flows—where change joins no-change. Even the storm serenades a prelude to the calm-after on its way, particularly clean and sweet; gone will be all clutters and debris, noises of joys and sorrows. All ―pastorale‖ music, operas, sonatas, and symphonies, contain storms that welcome the calm thereafter. Uncle Fort always asks, ―How do we know this does not make its opposite?‖ ―In the winter, is the spring far?,‖ sing poets in China and the West. Be an Uncle Monkey always ready to go both ―morning, three‖ and ―morning, four.‖ Grand Harmony allows ―walking both ways,‖ ways of moving and calm, advance and retreat, staying in moving, moving in staying. It is the grand Harmony of the Always Weighing human and cosmic, unawares or no. Does all this sound spooky, distant, and exotic? Well, just stand at any street corner, or sit in any restaurant chair, or go into any store, or even just stay in your own room. Are these places-you-are-in-now the same as they were yesterday? Yes. Are they somewhat different from yesterday, though? Yes, again. So, you see, our actual daily world is always changing 237

E.g., 春秋左傳, 春秋公羊傳, 春秋穀梁傳, 晏子春秋, 呂氏春秋, 春秋繁露, and the list goes on.

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without changing, and so any place any time is a slice of the Always such as this, Weighing changing with Always no-change. That is the grand Harmony of the cosmic triune Unity with Humanity as its spearhead, and with the Always as its Pivot. Now, beware. Harmony and unity indicate wholeness inside and out, and wholeness spells happiness, joy. Chinese wisdom is, then, composed of joy, not just attended with joy.

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Chapter 5

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CHINESE WISDOM AS JOY Socrates preached and practiced self-examination. To examine oneself is to criticize oneself, to find faults with oneself; here is no room for joy. Absent in his pursuit is joy, then, and his sunny personal outlook overflowing to others, if any, is something unrelated to his philosophy; joy is not a part of his philosophy. Plato and Aristotle‘s analyses of happiness, and Mill and Bentham‘s calculations of pleasures, are not themselves happiness or pleasures. Analysis of joy is separate from joy, irrelevant to joy-integral-to-thinking. Thinking in the West is separate from ―emotive state‖ such as joy, and is proud of separation from joy in their thinking. Joy is irrelevant to thinking in the West, if not absent in Western philosophy, absent even in thinking intent on praxis of living, such as morbid existentialism, sober scientific pragmatism, and various philosophies of Utopia that include even unpleasant ―dystopia,‖ quite contrary to utopian joy. In contrast, Confucian ―self-review 自省‖ is not criticism but tuning-up to tune-in, to inner-harmonize and inter-harmonize, to reach wholeness all around,238 health, happiness of being whole, even in miseries. Happiness is part and parcel of Chinese wisdom; pull out joy, and Chinese wisdom collapses in senseless pieces. Joy is unique ―cash value‖ of Chinese wisdom harvested from its totality-thinking of human beings and of myriad beings of Heaven and Earth, and Heaven and Earth themselves.239 Joy here means enjoying living, living it up, enjoying simple things that surround us so completely, unnoticeable. Chinese wisdom nudges us to see how spectacular these simple things are, in all their silence. These simple things are free, so they are enjoyed—they have to be, for the poor to survive unbearable miseries—by the rock-bottom poor and dejected, social outcasts, marginalized retirees (陰居). 238

Music is attuned harmony on the go, and so it manifests itself often and prominently in all Classics in China. On lived musicality in China, see ―歌與詩‖ (聞一多全集, 湖北人民出版社, 2004, 10:5-15), ―詩的語言,‖ ―詩言志辨‖ (朱自清古关文學專集(上), 臺北宏業書局, 民72, pp. 79-88, 183-355), 徐復觀, 中國藝術精神, 臺灣學生書局, 1966, pp. 1-44, 57-60, Wu, History, Thinking, and Literatrue in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991, pp. 125-173, and the list goes on. Sadly, the traditional Chinese music is much less popular today than popular music, but music is music, and Chinese love of music is all over and contagious all over. 239 This is not to deny that joy may have been important, even central, in the West among its ancients, its Stoics. Still, Chinese wisdom has joy as its constitutive center through millennia, not objective as the West.

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Confucius, a social outcast, was keen on learning, enjoying it as his Analects begins bursting with joyous shouts on learning, welcoming the ancient sages and classmates from afar to inter-learn, and as he confessed to finding one out of every three persons walking together, in simple joy of talking and learning about classical poetry with his disciple in delightful outburst, ―told what is gone, you know what is coming!‖ He was so moved at seeing a common river flowing, exclaiming, ―Water! O, Water!‖ He watched with deep feeling how wise people enjoy water, kind people enjoy mountain. He admired his disciple for enjoying himself sleeping pillowing on arm, living on scanty food.240 The joy is expressed in musical rhythm of all his statements. You pull such music joy out of Confucius, and all his ―teaching‖ vanishes into thin air. Later, a poet at the rock-bottom of lonesome poverty, 李白 Li Po, danced with joy drinking alone under moonlight. He was so overjoyed that he entrusted the situation in a poem, claiming that three parties were enjoying drinks, dancing together—the moon, his shadow, and himself. Being alone is already a threesome camaraderie of joy! As Chuang Tzu (17/87-91) felt and exclaimed at the leisurely joys of small minnows swimming around, logician Hui Tzu challenged him on how he, being not a fish, knew the fish‘s joy. He responded, ―I know it, here!‖ Perhaps, among other implications,241 he warned him, ―Leave us alone! Never touch our contagious joys all over with anything else, such as logic—and you come, too.‖ Now, relish these lines by T‘ao Ch‘ien 陶潛, another of our favorite poet-thinker:

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―Thatched a hut among people, not hear horses and buggies clanging.‖ ―Pray, sir, how could it be?‖ ―Heart distanced, my place is out elsewhere. Plucking ‗mums under east hedges, overlooking south mounts long, Mount air, dusk glow, sweet, Flying birds, in pairs circling, Herein is a touch of truth, desiring to explain, already forget words.‖

Words are lost indeed in such unspeakable calm and joy, all so casual, so free, so costless, and so priceless. Such joy reminds us of a Mr. Five Willows who, reading without getting details, and at every meeting of the minds there, is so happy as to forget meals.242 This is the joy of meeting the great ancient, now dead yet forever alive, never despising us but always welcoming us with outstretched arms, anytime, anywhere. Such joy supports us in all circumstances, for those historic people have gone through all these circumstances, and their experiences give us comfort, strengths, and strategies. Many literary gems of reports on despondency and failure are waiting for us to go in, e.g., the great

240

Analects 1/1, 15 (3/8), 7/22, 9/17 (Mencius 4B18), 6/13, 6/11. Cf. among others, Wu, On Metaphoring, op. cit., pp. 79-81. 242 These are typical Taoist stories and poems. Li Po‘s 李白, ―月下獨酌‖ is in 唐詩三百首 (民62), pp. 11-12; T‘ao Ch‘ien‘s 陶潛, ―飲酒共五,‖ translated by Wu, is in 陶淵明集 (2004), pp. 157-158 (both published by 臺北市三民書局). They appear as ―Drinking Alone in the Moonlight‖ (p. 203) and ―Poems after Drinking Wine‖ (pp. 180-181) in The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature, ed. Victor Mair, 1994. Chuang Tzu enjoying fish‘s joy is in 17/87-91. T‘ao Ch‘ien‘s ―Biography of Mr. Five Willows‖ 陶潛, ―五柳先生傳‖ is in陶淵明集, op. cit., pp. 361-365 and 古文觀止, 高雄藝文文化公司, 1995, pp. 548-551. Cf. Arthur Waley, Translations from the Chinese (1919), NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941, pp. 83, 118. While complaining about these translations, we appreciate their appreciations. 241

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Chinese Wisdom as Joy

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楚辭 Ch’u Tz’u, the ―19 Ku Shih 古詩‖ in the Wen Hsüan 文選, and historical Tso Chuan, Shih Chi, the various dynastic histories, to replenish, heartfelt. No wonder, all Chinese thinkers are eager students of historical and literary writings. These writings are where we compare notes with ancient people. There is joy in affirming with them this as this, that as that, Ok as OK, and not-OK as not-OK. They and ourselves together affirm all thus-and-such to ―thing things 物物‖ and forget ourselves in them. No wonder, ―letting the fragile fleeting ‗words stand‘ through time‖ (立言 li yen) is the last—and the surest—of the Three Incorruptibles (三不朽, virtue, exploits, and words) in China, for words alone can let the other two stand incorruptible through time. For example, Chuang Tzu said (22/39), ―Our life passes fast as a white horse galloping through the doorcrack,‖ said Chuang Tzu (22/39) millennia ago, and ironically this statement has lasted till today after 2,400 years, and will last long beyond today. All lives are ―curable,‖ the ultimate medicine says. All these lives can even be resuscitated, as Jesus used to do for us. Stem-cell research and the principle of energy conservation augur well for extropy. Monkey Sun Wu-k‘ung 孫悟空 in the hilarious fiction Journey to the West 西遊記 who throws out his hair to turn into many Sun-monkeys is no joke any more, for his hair is his stem cells. China‘s past imagination is our future today. These fragile things Incorruptible replace the West‘s immortality separate from this world, such as timeless logic-rational necessity. The Incorruptible in China is in contrast entirely this-worldly, admired, relived, and reenacted, again and again, on a daily basis, since time immemorial, for several millennia until today, and is still being admired and relived everyday—now. All this is China‘s wisdom incorruptible historically. In China ―history‖ and ―literature‖ perpetually transmit priceless human-cosmic experiences. Writing fulfills a threefold unity—characters with their performance (calligraphy), fullness of expression (not vulgar, not lean), and heart-penetration with cosmospermeation—three in one. Writing is full living through history-time and cosmos-space.243 Our sincere distinguished Friends do keep coming from afar in time and in space, and they are most welcome for our mutual enrichment, and mutual enrichment to come, again and again, no matter where, how, or when, to compose history, so as for the posterity to read and learn and live it up again! Such cosmic happiness and historic joy is indeed the essence of Chinese wisdom. The wind keeps blowing for us and then the wind keeps blowing against us, and we are ready to accept both sorts of winds. This is Joy Incorruptible, unshaken by surprises. This joy is no eternal giggling or eternally in tears, but embraces both smiles and tears. It is this embrace that is ―joy.‖ After all, joy and sorrow are outside-impacts joined by inside-reaction, an outside-inside harmony. Let us say it is A, joy (Yes) and sorrow (No). When we consciously affirm A (Yes, No) as A (Yes, No), we are in place, wherever it is; we are tuned in. To be tuned in this way is to be enabled to respond, readied to harmonize with the situation, to embrace A. 243

We just cite Sun Kuo-t‘ing‘s (in T‘ang era) Musical Score of the Writing 唐孫過庭, 書譜, which was originally written out in his own exquisite grassy-styled calligraphy. We have no need to cite Liu Hsieh‘s (c. 465-c. 521) famous Literary Heart Carving Dragon 劉勰, 文心雕龍. For detailed exposition of the former, with its beautiful reprint of calligraphy, see 孫過庭/書譜, 香港商翰墨軒有限公司, 1997. For the latter, see 新譯文心雕龍, 臺北三民書局, 民83.

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Joy is then not a set feeling but a dynamic movement of readiness to contain the uncertainties of constantly shifting situation. China applies the rule of identity to living it up. The rule of identity ―A is A‖ is concretely to take A as A, con-firming A with A, and thus affirming A, with A.244 This is the law of identity lived in China. What does calling a violation of logic-rationality ―invalid‖ mean? Does it mean ―we can then not understand you‖? What does ―understanding‖ mean? Is it ―expectation‖? Isn‘t expectation based on a thing, A, being itself, A? If so, validity stems from ―A is A,‖ then; all logic, all understanding, rests finally on this law of identity of a thing as itself. But ―A is A‖ depends on its being ―not not-A.‖ So, logic depends on dialogic, dialogue that inter-shakes and inter-shapes ―A is A‖ of every A; but if so, ―A is A‖ is no longer a set logic but a dynamics of uncertain future leading present. Logic-rationality stems from the logic of existential identity, and existence is inter-existential change. This is no relativism that is an ism, but actual situation in constant change. It is stability in instability, ―cosmos in chaos‖ in ―chaos in cosmos‖ 亂中有序, 序中有亂. It is existents trafficking where traffic laws are needed to be broken in inter-negotiations among interweaving vehicles of existence. Logic is dialogic in inter-negotiation of existential vehicles. Let us now put on flesh and blood to all this. When A is the self, the self affirmed as self becomes self-so 自然, self-thus, and then can afford to self-forget自忘; it is to cultivate the self. Every night we naturally go to sleep, to go home to ourselves, so much so that we forget ourselves in sleep—to nourish ourselves. Deprivation of self-forgetful sleep spells self-depravation; uneasy sleep and sleeplessness cipher ill-health to forebode death. ―A is A‖ of the self is the health of self-integrity unawares. When ―A‖ is a thing, to affirm A as A establishes a thing as such 然於然, solidifies a solid object 固然. We can then OK what is OK, not-OK what is not OK 可乎可, 不可乎不可. In the next breath, Chuang Tzu says this is the way to walk it and form the Tao. This is how we can be at home in the undesirable storms of life.245 Now, how A-as-self relates to A-as-thing is quite interesting. Confucianism takes advantage of A-as-self being different from A-as-things, so as to manage the world step by step from self-cultivation to family harmony, through state-government, to reach world concord. The progress was poetically schematized in the Great Learning 大學. Later Confucian scholars made much of this schema to propose world-management. Taoism on its part takes A-as-self to blend into A-as-things. To affirm the self as the self enables the self to go out of oneself, as it were, thereby to become a new self, to turn outside the self, self-transformed 自化 into things to transform with things 物化. Have I dreamed to be a butterfly, or am I a butterfly currently dreaming to be myself? Either take of the situation makes sense; the self thus ―walks double 兩行‖ with things not-self. This thought helps on deathbed where one looks forward to further change.246

244

荀子‘s 正名篇 is good on this point (Burton Watson, tr., Hsün Tau: Basic Writings, NY: Columbia University Press, 1963, pp. 139-156). See Wu, Body Thinking, op. cit., pp. 35-37. 245 Chuang Tzu 2/33, 2/34, 3/7. Soon later he talked about how to不可乎不可 under dictatorial disasters by being at home in them so inevitable 一宅而寓於不得已, 安之若命 (4/30, 43). 246 Among many such passages, typical ones are Chuang Tzu‘s butterfly dream (2/94-96) and heartfelt friends heartily celebrating, on deathbed, further life-transformations (6/49-58).

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Such is how the Always of the Tao, even in the formal ―A is A,‖ concretely helps us to ride on the crest of wave of things, weal or woe. This wave is so pervasive and powerful that ―small people‖ often take advantage of it for their petty benefit. History has no lack of records on how during the cut-throat Warring Period, hegemonic rulers exploited Five Human Relations to their brutal advantages. This fact shows two points. This fact shows, first, how generally pervasive the Always is, so much so that shady people can rely on it to perpetrate evil, one of which is ―all under heaven under one family 家天下,‖ the Always localized to royal selfishness. The Always remains pervasive, however. So, secondly, ―the Always localized‖ is a contradiction, impossible to maintain. Thus evil cannot be universalized and cannot last long, however much evil people desire so and strive after it. The modern term for ―all under heaven under one family‖ is ―politico-economic globalization,‖ another contradiction, being a term for specific group(s) becoming universalized, an ambitious hegemony of socioeconomic dictatorship. We must instead work for universalizing the universal, storing all under heaven under heaven. In other words, we must work to make all under heaven public 天下為公, as ―all under heaven‖ should be, for ―all‖ and ―public‖ mean alike, and anything contrary to such equation, ―all‖ is ―public,‖ destroys itself. Japanese slogan, ―Co-Thriving Sphere 兯榮圈,‖ sealed its own demise during World War II because of its implicit contradiction that Japan must be the Big Brother of this Sphere. Let universal be universal, and the joy shall flood all over on everyone. Let us repeat. All this is the ultimate Joy of no conventional joy, the Joy even in sorrows by embracing them as sorrows, and the embrace is the grand Harmony. Such joy of grand Harmony, beyond all joys and sorrows, is what Chinese wisdom proposes. This Joy is Chinese wisdom; pull off this Joy, and there vanishes human life as human, together with Chinese wisdom.

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Chapter 6

CHINESE WISDOM IN SAD PREDICAMENT

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247

Now, we must be realistic. ―Politics in China as beauty universal‖ understandably shocks a typical Westerner, who would say, ―Politics is dirty and confrontational, exemplified even in ugly Chinese history, with power manipulation and strategies.‖ Politics as bloody antagonism is a worldwide fact. The West honestly facts it, starts its theory and practice on it. China takes politics differently, and falls into a sad predicament. Well, Chinese wisdom star-gazes; it takes politics as family-management, ruler-subject patterned after father-son,248 and has brandished this ideal throughout history. Such hypocrisy! But an ideal and dream dies hard; it has been a consistent nostalgia among the loyal subjects and effective arm of dictators. ―How could hypocrisy die hard?‖ The dream in China is hypocritical in two ways. One, every tyrant used the dream effectively, saying, ―Obey me as you do parents, for I love you as your parents!‖ Two, every loyal subject passionately embraced it though it proved ineffective. Thus, the dream dies hard. Tyranny could work only under cover of such dream; Legalists urged the tyrant to use it, to rally loyal subjects who constantly urged the tyrant to do what he advertised. All this shows how ingrained dream is in us. ―We all sincerely dream and yearn after such political Wonderland, don‘t we?‖ says China. A dream dies hard, and some such was even resurrected in the founding fathers of USA and M. L. King. The fact remains that this ideal-dream has been exploited as dictators‘ tool in China, and as slogan to rally people to overthrow dictators. In both these ways, the poetic beauty of harmony has effectively incited bloody tragedies. Poetry has turned dirges. So, sadly, we must balance all high description of Chinese wisdom so far with its inability to handle the stark fact soberly otherwise. Dream ennobles suffering injustice (by people), and incites (by dictators) unjust pain. We also cut public corners for private convenience, seldom walking our private second mile for public benefit. We watch for the other guys on highway, seldom thinking ―the other guys‖ are our brothers in those vehicles, more like unconscionable ruffian dictators than conscientious brethren subjects. Ruffians and dictators perish, for no perpetrators of ―evil‖ lasts for ever. Still, they keep emerging unceasing. Besides, not all who suffer pain adopt the way described above; in fact, 247 248

This section is brief, devoted just to describing the problem and the predicament, yet unable to resolve it. Analects 12/11.

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those did adopt the high way of ultimate Joy are so rare that we admire them as historic paragons. Our inevitable question is why. Why do we not practice what we dream is better? Why are we powerless to live full and well for the happiness we want? To err is human, to be powerless in errors is also human, and no one knows which is more tragically mysterious, to err or to be powerless and ignorant of why so. Nor can we afford to just brush aside our puzzlement. Saint Paul‘s mortal agonies in Romans 7 are a rock-bottom desperation, and his Roman 8 is a jump no less desperate. To know better and do/suffer worse is a mysterious weakness at our root.249 Many thinkers try to resolve it by either denying its existence (for Socrates evil is ignorance, and to know what is good is to do it), or by dividing ―knowledge‖ into two sorts, informed 見聞之知 and ingrained 心性之知. Denial does not wipe out the fact, and dividing drives us into difficulties. Let us look into the latter. ―Information does rub away at the desperate moment of truth, when we slip down to immediate short-term ‗convenience,‘ but ingrained knowledge is heartfelt conviction, our character we act out on, and the so-called knowledge of knowing better and acting worse is the latter sort of information-knowledge,‖ claims this proposal to divide knowledge. Unfortunately, this way-out is a cul-de-sac on four counts. [1] To begin, knowledge-splitting sounds like splitting hair to avoid a grave issue of akratic weakness. [2] Worse, dividing leads to amoral fatalism, for we must be born kind to know better and do better, and then our good deeds would not be moral (as Aristotle said). Or else dividing leads to an almost impossible, if not amoral, character drilling that drills into us the know-act connection.250 [3] Worst of all, after being pointed at the ingrained nature in 齊宣王 Ruler Hsüan of Ch‘i who was told by Mencius to have in him the ―heart of not bearing people‖ in pain and was urged to ―easily‖ act likewise, we never heard of the Ruler becoming any more compassionate toward his people. This fact seems to decisively count against the view that the heartfelt ingrained knowledge of the better would lead to doing better. The advocate of two sorts of knowledge may say, ―Heartfelt sensitivity to others may not be quite our personality character, much less physiological reflex; character and reflex lead automatically to action but sensitivity to others does not always.‖ But then, what is this heartfelt sensitivity to others that Mencius was so keen to remind the Ruler of? Mencius was keen to remind the Ruler because he must have thought that it would induce the Ruler to behave compassionately. Socrates who advocated that knowledge is virtue may have subscribed to two-knowledge view after all, for we see that his inducement (in Meno) of realization of geometric truth (from an uneducated slave boy) parallels Mencius‘ of realizing the innate heart of unbearable sensitivity (from a boorish tyrant). But geometry was taken as morality (is it, though?) and neither the boy nor the tyrant seemed to thereby turn virtuous. 249

Our powerlessness is called ―Akrasia.‖ See The New Oxford American Dictionary, 2005, p. 35 and Wu, ―Realism (Fajia 法家), Human Akrasia, and the Milieu for Ultimate Virtue‖ (Winter 2002, pp. 21-44), ―Violence as Weakness: In China and Beyond‖ (Winter 2003, pp. 7-28), both in Dao: A Journal of omparative Philosophy. 250 The traditional debates in China over ―easy-know, hard-act 知易行難,‖ or ―hard-know, easy-act 知難行易,‖ seem irrelevant and does not cut deep enough, for both sides assume that once we know, our act will follow, and that is precisely what the human fact denies.

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Chinese Wisdom in Sad Predicament

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[4] Finally, here is a neat move: ―Ruler Hsüan so loved discussing new views as to set up Chi-hsia club 稷下學士 with a host of salaried debaters.251 His toying with new ideas shows his informative mindset. He needs to convert (c-1) to the personal-ingrained mindset, to be readied to be converted (c-2) by Mencius into compassionate behavior.‖ This sadly fails, too, for Mencius meant precisely to convert (c-1) him; his lack of c-2 shows c-1 failed. Ingrained knowledge unreachable, we are trapped in information-mindset. Twist and turn as we may, we must admit that Mencius‘ unstoppable persuasion was topped by toying with ideas never serious, as St. Paul was defeated by casual Athenians. This is the crime of cognitive c-1.252 Thus, twist and turn as we may, we now know that neither denying our weakness to exist, nor dividing knowledge into two, seems to jump over the ugly ditch of our knowing better on one side and doing worse on the other, the ditch still exists between preaching and practicing, touting and doing. Chinese thinking, being a reflection of human nature and condition, falls into this weakness-ditch, unable to handle it. Touting thinking in China as concrete and practical worsens the situation. History honestly shows that, with us humanity, Chinese wisdom is in a saddest predicament, and there seems to be no way out. ―Do we really have no way out of our akratic predicament, though?‖ Well, let me see. I just wonder if our akratic ―not‖ cannot be taken as part of our growing ―not yet‖ of life‘s dream: if ―not‖ is a ―not yet,‖ we are in business. The Christians always repenting may be laughed at, and they could reply that they repent on a new plateau not yet reached. Their repentance shows their growth. The same situation applies to Tseng Tzu‘s self-reflections three times everyday, prominently recorded in the Analects 1/4; he is growing. The growing not-yet has a new not everyday. Our kid-imperfection is dynamo to our kid-dream of perfection-joy, jumping fresh. Kids‘ excitement of not-yet lies in its ―not.‖ Our growing not-yet originates in the Four Buds 四端 innate in us,253 for we as human cannot help but grow. Our growing not-yet is our life‘s dream of ideals, and this ―is‖ unifies the as-is with the is-to, the is with the ought, description with prescription. Our human nature is what we originally are 本然人性, out of which arises the ethics of Five Relations 人間五倫 among persons. This unity of the is and the ought-to-be is Chinese wisdom alive that persuasively counsels us. We can thus turn our sighs to our growing advantage. We can understand the why of neither our Akrasia nor our growing, much less their unity. We can only realize and dream of their exciting unity and its how, to assiduously real-ize their ―ought‖ of unity. In all this is the fulfillment of our nature, and we are unspeakably happy. Realizing thus unified and real-izing the unity, this happy dynamic unity tells how vibrantly alive Chinese wisdom is.

251

See 史記, 卷四十六, 田敬仲完世家第十六, 臺北市三民書局, 2008, 5:2311. Even scholarly Paul‘s passionate appeal failed in Athens gossiping (Acts 17: 21, 32). In cognitive conversion of the slave-boy (Meno) into doing ―good,‖ to answer ―Can good be taught?‖ Socrates simply confuses c-1 with c-2, and information-knowledge with ingrained knowledge. 253 Mencius 2A6. 252

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Chapter 7

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CHINESE WISDOM IN INDIRECTION Chinese wisdom continues thus to offer us insights into human living, one of which is ―indirection,‖ perhaps expressible in Chinese han-hsü 含蓄, being reserved, imbued with implication.254 Indirection is saying nothing directly to indicate something, not because we want to do so but because it is the way life is naturally lived; indirection is what describes life as really alive. Indirection can only be indicated by giving examples, telling stories, for indirection cannot be directly told of. Many things essential are hidden to our notice; directly describing them distorts them and they disappear. We can only indirectly allude to them, sometimes by strangely shouting something else to arouse notice to what is effable. Some concrete examples from life come to mind. After throwing bread out there, I must retreat here, hide if I must, for squirrels and birds to come and feed on it. Why? There must be more involved than their fear of me. They don‘t want to be disturbed, perhaps. They may want to be left alone, and I must respect their privacy. Privacy spells personal dignity. Likewise, some matters in life are best left hidden to mature, to become whole. Growth comes unawares; never ―help‖ it. By the same token, sleep essential to life comes unawares, when we least expect it; trying to catch it in awareness, and we end up being awake all night. Sleep is indescribable, so Chuang Tzu praised it in a story to evoke our attention to its crucial relevance to the indescribable Tao. Clothed begins to explain Tao when he notices Gap-tooth fell asleep who asked about Tao! So pleased, Clothed leaves Gap-tooth, chanting praise of him (22/21-25). Trees are another example of subtle mystery hidden, surrounding us. Trees are a presence that nourishes us in silence; they are our milieu—neither Thou nor It255—in which we live and grow and thrive. Such milieu is hidden from our gaze. As T‘ao Ch‘ien 陶潛the poet of extraordinary sensitivity confessed, ―Desiring to explain, we already forget words, for herein lies a touch of truth,‖ the ―touch‖ that can only be touched on, not directly chatted about. 254

―Indirection‖ is of course akin to ―understatement‖ and ―negatives‖ considered above; they are siblings in a family where sense is beyond expression, feeling overflowing words, but siblings are not identical. 255 On ―milieu,‖ see Kuang-ming Wu, ‗The I-in-Milieu, the I-with-Thou, the I-over-It,‖ in On Metaphoring, op. cit., pp. 510-513, ―Realism (Fajia 法家), Human Akrasia, and the Milieu of Ultimate Virtue,‖ Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Winter 2002, pp. 21-44, esp. 27-3, ―The I-Milieu: Its Implications for Culture and Thinking (I)‖ (December, 2007, pp. 1-60) and ―The I-Milieu: Its Implications for Culture and Thinking (II)‖ (June, 2008, pp. 1-68) in Journal of World Religions, and others.

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Nor can logic, the way we talk, be talked about as if there existed no talk but logic-assuch, but is hidden in talking-sense, as bones in bodies shown indirectly in bodily movement. Jokes appear by exposing unnoticed logic, by twisting ordinary logic into jolting jokes. Kids are disarmingly adorable due to living not as small adults but straightly as themselves, unassuming and natural unawares. These are random examples of countless things in life, essential as they are hidden in life. Kids straightly living as kids remind us of a sandwich-board man proudly displaying, ―I‘m normal‖; he thereby displays precisely its opposite—he is abnormal. Being normal is what we are, the core of our sanity, of our health, but defies all objective specifications of natural science. Psychology and medical sciences have to leave the notion of ―health‖ vague, discernible only by practicing counselors and physicians. Amazingly, my constipation is gone upon returning home from a trip; it is treatment by changed air. Likewise, enjoying mixing cultures (our milieus) heals culture-conflicts. All this is not as innocent as it looks. Being alive normally is what we are, so being normal is the Norm of what we should be, yet it is unsayable to be and do as we actually— normally—are and do. This ―as‖ is being natural, self-so and self-thus 自然, and yet ineffable is the core of ―ethics‖ and ―justice.‖ This is why human straightness 直 lies in shouldering one‘s father, even the ruler‘s own father, who stole a sheep (Confucius‘ example, 13/18) or even killed someone (Mencius‘ example, 7A35), to go into hiding with him out of the public‘s way. Such a deed is not done in disregard of justice but precisely to ex-press justice indirectly, for filiality is the root invisible of justice. Implicit expression is no explicit exposure, however. ―Making all this explicit and objective and public‖ as Confucius and Mencius did, risks making a mockery of justice, or else, conversely, awkward exposure of ―justice.‖ Only the truly human, the sage, is up to acting out such authentic humanness alive, to express real normal humanity in justice. This is a ―no-do 無為‖ of justice, a just no-doing, inexpressible, that truly does and shows justice. Thus, casual aping would commit the mistake of a clumsy young man aping the noble Han Tan gait, to end up learning nothing, forgetting his original gait, and crawling all the way home. Again, the legendary beauty Hsi Shih frowned out of heartburn and charmed neighbors; seeing it, an ugly lady pounded and frowned at neighbors, who all ran away.256 By the same token, a sagely deed identically acted out by an unruly person would end up becoming unruly. Now, how we can tell their difference—telling sagely father-hiding from unruly father-hiding—is itself a subtle noble task. Only heroes understand heroes; we must be as discerning as the truly human to nod at the difference. Being sagely is truly natural, which can only be conveyed in indirection, and Taoism is typically imbued in naturalness and indirection, and so, usually, consideration of indirection and naturalness is consigned to Taoism. This is a one-sided view of China, for Confucianism is no less imbued in indirection and naturalness; ―sagely hiding of criminal father‖ may be a

256

Chuang Tzu (17/78-81) told the story of a walking boy to an expert logician Kung-sun Lung 公孫龍. Logician is one who puts everything explicitly to words; here is no hiding. The story of two ladies (14/42-43) was told to alert us to hidden 所以然 (origin, reason) of beauty, not to idly ape its outward expression.

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negative example of Confucian indirection. All Chinese thinking is. We see how this is so as follows.257 Let us take one simple pivotal Confucian notion, ―respect 敬.‖258 Confucius bluntly declared (2/7) when asked about filial love, ―Those who love parents today only know how to feed them. Even dogs and horses can all be fed. Without respect, how could we tell them apart?‖ So filial-love 孝 is intrinsically linked to inexpressible respect 敬. Mencius (6A10) followed suit to sharply distinguish respect from mere feeding: One bowl of food and soup, we get and live on, we lose and die. Giving them with curses, then no pedestrian would accept them; giving them with kicking-trampling, then every beggar would be above receiving them. Million barrels of salaries, if received by discriminating no justice or decency, then how much do such salaries add to me? [Do you receive the salaries because of the upkeep of your great mansions or your wives-concubines or poor friends? What of previous risking of life to reject life-sustenance?] Where is your reason for accepting the salaries despite all? This it is that is called losing our original heart-of-being 失共本心. Here deep respect of the root of the heart-of-being, that is, the respect of personal integrity, is cherished above all things, even above life-necessities of foods and drink as well as millions of barrels of salaries. Filial love, respect of one‘s personal integrity, and respect of one another, are tightly connected. For all that, they cannot be ―explained‖ but can only be indirectly illustrated by concrete stories. Respect performs indirection of humanness, and humanness is expressed in specific acts that come out right and decent. Respect is at the root of interpersonal morality, the root of humaneness, being truly inter-human 仁. Without respect, parents are equivalent to dogs and horses. Without respect, foods and salaries are insults to personal integrity, throwing away one‘s root of being.259 Filial respect is at the base of all our acts. Filial respect extended to the ultimate in the cosmos is respect of Heaven, the Parent of all parents, Filiality Classic 孝經 right insists. All this while, significantly, neither ―respect‖ nor ―Heaven‖ is clearly defined in Confucianism, for neither can be, completely beyond direct definition or description. On such ultimate matters as Heaven, spirits, human nature, and Destiny, Confucius kept strict silence (5/13, 9/1), kept a respectful distance from them (6/22), and even said that, having offended heaven, we have nowhere to pray (3/13). He said (11/12), ―Not yet knowing life, how could we know death?‖ Life and death are our ultimate intimate matters, beyond direct description. Westerners think that such silence and refusal to describe deep things show Confucius is prosaic, pragmatic, mundane, and agnostic—if not irresponsibly commonsensical. Precisely the opposite is the case. Such a view exposes the West‘s naïve ignorance that Chinese negatives express indirection. 257

Taoism is imbued in indirection; so are Wu‘s writings that do explicate Taoism (but not exclusively), so much so that Robert Neville characterizes Wu‘s thinking as ―philosophy of Taoist indirection.‖ Wu would be happy to accept a simple epithet, ―philosopher of indirection.‖ 258 Wing-tsit Chan‘s technical (Neo-Confucian) translation of ―respect 敬‖ as ―seriousness‖ (A Source Book, op. cit., pp. xi, 785) seems a needless obfuscation. ―Seriousness‖ is a much weaker notion than ―respect‖ that includes it, and can easily be replaced with ―self-respect‖ or ―respect [of writings] of others.‖ 259 Therefore, the classics scholar Paul Woodruff hit the nerve of modern humanity when he published Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue, Oxford University Press, 2001. But see Wu‘s review of it in Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, June 2006, pp. 293-298.

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Again, many people, even Chinese scholars, identify stress of one thing with exclusion of another, and infer a denial of a thing from its negation; how ridiculous such confusion and inference are! We must realize. In China [a] negation may not be denial, [b] nor may dwelling on one thing exclude another. [a] Let us go to the first confusion of negation with denial. How could anyone be ignorant of—agnostic about, much less deny—human nature or life and death, etc., and still talk about how to properly behave as human? Human nature, life, death, or destiny cannot be talked about. We cannot talk about ultimate and holistic matters for two reasons. One, talk of something objectifies it to separate it from us, but such matters as ―human nature,‖ and so on, so thoroughly pervade us as to be part of us, or rather, as to include us as their part; they are inseparable from us. Two, ―talk‖ accounts by counting items, but ―human nature,‖ and so on, cannot be counted, for they are the whole of what we are or rather what include us. Thus uncountable and inseparable, such ultimate matters as ―human nature‖ and so on are ineffable. No wonder, Marcel was vocal about their being beyond expression, a ―mystery‖; Confucius kept silence on them, refused to talk about them, but keeping silence here is clearly not to be ignorant about them, much less to deny them. [b] Nor does affirming ―humanism‖ exclude things beyond human,260 such as the background, the milieu in which the human breathes, but cannot be explicitly said out. Human nature (性), reverence (敬), ceremonial decency (li 禮), and the like, are essential to being truly human; they are nourished by the beyond-human such as Heaven (and the divine), whose part is seasonal change that does not say but is effective in birthing hundreds of things (17/18). In fact, Heaven‘s Breath-Weather 天氣, heavenly time-and-timing (天時), is what makes human efficiency effective; for we turn efficient by being ―in season‖ (by learning from history), and yet Heaven does not speak; nor can we glibly talk about Heaven. Not-saying means not literally saying it, and ―not literally‖ is not-directly pointing, in other words, indirection. Confucius was reverentially circumspect on things ultimate-intimate,261 knowing that those things are beyond lightly munched around as if they were casual routines. If there is anything ―religious‖ about Confucius, here is one truly so. This is where the religious, ineffably reverential, resides; in this sense, Confucius is not an agnostic at all but deeply religious; he is proto-religious, the paragon of religion-as-such.262 Actually, not just filial love, respect, humanness, life, death, destiny, and Heaven, are undefined, but any and all pivotal notions are indefinable, such as decency (rite 禮), politics, fidelity, teaching, brotherliness 悌, whole-heartedness 忠, like-heartedness 恕, Tao, princely person 君子, that is, all core notions that make up Confucius and Mencius and make up life as humanly lived. These notions so intimately and essentially make up what is truly human that Confucianism is often called ethical philosophy, even nothing but ethics. The fact is that ethics is a part of such great Ineffable, the great Indirection that enwraps us. This is also why 260

Wing-tsit Chan, for example, consistently, and sadly persistently, commits this mistake. Things ultimate are often most intimate, closer to us than we are to ourselves. 262 See Wu‘s ―Confucianism as Religion‖ in On Metaphoring, op. cit., pp. 504-509. 261

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Confucianism has no ethical theories comparable to Aristotle‘s, for ―theory‖ is the clearest of verbal direct description, precise opposite of indirection. For the same reason, China is imbued with history-awareness but has no theoretical philosophy of history. By the same token, Taoism insists on no-self, no-name, no-words, no-desire, no-do, and be self-so. These phrases, if we look at them closely and meditate on them, turn out to be indirectly indicating the same ineffable fullness of concrete matters. Taken literally, their total negations of course destroy our life,263 but actually the situation is quite to the contrary. Those ―no‖-things stand aside—perform indirection—to let our self and our life stand firmly and authentically. Now, here is a bombshell. If double-negations affirm (circuitously, and so) indirectly, then double-affirmations spells [a] kids repeating to grow, adults repeating to reenact history, both being life as music-variations to dwell and deepen, and [b] insisting on platitudes to provoke insights. Taoism does both double-negations (if tao tao-ed is no Tao, then tao-ing ―tao tao-ed is no Tao‖ hits Tao, in Tao Te Ching), and double-affirmations (Be natural; 3+4 is 4+3). Confucius also denies the Beyond (not human) to reverent indirection and insists on platitudes to provoke insights ineffable (―Water! O Water!‖ ―Does Heaven speak?‖). We have two oddballs. ―Who can exit, not from door?‖ has double-negations (who . . . not) and double-affirmations (exit . . . from door), a both-and. In ―No do, no not-do,‖264 ―no do‖ is neither double-negations (but contradiction), nor double-affirmations (not ―do do‖). All this while, ―no do‖ is ―no not-do,‖ doing both double-negations (no no) and doubleaffirmations (do do). The saying is neither-both. We can go on like this without end, but we have cited enough examples—all in stories— to show how central and pivotal indirection is to our life and in Chinese wisdom. There is no philosophy in the West that mentions such indirection, much less set it deep at its center. Explanation is in order. Polanyi‘s tacit dimension and Merleau-Ponty‘s philosophy of the flesh (recently Lakoff‘s metaphor) are in the same wavelength of Kierkegaard‘s indirection, but none of them is as penetrating as Kierkegaard, and even Kierkegaard is not as concretely mundane, subtly and intrinsically comprehensive, as China. The concrete flesh is tacit indirection, the invisible humus, milieu, and womb that enables and invigorates all living and all acts, but itself not appearing at the front. Behind every man is a woman, for better265 and for worse; behind every performance of an act, locutionary and historical, is indirection that cannot be verbalized. We need the word-forgotten one (indirection) to word with (explicit accomplishment), the Yin to enable the Yang that depends on the Yin. We have seen how China portrays by telling stories how the Yin silently moves around and into the Yang, how disasters consolidate the glories of achievements. Now, it is significant to look at Western philosophy so intent on logic-rationality, a direct explicit layout of words on any matter considered, and as such is an exact opposite to 263

Name-debater Hui Tzu missed Chuang Tzu this literal way, e.g., taking Chuang Tzu‘s ―no feeling 無情‖ as lack of feeling, not ―not hurting inside oneself with likes and dislikes 不以好惡內傷其身‖ (5/55-60).

264 265

These sayings are from Analects 6/15 (誰能出，不由戶?) and Tao Te Ching 37 (無為而無不為). Eleanor Roosevelt the First Lady to FDR comes to mind. Ariel Durant to Will is also well-known.

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indirection. Western philosophy tirelessly exhausts everything in direct logic-rational explication. Some well-known philosophers, however, standing firmly on logic-rationality as they do, feel logical pinches, looking out on tiptoe beyond it. They are a Moses at the peak of Mount Pisgah,266 looking far toward the Promised Land, but without entering it. Let us look at some of them. Plato had mythology—stories—outside logic-rationality to clinch argument. Whitehead‘s last public statement, ―The exactness is a fake‖ without common sense beyond logicrationality, is in sync with Russell‘s induction—logic-rationality concretely applied—gone false unguided by common sense, as are Waismann‘s ―alternative logics‖ and Ryle‘s concrete ―informal logic‖ beyond formal. Wittgenstein concluded his Tractatus by counseling us to climb up on the ladder of his explicit propositions, only to kick it away (into indirection). Merleau-Ponty tightly argued for ambiguity unspeakable. Deconstructionism was a grand meltdown of ―logocentrism‖ as ―the end of philosophy‖ before vanishing itself.267 Crucially, then, what the Western philosophers ended with, Lao Tzu began at, plunging straightly into indirection (never mind the odd ring here; indirection said is always odd). So did Chuang Tzu, Confucius, Mencius, and all Chinese thinkers, living in story-making. China lives indirection. The West stays in logic-rationality to proclaim ―after philosophy,‖268 overlooking indirection, while China enters indirection after logic, after philosophy. That is Chinese wisdom; let us describe it. Chinese wisdom is a clear lake whose bottom can be clearly seen, right there. On entering it, however, we are surprised; the bottom recedes as we go into the lake. The lake turns out to be bottomless yet its bottom is right there, clearly visible. It is a strange lake indeed. The lake is our concrete world, and Chinese wisdom is its mirror. Take, again, Chuang Tzu‘s (2/38-40) ―dumbest simplest story‖ of ―Morning, Three.‖ Uncle Monkey offers ―morning, three; evening, four‖; monkeys are furious. ―OK, then,‖ says he, ―Morning, four; evening, three‖; they are happy. Uncle Monkey ―walks double.‖ Here we have tons of stuff, ―3+4=4+3,‖ a human-animal relation, a different-same relation, an unhappy-happy movement, all appended and clinched with a strange phrase, ―walks double‖ in two legs of the Yin and the Yang. ―Now, isn‘t all this life?‖ we ask. Doesn‘t all this tell us what we should do? Here is ethics involving prudential indirection. But what does all this mean? Isn‘t math there yet as somehow negated, but how is it negated? Who is the hero, monkeys or Uncle? Who is pleasing whom, Uncle pleasing monkeys or monkeys, Uncle? A drama goes on here from furor to joy, but things do not seem to be moving at all, for since ―3+4‖ is identical with ―4+3,‖ there is no change. And the list of questions goes on. 266

Deuteronomy 34:1. J. A. Stewart and G. R. Levy, The Myths of Plato, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960. Whitehead‘s ―Immortality‖ in The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp, La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1951, pp. 682-700. The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, eds. Robert E. Egner and Lester E. Denonn, NY: Simon and Schuster, 191961, pp. 154-155. Friedrich Waismann, How I See Philosophy, NY: St. Martin‘s Press, 1968, pp. 67-90. Gilbert Ryle, Dilemmas, Cambridge University Press, 1941, last chapter. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1933, 6.54., p. 189. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962. Lawrence E. Cahoone, The Ends of Philosophy, London: Blackwell, 1995. 268 Kenneth Baynes et al, eds., After Philosophy: End or Transformation?, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987. 267

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Answering each question opens out a distinct horizon of vast territories. We would not be able to finish comparing Chuang Tzu‘s ―3+4=4+3‖ with, say, Whitehead‘s ―1+1=2‖ and/or Kant‘s ―7+5=12.‖269 Since there is no end to questioning, each a door to limitless territories, this ―dumb simple story‖ is not dumb or simple at all. The story is simple but awesome, dauntingly open-ended in all its simple conclusive air. Everything is above board, clear as can be, and yet nothing is clear at all. It is an infinite mind-teaser, an eternal challenger to our heart and mind. All Chuang Tzu‘s stories are like that, simple and dauntingly spectacular. We have also tried our hand many times on Confucius‘ three chants of simple joys that begin his terse Analects. Things are uncanny in Chinese wisdom, for life is uncanny. Chinese wisdom is a clear bottomless lake because life is, to which Chinese wisdom calls our attention. Bottomlessness spells indirection that is alive and bottomless. Mind you. It is we who wade into the lake. Chinese wisdom does not, but is a dragonfly whose tail touches without touching the water, raising ripples on the surface, spreading, interfusing, to vanish, spreading to interfuse to vanish, again and again. Such ―again‖ is reenactment of history, again and again, for us to wade in, and then dot the ongoing of life, and then continue.270 Light continual dragonfly-dottings, touching by not touching, are ―indirection‖ that characterizes Chinese wisdom. When confronted with a lived situation, alive and protean, indirection is our operation to fit into the situation, whatever it is, however it goes, to turn right-in-situ. We must consider what right-in-situ involves.

269

Whitehead‘s ―1+1=2‖ concludes his last essay, ―Immortality,‖ quoted many times above. Kant‘s ―7+5=12‖ appears in his Critique of Pure Reason, B15-17, commented in Wu, History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991, pp. 16-17. 270 Wu‘s ―World Interculturalism: China Written in English‖ (Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, June 2005, pp. 1-42) applies this point to cultural comparison of writings in China.

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Chapter 8

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RIGHT-IN-SITU (宜 I2) AS RIGHT (義 I4) By way of contrast, let us first see how a typical question in Western philosophy goes, ―How do you know his toothache?‖ Put thus, the question is insoluble.271 It is a typical question generated by logic-rational thinking that sees distinction of terms as their complete separation. Chuang Tzu272 confronted this fallacy in a delightfully concrete situation of enjoying small fish enjoying themselves. Chuang Tzu and Hui Tzu roamed 遊 on the bridge above the Hao. Chuang Tzu said, ―Minnows out roaming 遊 at leisure, this is fish‘s joy.‖ Hui Tzu said, ―You are not fish; how [do you] know fish‘s joy?‖ Chuang Tzu said, ―You, not me, how [do you] know my not knowing fish‘s joy?‖ Hui Tzu said, ―I, not you, surely don‘t know you. You are assuredly not fish; ‗your not knowing fish‘s joy‘ is complete.‖ Chuang Tzu said, ―Pray [let‘s] trace to our root [of the matter]. Your saying, ‗How do you know fish‘s joy,‘ [shows you] already know my knowing and asked me. I know it above the Hao.‖ Chuang Tzu began by jostling with logic-rationalist Hui Shih on how, differing from Chuang Tzu, Hui Shih still knew that Chuang Tzu would not know fish‘s joy. The aim was to expose Hui Shih‘s illicit dogmatism,273 a confident denial, based on difference, of Chuang Tzu‘s knowing fish‘s joy, instead of admitting his ignorance of whether Chuang Tzu knew fish or not. Chuang Tzu then whammed Hui Shih with an answer, ―I know it above the Hao.‖ That is to say, ―I know their joy by just being here,‖ in situ, with fish. Three implications are here. [1] Distinction is no separation or irrelevance. The fishhuman distinction does not stop humans knowing fish‘s joy, nor does he-me distinction stop my talking with him, knowing his toothache. [2] To know you, I just need to stand here now

271

Today, this question, in vogue at the height of the logical positivism era, is shelved as artificial in the West, but without resolving its logic-rational artificiality, or knowing what is to take its place, or how to go into this what. It still bothers me as ―toothache‖ in China that I hope to resolve there. 272 Chuang Tzu 17/87-91; this delightful story clinches his profound Chapter 17, ―Autumn Waters 秋水.‖ 273 ―Talk‖ can go on because different people do inter-understand. ―Hui Tzu‘s very talk with Chuang Tzu‖ denies Hui‘s denial, for, differing from Chuang, Hui yet so knew him as to deny his knowing fish (because Hui knows he differs from fish). So Hui contradicts himself three times. Assuming difference blocks knowing; admitting to differing from Chuang, he yet [1] talks with Chuang, [2] claims he knows Chuang (to differ from fish), and [3] knows Chuang knows no fish. Hui‘s contradictions expose his dogmatism, to expose which is the point of Chuang Tzu jostling with Hui Tzu. This exposure sets the stage for the final move, ―I know it above the Hao River.‖

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with you, to listen 聽 with my whole thrust-of-being 氣274 to quietly nod, ―I hear you.‖ [3] Without difference, all relations cease, inter-human, arts, in nature, and all die. Difference enables communication of all sorts, never cuts it. Now our problem shifts from how we know the other to how we deal with conflicts in the relation with the other humans,275 such as between ruler and ruled, mixed with father and son. From now on, we will consider how to dissolve human conflicts, a typical Chinese problem. But first, we must look into what the whole problem is, the distinction and inter-involvement of desert and position. Desert is doing deeds deserving of recognition, even just the appellation of ―decency‖; we have no problem understanding it. Duty involving position we tend to miss but it is no less common. Dogs bark at any passerby at a certain position in relation to them; they do not care how wealthy or beautiful the passerby is. Expensive Mecedes of current year at a Stop-sign is required by law to yield to a 1978 clunker passing by. Such is duty entailed by occupying a specific position. Human relations are shaped by one‘s social stations or positions, which often entail how far one must deserve them. Every one of us has positions in society to fulfill their expected behavioral functions, and the extent to which we fulfill these functions make up what we deserve. Positions are cups to fill, ―names to right 正名,‖ with fulfilling deserts. Confucius (12/11) envisions and describes a well-ordered society in terms of positions and deserts, ―Ruler, ruler, subject, subject, father, father, son, son.‖ The first terms of those pairs are positions, the second terms are deserts. Confucius says, ―The ruler must behave to deserve ‗ruler,‘ the subject behave to deserve ‗subject,‘ as the father behave to deserve ‗father‘ and the son, ‗son.‘‖ Ruler-ruled interactions must reenact father-son interactions, where father must behave to deserve ‗father,‘ as son must be filial. Now, however, problems often emerge when these positions are not properly filled with respective deserts. The father often deserves no ―father‖ as the son is not filial, and the prince deserves no ―prince‖ as the subject is not subordinate and loyal. Social provisions exist to deal with unfilial sons and insubordinate subjects, but none for unfatherly fathers or unruly rulers. In the latter cases, difficulties visit filial sons and loyal subjects. Remonstrations and admonitions 忠諫, 諫諍, can go only ―so far‖ and no farther, and are often ineffective. Difficulties often turn severe, serious, and bloody. Traditionally China had two ways of resolution—position-supreme, desert-supreme—and neither is convincing. Confucius (13/18) famously praised a ―straight fellow‖ who shouldered and hid his father a sheep thief, but sometimes the situation gets complex. Mencius (7A35) mentioned legendary ruler Shun 舜 whose father was found a murderer. Shun appointed an officer to search and prosecute the murderer, and shouldered his father away in remote seashore. Such are filial son‘s stunning position-supreme performances. But Mencius also saw the ―good ruler‖ as one treating people as if ill, injured (4B20) with the ―heart of not bearing people‖ (1A7). The ruler without compassion deserves removal as merely ―a fellow 一夫‖ (1B8); ―tit for tat‖ exists between ruler and ruled.

274 275

―聽之以氣‖ Chuang Tzu 4/17. In China, nature-human conflict is unthinkable; China‘s humanism is nature-human harmony, where there is no problem of conflict in any sense. ―Impeaching‖ nature for natural disasters makes no sense; everyone complains about weather but no one does anything to it.

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If the ruler takes the subjects as hands, feet, then the subjects take the ruler as viscera, hearts. If the ruler takes the subjects as dogs, horses, then the subjects take the ruler as [just another] countryman. If the ruler takes the subjects as dirt, weeds, then the subjects take the ruler as an enemy bandit (4B3). All this describes a desert-supreme approach somehow unsatisfactory; it was hated by later rulers who often excised these passages from respected classic, the Mencius. Let us go to the other extreme. Often evil or incompetent rulers generated their loyal subjects‘ deaths, avidly extolled by later historians. ―Tragic Dilemmas in Life‖ in Wu‘s History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy discuss them. We cite here only one quite famous case.276 Shen Sheng 申生 was the heir to Duke Hsien of Tsin 晉獻公, whose second wife Li Chi

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驪姬 was jealous of Shen Sheng. She urged Shen Sheng to make a sacrifice to his deceased mother. Having kept some meat and spirits for the Duke, put poison in both, she then proved to the Duke that the meat and spirits were both poisoned. Shen Sheng fled. Someone urged him to explain the matter to the Duke; he refused, saying, ―Without her ladyship my old father would be miserable.‖ ―Would you go away, then?‖ ―No,‖ he said, ―With the name of such a crime I go away, who will receive me?‖ He finally hanged himself. By committing suicide, Shen Sheng covered his stepmother‘s crime and protected his father from misery. His death fulfilled filiality and loyalty. He was a tragic hero who deeply moves us, yet unspeakably dissatisfied. Neither position-supreme way nor desert-supreme way is satisfactory, for both see each as set and separate. Instead, they can be taken as reciprocal, inter-influencing implications and content. How does this way go? To a child every moment is precious and passing. Each is unique, carved in memoryeternity; kids do remember until they are adults. All this while, each moment passes away, never to come back. All this is because kids are alive, i.e., growing, and that is life itself, each moment blending into the next. A ―moment‖ is position and desert intertwined; each moment blends into the next to change into the next. Reciprocity and inter-change of position and desert are our life-situations to make history. This description of life indicates four ways to dissolve the position-desert conflict. One, things happen, as position and desert blend. Two, inter-listening intently opens dissolution together. Three, mutual listening leads all into universal humaneness beyond petty regionalism. Four, position and desert are inter-open, in three ways. One: When Position and Desert Interblend: Position and desert are never fixed; fixation spells tragedies.277 Position and desert must instead inter-penetrate to change each other. The situation would then be thus. As position rises up, as ruler, his desert turns more serious, his responsibilities become more stringent, to prevent his position from turning a mockery, to breed disasters to subject and citizens. Similarly, as position widens into, say, the people in democracy, their desert also must turn more serious and strict. People‘s constitutional right to happiness is not, and must never become, guaranteed right to license to immediate pleasures without limit or self-examination. 276

左傳, 僖公四年 (2002, pp. 297-298) and 禮記, 檀弓上 (2004, p. 78), both published by 臺北三民書局. Burton

Watson, tr., The Tso chuan, NY: Columbia University Press, 1989, pp. 23-24. See also Wu‘s History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991, pp. 237-254. 277 See ―Tragic Dilemmas in Life‖ in Wu, ibid., pp. 235-259, for various tragedies when position and desert are taken as fixed. These pages here extend that section to offer dissolving tragedies by dissolving fixity.

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Otherwise, democracy turns chaotic mob-rule; ―anyone has the right to do anything one pleases‖ is a license to brutal chaos. So, desert is backbone to privilege-position. Hollow position is dangerous; position needs ―quality control‖ without nepotism. No ―prestigious‖ schools without quality students and professors; no brand-name products shoddy. Chevrolet should not turn ―shoddy-valet‖; no ―dried grapes‖ should be gritty. Thus our tragic hero Shen Sheng might have had to check with his royal father, who had steadfastly turned down his stepmother‘s persistent passionate requests to demote Shen Sheng from heir-ship apparent. Shen Sheng could have communicated with his father to review his position vis-à-vis his mother‘s insistence, the root of tragedy. Two: Listening Dissolves Troubles Together: One way to control quality is to ―listen.‖278 We must listen to each other, not agreeing, not disagreeing, but just accepting the differences as we listen, as painters and scientists just watching Nature. I saw three or four soft branches on top of a swaying small tree, and so many soft shoots of a bush of reeds appeared waving so softly with mouthfuls of rain drops. It was high afternoon, no sun in shy crisp air. Just a handful shoots were countlessly waving, fluffy, mesmerizing. Their sways brought me Basho, Frost, and Li Po, Japan, USA, and China, in bygone days of common humanity. Their swaying now brings us together, all into the Family of Heaven, Earth, Humanity, and History—thanks to our watching and listening to their soft swaying rhythm. We must thus open our souls to our environs and whisper to it, ―I hear you.‖ What enlivens democracy, in its insistence on the right of individual to decide, is to listen to as wide outside voices as possible. Individual decision is monstrous disaster without heartfelt listening to others. People need inter-listening; the president must listen to disturbingly different opinions, on pain of devastating failures (as Bush). Ancient China advocated listening to the situation flexing with it, enhanced by Confucian reverence of the past, enhancing present flexing, by Hsün Tzu, Mo Tzu, Han Fei Tzu, and so on. Taoists being relative is but alive, not fixated as dead leaves in whirling winds of haphazard desires and circumstances. Shen Sheng could have carefully taken the pulse of the rapidly deteriorating situation. Three: Universal Humaneness beyond Petty Regionalism: Listening to others outside widens into universal humanity under vast Heaven and Earth. ―Life, nobility, and wealth depend on Heaven; within Four Seas we are all brethren‖ says a celebrated Confucian (12/5). An actual practice of universal humanness, though rare, does exist.279 King Chuang of Ch‘u 楚莊王 besieged Sung until his troop had only seven days‘ foods left. So he sent Ssu-ma Tzu-fan 司馬子反 to go up to a hill to spy on Sung. Ssu-ma went, and was told by Hua Yüan 華元 from Sung, who came also to spy on Ch‘u, that the entire state was starving to the point of ―exchanging children to eat, crushing human skeletons to cook.‖ Deeply moved with compassion, Ssu-ma came back to report the situation. Duke Chuang was overjoyed to begin his assault when Ssu-ma said that he had already told Hua Yüan that his troop was not too far from starvation, either. When accused of negligence to his duty, he replied, ―So small a state as Sung has a subject who does not cheat; why cannot we have one, 278

See Erich Fromm‘s last important work, The Art of Listening, NY: Continuum, 1994, which sadly does not deserve its title. 279 公羊傳, 宣公十五年 (臺北三民書局, 民87, p. 408). Chinese Wisdom Alive : Vignettes of Life-Thinking, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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too?‖ Duke Chuang still wanted to go ahead and take Sung; Ssu-ma told him that Ssu-ma will go home. Duke Chuang had to return home with him also. Sung was saved. Such compassion toward the other side, even to enemy, goes far beyond petty nationalism toward all-embracing considerateness to all beings to ennoble all positions. Could Shen Sheng have risen above petty rivalry over rulership of a state? Could he have even proposed abdication of heirship? Four: Making Position and Desert Inter-Open and How: How do we expand ourselves to all-human humaneness? Just open position to desert, and desert to position. Admit and announce to the ruler, whoever he is wherever he is, that ruler-ruled relation is absolutely reciprocal. Let us repeat what we cited from Mencius (4B3) before: If the ruler takes the subjects as hands, feet, then the subjects take the ruler as viscera, hearts. If the ruler takes the subjects as dogs, horses, then the subjects take the ruler as a countryman. If the ruler takes the subjects as dirt, weeds, then the subjects take the ruler as an enemy bandit. If there is no open reciprocity among people, between ruler and ruled, open them anyway. Never leave them closed, to push boat on dry land. Least of all, never push the river, lest we drown. Could Shen Sheng have opened communications with his father and mother? He could thereby inter-open their respective positions and deserts to promote both. ―How do we make people open one to another, though?‖ We can see at least three ways. The first way is this. We do not stiffly confront the stiff situation, as a man drowned to death by holding on to a post under bridge when the water came up, just because he promised to meet his girl friend there. We must instead step aside and watch, as a recluse 隱士, a bystander. Shen Sheng may have had to hide, for a while. Confucius (17/1) refused to see minister Yang Huo 楊貨 (scheming to take over state of Lu) and accidentally met him. Yang Huo persuaded Confucius to serve him on two grounds: one would not keep one‘s jewel and leave the state-in-confusion, and one must not waste time waiting when an opportunity turns up. Confucius complied. Then Pi Hsi 佛肸, another evil man, invited Confucius to serve him. Tzu Lu objected, on the ground that the princely man mixes with no evil party. Confucius said that things really hard and white cannot be ground or steeped black. Besides, Confucius is no bitter gourd only to be hung without being eaten (17/7). Confucius was consistent in wanting to serve the state whenever an opportunity turns up (cf. 17/5). Socrates and Jesus could have followed Confucius‘ consistent flexibility. So could Shen Sheng who could join his unflagging loyalty to his father with flexible watchfulness, always. The second way is this. We could and should institutionalize above flexibility in government setup, as, e.g., the four year tenure of US presidency. What the presidents should do, however, is not to overhaul the entire performances of the previous administration but intently review their mistakes and successes, to revise and improve on them. This is to better the past administration and to ensure continuity of policies, domestic and international. This move could be Shen Sheng‘s necessary but long-term mission, proposing to institute permanent airing mechanisms in his father‘s royal court between ruler and ruled, and among the royal members. Its alternative is surely the brutal mechanism of intrigue and militarism, both sure to lead to bloodshed and demise of the state itself, which actually happened.

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The third way is this. We should take a high position as ―high,‖ low performance as ―low‖ and their deserts as such. We respect the ruler as ruler, and act to flex with his childish acts as playing with a child. We neither abjectly obey the ruler, nor confront him as a praying mantis raising feeble hands at the oncoming cart. Even as we love our pet animals, we must act in line with their inborn natures. A horselover was kicked to death by his horse because he forgot horse-nature when he swatted a fly on its side. A tiger-master skillfully feeds the tiger in line with its ferocious nature until the killer tiger comes to fawn on him. This is to take the position of one‘s pet as pet, while acting according to its desert manifested in its nature. Likewise we should treat our ruler as ruler, while reciprocating his behavior as it deserves, as Taoist Chuang Tzu‘s Chapter Four tells. Love and loyalty with stiff do-nothing is a sure recipe to suicidal tragedy. Shen Sheng could have joined his loyal love with apt flexibility toward the situation, with many counselors devising ways to flexuous loyalty that hurts no one, his father, stepmother, as well as himself. In sum, since life always shifts both in position and in desert, we must flex our responses accordingly, with positions inter-changing with the desert ever shifting. When things are rough, step aside, yet as we step aside we are ready to step in to act aptly. So, always be humane to all parties, all persons and milieus, universalizing our steady attitudes and sinuous actions.

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Chapter 9

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HEAVEN IN CHINESE WISDOM Radicalized and universalized, this adjustment in situ, in position and in desert, amounts to responding to ―Heaven,‖ an umbrella notion of all-in-all, in China. Curiously, although Heaven, t‘ien 天, originally meant the head of deceased ancestors, filial Confucius steadily refused to say about it. Perhaps Heaven the greatest of all ancestors can respond to us, not personally, not impersonally. We should respect 敬 Heaven as we do our ancestors, while distancing 遠 ourselves,280 not in agnostic indifference but in awe of the Ineffable.281 Our self-distancing reverence ciphers refraining from meddling It or coaxing It into our ways, but letting It be and act as It would. All this is no deistic impersonalism, no theistic personalism, nor is it between the two, but quite different, something unique. We must understand what it is. Confucius‘ negatives predispose us to take him as an agnostic, an irreligious, fatalistic pragmatist, even mechanistic. This is a typical Western taking of negatives in logic-rational either-or, to shut off affirmatives. Confucius meant to negate human definitions to open to Heaven. We must understand (心領) this open field of meanings. Instead of tediously superficially citing many passages from many quarters,282 we would delve into only two passages of Confucius‘, from early and later parts of his Analects, both negative sayings that have invited much misunderstanding. We take three steps. One, we consider Confucius‘ ―sinned against Heaven, nowhere to pray.‖ Two, we consider his ―What does Heaven say?‖ Three, we hazard our modern understanding of an equivalent of ―Heaven‖ as holistic milieu. ONE: ―Sinned against Heaven, nowhere to pray‖ (3/13): It is in the context of political expediency. A powerful officer tried to lure Confucius by pretending to ask what a popular saying of prudence means, ―Rather play up to a minor effective officer at the front furnace (sacrifice to gods), than flatter the ineffective boss in the interior.‖ Confucius said, ―Not so. Having offended Heaven, there is nowhere to pray‖; once offended, no wheedling, supplication, or oiling can work. 280

敬 and 遠 in Analects 6/22 are applied to dead souls and active spirits 鬼神, not irrelevant to Heaven. China‘s reverence of the Earth is expressed in geomancy and ―wind water 風水.‖ Western geometry and geography came from measuring the earth, but soon shed its reverence to the earth. (cf. chapter III [religious tradition] in Benjamin Farrington, Greek Science, Melbourne: Penguin Books, 1953) 282 For the unity of totality, ultimacy, and reverence see again Wu‘s ―Confucianism as Religion,‖ On Metaphoring, op. cit., pp. 504-509. 281

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Now, we customarily think the response as Confucius refusing all religious incantations and atonements as a religious agnostic, a pragmatic long-faced moralist. But the situation may well be otherwise, and more subtle and complex. That sneaky powerful officer Wang Sunchia 王孫賈 insinuated a shady deal with him with religious rituals. Confucius stuck to the major serious issue of religious performance, and rejected any business deal to mix in religion, to free it from dirty politics. This cleansing left wide open the whole horizon of religious performances as truly religious. Confucius was thus profoundly religious, defending religious integrity with reverence. Heaven is clean now. TWO: ―Does Heaven speak?‖ (17/19): He said, ―I desire not to speak [any more].‖ His disciple Tzu Kung 子貢 said, ―If you do not speak, what would we small ones receive-andtransmit?‖ The Master said, ―Does Heaven speak? Four seasons go under It; hundreds of things are born in It. Does Heaven speak?‖ Heaven does not speak as the four seasons are silent, while we are in them, as things are responding, birthing, birthing, without ceasing—in season. We take part, responding silently to Heaven that speechlessly acts and creates. Our life goes on by so intimately reciprocating with seasons that are a part of Heaven, and all of us, human and non-human, do so in heartfelt silence. Heaven goes and shifts in its own time and its own timing. We must likewise respond with its timeliness, in season under Heaven. Does it all sound spooky? On the contrary, this is the real portrait of what is actual, what is cosmic. It is so concrete as to be unclassifiable, unsayable. The whole actuality is called Heaven; it covers, pervades, and penetrates all things, we included, as fish alive in water. No fish ever pushes the river; they swim in it. So should we swim along, and cannot cut a sharp corner. We must admit, affirm, and follow ―thus‖ as thus, ―not-thus‖ as not-thus. Heaven is the natural river of hundreds of things. I am in it, enwrapped, imbued, pervaded, and penetrated. All this sounds like Taoism, doesn‘t it?283 Yes, but Confucius also has a personal touch to all this, enjoying water, enjoying mountain (6/23). Confucius proposed fulfilling oneself in one‘s social position—prince, princely, subjects, subject-like, father, fatherly, sons, filial (12/11), i.e., the position-as-desert integrity—to con-form to the order of the times, to manage the world. Here Confucius nods to Chuang Tzu (11/61, 64) who ―thing things 物物,‖ as shadow follows the thing, as echo resonates with the sound. THREE: Heaven as Milieu: We venture to understand all this in today‘s term, ―milieu.‖ The West with all its metaphysics and cosmologies has no such cosmic sentiment; ―milieu‖ does not exist in Martin Buber‘s Thou or It. We form a milieu with animals, plants, stones, rocks, weather, water, a mountain, and the sunshine, to live in such milieu that is beyond words. ―Wanting to explain, [I] already forget words,‖ T‘ao Ch‘ien sighed. As I gazed long into the lake in a park, geese‘s noisy honking turned me to a long impressive line of them! I counted, and counted—they are 25 in all, all lined up, magnificently gliding on water! Honking proudly, gliding regally, they go through the lake; they just gave me such joy, so much excitement! Now, did they care to even glance at me? But how could anyone deny my joy because of them? Still, they were not even aware of me, they were so far away, or were they? They kept honking, honking, and now, they suddenly took off, still proudly honking! Magnificent! ―OK, 283

Chichung Huang actually said, ―This chapter strongly suggests the influence of Laozi‖ and cited Dao De Jing 2, 43, in The Analects of Confucius, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 170.

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OK, you guys have made a point!‖ I shouted, but I did not know what the point they made was. And then, suddenly, came along a black lady singing lustily, going by me! Does she notice me? She is looking straight ahead! I wrote all this while standing on the spot of my Mr. Cottonwood. Where is John Ruskin‘s ―pathetic fallacy‖ now, cautioning me against personifying impersonal objects? If there is such ―fallacy,‖ I would rather embrace it than avoid it! We need not be a Greek Aesop or Chinese Po Loh 伯樂 to feel the animals‘ wisdom, so loud in their silent stare, honking or no. The fact is, we respond without responding, doing with one another without doing with one another, mutually engaging as we mutually let go. We are at home here, being together. This is where we are nourished, nestled, moved, and lived, to nourish, nestle, move, and live being, ours and all others, animals, plants, rocks, water, and mountain. Chuang Tzu is at home here, enjoying small fish‘s self-enjoyment, overhearing chickadees chitchatting with tall oak tree, silent long. ―Do you, my dear Mr. Flower Power, have problems? I have one problem after another to ask for your help on, and you have been giving me resolutions one after another. But you don‘t seem to have problem at all, do you?‖ I stood on the stem of my favorite tree that once strewed flowers all over my path. My Mr. Flower Power just smiled in silence. I walked over a hundred or so yards, and stood on the spot where my Mr. Cottonwood used to be, and still is now. ―Mr. Cottonwood!‖ I looked up into the sky. Mr. Cottonwood then seeped into me; I felt it. ―I cannot like you, for you are in me, and I am you.‖ Rain began to drip on me. I left, slowly. ―Now what‘s the matter with you? I thought you are describing Chinese wisdom, but isn‘t all this an idling? What has such irrelevance got to do with Chinese wisdom?‖ Well, wandering and idling (逍遙遊) lets seep in equally all things and thoughts (齊物論) to nourish our life, and situation (milieu) is the lord of such life-nourishment (養生主); fooling around is no less beautiful a milieu than Mozart‘s Sonatas for Piano and violin.284 Chuang Tzu regards idling and wandering as so important for life, in fact, lifeindispensable, that he devoted no less than three chapters to begin his book by his name.285 Remember planning for ―vacation‖ from work? ―All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy‖; goofing around is part and parcel of creative life, creating a ―life-situation‖ where we are situated, placed, posited, to live as we are. Fooling around makes our con-text of life where things inter-weave, inter-in-volve, run into one another goofing, and inter-twine—to inter-birth. Context is literally a woven-together subtly, literally inter-under-woven tacitly, indirectly, unawares, while we live on, being enabled to live on by all this ―milieu.‖ Crowd psychology studies such phenomena, humans as social animals, but sociality is not confined to humanity; all beings exist by existing together. Existence is coexistence and inter-existence.286 Togetherness is the essence of things, what makes things as things goofing concrete, ―concresced,‖ grown-together.287 284

Just listen to Ingrid Haebler and Henryk Szeryng enjoying playing the whole set of Sonatas, issued by Philips, in an orthodox calligraphy style. Fooling around with Mozart in orthodox calligraphy style? Yes! 285 Wu wrote a companion to these three chapters, The Butterfly as Companion: Meditations on the First Three Chapters of the Chuang Tzu, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990. 286 Lonely poet Li Po‘s 李白 ―Under Moon, Lone Toast 月下獨酌‖ dancing with the moon and his shadow, comes to mind (唐詩三百首, 臺北市三民書局, 民62, p. 11). Even self-admitted solipsism is ever in relation,

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North Korea under its ailing belligerent ―dictator‖ Kim Jong Il has consistently been going against world opinions expressed by UN, and then captured two American journalists. He agreed to release them on condition that the ―world renowned Bill Clinton‖ goes to him to negotiate. Clinton did go, had a state dinner, and took a picture with him—and he released the US journalists as a ―humanitarian gesture.‖288 All these are a big show of North Korea to the world. This isolated state clearly craves for world recognition, thereby fellowship, by developing nuclear weaponry against its treaty, with big nations, not to do so, by arresting then releasing US journalists at the visit of Bill Clinton. On its part, USA uses its ―soft power‖ of negotiation backed by its militaryeconomic clout. Inter-existence is being actively, interactively, displayed here. We remember the famous story of Mencius‘ mother who at first lived near the cemeteries, and Mencius played burial procedures. His mother then moved to the market place, where she found Mencius play bargains and deals. Alarmed, she moved to a school district for Mencius to play schooling.289 ―Mencius‘ mother purposely chose residence, but Chuang Tzu just fooled around. They differ.‖ Well, she also roamed around places before finding them ill-suited, Mencius just followed the customs he found himself in, and both Mencius and his mother roamed and found the place for them. Chuang Tzu also saw that each animal finds what is best for its food and lodging.290 Free roaming goes with finding things suitable, and the going-with experiments. Milieu does shape us, not communicate, not Thou or It. Milieu does with us without doing with us. Mencius‘ Mom was his Thou and Milieu, his Thou-Milieu that molded him.291 We inter-twine with things and persons around to turn one twine in the cosmic three, Heaven, Earth, and Humanity, en-twining with them, in them, into them—without ceasing, nature naturing. We pilot our life-skiff along the stream, and our skiff blends in the flow of this river of cosmos. Mom follows her baby roaming and playing, gazing at him roaming. We are in Mother Nature, our ancestral Heaven, which is our revered All in all, Confucianism and Taoism entwined, inter-fulfilling, both fulfilled in Heaven. Now, we may not realize that we have been engaging in description as translation.

―always acted on the inside;‖ the acts are called ―dream,‖ ―imagined,‖ but are more than unreal. It is revealed so in writer Fernando Passoa‘s jottings in ―From a Notebook that Never Was,‖ translated from Portuguese by Richard Zenith in Poetry, October 2009, pp. 39-48. 287 Wu, On the ―Logic‖ of Togetherness: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1998. 288 See among many news reports, The Globe and Mail, Toronto, August 5, 2009, p. 1, and Time magazine, August 17, 2009, p. 11. 289 This famous story of Mencius‘ Mother Teaching with Three Moves 孟母三遷之教 is recorded in Liu Hsiang‘s Biographies of Heroines 劉向‘s 烈女傳. 290 Chuang Tzu 2/67-70. 291 The two stories of Mencius‘ Mother thrice moving residence and cutting cloth in the making in half are neatly packaged in The Three-Character Classic 三字經, as ―昔孟母, 擇鄰處, 子不學, 斷機杼.‖ (三字經: 新撰白話註解 [1904], 臺北南天書局, 民國七十六年, p. 3)

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Chapter 10

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TRANSLATION AND DESCRIPTION IN CHINESE WISDOM We have translated-described Chinese wisdom; we now cosider translation and description, to further illuminate Chinese wisdom. Let us consider translation first, and description would appear of itself to deepen translation. To translate is to transfer a description in one language to another, to metaphor, so to translate is to metaphor. Such simple realization is beyond simple transference of one language to another. Translation has surprising homo-cosmic implications and repercussions that China displays. Urging Duke Hsüan of Ch‘i to recall his ―casual incident‖ of releasing a bull so as to realize his own heart that cannot bear people in pain, Mencius (1A7) pushes him to realize ―old-ing my old‖ folks to reach people‘s old folks, ―young-ing my young‖ to reach people‘s young, to attain the governance that cannot bear people in pain, to reach Great World Concord 世界大同. The push-reach metaphors with two harvests. One, to learn is to translate, to metaphor, as Mencius performed. Confucius (1/15) was overjoyed in such metaphorical translation with his students on the classics, ―telling what‘s gone to know what‘s coming.‖ Baby Tommy points to a giraffe and says ―Doggie!‖ translating nature! Tommy is excited at finding that Something huge over there as one of his familiar ―doggies,‖ thereby expanding his repertoire of ―doggie.‖ Such refreshing explosion of novelty surprises Mom and everyone around into laughs. They all live afresh at that moment of truth, Tommy‘s explosive pointing, ―Doggie!‖ Thus Tommy‘s ―translation‖ bonds us all in fresh joy; we really live together at that moment, thanks to Tommy‘s ―Doggie!‖ Such is what excited Confucius (1/15, 3/5) when his disciples pointed at the Classics with their life praxis, to learn anew how to live well and properly as the revered ancients. Young disciples‘ indomitable expansion of ancient phrases into their lives bonded the great Ancient with them and teacher Confucius. Two, such is ―learning‖ as inter-language translation enriches the original language and the targeted one,292 as does translation of nature into human language (understanding) to enrich both nature in ecological cultivation and humanity in adjustment and adaptation. 292

See Wu, ―World Interculturalism: China Written in English,‖ Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, June 2005, pp. 1-42, for detailed mechanism of English translation of Chinese stories.

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Translation of nature is description that translates by words spoken and written, from a situation into language, to enrich into a story in space (journals, science) and in time (history, library, museum). China is quite rich here, rivaling all world cultures. In fact, ―culture‖ is itself a wealth of descriptive translation and humanity is a culture-animal, primal and contemporary. Translation needs poetic sensitivity; it is so enormously difficult that complaints abound on translators. Boney Wing-tsit Chan misses the jumping fresh original; wordy D. C. Lau misses its rhythmic vigor. Literary Arthur Waley adds too much, misses too much. Legge and Hightower are gone too Elizabethan stiff. David Hinton and Martin Palmer pay too much attention to English. Burton Watson is too smooth for Chuang Tzu‘s philosophical poetry; A. C. Graham is too obscure. And the list goes on. Translators are drunkards trying to jump and mount the horse of the Chinese original, to end up falling to the other side (target language) or staying on this side (the original) struggling to mount, thinking they have mounted the horse when they stay here or fall over there, or even mount a wrong horse. Whatever difficulties seen in translation apply also to description, for description is translation of what is out there into our language here. Pictures and paintings are usually less actual than what‘s actual, often too flat (pictures) or, no less often, too flowery (paintings). Novelist Sartre‘s words recur: Stories are lies. He said,293

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. . . a man is always a teller of stories. . . he sees everything which happens to him through these stories; and he tries to live his life as if it were a story he was telling. . . . While you live, nothing happens. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that‘s all. There are no beginnings . . . an interminable and monotonous addition. . . But when you tell about a life, everything changes; . . . events take place in one direction, and we tell about them in the opposite direction. . . . I wanted the moments of my life to follow each other and order themselves like those of a life remembered. I might as well try to catch time by the tail.

Storytelling reconstructs, creates; description is poetry we live by. It is a ―lie‖ if you like, but it is a significant lie, which is less a lie than a new creation. Besides, Sartre himself is a superb storyteller, so he is a superb liar who is self-aware of being a liar, and a selfannounced liar is a funny Cretan liar. Sartre tells lie about storytelling as lie; ―reading‖ such descriptive translation adds confusion to translation. Translation and description are thus new creations nonexistent before, and those who want the original vigor must read the original themselves, and then the ―distortions‖ would be their own, to be adjusted as they see fit by checking commentaries and many translations and descriptions that may or may not be ―accurate‖ or ―apt‖ but at least different and conventionally taken as trustworthy guides. Description is a sort of translation; it transfers what is actually out there into our language we understand, spoken or written. Casey said we have two sorts of description, description in literature and description in philosophy,294 but we must claim three sorts of description, 293 294

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, NY: New Directions, 1964, pp. 56-59. Edward S. Casey, ―Phenomenological Method and Literary Description,‖ Towards a Theory of Description: Yale French Studies, Summer 1980, pp. 176-201. On ―translation,‖ see Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, eds. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, University of Chicago Press, 1992. Significantly, China has no such theories of translation or description.

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literary, Western-philosophical, and Chinese-wisdom sensitive to what is actually there as literature, and discerning what the point is. Chinese wisdom is special because it has literary sensitivity with philosophical sensibility, thought in description and description in thought. It presents, reenact, and evokes sense and sentiment, rhythm and echoes, of actuality. Here the sense of actuality is flavored with actuality itself, and flavors are sense-infused. Thus Chinese wisdom resides in history (factual), fiction (likely, unlikely, virtual, and counterfactual), and poetry (conveying the rhythm of what is actually there). Kids ride on the rhythm of things; so do kids‘ stories. They sing, shout, and dance what is there. That‘s exciting. Nursery rhyme is reality-rhyme. Nature has meaning, kids dance it, and we read it. When spelt C-A-T, the word means ―cat.‖ That‘s kids. When spelt after-rainmoisture-in-the-sun, it says ―rainbow,‖ and the Bible says it means ―God loves you.‖ The glow in the dusk means fair weather tomorrow, so read the signs of the times, says Jesus. To transfer such reading is description. Natural science deciphers nature‘s alphabet; poet, economist, musician, and plane pilot read its alphabet each in their ways, and convey them to us in description. To describe these descriptions is one sort of description called ―philosophy.‖ To describe how we parse all this description and meaning is Western philosophy. To describe what all this meaning means is Chinese wisdom. Moreover, as with three sorts of description, so we have three sorts of translation, literary, philosophical, and Chinese. Interculture is here to inter-enrich humanity. How? Well, it goes as follows. In the West, both literature and philosophy describe295; mathematical philosopher Husserl put so much stress on literature, saying,296 ‗Fiction‘ is the vital element of phenomenology, as of all the eidetic science; it is the source from which the knowledge of ‗eternal truths‘ draws its sustenance. . . .We can draw extraordinary profit from what history has to offer us, and in still richer measure from the gifts of art and particularly of literature. Still, literature thrives in actual things and events while philosophy pursues their interpretation; literature is in levels 1 (textual) and 2 (critical) of storytelling while philosophy is in levels 3 (expository) and 4 (hermeneutical).297 Chinese wisdom (explicitly) and Western philosophy (unawares) are story-thinking. Chinese wisdom distinctly reaches Tao and Li the jade-grain of things within the historical and the actual, elucidated with Tao and Li. China embraces facts (levels 1 and 2) in Tao and Li (levels 3 and 4) where facts make sense, and Tao and Li in facts where Tao and Li live and have their being. Thus China has phenomenology (implicitly) and literature (explicitly), both of which are alive in Chinese wisdom. How alive? Hear this. China shows the fourth level. After all, to write is to be at meta-level, in a fourth level élan, as calligraphy shows; existential involvement is another showing. 詩品 and 文心雕龍 are exquisite meta-literature as 昭明文選 and 古文觀止 are, 史通 and 文史通義 are historical historiography as 論語 and 論衡 are meta-logical. They show, not say, for saying 295

Traditional philosophy describes implicitly, phenomenology describes explicitly. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, The Hague: Nijhoff, 1950, I. 163. 297 All this replaces Edward S. Casey‘s noisy marrow-less ―‖Phenomenological Method and Literary Description‖ in Yale French Studies: Towards a Theory of Description, 1981, pp. 176-201. 296

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gets caught in infinite regress (saying about saying about . . .) and cannot complete saying. China is pragmatic, and has no pragmatism. The Six Classics 六經 in China are continually commented on throughout history. They are 詩經, 書經, 禮經, 樂經, 易經 and 春秋, i.e., canons of literature, politics, religiosity, music, cosmos, and history. Canons on these six areas make up all the central rules on these comprehensive aspects of human life.298 Commenting on them is then an important fourth level activity in China, yet Chinese tradition does not say it is at fourth-level. Instead, China shows so indirectly. It is because showing indirection is how actuality operates as actual. Showing acts out saying; to show says most powerfully. Here, verbal saying spoils the powerful showing; indirection is intensely direct. ―He sat down at the table with them. Taking the bread, he blessed and broke and gave it to them. At that moment, open-eyed, wide-eyed, they recognized him.‖299 My Shakespeare specialist friend Alexander Huang said that we can understand what Shakespeare said by seeing it acted out; seeing acted is knowing believed. This is a performative utterance, saying in doing on stage (acting saying), in the audience (receiving and understanding the acted saying).300 ―Don‘t say it. Show it!‖ shouts the beloved. Rituals to our beloved gods act out Greek myth, vase and painting present the myth,301 and so do all architecture, music, religion. All this has been the case through all history. We understand what is said when we see it acted out; we even partake of it by singing and dancing it, as in Confucian ritual, Buddhist celebration, and church worship. Such concrete pulsation of thinking is lost in Western philosophy today, but vigorously alive and thriving in Chinese thinking. All this indicates that truth, whatever it is, is bodily and performative. Kids understand mathematical addition by performing it; it ―clicks‖ in as they concretely add things, while computers do not click in. Mathematics is the holy of holies in disembodied philosophy typical of the West that tends to enshrine it separate, high up in the Platonic sky. Not accidentally, computer technology developed in the West, to concoct a conundrum, ―Does computer think?‖ Artificial separation between thinking and the world is hard to maintain, however. From this august tradition Kant deviated unawares, when he hit ―synthetic a priori‖ in mathematics, but we had to wait until Merleau-Ponty clearly puncture this ―myth‖ of anti-myth,302 and then deconstructionism came to melt down the whole idealistic edifice. Since then, Western philosophy is never the same again. In contrast, Chinese wisdom-thinking describes what goes on as it translates the actual ongoing into thoughts, and translates what is actual inside us and actual out there by describing them. There has been no split between thought and actual matters, each side deepening and enriching the other; in fact, China shows how both thinking and concrete 298

樂經 was lost in Ch‘in‘s First Emperor‘s burning of books. All this follows and expands on 文心雕龍, esp. its 宗經. See 臺北市三民書局, 民83, pp. 20, 22, and 24. 299 Luke 24:30-31, The Message (E. Peterson). 300 John Austin‘s ―performative utterance‖ is saying-as-doing. 301 See the first and last essays in Approaches to Greek Myth, ed. Lowell Edmunds, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. 302 See Wu, History, Thinking, etc., op. cit., pp. 16-17.

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matters are two sides of the same coin of compelling actuality. As such, Chinese wisdom can calmly welcome the West and inter-learn with it. ―How do we inter-learn?‖ Chinese thinking must learn from the West to become clearer on both literature and thinking. Western philosophy must learn from China to become more organic in unification of both literature and philosophy. Chinese thinking must thereby prevent itself from being muddled as it becomes Mr. Ambiguous to ―treat everyone so well 待之甚善‖ as Mr. Hun Tun did.303 Western philosophy must in turn prevent itself from sundering what nature has together to inter-pervade, one constituting another. Chinese wisdom-thinking must realize that notsundering is not failing to distinguish, and distinguishing is not to separate. Distinction must not separate as we think, in China or in the West. This realization leads to thinking of a sort of knowledge that is inexpressible, distinct from the knowledge that distinctly expresses.

303

This is the key feature of Mr. Hun Tun that concludes Chuang Tzu‘s profound Inner Chapters, 7/34.

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Chapter 11

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CHINESE WISDOM AS KNOWLEDGE SUBTLE-INEXPRESSIBLE In all this, we must not lose sight of the fact that, as thinking, Chinese wisdom does concern itself with knowledge. We tend to forget this point because knowledge in Chinese wisdom is often subtle and inexpressible,304 and this feature makes it uniquely alive. We must look into this fascinating feature of knowledge as subtly inexpressible. Confucius said (2/17), ―To know it as (wei 為) known-it, not to know as not known, this is to know.‖ Here the wei-為 is not a casual propositional nod, but an Uncle Fort‘s 塞翁 ―making 為‖ when he asks, ―How can this not make-為 [its opposite]?‖ to make his life confirm and conform to what the times make. In the same way, Confucius makes the known in fact as his known, and the unknown in fact as his unknown.305 Negatives in China are relevant here. ―Not to know 不知‖ is no simple ignorance but knowing what by nature we cannot know. To admit the knowable as knowable, the unknowable as unknowable, to nod-at-the-heart-of-our-being to this ―as,‖ this existential nodding affirmation of each ―as‖ is true knowledge. Now we are in ―Chinese wisdom.‖ The first knowing the knowable is later called ―knowledge by sight-and-hearing 見聞之知,‖ and the second knowing the unknowable, ―knowledge of heart-and-nature 心性之知.‖306 The first sort is informative, describable, translatable, and storable as cumulative computer-knowledge. Information explosion is typical of today‘s world.

304

―Knowledge is what we are aware of, so it cannot be inexpressible, can it?‖ We ll, being aware could be either expressible or inexpressible. 305 We remember the story of two disciples arguing, when their master went to one and said, ―I think you are right,‖ and went to the other, and said, ―I think you are right.‖ A third disciple said, ―But Master, they are opposed; how could they be both right?‖, whereupon the Master said, ―And I think you are right, too.‖ His affirmation is a meta-affirmation of Confucius‘ ―as‖-knowledge, as Uncle Fort‘s. 306 This dichotomy here looks similar to but is actually entirely different from Bertrand Russell‘s knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. Besides, Russell placed the latter as higher, more advanced, and more valuable of the two. See his The Problems of Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 1912. We could classify his both sorts as knowledge by seeing-hearing advanced from knowledge by acquaintance. Russell is unaware of knowledge of our core of being, of our heart-nature.

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Far from the West‘s impersonal computer-knowledge, informative objective knowledge in China is an object-of human thoughtful attention, ssu 思,307 as consciousness is always intentional consciousness of something. This intention-related objectivity in China has three features. One, whatever information obtained is fitted in the big organic picture of the whole unity of Heaven, Earth, and Humanity. China has humanistic cosmology, but no impersonal science or metaphysics. Based on Neo-Confucian ethical cosmology, after explaining the Yin-Yang interaction in Five Goings-on 五行, Chou Tun-i 周敤頤‘s ―Treatise on the Diagram of the Great Ultimate‖ 太極圖說 declares, ―Humanity alone receives the Five On-goings at their highest excellence,‖ and then went on to explain how human life goes, and should go, according to such cosmic operations. Similarly, at the base of Neo-Confucian cosmological ethics, Chang Tsai‘s ―Western Inscription‖ 張載‘s ―西銘‖ put things baldly in family terms the coherence of everything with everything else. It said,308

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Heaven I-call father, Earth I-call mother, in whom I-am here so-tiny, mixed-in. So, Heaven-Earth filling, I-am its body, Heaven-Earth leading, I-am its nature. People are my family-members 同胞, things are with me [inter-being] 物吾與也. Etc.

Realization of puny ―me‖ leads Chang to cosmic family-camaraderie, a harmony, while the realization leads Pascal to the paradoxical ―thinking reed‖ of absolute fragility in cosmoscomprehending reason. The contrast is staggering. Two, all information must be humanly significant, must mean something to some persons here now to augur their future. This is why Chinese bird science tends to bird divination, astronomy is tinted with astrology, and chemistry with alchemy; objective information always has pragmatic cash value. Three, conversely, we humans are an intimate part of whatever is going on. We must ―enter birds, not disturb rank, enter animals, not disturb group,‖ says Chuang Tzu (20/36); things‘ objectivity is always humans ―entering‖ un-disturbing. With no impersonal metaphysics, China has intersubjective ―meso-physics‖ (Hsü Fu-kuan). Information out there in Nature is we-related, always somehow subjective and interpersonal, subject to knowledge under our heart and soul (our innate nature). This description of seen-heard knowledge leads to considering innate knowledge, to which the seen-heard knowledge is a subspecies. This subjection is contrary in sense and stress to the West‘s tendency to subjecting the personal to the impersonal, to put the subjective to the impersonal-objective; Russell subjected acquaintance-knowledge under description-knowledge. Knowledge of our nature-heart-soul is in contrast indescribable, nonaccumulative, and non-transferable, but inter-evocative, and has two subclasses. 307

On ―thinking 思‖ as keeping (容) things at heart, see 說文解字詁林正補合編 (臺北市鼎文書局, 民72, 8:10911095 (cf. Luke 2:51); as directing our attention, see Arthur Waley‘s The Analects of Confucius, NY: Random house, 1938, pp. 44-46. Also, 思 could depict heart (心) seen throbbing at the seams of the brain-skull (田) (藤堂明保著, 漢字語源辭关, 東京都學燈, 1965, p. 118). If so, the heart thinks in the brain, the brain thinks in the heart, both portrayed as 思. 308 陳榮捷編著, 中國哲學文獻選編, 臺北市巨流圖書公司, 民82, p. 619. Wing-tsit Chan‘s translation misses its thrust (A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963, pp. 463, 497).

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One class of heart-nature knowledge we intimately feel but cannot describe. As soon as we want to talk about it, we forget words, says Chuang Tzu. Parents and children are mutually intimate, siblings are in love, spouses harmonize, and friends inter-trust, and we all have hearts that cannot bear people in pain. We know all this so much that Mencius says we ―know words 知言‖ for it, yet we are lost in words to such situation. Of another class of heart-nature knowledge we are aware but cannot express. When asked about it, we just say we do not know and fall asleep, says Chuang Tzu (22/1-7, 21-24). We are aware of our own nature, and what surrounds us as Heaven and Nature (Self-so), Destiny, Spirits, and the like, but we do not know how to express them; they are even less than indescribable. Even Mencius says (2A2) it is hard to say 難言也, but just counsels us to nourish such our inexpressible nature 養性 until we breathe vast as cosmic cyclone 浩然之氣, and, says Chuang Tzu (4/27), listen with the breath of our core of being 聽之以氣. Such is the second sort of heart-knowledge. One thing is certain. Being filled with this second sort of knowledge makes us ineffably happy, fulfilled. Confucius (2/4) had his being turned all ears attuned to whatever comes, thereby freely following his desires without overstepping rule 耳順, 從心所欲不踰矩, and heartily declared (4/8), ―Morning, hearing Tao, evening, can die!‖ Chuang Tzu would smile and nod, saying that (4/30. etc.) this is to be at home in whatever comes, even under brutal stupid dictatorship. Here there exists no gap between desire and decency, and our life is realized and destined, for our free desire is our Destiny now. Here is no Akrasia, knowing, desiring, and can do better, and doing worse; our words and deeds are one as our heart, our life, and our Heaven inside and out. This is the life of the Great Adults who lose none of their baby-heart, as Mencius admired (4B12). Of course, reenactment of Confucius‘ Straight One 直者 (18/18) who hides his father the sheep-thief, and that of Mencius‘ straight ruler (7A35) who hides his father the murderer, are so rare that they offend surface correctness of social convention called ―orthodox decency,‖ legal or moral. The offence is called ―heresy‖ that jolts us all into Socratic self-examination. Such is the heretical bite of being primordially alive as the baby. Such is the pristine knowledge in Chinese wisdom alive. A final question must be asked. ―In all this description of two sorts of knowledge so far, where does this description belong, informative-interpersonal or intimate-inexpressible?‖ Well, it is as difficult to say (as Mencius would say) as to ask of Confucius‘ final clinching ―knowledge‖ in ―To know known as known, not-known as not-known, this is to know.‖ Our description belongs there. Such knowing is historical. About an event, big or small, and about a person, glorious or horrendous, we often ask two questions, ―What‘s going to happen next?‖ and ―How decent was it?‖ The first question is what Taoists ask; the second, what Confucians ask. The first shows an informative personal Uncle Fort 塞翁, the second shows an intimate inexpressible Straight Fellow 直者. In addition, both these questions are asked to know and to judge, so as to weave out ―history.‖ Somehow in questioning and in knowing, the knowledge seen-heard and the knowledge by heart-nature are joined in historical knowledge. Here is Chinese culture; here is Chinese wisdom. Let us put it another way.

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To age is to come to be able to pack things, to grow timely to see through and round things up, to arrange the knowable as knowable, the unknowable as unknowable, and such arranging and packing is to ―know‖ in aging, to cut one‘s eyeteeth. ―Look at them! Wow!‖ I shouted to an old lady walking by, as I pointed at a magnificent pack of geese ―grazing‖ in the faraway grassland. That lady smiled an accepting friendly smile as she looked. That smiling look is rounding-up maturity, round mature all around. Having packed enough, we will then round everything up and go out of this world, packing even this world and go into the incorruptible. So I thought, and wrote it down, standing on the stem of my favorite flowering tree. This is what flowers life, what blossoms life. Thanks, my Mr. Flower Tree! Then, as I walked on in the park, I saw a pack of ducks ducking around out on the lakeshore. I said, ―Hey, guys! I like you!‖ They quacked. Liking is a packing, too. Chinese wisdom is positioned here with Confucius‘ ―Heaven is silent; this is to know.‖ It is a meta-knowledge, neither informative nor inexpressible, but a simple eye-opening lifeperformance. Chinese wisdom is a peculiar performative utterance. But what does Chinese wisdom performatively know? We note that, among others, two items stand out, Tao and Heaven.

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Chapter 12

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TAO AND HEAVEN IN CHINESE WISDOM We all glibly say Tao is how things go, Heaven is what things are, but what is this what? Chinese culture is greatly interested in both items that are no items, for they are too big and vast to be ―items,‖ and the vastness attracts China all the more. All literature, fictions, treatises and essays in China, big or trivial, sooner or later, explicitly or tacitly, mention and express these two, both so intimate and so huge, indescribable. ―How do the Chinese writings manage to mention and express Tao and Heaven?‖ Variously in two ways, we see. Collections of Confucius‘ sayings, Mencius‘ and Chuang Tzu‘s, are quite miscellaneous, no explicit mention of Tao or Heaven yet full of both, while Lao Tzu is meticulous, to begin with a bombshell, ―Tao can tao, not always Tao,‖ then sprinkles Heaven and Tao in what follows. Later writings follow suit. Some are miscellaneous and implicit as Mo Tzu and Han Fei Tzu, some others begin with Heaven (or Tao) as Lieh Tzu, Huai Nan Tzu. In any case, China loves Tao and Heaven, never tires of mumbling and chanting them, and yet never making any sense coherent and intelligible, for both are all over in positives and negatives, here now and there then, mirroring what has gone on to go on further, and further. ―Why is practical China obsessed with such obscure Heaven and Tao, making no sense of either?‖ It is because they cannot help it, feeling in their bone marrows Heaven and Tao everywhere every-when, so much so that they have to be obsessed; we can even say that they are sensitively metaphysical with no metaphysics. Still, Chinese people are practical and honest enough not to package either Heaven or Tao into intelligible manageable bundles metaphysical; they are metaphysically open-ended, metaphysically anti-metaphysical, a self-contradiction. Such radical realistic honesty mirrors actuality, for, to repeat, what is actual, inside us and out, here and there, now and then, are full of Heaven and Tao, whatever is actual is Heaven and Tao, nowhere is without them. ―Have we been going in a circle?‖ But how can we help it? One thing is certain. Such a circle is everywhere-centered and nowhere-edged—here we go again. Anywhere any-when we are, we see Heaven and Tao both, and make sense of things with them both, so they both are a circle of sense centered everywhere, and ―everywhere‖ here means nowhere-edged, yet we cannot make sense of this circle. Things are everywhere-when, so such a sense-circle is edgeless, or rather, it is edged but edged-nowhere, for the sense is so vastly anywhere-when as to be sense-less. No wonder

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Chinese people are obsessed with Heaven and Tao and are unintelligible expressing them; they are so useful as to be useless. Any writing in China tells you so. Western philosophy also tells us so, but with the absolute certainty of each theory that shades into each ―other‖ and is opposed to each ―other.‖ Each aims at being ―clear and indubitable,‖ and we sigh at an endless ―each‖—life is short, knowledge is long, too long for ―each‖ short system within short life to contain. Our sigh in the West intimates and echoes Chinese obsessive unintelligibility. We are human, all too human, embraced and embroiled in the bewildering Net of Heaven and of Tao Limitless, intelligibly unintelligible, the circle of no-circles. We are that active Monkey we laugh about, if not at, in that China‘s eternal bestseller, delightfully wandering in his Journey to the West 西遊記 of ―here now.‖309 We remember that the Monkey is so naughty and active; it brags to a casual old man at the roadside that it can fly out ten million and eight thousand miles in a flash. The old man broke out in smiles, saying it cannot even get out of his palm! Enraged, the Monkey accepted the challenge, and flies at once up into the sky. It flies so far away that it gets tired. Far away he sees vaguely wrapped in clouds some huge pillars. It flies over there, and found not one but five of them awesomely soaring up to the infinite High clouds! Delighted, it thinks it has reached the ends of the universe and is about to turn around back, when it thinks perhaps it had better leave some proof that it has been there; so it wee-weed at the base of one pillar. Having flown back puffing, it finds the old man still there, asking, ―What took you so long to be back?‖ Still huffing, it tells the stupendous story of the stupendous flight it has made, and invites the man to go with it to see how far it has gone on. The man said, ―Never mind. You had just reached my fingers, and even wee-weed at the base of one finger. You, naughty monkey!‖ Shocked, the Monkey was about to fly away, when the old man casually cupped it under his palm. The Monkey is now trapped in the Mount of Five Goings-on 五行山. Later, the Monkey would be released to accompany Monk Tripitaka 三藏僧, to protect him to journey to the West, Wonderland of Indian Alice. This is the vast journey of no journey (in the fingers of nature‘s Five Goings) we all undertake. The journey is Tao, Wonderland of no journey is Heaven, and our undertaking is our monkey-life, of course. The Mount of Five Goings-on is this world here now of varied goings-on, where we are on the go, in Tao, to journey to Wonderland in the West that is Heaven here now. We are on the road Tao of no-road Heaven. All writings in China and all Chinese wisdom mirror all this; they are all this. Now, we have many times repeated ourselves in circles, Wonderland-circles. We had better stop talking and start walking, but always thinking—without thinking. The West says, ―These circles are spirals, each differing from the other.‖ China responds, ―Well, spirals go somewhere, but where do these spirals, if they are, go? Are these spirals themselves going in circles? Spirals or circles, are they not the same, then?‖ Well, spirals show they are going, on the way, the Tao; spirals going in circles show they stay as they go on, and staying is staying in Heaven. So we might say. So we think, but is all 309

Isak Dinesen‘s ―Monkey‖ in Seven Gothic Tales (1934), Vintage, 1991, has also bizarre metamorphoses to tell us that all elements, from the historical to the surreal, cohere. Sadly, the story is tucked away in an obscure corner of the West, none like the all-time best-seller of China‘s Naughty Monkey.

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this saying, ―thinking‖? Are we not, then, thinking without thinking, after all? Similarly, we must be walking without walking, living beyond living, and so we keep walking and living— and thinking without thinking. Thomas Nagel has a book, The View from Nowhere (Oxford, 1986), advising us to stay atop nowhere and see everywhere. But ―stopping nowhere‖ does not stop, and Chinese wisdom does not ―see‖ but walks, as itinerant Confucius and Mencius, and Basho, did; they walked everywhere nowhere in particular. Chuang Tzu calls it ―yu 遊‖; it is a play, a playful roaming journey. Now we know. Chinese wisdom is alive, always walking; ―walking‖ is Tao, ―always‖ is Heaven. All its vignettes are snapshots of scenes—as Basho‘s haiku—taken and forgotten, and remembered and forgotten again—and remembered again, as Chinese wisdom. Lao Tzu said (64), ―A thousand-mile walk begins underfoot.‖ Every step of our walk, the Tao, begins underfoot here now that stays walking here now, under Heaven. Tao is how we walk out Heaven, the expedient Weighing 權 of the situation as the situation shifts, while the sun and the moon of the Always 常 accompany us as we walk following the way shifting and turning. Without the Weighing Way 道 of walking, the destined Always of Heaven 天 is empty; the destined Always being there not-there, the weighing walk simply roams groping. We live on, on the Way we walk as we gaze at the Heaven. Our life walks to unify Way and Heaven into the future. The future describes how the unity goes on to form itself. This future-forming unity says that our walking unity is dynamic, forward-going, the future is embraced in the now walking that is our moving Way under Heaven. The future arrives each day, one at a time. The future is now, the Heaven, then, forwarding, morning fresh, autumn ripe, snap-shooting the vignettes on the way, the Tao. We are homo viator (Marcel), humans on the way, and our destination changes every step, every snapshot, and every vignette, of our way, our Tao, and the Tao invites us to see the Heaven embracing us every step of our way, under Heaven as Inside (Chuang Tzu 17/50), underfoot (Thoreau), all around. Is it incredible? Here is Thoreau‘s prose of Heaven.310 Standing on the snow-covered plain, as if in a pasture amid the hills, I cut my way first through a foot of snow, and then a foot of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink, I look down into the quiet parlor of the fishes, pervaded by a softened light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded floor the same as in summer; there a perennial waveless serenity reigns as in the amber twilight sky, corresponding to the cool and even temperament of the inhabitants. Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads. Cutting our way into the pond of this world, ―Tao walks it and forms,‖ says Chuang Tzu (2/33). Kneeling to drink of the water there, we are blessed with the amber twilight of Heaven, the softened light shimmering (葆光) winter fresh, summer bright. We are in fishes‘ parlor, even, serene, and tender. Tao and Heaven are here, underfoot for us to kneel at, drink at, and admire at over our heads. Here is Chinese wisdom at home. ―But Thoreau is no Chinese,‖ you say. Well, it is easy to cite Li Po and T‘ao Ch‘ien, but the fact that Thoreau is no Chinese remains. Do we see ―Chinese people‖ everywhere after we 310

Henry D. Thoreau, Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, Second Edition, ed. William Rossi, NY: W. W. Norton, 1992, p. 188. The whole page goes on like this.

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see Thoreau, then? Yes, look at Basho, too, but we must see what it means. Now, at this juncture, two points appear. One, this problem is a side issue. Whether Thoreau is a Chinese or not, the fact remains that he happens to express just right the core of Chinese wisdom; and that expression is what is crucial. Two, no Chinese wisdom has ever raised this objection that Thoreau is no Chinese, much less Thoreau himself. This wide wise realm of Tao and Heaven silently rooms such an objection, academically important as it may be. Thus, as soon as we step into ―resolving‖ this difficulty, we go into silence, and silence is part of Chinese wisdom, going beyond words. In short, we cannot and do not want to resolve this difficulty, whatever it may amount to be.

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INCONCLUSIVE AFTERWORD: CHINESE WISDOM ALIVE! Now we are excited beyond words. We are alive, and China is, and so we might as well call ourselves ―China.‖ Chinese wisdom is then quivering, jumping, and soaring high, to point at Nature, gentle breeze, morning fresh, as morning doves gently coo the arrival of autumn. Squirrels are hopping around to gather nuts to store, ducks showing their white bottoms drilling water. Nature is alive, so is China, so are we. Here we express, for we cannot describe it, whatever ―it‖ is. We live and present, for how else could we do? How could we help it? Much less can we theorize about all this life; it is nature around and inside and all over. But why do we write all this down? Well, how could we help it? Such is how we live on, we utter to perform life, and we read and add as we write on, to live on. Thus we live on reflecting, reenacting China, its history the story of our lives through millennia. We are with the historic Wise who lead us without being with them, for we are we, not they. We are young as we feel and live, jumping fresh. Years ago, we drove over to the other side of Lake Winnebago in Wisconsin, being invited for a dinner by the warm Petersons who had been to Asia and had been warmly entertained. There a tender little missy shyly came out and asked my daughter Mary, aged ten, ―Are you a kid?‖ ―I guess so,‖ Mary answered. ―Can we play, then?‖ So they did! Such pleasure they had! The historic Wise are tender little kids, several millennia young. They are Great Adults with active twinkling eyes showing their baby-hearts. They come shyly out to tap us on our shoulder innocently, ―Are you a kid?‖ They wait for us to say, ―I guess so,‖ so they can shyly say, ―Can we play, then?‖ Huston Smith mentions a great shaman.311 Even the childishness and naïvete of their [elders‘] later years tends to be regarded [by American Indians] as an advance toward the state of paradisiacal rightness that preceded the world‘s decline. Toward the close of his life, Black Elk, a shaman of the Oglala Sioux, often fell to all fours to play with toddlers. ―We have much in common,‖ he said. ―They have just come from the Great Mysterious and I am about to return to it.‖

311

Huston Smith, The World’s Religions, HarperSanFrancisco, 1991, p. 374.

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We on our part must add that we are on all fours, innocently, matter-of-factly, yet reverently, about to enter the Great Mysterious Here Now. My Mr. Cottonwood and Mr. Flower Tree are calling calmly, patting me on my shoulder irresistibly, autumn-fresh. ―Where is winter?‖ Winter is the spring of the spring, the timeless spring. When autumn is here, is spring far away, that ―spring‖ that is forever spring in the snow? This is why the present volume cannot conclude. How could a lively kid conclude? How could autumn-fresh conclude? We do not even know what ―conclude‖ means here. All we see is the child. We can only breathlessly gaze at the child, take care of this toddler by removing any obstacle noticed, as Mencius‘ Mom did, changing his surrounding, encouraging him to keep going his way. We remember Mencius‘ Mom brutally cut a piece of cloth she was weaving into two, saying this piece of cloth is now as good as no cloth, and your studies quit half-way are also no studies. Shocked by this object lesson, Mencius went on further to make progress until he reached the great adulthood with his baby-heart embraced in Mom. No conclusion is here. ―Concluding‖ life is ―cutting‖ life in the middle; life is unfinished. All we have done so far has been to portray, in such vignettes, how alive Chinese wisdom is, for several millennia, to invite us to live likewise, to grow up in the Baby Adult so young for so long, thoughtfully, heartily, naturally, innocently, in the living actuality of the lived world of ours here now. ―What do you mean by no conclusion? Everything must come to an end,‖ you say. Well, does history come to an end? Does season do? ―God makes things end,‖ you say. Your God must also smilingly let us end, as kids go to bed. No fuss. Remember the shaman on all fours with a toddler, both being close by the Great Mysterious? We are all close by the Great Mysterious, for we are all babies on all pious fours whom our Parent God loves, and babies have no conclusion, they just keep growing. ―Did you say God love us?‖ Well, God loves us not as we do, as we humans, infinitely less than God, know next to nothing about anything. We know, though, that as China has been millennia young, so we can each live at least five hundred years young yet. ―The sky ain‘t falling,‖ at least for a long while yet. Chinese wisdom loves Heaven and keeps silence about it. We had also better love all this—end of things, if any—and do our own things for another five hundred years, with babies, for we are alive as they. So does Chinese wisdom beside us counsels us, all alive, fresh as autumn fish, soaring as spring hawks, running and do not faint, sometimes pausing to stand firm and then keep walking, stumbling and getting up again, and again. We have been describing ―being alive.‖ To think of it, being alive is one of those things Greatly Mysterious, ―alive‖ are we; as we cannot see ourselves, we cannot see ourselves alive. We have not ―described‖ being alive, then, but just ex-pressed It. Chinese wisdom being one being alive, we have just expressed its life, inviting us all to live as alive as it is. Expressing being alive cannot help but drawing the audience into being alive, as a kid watching other kids playing ends up joining in the play, alive. We have a tough problem, though. China‘s heritage of wisdom is being forgotten, if not consciously discarded, and the situation has never been other than like this since God knows when. I am over 70 now, and I still remember my parents and grandparents shaking their heads sighing, as they looked out the window.

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In fact, it was so, as early as in Confucius‘ days, as poignantly portrayed in the Chh’un Ch’iu 春秋 the brutally honest record of the days, commented on no less frankly in the Tso Chuan 左傳 and other two commentaries. That was why Confucius had to compile the cherished Classics and simply expound them, never making them up 述而不作 (7/1), being just busy restoring the Ancient Heritage. So was the situation of the world much later than Confucius‘ days; Mencius shouted everywhere in itinerary for timeless decency of old, only to meet deaf ears everywhere, frustrated as Confucius was. Mencius‘ frustration was proverbial, driving him to being argumentative 好辯 (3B9). Mencius‘ (371-289 BC) frustrated passion so filled Wang Ch‘ung王充 (27-97 AD) as to devote 35 years (most of Wang‘s life) to writing his magnificent Balanced Critiques 論衡, Wang confessed in its 對作篇.312 Since then, phrases like ―low-ebb age 衰世‖ that is ―dim and low 式微‖ have been constantly on people‘s lips. ―What is alarming in all this?‖ It is this. People have lost a crucial distinction: There is the drifting new, and there is the vibrant dawn. The new drifts as fads and fashions, dead leaves in winds of whims, empty, dry, drifting on to breed violence for short-term profit—for kicks. Sadly, the more kicks people get, the emptier they find themselves, and existential ennui seeps in to corrode the core of their being. Sartre and Kafka and Becket and others are here to rehearse all this empty absurdity and tragedies. ―Back to things themselves!‖ shouts phenomenology. True enough, we need to be in raw touch with things themselves to restore pristine sanity, but all too soon this very phenomenology gets entangled in impossible technicalities away from things themselves. Husserl was already unreadable. So were his student Heidegger and their latecomers, and Derrida and others. In reality, ―Back to things!‖ must be backed up by ―back to the pristine vigor of the Great Adults of their baby-hearts‖ of historic Mencius so simple. This is because things themselves at their pristine vigor were captured by the primal life of legendary history. Such is how we feel at our core when we meet Confucius and Mencius, and when they met their ancestral wisdom. No wonder, Pearl Buck said that young folks are learning anew what China truly is. That was in the early twentieth century when she introduced Lin‘s celebrated My Country and My People to the world,313 and what she said is as true today in our early twenty-first century. Tradition is an exciting force of kid-vitality that embraces us, whenever we go back, as we return to our parental home—to be nourished and nurtured at the root. Never is there a generation gap between grandparents and grand children, each party drawing nourishment from the other; in fact they are one. That is what we mean by the ancient Chinese wisdom as jumping alive today here now. No more can be said. Words are forgotten. History must be lived—as Baby Wisdom in China. Now, we note that in the ancient custom of China, writers used to put ―introduction‖ at the end of their volumes, however long the volumes were. This Part is an introduction to our volume that is itself Chinese wisdom, which is an introduction to life, as life itself is 312 313

臺北市三民書局, 民86, p. 1469. Passion is contagious even across time of historic dimension. This is Pearl S. Buck in her discreet Introduction to Lin Yutang, My Country and My People, NY: Halcyon House, 1935, pp. xi-xvi. The book has changed many a life at least in USA, at least on China.

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introduction to life itself. Our involved thoughts on ―introduction‖ are put in ―Eight Cautions‖ to begin Part II that follows this Part.

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APPENDIX I: CHINESE ART CRITICISM AS ART China‘s criticism of arts has four distinctive features as follows: 1. China‘s criticism of literature is itself literary, itself a crafted gem of literature. Chung Jung‘s Poetry Critiques 詩品 and Liu Hsieh‘s Literature Heart Dragon Carved 文心雕龍 are two prominent examples. Liu cited at the end many excellent works in literary criticism, all excellent literary works.314 2. China‘s artistic criticism is artistic writing on arts and crafts (not just on literature) that involves the detailed how of characters, calligraphy, music-making, and sculpting. 3. Its artistic criticism is cosmology-cosmogony. Arts create cosmically, arts create the cosmos, and humanity is co-creator of the cosmos with the cosmos. This fact is achieved by human arts, and achieved by human arts. 4. The cosmos includes humanity, so arts create the authentic human, with moral overtones. What arts criticism says is what arts said, presented (not described) as fitright as what is said, and seeps into readers to make them as fit and right.

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It is a commonplace that literature presents what it describes, but that criticism of arts does so, and shapes humanity socio-ethically, as well, is unheard of in the West.

314

鍾嶸著, 詩品 (臺北市三民書局, 2003), 劉勰著, 文心雕龍 (臺北市三民書局, 民83), in whose concluding 序志第五十 (pp. 484-485) are listed 曹丕‘s 关論、論文, 曹植‘s ―與楊德祖書,‖ 應瑒‘s ―文贊論,‖ 陸機‘s ―文賦,‖ and two more essays now lost. His 詩品序 lists 7 more (with some repetitions). All these literary critical works are themselves literary masterpieces exquisitely crafted.

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APPENDIX II: CONFUCIUS’ SILENCE AND DENIALS On ultimate matters—Heaven, human nature, spirits, Destiny—Confucius was silent (5/13, 9/1), was respectfully distant from them (6/22), and even said that, having offended Heaven, we have nowhere to pray (3/13). He said, ―Not yet knowing life, how could we know death?‖ (11/12). The West and others take such silence on deep things and refusal to describe them to mean Confucius is mundane, agnostic, staying prosaically pragmatic and steadfastly commonsensical. All his silence and denials mean precisely the opposite of the above Western view, showing their ignorance of Chinese negatives and affirmatives. Many people, even many Chinese scholars, [i] infer Confucius‘ denial of a thing from his negation, but negation may not deny. They [ii] take stressing one thing, A, to mean excluding another, B, but stressing A may not exclude B. Let us take point-[i], negation as denial. Just a moment‘s reflection shows how ridiculous such confusing inference is. How could anyone be ignorant of—agnostic about—much less deny, human nature, life and death, etc., and still talk about how to properly, seriously, behave as human? Still, human nature, life, death, or destiny cannot be talked about. We cannot talk about ultimate holistic matters, for they are inseparable and uncountable. One, talk of something requires the thing to be separate from the talker, but such matters as ―human nature,‖ etc., so thoroughly pervade us as to be part of us, or rather, as to include us as their part, so much so that they are inseparable from us. Two, ―talk‖ accounts for matters by counting their items, but ―human nature,‖ etc., cannot be counted, for they are the whole of what we are. Thus inseparable and uncountable, such ultimate matters as ―human nature‖ etc. are ineffable. No wonder, Gabriel Marcel was vocal on their being ―mysteries‖ beyond expression, while Confucius kept silence on them, refused to talk about them. But being silent is not to be ignorant about them, much less to deny them. Nor does his being vocal on life necessarily imply prioritizing life over death any more than being silent on Heaven relegates Heaven to a subordinate position in his Tao-scheme. This point leads to the next point-[ii] that is the other side of the same coin. This coin is reverence, itself doubly loaded—Heaven up there to which our reverence here is due, and silence as reverence (point-[i]) is matched by talking about A to hint at B unsaid and unsayable (point-[ii]). It is the latter two sides (reverence, silence) that we are at, to hint at the former two sides (no talk, no denial)—of the same coin, called ―religiosity.‖ What joins the doubles is the fact that Heaven is up there because it embraces everything, and our reverence is heartfelt because it is due to Heaven‘s parental solicitude called Mother Nature. We call this overarching ―fact,‖ this comprehensive ―coin,‖ the Milieu that is interactive, an inter-milieu-ing. Now we consider point-[ii], stressing A as excluding B. Stressing ―humanism‖-A does not exclude things beyond-human-B315 as the background and meaning-milieu in which the human breathes, but cannot be explicitly said. Stressing A (nature, respect, ritual) does not deny B (Heaven, spirits, life and death).

315

Wing-tsit Chan, say, consistently makes this mistake.

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Human nature (性), reverence (敬), ceremonial decency (禮), and the like, are essential to being truly human, and they are nourished by Heaven the Beyond. They are indeed part of Heaven as silent seasonal changes keep birthing hundreds of things (17/18). Thus Confucius is religious in being ineffably reverential, not an agnostic at all. His religiosity silently deepens and nourishes all his zealous instructions on being human, as Heavenly seasons do. Thus religiosity is far from a side issue in Confucianism but its core, testified to by its stress on ―decency to ritual-heights 禮,‖ matched by all Sino-Japanese Confucians‘ utmost ―reverence 敬‖ that pervades every page that depicts Confucius, far beyond Western love of Socrates. Pull out reverence, and Confucianism flattens into tiresome platitudes. This pervasive reverence can only be felt as ―religious‖ without institution or worship. Here is Confucian religiosity.316

316

―Confucianism as Religion,‖ Wu, On Metaphoring, Leiden: Brill, 2001, pp. 504-509, explains this point.

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APPENDIX III: ON BEING AS SELF-SO Heidegger‘s ―forgetfulness of being‖ results from analysis that leaves what/how it is, and its ―revealment of being‖ aims at our return to it. In saying so, however, Heidegger does not leave the West‘s mode of analysis, and so stays bewilderingly complex—to defeat his purpose. Why? Well, what is ―it‖ in ―what/how it is‖? ―It‖ is unspeakably simple, what/how nature e-merges and grows, ―phusis,‖ so simple, ―it‖ is what/how there is. Simplicity is unspeakable because speech is analytically complex, and simplicity is beyond complexity. To say the un-say-able falls away from the un-say-able back into impossible complexity. ―Tao can tao, not always-Tao.‖ Bergson on his part expresses ―it‖ in ―flow,‖ Ortega in ―journalism,‖ and both are beyond the West‘s analytical bent, to appear ―vague.‖ Again, ―Tao can tao, not always-Tao‖; the West misses Tao the ―it,‖ the simple, the ineffable. In his Foreword to Nishida Tetsugaku,317 an exposition of his philosophy by a brilliant student of his, Takayama Iwao, Nishida Kitaro 西田幾太郎 said that he is a strenuous ―miner‖ too busy digging out precious ores to refine into gems, then arrange and exhibit them, and thanked Takayama for doing so. His saying so makes us think, on three counts. One, the miner‘s struggle is itself the ―concrete reality 兲體的實在,‖ alive and lived reality, what Nishida wants to capture. Systematizing 體系化 such struggle kills the sweating struggle of the living miner, losing its concrete reality. Tao tao-ed loses Tao. Two, still, Nishida‘s struggle is struggle toward its own systematization, as he admits, and yet systematizing struggle conflicts with the miner‘s struggle so messy, and negating messiness of struggle negates the struggle. Nishida continued to the bitter end such selfcontradictory struggle. Tao tao-ed loses it. Three, both Takayama and Nishida persisted in ―tao-ing,‖ to end up negating Tao. This negation is crucial; it is crucial to gaze at this ―not‖ of ―not always-Tao‖ to accept their selfdefeat as it is, for at this moment of admission of self-defeat, the true always-Tao appears. To ―accept‖ here means to admit. As soon as we mumble, ―Tao can tao, not always-Tao,‖ as soon as we admit, ―To claim ‗I‘m normal‘ is to turn abnormal,‖ we realize the Tao of the normal-natural. This must be part of what Nishida means by ―the dialectic of absolute negation 絕對否定の辯證法.‖ Here is an af-firming by negating, or accepting negation. The positive is entwined with the negative, the one con-firming the other and con-forming with the other—although we are not sure if they themselves realized this point. Mind you, China uses negatives to confirm positives more often than using positives rhetorically to negate.

317

高山岩男著, 西田哲學, 東京岩波書, 昭和十年.

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APPENDIX IV: CONTINUITY IN DISCONTINUITY, DISCONTINUITY IN CONTINUITY The phrase, ―continuity in discontinuity, discontinuity in continuity,‖ is quite a mouthful. Five loosely interrelated aspects of our making sense of the phrase are cited to show the first relation, and three aspects, also loosely interrelated, are cited to show the second. First of all, life‘s continuity in discontinuity appears in five ways, among others, as follows. One, we sense with a lateral vision of metaphor, allusion, and irony. China shows it by, among others, denying to affirm and affirming to deny. Denying as affirmation is amply cited in the main text above, so no further explanation is needed. Loud affirmation (as praise) to tacitly deny is a constant ploy of loyal subjects to remonstrate with their ruler. A typical example is Sung Yü‘s ―Prose-poem of Wind‖ (宋玉, ) that praises the glorious winds filling the royal palaces and deprecates the decrepit foul air ominously blowing through commoners. The point is obvious; he alerts his lord against the lord‘s dictatorial extravagance. But he praises the lord, so the lord cannot do anything against him. (昭明文選, 臺北市三民書局, 民90, I:511-514) Two, we sense things with uncanny recognition of an identity. Numerous and various descriptions are seen as about the same person, same scene, same matter, or same notion. T‘ao Ch‘ien in his well-known poem has several different scenes—plucking chrysanthemum at eastern hedge, gazing long at southern hills, birds in pairs encircling in the crisp dusk mountain air—and then says that they share a touch of sense in them, quite word-forgotten. Three, we recognize patterns, and undergo Gestalt revolution. A dog cannot see itself in the mirror as we can ourselves in it, for we can recognize a pattern that is ourselves, while a dog has no pattern-recognition. We also undergo paradigm shift as Legalism is derived from Confucianism (Hsün Tzu) and Taoism (Han Fei). Debates and disputes in China—Mencius vs. Moists, Chu-Wang vs. Buddhists, Taoists vs. Confucians, Wang Ch‘ung vs. ancient views, Tai Chen vs. Neo-Confucians, etc., amount to inter-proposals of alternative competing perspectives. Four, we see through views, schools, cultures, and things. Mencius inherits the Confucian tradition, as Chuang Tzu does the Taoist, although Mencius is more Taoist than Confuian, and Chuang Tzu criticized Lao Tzu. China has no universals, not even transversals (Calvin O. Schrag), but inter-versals called Tao, Li 理, etc. And China has a traditional ideal of World Concord 世界大同 undefined. Five, finally, we see existence as interdependence, a coincidence of opposites. I am the not-I; I am the other. I live on by inhaling and exhaling the other surrounding me, called air, and eat and drink the outside other, as food, and expel (defecate) it. My living depends on my interactions with the not-I, and my interaction may be in a Yin-Yang antagonism that interkills to inter-birth. All these five aspects describe life as continuity in discontinuity. As for discontinuity in continuity, we see that in all above, a) each of the individuals (persons, scenes, matters, assertions, notions) remains discreetly ―individual,‖ indivisible, and distinct one from another. b) No one is a mere part of a whole. There is no holism, universal totalism, to overwhelm individuals. ―University‖ is nowhere visible as we attend to each

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department, or building. ―City‖ is nowhere as we attend to each street, home, or individual person. c) Sharing of differences is not identification of inter-melting.

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In other words, ―to see‖ is to see a world in a grain of sand, but a grain remains itself, not any other grain, and a world of this grain is not the other world of that grain. ―A world in a grain‖ is continuity in discontinuity; ―many grains and many worlds‖ is discontinuity in continuity. Our world and our life is thus continuity in discontinuity and discontinuity in continuity, both at once without confusion, This ―difference in joining‖ is concretely presented by the Golden Rule. Objections, quibbling that it amounts to ―do to others as you wish to be done by; treat others as you would be treated,‖ are based on misunderstanding. The Rule does not say, do so ―in your way,‖ but ―in other‘s way as you would in yours.‖ I wish to be treated as I wish to be treated; I see that you also wish to be treated as you wish to be treated. So, I should treat you as you wish to be treated, as I wish to be treated as I wish to be treated. Here continuity (as-treatment) joins discontinuity (I am not you), and the joining spells World Concord where everyone independently wins, interdependently. This is continuity-discontinuity joint as the socio-ethical Golden Rule.

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PART II: STORY-THINKING IN MUSIC-REASONING This Part considers Chinese wisdom as logic alive as heart-logic at the core, pulsing in seasons, to sagely cyclone-breathe in cosmos, casting shadow as heartless logic-rationality. Cosmos logic pulsates in music-historic reason as Chinese Wisdom Alive, sketched here. Still, Western thinkers may not see wisdom as philosophy, nor may Chinese thinkers see China pulsing wise. Dear Western reader, take all this as portrayal of Chinese lived-thinking; dear Chinese reader, take this as typifying China alive against the Western background. This is interculture at work.318 Thus by simply describing Chinese wisdom our way today, palatable to both China and the West, our portrayal unwittingly practiced lively interculture.

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INTRODUCTION We live concretely, so we must think concretely; Chinese wisdom-thinking is alive jotting down living lived raw, sensible, and fresh. How does it do it? That is the question to be answered in pages below. We live in the world free, open, and uncertain, yet coherent and sensible, and so Chinese wisdom is also free, open, and unpredictable, yet coherent and sensible. ―Life‖ is inexhaustible to us as we live on; living is not easy to express. We can only tell stories of how we live on. Two bunches of story-examples tell of living, how unpredictable yet coherent it is. One, as we live, staying put can be as rich as moving on. Kant is no less broadly cosmopolitan though having been in one town through life, than Russell who lectured in China, Russia, Japan, and USA. Moreover, our estimation of a person may be skin-deep. Is depression an illness? Well, Schumann, Van Gogh, Lincoln, Tchaikovsky and John Nash are all depressed and so rich. Is pain from abuse wrong? Haydn, Beethoven, and Ssu-ma Ch‘ien have suffered injustice to turn great. Staying or moving, happy or no, anyone can be as richly rewarded as anyone else—as long as one is consciously alive.

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World interculture as globalization that thrives on letting China be China, will be considered toward the end of our Part IV.

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Two, even ―one‖ can mean two extremes, stupidity or wisdom. They say that a Confucian scholar was scratching head trying to bring a long pole into a house. A boy came along and put the pole sideways and put it into the house. The scholar was hung up on his one specialty. The ―hang up‖ can make us wonder at the traditionally ―wise‖ Jesus and Kierkegaard. Is Jesus wise, saying, ―One thing only matters, and Mary has chosen it‖? Is Kierkegaard a fool, saying, ―Purity of heart is to will one thing‖? Does ―one‖ show stupidity or wisdom? ―Well, it all depends. Can you see 3+4 is 4+4, both as at one?‖ Chuang Tzu winks at us.319 Is he wise or not? Such is living, surprisingly not surprising, strangely not odd, to make sense of which logic-rationality is so poor as to be useless, noted by above two bunches of story-examples that make common sense; we follow along to ponder on their ups and downs to see. Storythinking is how Chinese wisdom goes.

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Luke 10:42, The Message. Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing (1938), NY: Harper & Brothers, 1948. Chuang Tzu‘s story of ―Morning, Three 朝三‖ is in 2/38-40.

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Chapter 13

EIGHT CAUTIONS

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Since we live free, open, yet inevitable, our parameter must set as China goes as living goes. ―Let China be China!‖; China lets living be living, its ―syntax of thinking‖ typified by stories, ―history.‖ But first we must describe eight way-through (meta-hodos) methods, cautions; we look at the West‘s logic-rational, analytical, and systematic thinking, and we are surprised at it echoing China. Schopenhauer‘s primal upsurge of Will to live is too basic a drive to articulate; Kierkegaard‘s ―truth is subjectivity‖ in ―postscripts‖ explodes into ―fragments‖ Hegel‘s pretension to an objective comprehensive system of all. ―Systematic‖ Aquinas produces Summas-bits, Marcel has Metaphysical Journals with James‘ two-volume hotchpotch of The Principles of Psychology. Mathematical logician Wittgenstein chimed.320 The thoughts . . . in the following are sediments of my 16 years of philosophical search [as] markings-down, [in] short bits [with] sudden change, jumping from one topic to another. [I planned to have] ideas go unbreakably in a natural order, [but] I realized I‘d never succeed; the best would never be more than philosophical markings-down [, not to] force them in any single direction against their own inclination [as] connected with the very nature of the search, . . crisscrossing in every direction [as] many sketches. . . . The same or almost the same points were always approached afresh from different directions, and new sketches made. Many were defective [where] you could see a picture of the landscape. This book is only an album.

Such impression of a mathematical logician echoes any Chinese writer-thinker. We see systematic coherence in free roaming of thinking, seemingly random, as strict logicrationality led Einstein to cosmological relativity, Gödel‘s logic-rational incompleteness, etc.321; Western ―coherent‖ philosophy is made of paradoxes, i.e., inherent contradictions and

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Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr. G. E. M. Anscombe, Macmillan, 1953, p. ix. Wu tried to restore the original German‘s natural flow marred by translator‘s dignifying of style. 321 Einstein‘s reputed firm Platonism strengthens our case, for his solid Platonism came to overthrow Newton‘s cosmological absolutism into relativity. Do we have to mention Heisenberg‘s uncertainty, Kuhn‘s paradigms, Polanyi‘s tacit dimension, Russell‘s paradox, if not mathematician Charles L. Dodgson‘s Wonderland (of Lewis Carroll)? (Dodgson is cited because perhaps only a mathematician could have concocted such delightful Wonderland-non-sequiturs.) Examples are legion.

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dilemmas, as Sorensen noted.322 What is described is the way of lived reasoning, Socrates‘ dialogue and dialectic. Our thinking must faithfully pre-sent this living-thinking. Chinese wisdom records it, alive, unpretentious and historical as vignettes of thinking in dot-pragmatics,323 jottings in diaries and journals. All Chinese writings have random bits somehow cohering in stories. They all magnificently—because faithfully—present lived-reasoning irresistible. The pages that follow aspire to follow them without pretense. ―Does it mean we just jot down random ideas?‖ Well, ask Aquinas, James, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Confucius, and Lao Tzu; all are ―responsibly random‖ to somehow make sense, but this ―somehow‖ is beyond explicit scrutiny that turns just ―random‖ if not ―insane.‖ It is spontaneous nature-reason; trying to be random would turn out random no more. The ―somehow‖ is natural, seeming ―insane‖; it is Taoist. ―Insane‖ folks are beyond us; Confucius and Chuang Tzu cherished them.324 It is this cherishing that discriminates anything-goes (―random‖) from responsible rambling (with the insane); it is ―natural.‖ Watson‘s words recur.325 After all, it is the drawing of forced and unnatural distinctions that Chuang Tzu most vehemently condemns. In the end, the best way to approach Chuang Tzu, I believe, is not to attempt to subject his thought to rational and systematic analysis, but to read and reread his words until one has ceased to think of what he is saying and instead has developed an intuitive sense of the mind moving behind the words, and of the world in which it moves. Now that an overall methodological description has been made, eight ―random‖ cautions can be listed, overlapping; they will reappear later in miscellaneous spots.

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CAUTION ONE: STORY-THINKING China story-thinks, sinuous and flexuous, living, not formal-logically separated from life. Storytelling freely moves in and out of any frame, not logic-rationally padded, straight to the heart of the matter. Asked ―What does ‗one plus one‘ make?‖, mathematical logic says, ―Two!‖ Storythinking would say, ―Well, it all depends,‖ and tell stories of various situations. One stone plus one stone makes two stones, but one spouse plus another makes one (family) of many (children), to make ―one and many.‖ ―One investment plus another‖ make profit, none, or loss. ―One‖ carload of explosives plus ―one‖ spark makes a devastating zero in countless debris bits. All these stories say that story-thinking must step in to explain how logic-rationality applies to living. Aristotle cautions that ―logic‖ works only under the same conditions, etc.,326 322

Roy Sorensen says paradoxes are atoms in philosophy as prime numbers are atoms in mathematics, to begin his whole book, A Brief History of the Paradox: Philosophy and the Labyrinths of the Mind, Oxford University Press, 2003 (p. xi). 323 See Wu, On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 2001, pp. 387-398. 324 Analects 18/5, Chuang Tzu 4/86-89. Analects 18 collects Confucius‘ contacts with Taoist sentiment. 325 Burton Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, NY: Columbia University Press, 1968, p. 7. 326 Of course, this caution is unrealistic, for (unlike ―logic‖ that works only under the condition of such artificially contrived stability) actuality is experienced under diverse and unpredictable conditions.

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but his caution is extra-logical, so ―logic‖ is extra-empirical, waiting for story-thinking to step in to connect to the concrete. Story-thinking has four levels.327 Take Chuang Tzu‘s short story that ends his Inner Chapters (7/33-35): Emperor of South Sea is Shu; Emperor of North Sea is Hu; Emperor of the Middle is Hun Tun. Shu and Hu oftentimes meet at Hun Tun‘s Land. Hun Tun treats them very well. Shu consults Hu about hot to repay Hun Tun‘s hospitality, saying, ―People all have seven holes to see, hear, eat, and breathe; this person alone has none. Let‘s try and dig them.‖ Daily one hole is dug; seven days, and Hun Tun dies. We ―understand this story‖ only after understanding it on all four levels.328 One, textually, it is authentic as universally agreed on; two, exegetically, we scrutinize the names of these Emperors; three, expository-wise, Wu saw no less than nine implications on how distinct it is; four, hermeneutic-wise, the bulk of Wu‘s essay considers the incredible complexity of its significance, and the following pages will explore more on many occasions.

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CAUTION TWO: “LET CHINA BE CHINA!” China sticks to story-thinking all the way, the fourth hermeneutical level included. Today, ―Chinese philosophers‖ of all stripes often resort to Western philosophies—logicrational analysis, linguistic analysis, post-modernism, pragmatism, phenomenology, medievalism, process philosophy—to engage in level-four analysis, assuming that such analysis suffices to bring out China. Sadly, no alien methodology can bring out indigenous methodology. This is why we need to ―let China be China.‖ Story-thinking is free, subtle, inevitable, and difficult to capture as living is; it takes patient sensitivity to perceive and bring out story-thinking in China. ―Let China be China!‖ is now a battle cry. We must not yield to the temptation of taking an easy way out, following a ready-made Western thinking-pattern.329

CAUTION THREE: COMPARISON IS NO DESCRIPTION Often ingenious sophisticated comparisons are made of Chinese thinkers, trends, ideas, etc., with the Western. Such comparisons are often so instructive that we tend to take

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Actually we have two more levels. Level Five considers inter-connections and interdependence of these four levels, as Wu did in ―Chinese Philosophy and Story-Thinking,‖ Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Summer 2005, pp. 217-234. Level Six is to pack-express such thinking in rhythmic rhyme, musical poetry, as is done in Chinese classics and as this book-essay tries. Would such increase of levels lead to an infinite regress in proliferation of levels? Yes, in the sense that all above can be taken as Level One, and we start all over. Still, such proliferation is not a vicious circle but cycles of delightful renewal. This is historical, selfrenovating life-pulse of the life-world. 328 See Kuang-ming Wu, ―‗Emperor Hun Tun‘: A Cultural Hermeneutic,‖ Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, September 2007, pp. 263-279. 329 Wu lamented aloud in his autobiography in Jay Goulding, ed., China-West Interculture: Toward the Philosophy of World Integration: Essays on Wu Kuang-ming’s Thinking, NY: Global Publishing, 2008, pp. 3-34. See the concluding section and Appendix.

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comparison itself as describing China. Still, comparison remains comparison; without extrapolation and interpretation, comparison is not China or the West.

CAUTION FOUR: THIS BOOK IS INTRODUCTION INTERCULTURAL This book is an ―introduction 序,‖ a quest, the beginning thread 端緒 that leads us to elucidate the order 次 (明先後) of one chapter after another, says330 Ssu-ma Ch‘ien 司馬遷, who may not have realized that he and his entire 史記 itself is such 序 to what were to emerge after him, who follows the convention since time immemorial. Besides, his ―introduction‖ ends 史記, to placate Oxonian Farrer, saying,331 Nothing justifies the writing of prefaces, except that they are in fact epilogues; one puts them at the beginning, as a concession to the common vice of reading books backward. The preface is written last, and so it may serve as a vehicle for those general observations one feels moved to make on the scope and nature of the work as a whole, after it is finished and done with. Fortunately, China has had no such ―common vice,‖ and lets ―epilogues‖ to inttroduce writings, e.g., 毛詩序, 尚書序, 春秋左傳序, 三都賦序, 思歸引序,332 莊子天下篇,

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淮南子要略,

說文解字後序,

公孫龍子名實論,

論衡對作篇自紀篇,

文心雕龍序志,

―Postface to a Catalog on a Collection of Bronze and Stone Inscriptions,‖ 蘭亭集序, 愚溪詩序,333 etc., as was the custom of ancient world to end the volume with its beginning.334 Ending with beginning packs the volume tight; we hope our volume serves epilogueintroduction, a ―brick thrown to draw the jade‖335 of many reflections on vibrant Chinese wisdom, by dialoguing (not just comparing) with the West. Few books on China situate it interculturally as this book does, but interculture is crucial for two reasons. One, culture is human mode of living and thinking, philosophy as thinking is part of culture, and so philosophy in the West and in China as its wisdom can and should inter-learn to inter-complement, inter-enrich. To forget this necessity, and take a philosophy in one culture as, alone, universally applicable, is cultural hubris to harm that philosophy and all others. Two, the world today of globalization is in need of intercultural awareness at the basic level of thinking-mode, wisdom and philosophy. In fact, world survival hangs on this basic 330

See 史記 in 卷一百三十太史公自序第七十, 臺灣: 中和市建宏出版社, 1995, V: 646-702. Austin Farrer, A Rebirth of Images: The Making of St. John’s Apocalypse, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986, p. 5. Revealingly, these words cap a book on the last biblical book, Revelation. 332 These five 序s are all collected in 昭明文選, 卷四五 (台北三民書局, 民90, III: 2155-2189). 333 The last four also appear in The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature, ed. Victor H. Mair, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994, pp. 562-572. The last two may not be at the end of poems; Preface to 昭明文選 seems to begin it also. 334 ―The final page of the manuscript; at the bottom comes the title (which normally concluded a book in antiquity): ‗The Gospel of Judas.‘‖ (Bart D. Ehrman, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot, Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 157) 331

335

「拋磚引玉」 is a saying since T‘ang on 常建‘s move. Anticipating 趙嘏‘s visit at 靈巖寺, 常建 posted the first half of a poem for 趙嘏 who came to complete it. (景德傳燈錄, 從諗禪師)

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intercultural learning, to counteract ethnocentrism unawares that damages all cultures. Now, we agree that wisdom and philosophy are thinking; we first consider it in the West, in three points. One: Kant‘s Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics (1783) cleans up rubbish speculative, and his ―critiques‖ are a ―prolegomena‖ to philosophy, so he is introduction to Western philosophy that is a series of footnotes to him, never beyond him, and his cleanup reenacts Socratic self-examination, so Kant made a ―footnote to Plato.‖ Heidegger‘s Introduction to Metaphysics induces quest beyond (meta-) what emerges (physics); its First Half is Being and Time, the Second never appeared, so he is introduction. Two: ―Philosophy‖ is thus always an introduction336 to philosophy, and must induce questioning quest, thinking at the root. In the West, philosophy quests beyond (meta-) all beings (physics), a metaphysics337 形上學. In China, philosophy-as-wisdom is meso-physics 形中學, a quest among things (meso-) of how beings emerge (physics) to go on, and how we should behave likewise. Chinese wisdom lives to quest for living at the root mode of livingthinking, explicitly (as Western philosophy) and implicitly.338 Three: What is Chinese philosophy-as-wisdom? Bergson and Ortega complained they said long before what Heidegger said but were ignored, victimized by their clarity as Heidegger‘s obscure complexity won him. What all three said is simple as living, expressing which demands complex skills. Now, China expresses living-simplicity with subtle sensitivity, not with skillful complexity or straight simplicity. Western philosophy complexly or straightly analyzes life to explicitly express it; Chinese wisdom sees things sensitively, thereby presents living in the flesh of story-thinking, as trees, birds, babies, etc., tell of themselves.339 Poets and novelists are sensitive to such live-presentations and describe them as they are, alive. So, Chinese wisdom thinks in living, curious as children are keen and alive, more literary than analytical; it is life-on-the-go, Homo Viator,340 humans ever on the way of selfpresenting, life-presenting. It is poetry of life. Poetic diction keeps moving to modify one another, to keep violating dictionary meanings. No set dictionary of moving poetic diction is possible. Poetry revolutionizes common words to deepen common sense, to express the common as uncommon, the prosaic as poetic. As living is unique, so a poem is judged solely on how apt it is to living; it compares with no other. Poetry is intensely autotelic; no logic-rational formula can be formulated for ―poetic structure‖ that is alive, mirroring ongoing life.

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―Doesn‘t Western philosophy elaborate on Kant?‖ Well, it is an elaboration as footnotes. Such is also Heidegger‘s ―introduction to metaphysics.‖ (Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics [1953], New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000) 337 Ibid., pp. 18-21. 338 ―Doesn‘t the West‘s pragmatism explicitly express life?‖ Well, it is the closest the West has gone to living, but the West‘s spirit of pragmatism is not quite China‘s pragmatic spirit. See Wu, On the “Logic” of Togetherness, Leiden: Brill, 1998, pp. 313-342. 339 Interestingly, in the West, philosophers as ―lovers of wisdom‖—―sophists‖—were admired and then rejected, and then their fame is revived occasionally. China reacts to such ―tricksters‖ ambiguously as well. They were rejected as unorthodox yet recorded as fascinating part of history of ideas, as in an all-time bestseller, Intrigues of the States 戰國策 and historical records of various sorts about them. 340 Gabriel Marcel, Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope, NY: Harper & Row, 1962. He was a musician dramatist—of life. How he differs from Chinese wisdom to inter-enrich is our future project.

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Poetry is patterned as music performing the drama of life to compose history. History is an ongoing drama in life-details never to be abridged, and cannot be abstracted into an abstract structure. Poetry is dynamically sequenced in life-drama of details. Poetry is history vivid and alive; history is literary, musically poetic. Now, how does philosophy present such life-drama? Philosophy ―loves wisdom,‖ in quest of being wise about living as the sages are. ―Chinese philosophy as wisdom‖ learns 學 from wise sages 哲, a 哲學 as 西周 said to 希哲學,341 i.e., learning how to live by learning from others who live well, from the wise ancients, dialoguing with Western philosophy from which China also learns how to be logic-rationally explicit and coherent. We soon see how the West could learn profitably from China. To begin, China can learn from the West this way. Wang Ch‘ung‘s magnum opus, 論衡 Balanced Critiques of Views,342 however impressive and comprehensive, does not specify what this balance—criterion—is, how it is applied, wherefrom it is obtained, and how wrongin-general those ―views‖ are, what their characteristic wrongs are, etc. Perhaps Wang did not say out all above explicitly, but showed them in his concrete execution of critiques, for how could he have helped showing them? Now, our job is to extrapolate all above desiderata from how he shows, and it takes sensitive labor to bring them out clearly, explicitly. Such bring-out requires Western training in logic-rational thinking. Thus all Chinese writings need Western sensitivity. Let‘s take a practical example, to see how we do well to deliberate logic-rationally. In praxis, we must stand apart a bit and watch them theoretically, not abstractly.343 The problem of world hunger cannot be resolved by [1] going into or through the miseries, Chinese way or Mother Teresa way. [2] Garrett Hardin‘s proposal, to stop feeding the hungry to let world population balance itself,344 is one solution—in fact, we all adopt it today—and a defeatist immoral approach.345 [3] However many Bill Gates‘s thrown in as charity would not fill this bottomless pit, worsening the problem (Hardin346). 341

From 周敤頤‘s (1017-1073) ―希求賢哲,‖ 西周 (1829-1897) coined ―希哲學,‖ later shortened to ―哲學.‖ 論衡, 臺北市三民書局, 民86, two volumes. 343 ―In praxis . . . [w]e must stand apart a bit and watch them theoretically, not abstractly.‖ This statement has three points. One, in practical deliberation, we must often stand apart from the situation, to get us out of blindness enmeshed in immediacies. Two, such theoretical—watchful—standpoint gives us a good purview to design practical solutions. Three, still, ―theoretical‖ is watchful attitude—as its etymology says—not abstraction to fly off into irrelevance. 344 George R. Lucas, Jr. and Thomas W. Ogletree, Lifeboat Ethics: The moral dilemmas of world hunger, NY: Harper & Row, 1976. Curiously, only USA raised this problem, worldwide and urgent, and even in USA, there has been no follow-up debate on this issue. Luckily, the worldwide problem of ―food for all‖ has been kep alive. The Nation, September 21, 2009, devoted the whole magazine to detailing various contributions on the world food problem (rightly accusing USA of being the culprit); it is in substantial agreement with what is said above. 345 Hardin‘s ―lifeboat ethics‖ is a variant of calculative consequentialism, of eugenics that justifies killing the inferior, the lower-value people, to conserve and improve on the overall quality of the whole human race. The dictator Hardin authorizes who should be killed. It is naked inhumanity, crime against humanity. Hardin capitulated to the death knell of world hunger with the death knell of let-die; his defeatism, unethical, brutal, is decorated ―lifeboat ethics,‖ as Hitlerian crime against humanity is decorated ―ethnic cleansing‖ (by Milosevic 1941-2006) or ―war against terrorism‖ (by Bush). Thus killing comes in many shapes—Hitler‘s, Hardin‘s. Now, here is another ―shape‖ of killing, ―birth control.‖ Do I risk approving of Catholicism? Perhaps, but just listen, and you‘ll see it is different in the context of world hunger. ―Birth control‖ is purposely omitted here as one of the solutions to world hunger, because [a] affluence (well-fed) would lead to less births, so ―birth control‖ puts the cart before the horse, and because [b] it smacks of Hardin‘s approach insinuated into the poor. ―Let die‖ is now ―cut birth,‖ ―the rich decide‖ is now ―the poor 342

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[4] We see two causes of world hunger, lack of foods and lack of system to distribute foods. Technological ―green revolution‖ can vastly produce edible plants fast, to answer to the first cause. Solution of the second cause, to reform sociopolitical system to distribute foods, is quite hard to implement due to sloth, inefficiency, and selfish unwillingness to pay for others with no profit to oneself. In fact, a major contributor to world hunger is the pervasive system rotten with the most profit hoarded to ourselves, in dealing with the poor, to push them to starvation. To turn around the world system of glut toward starving others is one major solution to world hunger, and of course glut shows selfishness ingrained in us, and turning it around is harder than moving mountains around. We are now surprised. A world problem today turns out to be our own chronic problem of selfish grabbing-hoarding Mencius used to hit hard at, to begin his whole book. No wonder, world hunger is well-nigh impossible to tackle, being a variant to our own ancient problem of other-excluding selfishness; we have been struggling against it for ages in vain. Our long detour into world problem hits home hard by Mencius-Classic. In any case, China must engage in such watchful survey typical of the West, however ineffective it has been so far. Mother Teresa‘s (and China‘s) one-to-one respect must join technical-social management; we must manage mass technical-social food-distribution with personal respect of the hungry individuals. The two words ―join‖ and ―with‖ express the heart of resolution of world hunger. Chinese inter-personalism must learn from Western management to tackle world problems. And then, China sees what it has that the West has not that the West may do well to adopt. Four examples suffice for now. First, the West excludes a ―nothing,‖ for thinking of ―nothing‖ makes it a something, to commit illogical senselessness.347 China takes ―nothing‖ as a negative force supporting being, and expresses it subtly, aware of the risk felt by the West. The Yin is first in Yin-Yang interaction. No-doing 無為 is ―do-not,‖ pushing no river, to strongly affirm by negation. The West‘s ―ouk on‖ is a blank; China‘s ―wu 無‖ moves sinuously in things and thinking. The ―nothing‖ is two different animals in two cultures. Secondly, Confucius cherished following nature as he sighed after ―loving virtue as loving sex,‖ twice (9/18, 15/13) in the brief Analects. Sex is what we are naturally, and performing morality delightfully as following sexual delight is an absence of unnatural effort at being socially decent. Here is ―nothing‖ in growing human. Thirdly, ―wording 言‖ is one of Three Incorruptibles 三不朽, virtue, feat, and words.348 Virtue we are born with to tread out body-living,349 and virtue stands 立德. The most versatile body-living is our achievement 立功 of what we are (virtue) and express it in writing (wording). Lastly, as birds are born to sing, so we are born to self-express 言; suppressing this decide.‖ If let-die is killing, is cut-birth far? If ―we decide the killing‖ is wrong, is ―we tell you to decide to cut-birth‖ right? 346 Hardin says that feeding the poor increases hungry mouths to feed, to worsen the situation; the more we feed the hungry, the more people would become hungry. Let-die differs from killing, he says, but to let die harms by omission, to kill harms by commission, and so the Hippocratic Oath explicitly identifies them. To let die kills. This logic-rationality is defeatist and immoral; as the previous note details. 347 Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, New Haven: CT, Yale University Press, 2000, p. 25. 348 立德, 立功, and 立言 in左傳, 襄公二十四年 (臺北市三民書局, 2002, p. 1084).

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innate urge kills humanity. Letting it out achieves it 立功 in living (virtue 立德), expressed in 立言 incorruptible. Three Incorruptibles are concretized this way. The root of humane-virtue 德 is filiality, the greatest of which is to have children, to make children is then an achievement 功; so sex, natal pleasure, establishes filiality-virtue and children-achievement. No wonder, Confucius lumps pleasure of virtue and sex, and follows desire to fulfill rules. Words 言 of classics350 tell us all this, that Three Incorruptibles are based on sex, our natal root. Lao Tzu said, ―Humans model on Earth, Earth on Heaven, Heaven on Tao, Tao on the as-is.‖ Ssu-ma Yüeh 司馬岳 said, ―Filial-parental [love] arises natural; loyal-filiality springs heavenly.‖351 Confucianism is thus Taoism socio-ethical and historical, for Confucian social ethics is based on naturalness self-so 自然. Fourthly, Chuang Tzu is fascinated with life as ―inter-with without inter-with, inter-do without inter-do.‖352 Life is a park; some people stroll, some jog, some picnic, while squirrels hop around, concerned unconcerned, making room to let us by. Birds sing high, selfabandoned, whether we listen or not, while we so viscerally feel them sing that China had bird-divination and entrusted feelings, yearnings, to them as the poets sing their singing. Inter-with without inter-with lets everyone emerge as they are. No Western philosopher has noted such innate command to become as we are, together with birds as they are. Chuang Tzu (20/36) beautifully put it, saying, ―入鳥不亂行, 入獸不亂群 enter birds, disturb no going; enter animals, disturb no grouping.‖ Failure to do so destroys us all, together. We have claimed above that these four examples show what Chinese wisdom has that Western philosophy lacks. What has enabled us to do was comparing Chinese way of thinking with Western; to count and ―argue‖ thus requires learning from the West, on its logical coherence, its logical sensitivity. To compare thus is to dialogue. We have just practiced an essential maxim of dialogue: Be sensitive to others different, let them be as they are, and learn from them; never be ―holier than thou,‖ never think they are just a part of us, never interpret them in our terms alone, i.e., never be a cultural chauvinist, but always respect cultural differences, i.e., different ways of thinking. This book aspires to help us go this twofold way, compare and inter-learn, to patiently perceives China. Cautions Five, Six, and Seven illustrate the harvest of such perception.

CAUTION FIVE: LITERATURE AS PHILOSOPHY-WISDOM Metaphysics and cosmology belong to literature in China, and literary themes abound in its wisdom. The pages below are naturally more literary than formal and technical. For example, Chuang Tzu‘s (2/33) ―Tao (road) walks and forms it‖ says ―a road walks out,‖ quite mundane and routine statement.

349

踐形 (Mencius 7A38). Analects 1/2, Mencius 4A26, Analects 9/18, 15/13, 2/4.. 351 Lao Tzu said so to conclude Tao Te Ching 25. 司馬岳 said, 「孝慈起於自然，忠孝發於天成」 in his 通关, 卷八十, quoted in 導讀, p. 7 in 文心雕龍, 臺北市三民書局, 民83. 352 Chuang Tzu 6/61, ―相與於無相與, 相為於無相為.‖ 350

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This saying connotes that meaning, the cosmic principle-Tao (Way), is not set and separate but walks ―two-leg walks 兩行‖ (2/40) into ―five walks 五行‖ by five thing-powers (metal, wood, water, fire, earth); each kills to breed the next till the fifth that kills and breed the first. Cosmology is cosmogony by common thing-powers internecine as inter-nascent, the Yin-Yang Way. This is actuality-dynamics beyond logic-rationality. Socrates logic-rationally denied ―seducing353 the youth,‖ while Confucius (9/11) heartily ―seduced [people] to good, step by step,‖ and lamented that no one delights in virtue as delighting in sex (9/18, 15/13). Literary Confucius is no logic-rational Socrates. Chuang Tzu said (14/10), ―Loving parents forgets them (as we self-forget),‖ to stab common sense in the back. They are all deep, provocative and ―illogical,‖ to awaken us to the literary as the logical, punchy, alive. The literary is thus compact, stabbing, open-ended, self-recursive,354 multi-layered, and com-plex,355 to mirror actuality as such, cosmic and personal. The literary envelops the logical while the logical develops the literary later, retrospectively, as the literary requires logical sensitivity to unpack, punchy. The literary tells stories that are history, and so literature and history are one. History is life-stories356 thought-full, so Chinese wisdom is alive in the unity of literature and history. The pages that follow also think story-way to present Chinese wisdom as literary-alive through history.

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CAUTION SIX: LOGIC, SYSTEM No word ―logic‖ exists in China, but logic in its original sense of ―to gather,‖ to rhymein-meaning to let things stand-together systematically,357 as ―collection‖ of miscellanies, in a journal jotting down what comes to mind, in daily living, as it happens—to make dotpragmatics, ongoing system-pragmatics as posterity continues to comment on the classical wisdom,358 as system in China in time, as history in daily living. Logic of life is naturally exhibited in China. 353

―Seducing‖ (diaphtheíronta, Apology, 24b9) is usually translated as ―corrupting.‖. Analytical computer expert Douglas R. Hofstadter has self-recursive reflections on the self, but O how forbiddingly contorted he is! See Gödel, Escher, Bach (NY: Random House, 1979), The Mind’s I (with Daniel C. Dennett, NY: Basic Books, 1981), and I am a Strange Loop (NY: Basic Books, 2007). China goes another self-recursive way, quite natural, self-ed, and cosmic. 355 ―Many-layered‖ is synonymous with ―com-plex‖ that implicates ―complex,‖ to allude to ―envelopment‖ interinvolving various concrete senses, elements, matters and layers. ―Many-layered wording 重言‖ is ―weighted‖ with all these implications and connotations, ever opalescent with actuality. If all this is not ―systematic,‖ nothing is. 356 History is story-full, factual, likely, unlikely, all parts of actual ongoing. 357 The Western word ―system‖ does not exist in China, either, but its original sense of ―sym-histemi, standtogether‖ exists in [a] gathering-論, rhyming in sense and sound with 倫 and 輪, an interpersonal revolving togetherness, and in [b] standing-立 three incorruptibles 三不朽 firmly in world history, standing virtue, feats, and words together. ―System‖ is translatable as 系統, ―serial comprehension,‖ reminiscent of 道紀 or道統, connoting ―orthodox tradition,‖ system-in-time. ―Sym-bol,‖ word-and-sense ―thrown together‖ to make sense, is at work here. 354

358

Chu Hsi‘s 近思錄 can be seen as a commentary on ―博學而篤志, 切問而近思, 仁在共中矣‖ in The Analects 19/6. Wang Yang-ming‘s 傳習錄 can be seen as a commentary ―吾日三省吾身 . . . 傳不習乎‖ in The

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So, China‘s ―logic‖ is a gathering, networking natural. The word ―故‖ is logical ―therefore‖ due to actual ―thus,‖ what ―comes‖ to be, ―in short,‖ ―to make a long story short.‖ Logic is alive in齊 and 物論 of Chuang Tzu‘s ―齊物論,‖ 論 and 衡 of Wang Ch‘ung‘s 論衡, and ―好辯‖ in 孟子, 墨辯, 名家; it is goblet wording 卮言, layered wording 重言, and lodged wording 寓言, wording 言 at work in life. China has ―philosophy‖ as 希求賢哲 in學問, studying wide, asking close 博學切問.359

CAUTION SEVEN: “KNOWLEDGE” IN CHINA

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In China, ―knowledge 知‖ is not code conveying information but personal 視 (viewing), 觀 (observing) and 察 (perceiving), watching the human wherewith 視共所以, observing personal wherefrom 觀共所由, and perceiving their wherein 察共所安 (Confucius 2/10). ―Thinking 思‖ is not cogitation, abstract, theoretical, and systematic,360 but thinking-on in the personal heart-of-being 心 intending, observing, past-remembering and future-projecting; Arthur Waley also noted so.361 The ―heart心‖ is personal core throbbing logically, sensibly; ―emotion‖ e-motes being, moving-out to heartily ex-press oneself.362 ―Thing 物‖ is something precious as an ox 牛, cut out of ambiguity with the knife 刀 of naming consciousness363; ―logical treatises‖ (墨辯) have ―horses and oxen 牛馬‖ as ―things, items.‖ Hsün Tzu‘s 荀子 ―正名篇‖ insists, surprisingly, that naming lets things appear.364

Analects 1/4 Interestingly, Chu the traditionalist selects personal ―近思‖ while personal Wang‘s students select traditional ―傳習‖ as titles to their respective books. 359 Analects 19/6. 360 Martin Heidegger has a handy description of what ―thinking‖ is in the West. ―Here, to think means to devise this and that, to plan, . . . to set one‘s sights on it. ‗To think evil‘ means to intend evil . . . [To think is] not to forget something . . . memory . . . To think something up [is] to imagine it. . . . ‗I think it is turning out all right‘ [means] that‘s the way it seems to me . . . I am of this opinion . . . I think it over [means I] deliberate. . . [All this is] opposed to animals.‖ (Introduction to Metaphysics, Yale University Press, 2000, p. 125) 361

On 思 see 說文解字詁林, 臺北市鼎文書局, 民72, 8:1091-1094 and Arthur Waley, The Analects of Confucius, NY: Random House, reprint of 1938, pp. 44-46. ―思 to think-on‖ is the modus operandi of ―知 to know,‖ to be explained soon. 362 ―E-motion‖ echoes ―attunement‖ (Heidegger). F. S. C. Northrop expressed a Western impression, saying, Orientals are intuitive, empirical, aesthetic, continuous, and religious, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities, Cleveland: World, 1969, p. 100. 363 An extra-line on ―勿‖ to ―刀‖ supposedly portrays blood-stain. 364 It is shown by Wu‘s dramatic example in On Chinese Body Thinking, Leiden: Brill, 1997, pp. 35-37. This intuition was traced by Sartre‘s Being and Nothingness, NY: Philosophical Library, 1943; nothingconsciousness knifes things out of gluey-being. Western ―thing‖ was originally ―meeting to discuss common concern,‖ ―assembly, council . . . for judgment and transaction of business, lawsuit, affairs, matters, . . . case in law,‖ etc. See Oxford English Dictionary, 2001, XVII: 941.

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CAUTION EIGHT: DIALECTICAL COMPARISON ―Comparison‖ is revealing if properly perceived and interpreted. Heidegger‘s ―forgetfulness of being‖ is analysis that departs from what/how it is as it is; ―revealment of being‖ returns to it, yet he does not depart from the West‘s analysis, to turn impossibly complex. What happened? Well, the ―it‖ in ―what/how it is‖ is unspeakably simple, speech is analytically complex, and simplicity is beyond complexity. To say the un-say-able falls away from the un-say-able into impossible complexity; ―Tao can tao, not always-Tao.‖ Bergson did express ―it‖ in ―flow,‖ Ortega in ―journalism,‖ and both appear ―vague.‖ Again, ―Tao can tao, not alwaysTao‖; the West misses Tao the ―it‖ the simple. This ―missing,‖ however, has an unexpected harvest. Let us turn our look at Japan. In his Foreword to Nishida Tetsugaku,365 an exposition of Nishida‘s 西田幾太郎 philosophy by his brilliant student (Takayama Iwao), Nishida said that he is a ―miner‖ too busy digging out raw precious ore-stones, to refine, arrange, and exhibit them, and thanked Takayama for doing so. His saying so makes us think, on three counts. One, the miner‘s struggle is itself the ―concrete reality 兲體的實在,‖ alive and lived, that Nishida wants to capture. Neatly systematizing 體系化 such struggle kills the messy struggle of the living miner—concrete reality already there. Tao tao-ed loses Tao. Two, still, Nishida‘s struggle is struggle toward its own systematization, as he admits, and a struggle toward something assumes its distance from that something, and so the systematizing clashes with the struggle itself and negates it. Nishida continued to the bitter end such self-defeating struggle. Tao tao-ed loses it. Three, now, here is an unexpected harvest. Both Takayama and Nishida persisted in ―taoing,‖ to end up negating Tao. This negation is crucial; it is crucial to gaze at this ―not‖ of ―not always-Tao‖ so as to accept their self-defeat as it is; to accept is to admit, and at this moment of admission the true always-Tao appears. As soon as we admit, ―To claim ‗I‘m normal‘ we turn abnormal,‖ we let our being normal appear. Likewise, as soon as we say, ―Tao can tao, not always-Tao,‖ we realize the Tao of the normal-natural. This must be part of Nishida‘s ―dialectic of absolute negation 絕對否定の辯證法.‖ This is the method of af-firming by negating, accepting in rejection, as good teacher often does; ―spare the rod, spoil the child.‖ The positive entwines the negative, the one con-firming to con-form the other. Did Takayama or Nishida realize this entwining, though? ―Alive‖ is such an elusive inexpressible. So, to present Chinese wisdom alive inevitably involves a cultural dialectic of comparison, to realize the ineffability. China stands firm against their logicism, to benefit from it, taking care lest the comparison frames China in Western frame, and our caution derives from learning the Western frame; such tight-rope performance! But then, we must begin at the beginning. We must go deep into what ―knowing‖ means in China that differs so much from Western ―knowing.‖ We now forget the West for a while, and just look into China.

365

高山岩男著, 西田哲學, 東京岩波書店, 昭和十年.

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Chapter 14

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“KNOWING” IN CHINA ―Knowing 知‖ is central in wisdom philosophical. ―心徹為知, 知徹為德,‖ says Chuang Tzu (26/38); heart-penetration 心徹 is 知, mouth-expressing (口) the arrow-targeted 矢, and so 知 penetrated is personal sagacity, virtue 德.366 Western ―knowing‖ is to know by the senses to recognize, to identify, not personal.367 But senses are personal, so to know is human action displaying the person. Confucius says, ―To take known as known, not-known as notknown, this is to know.‖368 We must understand him. Before even considering Confucius‘ saying, we must impress ourselves with its existential weight by contrasting with Socrates‘ superficially similar pronouncement, to wit, we should never pretend to know, that unexamined life is not worth living. Confucius and Socrates share, indeed, an avid affirmation of lived authenticity in ―knowing.‖ Closer examination, however, exhibits their differences. To begin, Socrates alerts us against slippage down to knowledge-pretension; his examination is a cognitive warning, nothing positive. In contrast, Confucius is quite robust in comprehensively covering all knowing acts, saying, ―Taking known as known, taking unknown as unknown, this is to know.‖ Confucius‘ coverage is life-comprehensive, inclusive of self-examination. Here, selfexamination is a daily exercise, a total self-engagement interpersonal, as his student Tseng Tzu confessed, ―I daily examine my self three ways. Was I untrue 忠 in engaging with people? Did I not stand-by-my-words 信 in dealing with friends? Did I not learn-and-practice 習 what I was-transmitted-from-teacher 傳?‖369 Such is ―education.‖ Education is not mere information-transmission but ―warming-up the old to know the new,‖ as my teacher does.370 To learn and practice 習 is a forwarding time-dynamics of history. The past creativity 作 creates tradition 傳統 to transmit 傳遞 via exposition 述371 to 366

Akiyasu Todo, Etymological Dictionary of Chinese Characters, 藤堂朊保著, 漢字語源辭关, 東京學燈社, 1965, pp. 466-467. He connected 知 to 聖; he could have easily connected 知 to 德. 367 This is a composite of ―to know by the senses‖ (The Oxford English Dictionary, 2001, VIII: 512) with ―to recognize, identify‖ (The New Oxford American Dictionary, 2001, p. 943). 368 ―知之為知之, 不知為不知, 是知也.‖ (Analects 2/17) 369 Analects 1/4, 「吾日三省吾身： 與人謀而不忠乎？ 與朊友交而不信乎？ 傳不習乎？」 370 371

Analects 2/11, 「溫故而知新，可以為師矣。」 Confucius 述而不作 (7/1) to let 作; he 述而不作而使作.

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educe our life-praxis 傳習, so as to create 作 and transmit 傳代 as tradition. Such is history as education. Thus it is literally true that education is past shadow that follows the shape-now,372 for our teacher yesterday shadows us forth today as a new shape into tomorrow. Education is eduction, past creativity educing today‘s latent creativity. Education373 thus forms the creative tradition of history. Confucius‘ ―knowing‖ is such life-engagement interpersonal interhistorical. We are now ready for Confucius‘ saying. PREPARE: His words have two key terms, wei (to take as, 為) and chih (to know, 知). First, he expressed China intent on knowing as an act-of-為, ―to take to be, consider, allow‖ (Legge), ―recognize‖ (Waley), or even ―say‖ (Lau); Lao Tzu put it (71) as ―Knowing notknow, supreme; not-know [as] known, diseased知不知, 上. 不知知, 病.‖ Second, Chinese ―knowing 知‖ arrow-hits (at the bull‘s eye) 矢, mouth-expressed (口), as we inter-contact 交接 things from outside; knowing is an external thrust,374 resulting from ―things come into contact 接‖ with us, inter-contacting 交接 things into families 家, 匹偶 and friends, ―confidant-consociate or soul-mate 知交.‖ Thus our personal faces 面, 形容 and complexions 顏色 are said to let-see 見, i.e., appear 現, as ―known 知.‖375 The human ―face‖ shows knowing as interpersonal meeting, as our conscious activity toward external matters that come, personal, interpersonal, and impersonal,376 all expressed in our face as facing. Importantly, each ordinary face expresses a peculiar feature of life, which bears an infinite variety of depictions. No face-in-general exists, nor is there a single type of any single 372

Chuang Tzu says, 「大人之教，若形之於影，聲之於響，有問而應之。」(11/63-64) Curiously China has Filiality Classic 孝經 but no education classic 師經 or history classic 史經 or humanity classic 仁經. China has 三字經, 幼學瓊林, 格言聯璧 to facilitate education, countless histories and two historiographies (史通, 文史通義) to transmit history, and almost every page of writings is perfumed with humanity 仁. Education, history and humanity are too pervasive to form classics, perhaps. 374 The baby of ―knowing as thrust-out‖ was thrown out with the dirty water of ―abstract cognition‖ by AmesRosemont‘s knowledge-as-realization, an overcorrection (The Analects of Confucius, NY: Ballantine Books, 1998, p. 55). Knowing does carry praxis, as stressed by Wang Yang-ming‘s ―unity of knowledge and action 知行合一,‖ but Wang is revolutionary precisely because knowing has an inherent projective thrust out, not abstractive cognition. Nor is knowledge‘s praxis-feature subjective or objective but expresses the subject‘s inter-contact 交接 with outside; Ames-Rosemont‘s ―realization‖ misses all this. 375 ―物至而知與之接,‖ ―相交接曰知, 因而與人相交接亦謂之知故有知交之語, 因而相匹偶亦謂之知,‖ etc.

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373

―外見於形容, 知於顏色 . . . 知猶見地, 皆謂見於面也.‖ 說文解字詁林正補合編, 臺北鼎文書局, 民國七十二年, 5-215. 376 All these Chinese implications of ―knowing‖ are quite distinct from those of Greek ―knowledge.‖ Greek knowing is literally an in-sight into the reality underlying mere appearances, visual observation-inspection from outside to verify the ―truth‖—what is disclosed as real—away from perception and opinion. See Rudolf Bultmann‘s ―ginosko, etc.,‖ in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel, 1933, Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1964, etc., I: 689-719. Dr. David Schenker the classicist said, ―Eidenai and eidos (eidea) are closely related. The present tense verb form eido is posited (doesn‘t exist in usage, we have, replaced by the verb horao). The verb does exist in other tenses, and means ‗see,‘ or else, in the perfect tense (oida), ‗know.‘ And eidea are the things seen, from the same root, with many different shades of meaning.‖ All Western cognitive words express this external visualism. E.g., ―theorem‖ and ―theory‖ are from ―theorein, look at‖; ―contemplate‖ is from ―contemplari, to survey, observe, behold‖ from ―templum, place for observation‖; ―consider‖ is from ―considerare, to look at closely, examine‖; and ―meditation‖ is from ―meditare, to think about, from a base meaning measure.‖ (Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition, 1998, and The New Oxford American Dictionary, 2001). The West inspects to know from outside; China meets to know, personally involved.

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ordinary face. Being alive is such a mystery, bottomless, of the simple and common faces. Chinese wisdom keeps depicting ordinary human faces alive, showing how and what it means to be alive human, telling us how not to be inhuman by depicting cruelty in twisted faces of sorrow in history tragic. In sum, knowing (知) expresses 口 (as mouth) the arrow (矢) of attention (shooting out) to meet the other, to target-attend (為) knowns as known. Others-beyond meeting me are my self377 and my milieu such as divine, destiny, life-and-death; they are beyond meeting (知), beyond expressing 口(as mouth), and so unknown (不知). I can meet-know my self by meeting others meeting me, and I silence myself on my milieu beyond meeting. Such is to target-attend (為) unknowns as unknown, to complete knowing (是知也). Thus knowing others, not-knowing self and milieu, this knowing-both is to ―know.‖ To ―know‖ is to attend-meet the others such as things, friends, my self (known as meeting othermeeting-me), my milieu (silently known-as-unknown), and history (process of so knowing). EXPLAIN: We now can look into the Confucius‘ saying concerned, in two aspects, known taken-as known, unknown taken-as unknown.378 Explanations follow in five points: One, outward-known as known, Two, inner self-not-known as not-known, Three, mutual engagement of both as human life, and Four, inner unknown-as-unknown pushing forward outer known-as-known, and we see finally Five, cosmic-existential unity of known and unknown, and ―this‖ unity is to ―know.‖

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ONE: OUTWARD-KNOWN AS KNOWN ―Knowing‖ is an arrow-awareness hitting at the sense of things that come, an act of projection toward matters outside. So, the known is often outside seen and heard, and a person of wide knowledge is one widely seen and heard 見聞廣博; ―to take known as known‖ urges me to check what I met and know. Self-knowledge is also made by meeting the other. ―To know oneself‖ is to meet the self as another; the Chinese phrase, ―known-self 知己‖ is my bosom friend, my intimate other who knows-me. I can see my face, myself, only as reflected in the other, a friend, my knowing other. My physiology is part of my physiognomy, and I must go see a medical doctor to adjust my physiology. So, self-knowledge is other-knowledge that confirms-affirms my self-knowledge, ―to take known as 為 known‖ (Confucius).

377

I cannot attend attending or meet meeting, and I am attending-meeting, which is to know, and so I am an unknown to me. My self systematically eludes me, as Hume and Gilbert Ryle also noted. See Ryle, The Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson & Co., 1949, ―The Systematic Elusiveness of ‗I‘,‖ pp. 195-198. 378 ―You are just doing Confucius‘ first two sets, ‗know knowns‘ and ‗know unknowns.‘ What about the final ‗know‘?‖ We could say that Confucius‘ last ―know‖ acknowledges knowns and unknowns, accepts each category in its own terms, and knows their differences, and could add that all ―acknowledging,‖ ―accepting,‖ and ―knowing the differences‖ mean consciousness-arrow targeting its objects of knowing, as we ―掛心, hang our heart onto‖ something we think on. Although Points Three and Five above touch as much, Confucius would not go such an analytical route, and what is ―said‖ here on the final ―know‖ adds nothing to five explanations of knowing knowns and unknowns. The two sets of ―know‖ allude to the final ―know‖ as Lao Tzu‘s final ―Tao‖ is merely indicated (not said) by the two expressed sets of ―Tao,‖ in the statement, ―Tao can Tao, not always Tao.‖

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TWO: INNER SELF-NOT-KNOWN AS NOT-KNOWN ―What about self-knowledge itself Socrates stressed?‖ Sadly, as said above, selfknowledge is knowledge of self-not-known, and must go a circuitous negative route. I must deny ―taking not-known as known,‖ to oppose pretension to knowledge, to self-knowledge. Socrates did so to claim ignorance, and was divinely proclaimed ―the wisest of men,‖ a man self-knowing fullest. It is radical self-honesty in the integrity of ignorance, in self-recursive negation.

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THREE: MUTUAL ENGAGEMENT OF BOTH AS HUMAN LIVING All above has cash-value. ―Know them, know us, 100 wars, no risk‖ (Sun Tzu379); selfknowledge and other-knowledge combined in engagement make a winning strategy as sociopolitical ―humane rightness 仁義,‖ and commercial ethics where everyone wins. Mutual engagement obtains even in war; victory is vanquishing enmity into hearty mutuality; ―known taken as known‖ describes self-other mutuality; ―not-known taken as notknown‖ describes self-self mutuality, two ingredients of inter-personalism. After saying on ―known‖ and ―not-known,‖ Confucius claimed that the twofold mutuality (2/17) ensures employment (2/18): Listen widely 多聞, avoid the iffy 闕疑, speak warily 慎言 on the rest, then fewer misses; look widely 多見, avoid the chancy 闕殆, act warily 慎行 on the rest, then fewer regrets. Speak fewer misses, act fewer regrets, riches are here. To listen-look widely—to study extensively380—ensures the known being known, to avoid and caution ensure the not-known being not-known, and fewer misses and regrets result, to gain riches. All this describes the result of wide hear-looking and wary avoiding as the final ―knowing.‖ Beautifully balanced, comprehensively rhymed, this saying, 2/18, concretizes 2/17 into the blueprint for solid rich harvest in life. ―Fools rush in where angels fear to tread‖ (Pope); in contrast, China says, ―Heaven loves fools,‖381 and angels often suffer from their cleveress. Even Confucius (5/20) said ―thinking twice is enough‖ to someone thinking three times too much thinking does little. China loves fools perhaps because they may not just jump in but cut iffy chances to act with few worries, thus have fewer misses, and fools‘ paradise follows. Thus riches follow by joining fools‘ confidence (know) to angels‘ caution (not-know). Affirming both known and not-known, self-recursive authenticity via self-check of knowing-outside and self-not-known, composes ―knowing.‖ This it is that is to widely study

379

―故曰, 知彼知己, 百戰不殆‖ concludes Sun Tzu‘s Chapter Three, ―Scheming for Attack,‖ 孫子, 謀攻. Its beginning wisely said, to have ―100 wars, 100 wins‖ is not the best of best; ―no war, and subdue people‘s soldiers‖ is the best of best. (百戰百勝, 非善之善者也. 不戰而屈人之兰, 善之善者也.) 380 Chichung Huang said, ―In Lun Yu, sometimes ‗to hear‘ and ‗to see‘ both carry the force of ‗to learn.‘‖ (The Analects of Confucius, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 56) 381 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (1711), 3.l.65. The Chinese saying is a common folk wisdom.

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學 with devoted intention (know) and tenaciously to ask 問 with close attention (not-know); true humanness is here (19/6)382 with true ―scholarship 學問.‖383 To study 學 is to increase knowledge in authenticity, by questing for contents as we question 問 and check on what is known. This is what it means ―to take the known as known, the not-known as not-known; this is to know.‖ We have just understood what ―this is to know‖ means that clinches the twin quests.

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FOUR: INNER UNKNOWN-AS-UNKNOWN PUSHING FORWARD OUTER KNOWN-AS-KNOWN The not-known covers what we do not know, cannot know, and should not know, to push ―knowing‖ forward. We must consider the dynamic ―not-known‖ surprisingly various. Obviously, Confucius must not mean ―taking not-known as not-known‖ to be ―ignorance is bliss,‖ others’ judgment (or the self-later as self‘s other). He must mean a more complex sort of ―know,‖ i.e., we know the not-known and honestly admit, knowingly, our not-known to be not-known, instead of pretending to know what we do not know. Such not-known can be the not-yet known, yet to know soon, and also the neverknown, and should-never-be-known. The not-yet known pushes our knowledge, and keeps us humble on our status now. Once known, the specific not-known vanishes, and other unknowns keep popping up, so, the notyet known pushes our knowing. The never-known is awe that keeps the Absolute Other forever as other-than-our-known. Here the not-known stays not-known forever as divine, holy, and must not be known anywhere any time, keeping Confucius silent (5/13, 11/12, cf. 3/11, 17/18) on the heavenly, the divine, the Tao, the destiny, life and death. At the ripe old age of 70, he said, ―At fifty, I knew destiny‖ (2/4) and even said, ―Not knowing destiny, [we have] nothing with which to-behave-as princely person.‖ (20/3)384 Still, he said nothing about destiny. We must know it without words, then. We are reminded of his joy so overwhelming as ―not to know the old about to come‖ (7/19). To say ―not know‖ shows ―knowing the unknown,‖ a reciprocal of ―not say and know.‖ To say not to know (the onset of aging) echoes ―not saying knowledge (of destiny).‖ His silence and even denial to know such matters-beyond, reverently convinced on their necessity, bespeaks profound piety, denying usual interpretation that he is a flat pragmatic bore. Such interpretation is itself flatly mundane, out of touch with the depth of reverent silence. This awe breeds respect of the human other, the source of our etiquette, social ―ritual 禮.‖ Religious awe and personal respect inter-penetrate to inter-enhance to make up Confucianism

382

―博學而篤志, 切問而近思, 仁在共中矣.‖ This saying (19/6) is such a balanced beauty! 篤志 is focused intentionality, the authenticity of a person, that acts out 博學, 切問, and 近思. No wonder this saying

383

enamored 朱熹 so much that he borrowed 近思 to entitle his 近思錄.

Interestingly, ―scholarship‖ is student-ship, to practice studying, and jibes with ―學問,‖ to study and ask. 384 Significantly, the latter saying (20/3) is placed at the end of the entire Analects. Chinese Wisdom Alive : Vignettes of Life-Thinking, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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alive, decent, and respectful. Thus, ―to take the not-known as not-known‖ has a socio-ethical undertone and harvest. Keeping the unknown not known also applies to self-knowledge, taking myself as beyond my knowing. The fact that I cannot know my own future, such as my own death, indicates my self-ignorance. Uncle Border-Fortress 塞翁 is honest about this, always saddling on the border of present and future, mumbling, ―How could I know this would not make 為 its opposite?‖ He is thus ever prepared for the not-known that keeps coming. Thus, ―[take-]as 為‖ in ―taking not-known as not-known‖ has three possible meanings. One, this event may make-為 its opposite for us to identify-為 it as such—為 then has two implications of ―making‖ and ―identifying.‖ Two, 為 can mean to identify the known as known, the not-known as not-known. Three, 為 can mean, in the not-known, letting the bygone be bygone, and leaving things not-known as my not-known. Now here is another threefold way of classifying 為 in not-known. One, 為 leaves out 闕, to leave blank as blank, ―to leave-out the dubious, to leave-out the risky‖ (Confucius 2/18), as if a copier leaves blank where in doubt (15/25), beyond knowing. Two, 為 is being cautious 慎 in words and deeds (2/18) in gray areas. Three, 為 admits I do not know what I do not know, Socrates‘ favorite. This final self-admission differs—nor intended by Confucius—from me unaware of what I do not know. Others, knowing my not-knowing, may want to keep it that way, for my good and/or other‘s. In any case, in such ways, 為 in the not-known pushes knowing forward, even knowing as unknown what we should not know.

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FIVE: COSMIC-EXISTENTIAL UNITY OF KNOWN AND UNKNOWN Now, amazingly, known and not-known affirmed silently understood join in silence, for Confucius. We must now see how it goes. All knowledge, known and not-known, joins into one Tao that shows how the two join. Chuang Tzu describes it this way (22/43-47). Mr. Easturb asked Chuang Tzu, ―So-called Tao, where is [it]?‖ Chuang Tzu said, ―Nowhere non-existent 無所不在.‖ Easturb said, ―Be specific, so I know.‖ ―It-is-in 在 ants.‖ ―What? So low?‖ ―It-is-in weeds.‖ ―What? Still lower?‖ ―It-is-in [broken] shards.‖ ―What! Even worse!‖ ―It-is-in shit-piss.‖ Mr. Easturb did not talk-back. Chuang Tzu said, ―Your question, Sir, does not touch the point. Market-inspector asked market-manager to step-assess hogs; the lower-down, the fatter. But you must not try—there is no thing that escapes its presence. Such is ultimate Tao; great words are also such. ‗All-round 周,‘ ‗all-over 遍,‘ ‗allinclusive 咸,‘ these three differ in name, same in reality, pointing to One.‖ This remarkable passage has many surprising points, noteworthy, such as the following five. First, the Tao looked up to, also called ―God,‖ is what is nowhere nonexistent 無所不在, yet, second, of all things, Chuang Tzu compares such exalted Tao to a hog, 狶, big pig 豕, most deliciously nutritious and essential food at home yet least respected possession in the household roofed-over-pig 家. Thirdly, we realize how God the Tao is nowhere nonexistent, by looking not up but at downside, as we press down-under the pig to show its richest part, for pig-inspector. Concrete

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―down‖ and ―richer‖ entwine; the further down, the richer. Going down we attend the nittygritty of the concrete, to find richer fuller implications; it is what ―presence nowhere nonexistent‖ means. Ubiquitous presence explicates Tao-God also in life‘s downside evil and pain; God is mother cuddling her baby, cooing over him in pain, waiting on him hand and foot. Press lower down our life in evil in pain, and we also gain fatter riches from the pig of ourselves in Tao. That has happened to Haydn, John Nash, Ssu-ma Ch‘ien, and Confucius who wailed (11/9), ―Oh Heaven is killing me! It is killing me!‖385 China is nourished with the history of pain to yield great people, harvested riches beyond measure, by the unknown taken-as 為 unknown. ―How could this not make 為 its opposite?‖ asks Uncle Border-Fort, to ever chant with Lao Tzu, ―O woe, where weal leans! O weal, where woe lies!‖386 Flow with Tao of traffic of economics, of routines (Mencius 7A13) allover, nowhere not existing, while we go along, happily unemployed and neglected as Confucius, even happily maimed, in Paradise Now, said Chuang Tzu 3/12-13. This ubiquity of powerful presence is called ―love.‖ Huai Nan Tzu, Han Yü, and Liu Hsieh call it ―yüan Tao 原道,‖ Tao initiating myriad things, originating and birthing them; Chu Hsi and Lü Tzu-ch‘ien call it ―Tao t‘i 道體,‖387 Tao embodying myriad things, completing them. Thus China resolves the Christian conundrum of all-powerful all-loving God coexisting with evil his denial. Fourth, Tao is thus the pig 豕 at our home 家 to maintain and nourish it. Such Taoubiquity is what the West calls ―universal‖ that in China inter-penetrates myriad particulars, to be their inter-presence, what Ch‘eng I 程頤 calls ―Li is one, shared diversely 理一分殊.‖ Such inter-active ―inter-‖ is being ―alive.‖ Tao-universal is inter-versal alive through myriad things. Fifth, this ―active, nowhere-nonexistent‖ is beyond us to understand. How could what we look up to, Tao of all-power and all-breathing, embracing fully, and comprehending the richest, precisely at the lowest down, even at evil and pain, to nourish us there as pigs at home do? But this is what ―being alive‖ means at the root. It is life. ALIVE: Living is a clear lake, bottom-visible and bottomless; we live, exist, as its part. ―Being alive‖ is us, we are aware of being ―we,‖ so we know what to ―be alive‖ is, yet ―being alive‖ this way is beyond us; we are we and we are beyond us. To admit and affirm all this is to ―take known as known, take not-known as not-known.‖ Here known and not-known join, and to know this joint is to really ―know.‖ To know such is to know being alive; Chinese wisdom, in the joint-know, is thus alive. Still, to say, known as known, unknown as known, this is to know, is incomplete until we add the ―knowing of not-knowing‖ in a different sense as Chuang Tzu proposed. He said so everywhere, as Emperor Hun Tun, who ―treated two ocean-emperors very well.‖ They 385

This wailing came of Confucius as dearly beloved student Yen Hui died, despite Hui assuring he would not dare die before Confucius (who was once mortally threatened, 11/21). Mencius (6B15) put a dramatic positive spin to such a situation. See D. C. Lau, Mencius, Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1984, pp. 261-262, and David Hinton, Mencius, NY: Counterpoint, 1998, pp. 230-231. 386 Our 塞翁 keeps mumbling, ―此何遽不能為福乎?‖ then ――此何遽不能為禍乎?‖ (淮南子, ―人間,‖ 臺北三民書局, 民86, p. 965), to express what Tao Te Ching says (58), ―禍兮福之所倚, 福兮禍之所伏.‖ 387 See 韓愈‘s famous essay ―原道‖ (in 古文觀止, 高雄麗文文化公司, 1994, p. 610). ―原道‖ is Chapter One of

淮南子 and of 劉勰‘s 文心雕龍. ―道體‖ is the title of Chapter One in 朱熹 and 呂祖謙‘s 近思錄. Chinese Wisdom Alive : Vignettes of Life-Thinking, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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gratefully noted that Hun Tun had no seven holes to sense and breathe, so dug one hole a day to repay his kindness. After seven days, Hun Tun died. To say ―Hun Tun died‖ conveys his death today, alive, to clearly include the death of his ambiguity by clarity-digging. It amounts to the death of clarity of two emperors, for their gratitude caused the death (due to their wish to repay kindness) of ambiguity that ―treated them very well,‖ as the land-mist enlivening their turbulent oceans.. Hun Tun‘s death thus shows Hun Tun treating his own death well, for them. To tell a story of how ―Hun Tun died‖ is to convey its complex situation as above. This is to know beyond the know-not-know distinction, for we now know that Hun Tun was killed by the two emperors knowing that he had no (seven holes of) knowing, and wanted to let him have knowing, thereby killed his not-knowing. This our last ―knowing‖ is the knowing of notknowing, toward Confucius‘ ―not-know as not-know—this is to know,‖ for being human is to know this complex strange ubiquitous Way. ―Isn‘t all this spooky? How does ‗alive‘ appear concretely?‖ OK, let us walk to a pond. Yellow leaves are strewn, lightly, over soft dark ripples of autumn; they float bobbing up and down, flying without wings,388 flowing and going somewhere, nowhere. Late in morning, lazy, but how exquisite it is here! No one dares say one is unfamiliar here, yet no one dares say one knows it all389; known and unknown are exquisitely joined. We walk on. Leaves, branches, and trees, all cut themselves figures against the blue Tennessee sky. They soar high up, flying up there without flying, without wings, silently talking to us, so clear, alive. Strangely, a familiar poem comes to haunt. ―Pond, spring grass, I-dream un-awoke; on the steps, leaves already fall autumn.‖390 Seasons shift with trees and leaves whispering in silence, flying scattered without wings. We are in seasons to shift with leaves unawares, in woe, in weal. Here it is, Existenz, ethics, epistemology, cosmology, metaphysics, and pain, all rolled into one. This is Chinese wisdom alive. Tear them up into separate fields to study separately, and living Hun Tun is killed in abstraction.

CONCLUDE We have pondered on Confucius‘ ―To take known as known, not-known as not-known, this is to know‖; ―knowing‖ self-authenticates to establish personal integrity. Knowing includes knowing unknown to feed-nurture life, as Chuang Tzu said (3/1-2),391 My life has limit; knowing has no-limit. With limit to follow no-limit is already risky. Knowing the risk and [still] make-for knowing is risky indeed. To trail spine-meridian as constant-passage can keep oneself, preserve life, nurture parents, and complete years.

―Knowing‖ is a critical concern of philosophy; Chinese wisdom as ―lived knowing‖ is no ivory-tower luxury but centrally concerned with personal integrity. ―Knowing in China,‖ self388

Chuang Tzu‘s (4/31) ―以無翼飛‖ is borrowed here. E.g., I suspected autumn was dry, and I was right. Even its rain today was dry, and penetrating cold. 390 ―未覺池塘春草夢, 階前落葉己秋聲‖ is part of a poem chanted by all school children. 391 See Wu, The Butterfly as Companion, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990, pp. 281-359. 389

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recursively authenticating, expresses interpersonal integrity, even in time. Countless copyists‘ adjustments let the classics grow, exquisite, moving. Ideas were lived, objected to, and diversified in ―commentaries‖ in living, in writings. Confucius‘ (19/6) ―Extensively study with focused will, intently question with close pondering 近思‖ was expanded by Chu Hsi into a volume, Records of the Closely Attended

近思錄. Tseng Tzu‘s (1/4) ―I daily, three times, examine myself . . . What is passed on 傳, not practiced 習?,‖392 was turned by Wang Yang-ming‘s students into a volume, Records of

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the Passed-on Practiced 傳習錄. Such China‘s thinking is musical, moving our hearts of being. My life-confession may help. Á-pà my father taught me to chant and memorize Khóng Tsú‘s Lün-gú 論語 in Tâi-oân öe 台灣話, Confucius‘ Analects in Taiwanese.393 Music, rhythm, and sense entwined right there to move my heart of being, even I did not wholly understand what all that was about. My understanding of them grew as my days grew. That experience moved me later into comparing China‘s heart-music thinking with the West‘s heart-less cerebral cognition. My comparative culture began with Á-pà that sunny afternoon when he called me out of play to co-chant the Analects. This story of personal history is an archeological passing-on, tradition, history, of how China‘s heartfelt musical reason happens every time in concrete contexts, in life-history. Likewise, countless statements and ―arguments‖—in treatises, analects, fictions, essays, and poems, from old till now—are all flooded with past events, factual, likely, unlikely, and counterfactual. Thus we inter-grow across time, ―history.‖ Chinese wisdom grows as its history, toward tomorrows coming, alive across time as China is. ―Things that come may be unpleasant; does Chinese ‗arrow‘-attention heal?‖ Yes, Chinese ―knowing 知‖ is a healing arrow; unpleasant events are improper, and our four ways of ―knowing‖ them as such heal being improper. One, Buddhist prajna-knowing sees all as Empty. Two, Confucian knowing-shame shapes me to fit sociality. Three, Christian knowingguilt confesses; Love Beyond forgives. Four, Taoist knowing-nature goes home to Nature. These four ways must be interrelated somehow. So, salvation from being improper occurs in four ways of life-knowing, empty, social, forgiving, and natural. China contributes two, Confucian and Taoist, acquainted with all four. We are to avoid guilt-obsessed depression, and combine self-honesty on how my defects with going back to Nature. Nature is a verb naturing us, bubbling up existents. ―Knowing‖ meets things coming, naturally as they are self-so 自然, Nature. Chinese knowing 知 goes along with Tao 道, patterning Nature,394 Nature-at-work. Tao is nowhere not existing, even in ants, broken shards, piss and dung, not rejecting what comes, not pursuing what goes, but accepts all very 392

D. C. Lau has an interesting take, ―Have I passed on to others anything that I have not tried out myself?,‖ reminding us of St. Paul beating himself lest he saved others by preaching but not himself. But Lau seems to be a lone exception in this interpretation. 393 The so-called ―Chinese language‖ is a composite of quite many regional dialects. Taiwanese derives from Amoy dialect, Chu Hsi‘s mother tongue. The literati took their books-tablets and migrated south away from ―barbarian‖ incursions twice in history, Yüan and Ch‘ing. Thus Taiwanese is literary, with Chinese poetic tune and musical rhythm (7 tones, 仄韻). Now, mutatis mutandis, each dialect is unique, nodding one to another as members of the Chinese language-family. 394 ―Tao patterns after Nature the Self-So 道法自然,‖ says Lao Tzu (25).

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well.395 To see through all, as arrow-attention shooting-threading all, to express all such, is to know. I get all this by walking in Nature, future that keeps coming for me to see-through and express as my knowing. Wu‘s poem shows it.396

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Future comes One day at a time. My future is here, I must walk out to it. Morning fresh, Evening calm; Every day is my birthday, The first day of my life. My squirrels are here Hopping with me.

This poem says, Future comes a-hopping into me ―today,‖ each couplet hopping into the next. Hopping shows being happy, unhappy ones don‘t hop; ―happy‖ rhymes with ―hopping‖ in life-gait. Besides, squirrels hop forward, not backward even as they go back. They must be happy, or at least not unhappy. ―I‘ve been hop-writing more than a dozen books,‖ says Wu. ―Things-written don‘t connect into a system; they hop together into one another, to hop onward together. Things come in hopping, to make me happy indeed. Writing has been my joy for half a century now, literally my future coming one day at a time, new every today; writing is my first day of life, my birthday with my squirrels.‖ ―Are you a poet, or a philosopher?‖ ―The question is senseless (thinking must poet-hop), so I cannot answer, but never mind, I‘ll try. I am poet-and-philosopher, if you like; I am full of stuff I have to hop, pack, and express, for I cannot help it. All this is ‗knowing 知‘ in China. No hopping, no philosopher, much less poet; poet and philosopher inter-hop to hop into me, in unending story-bits of life, to montage a dynamic history that hops on and on, alive, into Chinese wisdom alive.‖ ―Isn‘t all this strangely un-Chinese?‖ No at all; this is Chinese wisdom hopping alive today. Both the Change Classic 易經 and all history-writings (including all classics) begin at revealing the true features of events to persons, to predict future consequences, ―through hundreds of generations.‖397 Wu‘s poem of life hops along with Chinese wisdom to hop out into the future with nature squirrel-hopping.

395

Chuang Tzu 22/45, 7/33-34, 34 are combined here. Timeless Voices, ed. Howard Ely, Owings Mills, MD: The International Library of Poetry, 2006, p. 1. 397 The 易經 is magnificent mathematical poetry musically throbbing to reveal the personal present to predict the future. 司馬遷‘s 「雖百世可知也」(in 史記 concluding 佞幸列傳 (臺北市三民書局, 2008, 8:4936) repeats verbatim Confucius‘ identical words in Analects 2/23. This is as Confucius said (7/1) to ―transmit, not create 述而不作,‖ continuing the tradition of historical transmission from Confucius through Ssu-ma Ch‘ien to Pan Ku 班固 and beyond. 396

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Chapter 15

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WEB-THINKING Thinking can be reticulating web-thinking or articulating linear reasoning. Let us first consider web-thinking. It is net-working crisscrossed, circulating in circular reflux, A follows B as B follows A, both at once, interstitial interspersing, intricate interlining, to turn complicated, multi-plied. Thoughts thus ramify branching out, while inter-hugging to belong one to another, packed inter-involved. These words depict living organism. Web-thnking typifies things alive and natural, growing together, ruminative-meditative. ―The Web‖ thinks both-and back and forth, Q in P, P in Q, weal-woe inter-involved in a jumble. In contrast, linear articulate reasoning has Q follows P logically, chronologically, causally, and clearly, for Q is no P. It thinks in either-or math, and forms a history of digital clarity to lead to self-recursive contradictions. A barber who shaves only those who don‘t shave themselves can not shave himself, shaving or not-shaving.398 It means the articulate either-or inevitably turns neither-nor. Articulate neither-nor is a negative of both-and, of reticulating web-thinking. This negation of web-thinking is a reasoning cul-de-sac of anti-nature, calling us to return home to nature alive, to web-think. The reticulating dynamics is Heaven‘s Web 天網 netting all to argur the innocence of nature, seeing worlds in sands, living incorruptible in moments,399 each hugging all, all belonging to each, all-intricate, pan-involving. Here to choose, to see, and to feel, is to feel to see to live on one‘s own way, all in one, one and all. Reticulating web-thnking thinks alive. Knowing spearheads thinking to come home to thinking, so knowing thinks to articulate to reticulate, reticulate to articulate knowing; web implicates reasoning that explicates no web. Reasoning keeps going into a later other, into river of causal-logical flowing with no return; web-thinking grows in reasoning and returns to enfold to enrich. Greece reasons; China web-thinks.

398

Russell‘s Barber Paradox is cited by Morris Kline in Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (1980), NY: Barnes & Noble, 2009, p. 247, to depict the inevitable contradictions math leads to. Kline took it as an unexpected calamity of math. It is taken as a natural outcome of anti-natural clarity in articulation. 399 Lao Tzu 73, William Blake‘s ―Auguries of Innocence,‖ and Chuang Tzu‘s roadside skull in cosmic joy (18/2229) are implicitely alluded to together.

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Germany, Spain, Holland, and the British Empire have all embraced the pride that ―the sun never sets‖ in their respective dominions,400 in reasoned expansion often by force driven by their coercive ―logic.‖ In contrast, China traditionally calls itself the ―Center Kingdom 中國‖ of all under heaven, culturally web-centered. Linear thinking is popular under today‘s ubiquitous Greco-Western influence, but it needs be networked in web-thinking to be relevant to living that webs, yet, strangely, we are not used to web-thinking, to be portrayed in four rounds: A. five threads inter-woven, B. soft concretization, C. net of inter-comprehension, and D. seed and spring-power, easy and inscrutable.

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ROUND A: FIVE THREADS INTER-WOVEN Web-netting has surprising riches, many threads inter-woven, one web-sense inter-threads in many ways. We see five here, and more appear in Rounds B, C, and D. The five are: To web is, one, to af-firm what is, two, to con-firm existence, three, to inter-net existence in, four, inter-reversal of webbing via, five, pivotal individuals. Now, we go into them one by one. ONE: Web-netting af-firms, firms-up, what is as it is. It is to hug oneself, e.g., hugging splitting headache, to keep oneself together; a thing or a person exists identity-netting, ―so as so,‖ ―so in so,‖ ―self-so,‖ as it is.401 A ―self-webbed‖ is not to be compromised, to enable A to accommodate non-A making itself at home in A.402 As Chuang Tzu‘s butterfly-dream story testifies (2/94-96), the dream awakened can lead to man-butterfly inter-change only because Chuang Tzu the man is himself and not a butterfly, and the butterfly is no Chuang Tzu. Only a solid ―distinction 有分‖ of identities enables their ―inter-change 物化‖ as this story concludes. The ―is‖ of ―A is A‖ is thus uninfringeable. I en-joy myself walking, enwebbed in the joy of be-ing myself. Here the ―law‖ of identity walks out the integrity of self-identity; I walk myself into myself, to network me into my wholesome self. As I walk, kids shout playing; they shout out their identity as I walk out mine. Every entity exists by self-webbing into itself, walking out ―A is A‖ in identity as self-net, as A (myself walking) webs with non-A (kids playing) in mutual self-enjoyment. TWO: Web-netting self-affirms to co-affirm, to con-firm existents beyond itself, even in time as balmy spring follows harsh winter. Winter is spring to spring, as sunset is sunrise to sunrise, to mutually confirm. To con-firm is to co-firm a thing as itself, to co-affirm a person as oneself. Confirmation reciprocally re-cognizes each other; I ―cognize‖ you as my other, as (―re-‖) you would do me as your other. Webbing thus inter-firms existents, inter-cognizing each, as 400

―The sun never sets‖ is conveniently anthologized in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, Sixteenth Edition, eds. John Bartlett and Justin Kaplan, Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1992, p. 364 and note 5 there. Cf. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, NY: Random House, 1987. 401 莊子 has ―然於然‖ (2/34, 27/7), ―固然‖ (3/7). Chuang Tzu Index 諸子引得: 老子, 莊子, 臺北市: 宗青圖書公司. 民75, has ―然‖ (+3 pp) and ―自‖ (+2 pp). 402 This is in contrast to the West‘s existential interpretation of the law of self-identity, as manifested in impenetrability, in two things unable to be in the same place at once.

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―father is fatherly‖ only as web-related to ―son is filial.‖403 Self-affirmation other-confirms to communal web together. THREE: Webbing confirmation inter-enwraps, a reciprocity of con-firming enbrace. My identity is my face (my ID picture has my face, not torso), but it is inaccessible to me; I must face the other to ask to describe my face. The self is a facing; to exist, as oneself is to face the other to web in the other. My identity is my face, my face is other-facing, and other-facing confirms my self, so I depend on my other to exist. To exist inter-exists, inter-webs; no interexistence, no existence. FOUR: Web-networking enwraps in inter-reversal. A thing ramifies and grows, and then reverses to return confirmed. ―Reversal is Tao‘s move‖ (Lao Tzu 40). Thanks to its reversal, another thing increases and grows. Growth-reversed is reciprocal internetting; branching out in reciprocal reversal implicates internet. Reciprocity is time-ed to bespeak reversals of confirmation, of causing-to-exist, to make inter-causality; the child engenders parents who engender the child. Besides, inter-reversal is interactive, even in enmity, as in celebrated Yin-Yang, internecine, inter-nascent. Such mutuality re-enacts into historical inter-enrichment between past and present, to generate what is coming; yesterdays not-so-attractive warns us today to live better tomorrow. FIVE: Pivotal individuals spread inter-netting; Confucius is a pivot molding the Chinese culture. These pivots are not many. In sum, web-netting has five senses, inter-woven. One, web affirms what is. Two, it confirms existents inter-affirming. Three, so it is inter-existence, each networking the other. Four, its reciprocity is constantly reversed, even in opposition. Five, it is inter-action in history, inter-reenacting with pivotal sages. Now, two actual cases, music and forbearence, concretize the five senses. Music swings in repetitive variations of tunes and tones, soft and strong, in patterns or no, to mesmerize performer and audience. We all live on music, in overlapping waves after waves. Music is such dynamics of life-web. This is so even when things get intolerable. Many events rain drops of pain, to compose literary music of sorrows. Bypassing the music bypasses the deep sense of literature. 404 Confucius fumed (3/1), ―This can bear, what cannot bear?‖ Common sense says, 405 ―Cannot bear and bear it, ocean, wide, sky, vast‖ to ride the waves of bearing, overlapping. Perhaps this networking attitude enabled China to muddle through millennia of suffering, as it continually reveres Confucius fuming.

ROUND B: SOFT CONCRETIZATION All this sounds abstract, so let us concretely compare God with Nature. ―God is love,‖406 says the Bible. Why? Blank. What is it? ―It is the cross of Christ.‖ How does it, 2000 years 403 404

―父父, 子子,‖ says Confucius (12/11).

―是可忍也, 孰不可忍也?‖ in Analects 3/1.

海闊天空‖ is extrapolated from Confucius in Analects 15/27. Cf. ―ならぬ堪忍, するが堪忍,‖ as the Japanese say. 406 1 John 4:8. 405

―不可忍而忍之,

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old, affect us now? Blank. ―God is our help.‖ We call for help. Blank. Things in the Bible are locked up, not connected to us. Now, Nature is also a mystery. Squirrels hop; trees sway. What are they? Why are they here? Blank. How do they affect us? Science responds. But why do they do so? Blank. Is it we who react to them? Are you kidding? Things in Nature seem locked up, not connected to us.407 Things in Nature are a mystery as well. We are at a dead-end again. Something must be wrong with this linear reasoning, for we are stuck. Perhaps God and Nature are those in which we are, our web that cannot poke at, our Mother bearing us along, cannot poke at. Does God exist? Are you kidding?408 Look, does Nature exist? We see squirrels and trees, but do we see Nature? But then, do we even have to ask such silly questions? All such is linear-reasoning; it does not work here. We must just allow to be inter-webbed in Parent God, in Mother Nature. ―Does Heaven speak? Hundreds of things are born there.‖ ―The above as swaying twigs, people as wild deer,‖ in whom we just join, ―entering animals, their grouping undisturbed, entering birds, their going undisturbed.‖409 Here if we live, we live, if we die, we die. Animals do so, trees do so, asking nothing, for no baby doubts Mom; if Mom lets babies die, then they just die.410 No sweat. Such approach is web-thinking. I-It and I-Thou relations are linear response-reasoning that, in history, means [a] ―going further‖ to [b] probe, and [c] objectify and [d] divide-analyze. These four activities are loosely related, in history, as linear reasoning. They take place in that in which they take place. The ―in which‖ here is [a‘] the web-milieu where things [b‘] inter-respond. Here is no [c] or [d]; events just happen, do not objectify or analyze. Web-thinking is milieu-living, inter-pervading; things co-respond to inter-milieu. We must now see web-living. The adult parents the child, who parents the adult; ―Those born later inspire awe‖ and ―Great Adults are those who never lose their baby-heart.‖411 The child commands our respect to make us great.412 History continually reenacts to inter-web yesterdays with today, going into tomorrows, inter-enriching. Name Scholars 名家, Kung-sun Lung 公孫龍 (fl. 284-259 BCE) and Hui Shih 惠施 (fl. 350-260 BCE) say, ―Going today arrives yesterday; the child stillborn lives longest; the longest lived of men lived shortest,‖413 etc. They express reversal-web. Chuang Tzu revels in parsing them to portray actuality, the world inter-constituting all-web.414 He enjoyed arguing with Hui Shih the poetic logician of names, and later sorely missed him at his grave. 415 They inter-web. Chinese people note that things inter-cause. Yin and Yang are internecine and, as such, inter-nascent. This ―inter‖ describe web. ―O woe where weal leans! O weal where woe lies!‖ 407

John Ruskin‘s ―pathetic fallacy‖ against attributing human pathos to nature must have come from here. The Bible never says God exists, much less raise such a question. 409 Analects 17/18. Chuang Tzu 12/81, 20/36. 410 Chuang Tzu has several stories, all quite moving, on this point in 6/47-97. These people seem more mature and advanced in the heartfelt knowledge of Heaven as Parent than Job protesting in Old Testament. 411 ―後生可畏.‖ (論語 9/23). ―大人者不失共赤子之心者也.‖ (孟子 4B12). 412 Have you read Art Linkletter‘s Kids Say the Darnedest Things! (Berkeley, CA: Celestial Arts, 2005)? 413 These sayings are quoted by Chuang Tzu (2/22, 52). 414 Western thinkers and those who subscribe to their thinking often take such inter-web as relativism wishy-washy, irresponsible. This view altogether misses Chuang Tzu‘s web-world alive. 415 Chuang Tzu 2/22, 2/52, etc., 24/48-51. 408

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for Uncle Fort at the city border to get another stallion after losing his, for his son to lose a leg (falling from horseback) to survive, waived from the battle.416 This evolution involves to devolve, to evolve again at later reenactment, and keeps com-plex-ing, ply-ing together, multi-ply-ing. Thus things ―walk double 兩行‖417 legged as Yin-Yang to Five Walking 五行 Nature, wood-walk, fire-walk, earth-walk, metal-walk, to water-walk, one causing the other by fighting the other, and then the last water-walk fights and causes the first wood-walk, and the round of inter-fighting and inter-birthing inter-revolves into 64 Hexagrams 六十四卦 of Change Classic 易經. I feel at home under a tree; I feel agitated meeting a person, to whom I smile, and our mutual smiles put me at home. Tree gives Milieu-at-home, smile is Thou-at-home, and both inter-web. In Mom, both join to her baby. The Mom-baby relation is I-Thou and I-Milieu inter-pervaded, but perhaps not I-It, or only medically. Such is the imagery, the dia-gram of actuality, going-through (dia-) picto-gram way. Here web-thinking moves all around; linear reasoning moves straightly, ―all around‖ embraces ―straightly,‖ and things are all around in many ―straightly‖‘s. Nature is com-plex this way, back and forth. The child takes off from the now into the next moment; Mom picks and stores leftovers. He then returns to en-joy what he has left, now shown, as cherished by Mom, who smiles and grows with him her alter ego. Mom wombs and rooms him; my Baby Mark used to say ―womb‖ for ―room.‖ He was absolutely, pregnant-ly, correct, thereby refreshes Mom. They form an I-Thou complex to inter-milieu inter-enhancing. All this while, Mom grows in him as he grows in her. Thus he, her milieu, parents Mom as she, his milieu, parents him; inter-web (I-milieu) inter-growing (I-Thou), they are a family. Nature webs into a family of a Net, sparse-netted, leaking nothing, birthing and nourishing hundreds of things.418

ROUND C: NET OF INTER-COMPREHENSION Mom is interactive matrix to her baby, his Network his Web, in three ways. Web a. interimplies, b. its matrix is a Net, wherein c. we walk seed-springing, ever unfinished.

[A] Web Inter-Implies Web is network of com-prehension inter-prehending.419 To comprehend is to be comprehended, to con-firm, even by birds and trees, stones and clouds, hills and water—and 416

Huai Nan Tzu tells this story to express Lao Tzu‘s (58) woe-weal inter-web. 淮南子, 人間, 台北三民書局, 民86, p. 965. 417 Chuang Tzu 2/40. 418 See Wu, ―I-Milieu (I)‖ (December 2007, pp. 159) and ―I-Milieu (II)‖ (June 2008, pp. 1-68), both in Journal of World Religions. Tao Te Ching 73, Analects 17/18. 419 ―Comprehension,‖ ―apprehension,‖ etc., have root in ―prehension.‖ A. N. Whitehead sensitively noted this word as a cosmic act in the smallest of things, to build an organism-cosmology, and philosophers extracted an

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history. Do things and persons co-confirm? A stone and a tree beckon a painter to af-firm their existence, and as she responds by bringing them out in painting, she is af-firmed as herself in her painting. She now exists as her self in the stone, in the tree, in her artwork, poetic and painterly. Mr. Henry Ford is af-firmed as ―Ford‖ by his company and the pubic he benefits. Enterprises co-comprehend with persons. Inter-comprehension inter-implicates. Seeing P, we see Q, and we say, ―P implies Q,‖ i.e., Q is in P as its ply. ―Q implies P‖ would be another story, another new implication, says linear reasoning. In web-thinking, ―P implies Q‖ is also ―Q implies P,‖ Q is P‘s ply as P is Q‘s ply, as Mom and her baby inter-implying. ―Do we see such in China, though?‖ Yes. Take the ―lun 論‖ of Lun Yü論語 Confucius‘ Analects. Besides disquisition 論議, 何晏 cites four more senses, 次, 理, 綸, and 輪.420 Lun4 論 as tz‘u 次 (order) orders each topic before the next. Lun4 論 as li 理 (grain in things) says the Analects has grain-principles in pearl-things. Lun4 論 as lun2 綸 (silk-belt) says the Analects canon-threads 經綸. Lun4 論 as lun2 輪 (wheel) says all theses rotate as wheels 輪. These four proposals on lun 論 show weblogic421 論 in many connotations. The five meanings of 論語 pack dialogues among ―conversaries‖ inter-turning, interfacing various positions, to inter-revolutionize respective assumptions. Such dialogues of contraries in Plato‘s early dialogues petered out in the West, while China thrives on interinvolvement of contraries in all analects, journals, essays, to exhibit the Yin internalizing its opposite the Yang, the Yang internalizing its opposite the Yin, internecine while internascent. Life lives on beyond the status quo422 to others in dia-logic 談論, to milieu in lung-logic 息息相關, and in heart-logic 脈絡可循 befriending the ancient 與古人為友 in time. All these interrelations are friendly; ―among three people walking must be my teachers; I choose good explicit logic-rational system, a ―Process Studies,‖ Whitehead-logicism. But Whitehead wanted to continue ―footnoting Plato,‖ inheriting ―his wealth of general ideas . . . his personal endowments, his wide . . . experience at a great period of civilization, his inheritance of an intellectual tradition [without] excessive systematization, . . . [his] inexhaustible mine of suggestion. . . . [Therefore, my] train of thought . . . is Platonic, [rendering] Plato‘s general point of view . . . in philosophy of organism‖ (Process and Reality: Corrected Edition, NY: The Free Press, 1978, p. 39). To inherit creative Plato, Whitehead must be creative himself, whose ―technical terms‖ are thus vivid-concrete, his wording is sensitive, connections among categories are literary, and the whole system is mute metaphors of aesthetics, yet they bypass his ―Platonic‖ artistry, part and parcel of philosophy. Now, how his creative artistry relates to China‘s, how both inter-enrich, is a fascinating theme. He said, ―[T]he philosophy of organism seems to approximate more to . . . Chinese, thought, than to . . . European, thought. One side makes process ultimate; the other side makes fact ultimate.‖ (ibid., p. 7) Whitehead infused concrete sensitivity to linearreasoning, while China is clad in web-thinking with reciprocity and reversal. Both can and must join to interprofit, to profit us all. 420

These proposals are from introductory pages of (魏)何晏集解, (宋)邢昺疏, 論語註疏解經, 臺北市中國子學名著集成編印基金會, pp. 1-14. Cf. Murohashi Tetsuji, Dictionary of Sino-Japanese [Cultures], 諸橋轍次著, 大漢和辭关, 東京大眾館, 昭和三十五年, X: 518, without references. 421 The Western word ―logic‖ meant ―collection.‖ See Wu, On the “Logic” of Togetherness (1998), p. 162 and note 41, p. 334 and note 181, On Metaphoring (2001), pp. 54-58, 106 (note 23), both published by Leiden: Brill. The New Oxford American Dictionary, 2005, p. 54 takes ―legein‖ as ―to gather‖ (under ―analects‖). Martin Heidegger is fascinated with logos as gathering in Introducation to Metaphysics, Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 65, 131-132, 180-181. All this describes web-thinking. 422 Brentano, Husserl, and all phenomenologists say that consciousness is intentional, consciousness of something else. China says that all life by nature is intentional, self-transcendent web toward others.

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ones to learn, not-good ones to correct,‖ says Confucius (7/22). ―Three people‖ here show [a] others, [b] milieu, and [c] time. Human life is an integral ―system‖ that opens out beyond itself; life is a web-system that includes dialogical contraries, open-ended as in Plato‘s early eristic dialogues, and as history that has no end; and so Chinese writings infused with history 文史 have no conclusion. An inherent life-grain 理 walks out ahead as 道; life is a dynamic order 原則 without governing principles outside. Life is an ―open system‖ that webs, involves, and envelops outside to grow forward.423 Web-network inter-embraces inter-facing; China cites ―face 面‖ to etymologically explain knowing 知.424 I am an inter-face with not-me, my friend or anti-me my enemy. Geese are in the lake, dotting it. They enjoy themselves in the lake, and they thereby turn into the enjoyable lake. As I face you, I embrace your face and am embraced in your face, and become you. I am faced-facing, co-existing, inter-be-ing, with you. We are enwrapped web, to exist as each, not the other. As I am an inter-facing to inter-web with non-me, so things are inter-facings, interimplied, inter-involved, a mutual run-into with not-me as food, friend (―I‘m what I eat, who I keep‖), or with anti-me (immunization with flu virus, stronger bone broken and fixed). That comes in negatively and positively to enrich this; web is inter-Yin-Yang.

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[B] The Matrix of all-Web is a Net Yin-Yang mutuality‘s matrix is Heavenly Net 天網,425 nature-network; each fiber is a two-way inter-implication, to form a con-text interwoven, subtly under-woven426 for events to take place. Here is a quick survey of Chinese web-thinking in this light. Confucians and Name Scholars perform ―righting names 正名,‖ life-verification, where living is made true to the names professed. Righting names is truth-making, i.e., life conforming, con-firming with names made communally. There are various names to live under, and so we live out different ways (names) to achieve different truth-livings. Truth is to live out varied and alive truthfully. Fidelity 信 describes truthfulness of one standing by one‘s words, one‘s names, one‘s life imbuing its expressions by them. It is thus that Goblet Wording 卮言 expresses a living that goblet-tips to the situation personal and actual, to inter-dwell (as Lodged Wording 寓言) word to word, person to person, life to life, to and fro, back and forth, overlapping at various levels, turning heavier (by the moment) in value and significance (as Heavily Inter-layered Wording 重言). All three words express living three-in-one inter-web, networking.

423

Western parallels to China‘s history-infused literature could be Homer‘s epics and biblical prophets. See also The Oxford Shakespeare: Volume I: Histories, Oxford University Press, 1987. 424 ―物至而知與之接,‖ ―相交接曰知, 因而與人相交接亦謂之知故有知交之語, 因而相匹偶亦謂之知,‖ etc. ―外見於形容, 知於顏色 . . . 知猶見地, 皆謂見於面也.‖ 說文解字詁林正補合編, 臺北鼎文書局, 民國七十二年, 5-215. Detailed explanation above is not repeated here. 425 Lao Tzu 73. 426 ―Subtle‖ is literally ―under-woven‖; the two are repeated here to stress both meanings.

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To concretize the above description, we now take Chuang Tzu‘s three wordings (27/1), lodged 寓言, heavily inter-layered427 重言, and goblet 卮言, to match China‘s four sages, inter-involved, Confucius, Mencius, Lao Tzu, and Chuang Tzu. Five points are here. One: Lao Tzu‘s ―Tao can tao, not always-Tao,‖ in self-contradiction, lodges 寓 in the inexpressible ―as is.‖ It is web-layered 重in Mencius‘ ―help growth‖ and Chuang Tzu‘s ―butterfly dream,‖ both com-plex-ed and self-contradictory, alluring us. As a result, Confucius‘ ―exposition, not creation 述而不作‖ and ―with ‗one‘ to skewer it, cover it,‖ wordtip as goblet 卮言 toward what is the case.428 Two: Any of four sages can fit into any of three wordings. Confucius classified above as a goblet-word-er 卮言者 can be seen as performing heavy web-layered wording 重言 as he sees learning and thinking together (2/15), ―learning 學 but not thinking 思 is empty, thinking but not learning is risky,‖ and as he (2/10) ―watches, observes, and discerns‖ (that is, thinks on 思) ―the wherewith, wherefrom, wherein‖ (i.e., what is learned). Thus learning and thinking are web-layered. Three: In fact, any of the four sages is describable with all three wordings. For example, Confucius sighs, lodging himself 寓言, ―O water! O water!‖ and induces students step by step 循循善誘, heavy web-layered 重言 with him, to goblet-tip 卮言 to classics in exposition 述 that amounts to creation 作,429 creation complex-layered 重 in the self brewing-dwelling 寓 in classics. Four: This is because any of three wordings leads (tips?) to any other of them; words lodge寓言 in pregnant implications web-layered 重言, goblet-tipping 卮言 to the situation. These expressions intertwine into heartfelt impact on actual situations, and back to the human hearts of being. Five: Besides, any of the four sages evokes any other. Confucius urges us to acknowledge ―not-known as not-known‖ to echo Lao Tzu saying, ―to know not-known, best.‖ Similarly, any of the four sages involves all four. Confucius says, ―The humane enjoy hills; the wise enjoy water,‖ to echo Mencius‘ ―flooding thrust 浩然之氣‖ and Lao Tzu‘s Nature-enjoyment. Confucius‘ rhetorical question, ―Does Heaven speak?‖ responds to Lao Tzu‘s ―one who knows does not speak.‖ Confucius‘ anger, ―If we can tolerate this, what can we not tolerate?‖ chimes in with Chuang Tzu‘s two boys both losing their sheep, one by reading books as moralist Confucians do, another by playing games as brigand Chih 盜跖, both intolerable.430 Mencius, the proto-Confucian, strangely quotes Confucius only sparingly,431 but Mencius‘ ―sages are like me 聖人與我同類者‖ echoes Confucius‘ ―born alike 性相近,‖ and 427

重 means [a] web-layered and [b] heavy in authority. Tao Te Ching, beginning quip. Mencius 2A2. Chuang Tzu 2/94-96. Confucius‘ Analects 7/1, 15/3, 2/2. 429 Analects 9/17 (=Mencius 4B18), 9/11, 7/1. Exposition as creation, we will soon consider. 430 Analects 2/17 vs. Tao Te Ching 71; his 6/23 vs. Mencius 2A2. Analects 17/18 vs. Tao Te /Ching 56; his 3/1 vs. Chuang Tzu 8/21-25. 431 Murohashi also noted that words of Analects appear few in Mencius and Hsün Tzu, but then unconvincingly inferred therefrom that the Analects was compiled after Mencius. 諸橋轍次著, 大漢和辭关, 東京大眾館, 昭和三十五年, X: 518. Mencius could not have helped recalling-recording his revered teacher Confucius‘ words, in or out of the Analects; Confucius could not have just said words recorded in the Analects. So Mencius‘ paucity of quoting Confucius must have been due to other reasons than that the Analects did not exist in Mencius‘ lifetime. Those ―other reasons‖ are beyond us for now. 428

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Mencius‘ Ox Mount 牛山, made bald by relentless tree-axing, grass-grazing, shows Confucius‘ ―practice, apart 習相遠.‖ Mencius‘ ―help growth 助長‖ reminds us of Lao Tzu‘s no-do, wu wei 無為, Chuang Tzu‘s not-help 不助, and Mencius‘ nurturing inner-thrust 養氣 is like Chuang Tzu‘s nurturing life 養生.432 Chuang Tzu profusely quotes Confucius at least three ways; Chuang Tzu‘s ―Great Tao declares not 大道不稱‖ rhymes with Lao Tzu‘s ―Tao can tao, not always-Tao,‖ and Chuang Tzu‘s enjoyment of fish‘s self-enjoyment reminds us of Mencius‘ heart unbearable to people in pain.433 Chuang Tzu is notable as Lao Tzu‘s companion, as Mencius-compacted and as Confucius-in-nature. And the list goes on. All this typifies web-thinking in kaleidoscope of things inter-acting, inter-shaping, for each existent is a node of an actual com-plex (in lodged wording 寓言) as context for another complex, a thicket of complex-formations (in web-layered wording 重言), parent and partner to another existent (in goblet wording 卮言). I am an ―embraced web‖ that is you, who is in turn embraced by me, even as negative ―you,‖ my negative alter ego who un-welcomes me your other. All this explains if not resolves the paradox of ―loving my enemy,‖ loving the antibeloved, for enemy is my neighbor, my close-by434 other-me, my ―you‖ who grate on me, hurt me, define me as me, as someone to destroy, while my destroyer would vanish without me to destroy. Such neighbor-interaction, even negative one, inter-be‘s, as inter-having, interconstituting, to inter-milieu, inter-context, and an inter-web happens. This Heavenly Net is Nature naturing, happenstances happening, Heaven and Earth interflowing, and we flow in (Mencius 7A13). This is time flowing; we inter-constitute with past happenings. History is such web of inter-eruptions we re-enact to inter-enrich into future.435

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[C] Web is a Network we Walk Ever Unfinished Does the ―inter-‖activity have a finish? ―No,‖ all sensitive geniuses say. Hellman remembered herself as ―an unfinished woman,‖ saying, ―All I mean is that I left too much of me unfinished because I wasted too much time. However.‖,436 Menuhin said his life is an ―unfinished journey,‖437 and Husserl attended to ―beginning‖ at the end of his life. Years later, they all turned silent. Do they have anything to say on ―finished‖ woman or journey? Their silence says that life‘s finish is an unknown, a mystery, as Hellman‘s ―however,‖ unfinished, may have alluded 432

Mencius 6A7, 6A8 vs. Analects 17/2. Mencius 2A2 vs. Tao Te Ching 3, 10, 63. Mencius 2A2 vs. Chuang Tzu 11/69, 3/12. 433 On how Chuang Tzu quotes Confucius, see Wu, The Butterfly as Companion, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990, p. 400, note 10. Chuang Tzu 2/59 vs. Tao Te Ching‘s beginning. Chuang Tzu 17/87-91 vs. Mencius 1A7. 434 ―Neighbor, plesion‖ means someone close by. 435 The sensitive reader may have noted a tacit enrichment of Collingwood‘s history as ―re-enactment‖ that slips disastrously toward mathematical ―repetition,‖ not past-present inter-web in time, reenactment. 436 These words conclude Lillian Hellman‘s An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir (1969), Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1999, p. 280. 437 Yehudi Menuhin, Unfinished Journey, NY: Alfred K. Knopf, 1977.

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to. Life is made of unfinished personhood, unfinished journey, in double walks 兩行fivewalking 五行. The ―finish‖ is a silent milieu to shape personal journey, ever beginning underfoot a thousand-mile life-walk,438 as Husserl did begin. ―What is the finish in unfinished walk?‖ The finish as the destined-there must go with our walk into future that comes one day at a time, with hills and water, birds and squirrels, and grass and trees, for walk without destination is aimless wandering, no walk, or walk of no walk. Finish, future, and walk, they inter-web to make the dynamics of walking alive, unending. I can of course protest, ―I walk my walk, my walk is its destination.‖ OK, then, I walk for walk‘s sake, and my walk is continually complete and finished at each step. So, the walk is finished and unfinished, both a web-living that walks unfinished and constantly finished, in self-web. To realize so is a blessing, as kids do, complete in playing forever unfinished, growing; kids do self-web.

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ROUND D: SEED 種 AND SPRING POWER 機, EASY AND INSCRUTABLE All this is worth repeating, this time softly, subtly. Web-system in time flourishes in the autumn, ―golden, [but] last not long,‖ says C. S. Lewis, and his words, on autumn not staying, stay. How? By autumn coming back again, and again, to prove him right, that it does not last long. That is web in time, lasting long in not lasting long.439 Things must go on to web in time, though, for ―return is Tao‘s move.‖440 Time heartbeats in rhythm alive, going and returning, repeating without repeating, web in time, as the threefold incorruptible in China establishing virtue, feat, and words, all imperishable as perishable through time. Our thinking can go linear-reasoning as in Western logic-rationality, and go web-thinking as in Chinese perception, and both are embraced in the dynamic actuality of Nature naturing unceasing. It is that ―easy‖ but ―few can know so, do so.‖441 This is also our sigh that begins and ends with our appreciation of Chinese wisdom that follows life, a relentless life-thinking all through history, so easy to read, so elusive to capture its sense, for it is as alive as life is elusive, and as our thinking alive is as easy and elusive. This is because linear articulation is explicative, displaying without end, for what we capture is always half true, the horizon stretches unlimited; the more we know, the less we know, till we know all about nothing, and then we wonder why, and our wondering inquiry starts all over again; linear reasoning overreaches itself thus into web-thinking implicative; the simpler it is, the more complex it is. To see is so simple; physiological intricacies of vision take countless lifetimes to see. Living is implicatively endless, so life-thinking is web-networking continuous. Webthinking envelops kaleidoscope-together, stuffing things many times, many places at once,

438

Lao Tzu 64. Cf. Appendix: Mr. Chu on ―Our Days Not Returning‖ and History, in Part III. 440 Lao Tzu 40. 439 441

―吾言甚易知, 甚易行. 天下莫能知, 莫能行,‖ said Lao Tzu (70).

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Web-Thinking

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dynamically moving multi-ply-ed, multi-layered, co-implying, com-plex-ing. This togetherness moves on as it multi-plies, de-velops, de-volves, and e-volves. Each existent is seed 種 of plant-power 禾 self-duplicated, heavy 重 with growing lifepower.442 A seed has its propensity to grow-toward a new situation, networking situational tendency, a Cupid-arrow to shoot into a new situation. Seeded 種,443 the seed sprouts into seedling. The sprouting moves a life-arrow of situational-intentionality, chi 機, an arrow bowfitted, taut-pulled to-shoot 以發,444 to spring to occasion, a power-full potential toward what comes. Let us call it ―springing power,‖ the power of the spring. Every occasion falls-toward445 an opportunity, and thus has its seed, its chi 機 its incipient potential. Shelley asked, ―When winter is here, is spring far?‖ In China, the spring is the spring-power, chi 機 of summer, and autumn is the chi 機 of winter, and so ―springautumn 春秋‖ is phrased to indicate the season-time 時.446 For all such inter-birthing, time is often internecine because when one season is uppermost, it falls-toward (i.e., occasions) the other contrary seasonal seed-chi‘s 機. As time goes, a season spends itself in eclipses and the next season-seed shoots out manifesting itself. This dynamic complex occasions an actuality. ―Occasion‖ is a name-noun of the complex and a verb to fall-toward, to seed seedling.447 It is life‘s way; Tao walks to form 成 an actual occasion, one at a time.448 All this must grow itself; we must not help its growth, says Mencius (2A2) and Chuang Tzu (11/69), but must raise one to induce three to nurture virtueseedling, step by step, says Confucius (7/8, 5/9, 9/11). Such an inducement initiates the branch-out of what has been networked in life. Sages watch the wherewith, wherefrom, and wherein of things, these where‘s of seeds 種 and spring-chi‘s 機, before they manifest, and finds five nature-seeds, wood, fire, soil, metal, and water. Each walks to manifest against—internecine—the next seed only to breed—internascent—the next, and then it walks back, and the round starts all over again, and their walkrounds came to be called Five Walks 五行, the cosmic web. These internecine inter-nascent occasions are classified into 64 types, each with six plies, Yin and Yang inter-web, waiting to ramify the next, with rhythm inter-rhyming Nature, musical poetry. Poetry the inter-facing of time-seasons is music, the time-poem dance out actual occasions to inter-web into music in variations on a life-theme. All this is being ―alive,‖ plants responding to seasonal shifts, Nature naturing, our Globe revolving, to go and return, and the round starts to re-web itself. Capturing nature-revolution, we re-turn to its seed, the original root spring-power (chi 機) of Nature. Confucius said (2/10), ―Watch one‘s wherewith, observe one‘s wherefrom, discern one‘s wherein, and no one can hide oneself.‖ Intently watched where one is (seed-power) and is 442

重 means to duplicate and to be heavy. A seed and to seed are indicated by the same character, 種, for the seed is the seeding power. 444 In this context, Confucius‘ admiration of his beloved student Hui as 以發 (2/9) is significant, as is his proposal of one to evoke three in his students (7/8). 445 ―To occasion‖ is literally to ―ob-cadere,‖ to fall-toward. 446 See ―‗Time‘ in China‖ in Wu, On the “Logic” of Togetherness: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1998, pp. 342-385. 447 Whitehead named one of his key categories, ―actual occasion.‖ 448 Chuang Tzu‘s ―道行之而成 Tao walks it and forms‖ (2/33) is just traced out. 443

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about to be-come (spring-power), and one reveals what one is. We must disturb nothing but sit tight and watch the originative seed, the initiating spring, of things‘ spring-power, and Nature shows itself. ―Do studies to daily decrease, do Tao to daily decrease, decrease it, again decrease, to reach no-doing,‖449 endlessly toward inner nature to implicate outer nature unawares, all over; the decrease captures life‘s elusive simplicity, nature‘s easy complexity. Its wording is ―very easy to know, very easy to walk, but none under Heaven can know it, can walk it.‖450 It is not easy to understand implicative simplicity in web-thinking, so we try to understand web, try its hermeneutics.

449 450

Lao Tzu 48. Lao Tzu 70.

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Chapter 16

CHINA’S PIVOTAL CLASSICS, THEIR HERMENEUTICS TODAY We must ask how to follow Chinese wisdom alive to think alive our way, for being alive can only be learned, reenacted, and embodied anew. Luckily, Chinese literature has been portraying thinking alive. So we gaze at Chinese writings, and we A. find the pivotal classics there and see B. how to understand them.

A. CHINA’S PIVOTAL CLASSICS

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We first, a. explain what ―pivotal‖ means, then, b. explain how we thus resolve a paradox in Chinese wisdom, to finally, c. appreciate its revolutionary significance.

[1] First, We See the Pivotal Significance of “Pivotal” Books Unlike many books that add to existing information, some few are pivots to let our thinking spin in a novel way and direction. These books are placed strategically at the faultline of the land of thinking, a landmine ready to be touched to explode into the new revolutionary lines of thinking. The Classics in China are classical because of this revolutionary potential. Confucius exploded in awe with ideas on history, and on personal existence as interpersonal, into a new direction in ritual and tradition. Mencius exploded likewise on personhood in Heaven and Earth, into a new mystical resonance, if not union, of Confucian sentiment with Taoist. Lao Tzu exploded in thinking-mode into the mystery that is nature-concrete, as Chuang Tzu did in expressing existence in forgetting words to turn nowhere without words. Mo Tzu Disputations 墨辯 exploded in ideas on thinking-mode and existence into concrete thinking.

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Plato‘s books are so pivotal that the West‘s subsequent tradition was ―a series of footnotes to‖ him.451 More subtly, Confucius claims to supply an exposition of the classics, denying any creation of his own (7/1), and thereby so inherits the tradition as to create the Confucian tradition.

[2] Secondly, We Can Thus Explain Some Paradoxes in Chinese Wisdom Such is how Confucius exerted molding influence so comprehensive and pervasive, ridiculously out of proportion to the scant amount of bland words he left us; it is true of all pivotal classical writers in China (as in world antiquity), with few bland words to explode. Worse, seemingly so mundane and bland, classical treatises are piecemeal, random miscellanies yet, as such, charged with explosive novelty all their own. This is how simple naiveté of scattered primitive poetry in the classics erupted a systematic repercussion so comprehensive, complex, in China.

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[3] Finally, We Appreciate Revolutionary World-Significance of Chinese Wisdom Chinese wisdom is alive as we are living, to offer an alternative way of thinking to Platonic-Aristotelian logicism separate from life, to radically redefine ―thinking,‖ to turn attention from development-logic to envelopment-thinking. Thus, to refashion Chinese wisdom with the thinking-mode of Western philosophy is to do Western philosophy, irrelevant to Chinese wisdom if not its disservice. Sadly, so many ―Chinese philosophers,‖ in China and the West, are engaging in such Western philosophizing and advertising it as ―Chinese philosophy.‖452 How do we see Chinese philosophy-as-wisdom alive, then?

B. HERMENEUTICS TODAY OF CHINESE CLASSICS ALIVE This subsection elucidates three key aspects in understanding Chinese classics: How it proceeds, its gentle Guide, and Pivotal individuals as crucial.

HOW ―How can we understand, and express, elusive pivotal classics in China?‖ Fortunately, we do have three clues in history and in nature. First, those pivotal classics in China are not 451

―The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.‖ (Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, NY: Free Press, 1978, p. 39) 452 See for its detail, the final section in Part IV, and Wu‘s autobiography in Jay Goulding, ed., China-West Interculture: Toward the Philosophy of World Integration: Essays on Wu Kuang-ming’s Thinking, NY: Global Scholarly Publishers, 2008, pp. 3-32.

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many, not long, and familiar to us today; any travel guide or businessman can recite phrases by Confucius, Lao Tzu, Mencius, Chuang Tzu, and so on. Besides, those books are pivotal because they are alive as we are and meditative on living persuasively, prudentially, so we can compare notes with them. Finally, China already has a long ―series of footnotes,‖ the commentarial tradition, to those classics to gently direct us in our lived understanding of the classics. [1] First, pivotal classics in China are not many, not long, and familiar to us, for what the classics do and live on is identical to what we do and live on, namely, living itself. Beware, however. Never let ―familiarity breed contempt‖ of cavalier superficial reading, skimming and chewing on memorable phrases into stale pieces, to end up missing their deep meanings alive. ―Analects read, Analects dumb,‖453 as Japanese saying warns us against turning ourselves into rot scholars 腐儒 regurgitating tiresome reading reports of who said what. Computers would do better. That it is so fatally easy to fall into such stale trap is shown in the next ―§ A Negative Example, What Our Elucidation Is.‖454 We must, instead, learn how to read the classics as never read before. Those texts look familiar yet are really unfamiliar, as we see them in life‘s shifting lights, twinkling opalescent 葆光455 with layer after layer of new implications. We must let them continue to produce new milieus, Gestalten, and connotations. Such a ―letting‖ is our hermeneutical task, easier said than done, for we must always freshly look at the familiar texts to let them shine forth on their own, and keeping familiar things afresh as they are alive is supremely difficult. We must ever be on the alert, observant.456 [2] Besides, those books are pivotal because they are alive as we are. All babies are alike, yet each baby is one of kind, each distinct, always distinctly fresh every morning, at every moment. Our life is our baby, so are our classics, so familiar yet so unfamiliar. We must let that familiar unfamiliarity shine. How do we let their fresh unfamiliarity shine? We can and must compare notes with them, to inter-learn on living, thereby deepen, reshape our own lived thinking, to dance our life our way, better than before. In this way, the classics show as never the oppressive canons but a gentle guide and directive to our own living. [3] Finally, China already has a long “series of footnotes” to the classics to gently direct us in our lived understanding as a distinguished commentarial tradition, never to be mocked; it is our gentle directive to understand the Classics, to compare carefully with our thinking today, to deepen it to dance life our way, better than before. Have we repeated ourselves? But how can we help it? May our enthusiasm make our repetition into hermeneutical music!

453

―論語讀みの論語知らず,‖ to be a learned fool, so to speak. An identical warning must be issued on reading Homer, Shakespeare, the Bible, and all classics so deadly familiar to us. Familiarity breeds contempt, indeed, and contempt goes both ways, over the classics to spread to ourselves, and we do not know which is worse. 455 On the three meanings of 葆光, see Wu, Butterfly, op. cit., p. 166, comment on line 189. 456 An obvious parallel is the Bible. Various ―versions‖ of Bible translations show how possible and imperative it is to read the all-too-familiar text afresh in every coming age. See The Oxford Illustrated History of the Bible, ed. John Rogerson, 2001. 454

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GUIDE Now, the tradition is not to blindly follow; it gently guides us. Lu Hsiang-shan 陸象山 quipped, ―The Six Classics are my footnotes‖457 showing the way, and he is free to go his way. He follows the tradition of independence, following their not following, to seek what classical paragons sought in the tradition of life-envelopment. Following the tradition is thus an art. We can neither neglect it to shoot out into arbitrary vacuum, nor just mechanically duplicate what is said mechanically 器 (2/12). All this sounds spooky, so we look to Confucius the supposedly arch-traditionalist, claiming to be doing ―exposition, not creation 述而不作‖ (7/1), and ended up creating. The key is how his ―exposition‖ proceeds. In seeming contrast to Lu bluffing that the Classics are his footnotes to take off on his own, Confucius claims to engage in exposition, meticulously footnoting. Surprisingly, he strikes out novel, to ―with One skewer‖ what he learned.458 ―With one‖ phrase, he ―covers the Poetry Classic, to swerve not‖ (2/2); he says (3/20) that the first section of that Classic, the Kuan-chü, says ―happy but not wanton, sad but not injurious.‖ These words are his, not in the Classic.459 So exegesis that is not creation is creation. He also claims (2/15, 2/21, 3/8), ―The Odes Classic says . . ,‖ ―The History Classic says . . . ‖ These words are his, the One that aptly covers the whole 一言以蔽之 (2/2), the ―one needle that manifests the blood-essence 一針見血‖ of the matter. He wastes no words expressing what is enveloped in the classics. His words do not exist in what we meticulously learn460 in the classics, but reenact the data to let the classics (not ourselves) come alive as they are today, so that we can come alive as ourselves today, and live better today than before, now that we are enriched by the classics come alive. It is thus that Confucius engages in ―exposition, not creation (7/1),‖ by creatively infusing his insights in his exposition. His insights arrow-hit at the bull‘s eye hitherto unknown. Confucius claims that his exposition is no-creation, but all his exposition is his creation. He is independent, inheriting the tradition of creative independence; he creates the creative tradition he inherits. Confucius is thus more subtle than Lu Hsiang-shan. Lu claims that the Six Classics are his footnotes; Confucius claims that he does exposition, not creation, and his exposition is creative. That is envelopment ex-pressed, shown forth, developed naturally. What subtle creativity of reverence! 457

「論語中多有無頭柄的說話，.

.

.

非學有本領，未易讀也，苟學有本領，則知之所及者，及此也；仁之所守者，守此也；時習之，習此 也；說者說此；樂者樂此；如高屋之上，建瓴水矣。學苟知本，六經皆我註腳。」陸九淵集,

語錄,

[457[xii]] 457xii] 卷三十四，頁393。 Lu did not say what this root 本 is. Our contribution is to see this root as the enveloped implicative insight and discernment. 458 一以貫之 (15/2) where 之 refers to 多學而識之. This point differs from 一以貫之 (4/15) where 之 refers to 吾道. This must also be what Jesus meant in Matthew 5:17, 7:12. 459 Actually, ―Swerve not‖ is in Odes 297 describing a horse team going straight without swerving (see D. C. Lau and other commentators). Confucius lifted the line out of context to cover the entire Odes Classic. In this extended holistic sense, the words do not appear in the Classic.

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Confucius denies creation in tacit creation, while Lu claims creativity that proved to have less novelty than claimed. This is why Confucius is pivotal in China, not Lu. ―How did Confucius do it?‖ He was sensitive to implicative envelopment, and sensitively ex-pressed it as implicatively and as enveloping-ly. Let us look into how. We see in Confucius five stages to ex-press implicative envelopment; these stages are logical and chronological. Stage One: He intently observes his parents his past, their intention, their behavior pattern (1/11), by watching their wherewith, observing their wherefrom, and discerning their wherein (2/1).461 He thus calmly looks into ―where‖ things take place before they do, the spring-seed about to spring out. Stage Two: He then com-prehends the matter with ―one‖ to capture its inmost nature, to skewer the matter and cover it with that ―one‖ (15/3, 2/2). Stage Three: He warms up the old, checks data and evidence for validity, and learns from them as he thinks deeply on them (2/11, 3/9, 2/15). Stage Four: In careful investigations, he raises one to see three, hearing one to know two, ten, etc., advancing discernment until he can follow desires without overstepping rules (7/8, 5/9, 2/12, 2/4). Stage Five: He is thus able to claim that he follows the Poetry Classic, while taking it in his way as happy not wanton, sad not hurtful, confidently quoting the classics, in his own exposition, in their authority (3/14, 3/20, 2/15, 2/21, 3/8, 7/1). Enwrapped in classical past, he envelops it in his creativity. Now, mind you. All this is my exposition of Confucius‘, others would naturally have other views. This is the way as it should be; creative expositions are creative, one distinct from another. Thus the point is made, that Confucius is alive in his understanding ancient wisdom, and so its exposition carries life-authority. Saying ―exposition, not creation,‖ he has to create to do exposition, for creation in exposition is for exposition, whose maxim is to ―skewer the whole with One,‖ ―with the One he finds to cover the whole‖ of the classic being interpreted. Here creativity warms up the classic to reach its new level of deeper understanding. Creativity ―footnotes‖ the classics that footnote creativity. This is ―reenactment‖ in history, enriching discoveries, wisdom, and failures of yesteryears, on one hand, and our today‘s sympathetic understanding, learning, interpretations of them, and their creative reliving, on the other. Writing-description creatively inter-reenacts past-actuality across time, to evoke future. Let us look again afresh at the classics, beginning with Confucius‘ intercreative reenactment with the past. Confucius comments on Poetry Classic in two ways. One, he does its exposition by pulling a statement out of it, ―ssu wu hsieh 思無邪,‖ reinterprets it as ―thinking no swerving‖ out of the original ―paralleling no swerving,‖ and claims the statement to typify the whole Classic. Two, he crafts his own new statement, ―loh erh pu yin 樂而不淫 happy and not wanton,‖ to cap and re-describe the Classic. Is his move arbitrary? Well, no, for this reason. A classic is itself a profound redescription and reenactment of the ―present‖ at the time, so apt as to hand down to future. It mirrors actuality creatively, to join creation and description into reenactment. We today ask what actuality is and answer by describing it as did the classics. Journey to the West 西遊記 460 461

Confucius painstakingly collects the classics data and critically judges them, 2/3, 3/9, 3/14, etc. We are extrapolating from his insights on parents and on really knowing a person.

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re-describes our quest, to turn another literature, Gold-Potted Plum 金瓶梅, Six Portraits of Floating Life 浮生六記. Confucius did the same, in wisdom alive. ―But why writing, describing, mirroring at all?‖ The question opens a panorama of intercreation through time. Mirroring actuality, past and present, provokes reader into thinking on their own, to enrich that mirroring into future. The past raises ―one‖ in history, in classics, for a Confucius now to return with ―three,‖ and then, thus inspired, the Confucius-today raises ―one‖ for students the future to return with ―three.‖ Thus raising-questions and returning-responses inter-involve past, present, and future; it is historic reenactment, for history the ―simple depiction‖ evokes. Western philosophy is footnotes to Plato to enrich Plato; Six Classics are footnotes to enrich us and beyond. Past and present inter-footnote to inter-enrich, to push to future fuller. Writing is a way of actuality through time to inter-reenact, inter-mirror, to inter-enrich.

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Chapter 17

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A SURPRISING SKETCH OF CONFUCIANISM Confucianism is more taken for granted than closely looked at, to surprise us. Mencius is taken as the authorized ―heir‖ to Confucius, but quoted or mentioned him less even than Taoist Chuang Tzu his contemporary. Often Confucius‘ saying, ―By nature, alike, by nurture, apart 性相近也, 習相遠也,‖ is taken to support Mencius as heir to Confucius, but both Mencius and Hsün Tzu espoused ―by nature, alike,‖ one as by nature good, another as by nature bad. ―By nurture, apart‖ fits Hsün Tzu better who stressed training and instruction by authority, than Mencius who warned against ―helping growth‖ for natural ―reach 及‖ of our natural ―olding‖ of our old folks to people‘s, our ―four buds 四端‖ of humanness as identical to the sages‘, etc. Hsün Tzu was developed by disciples Han Fei and others into RealpolitikLegalism 法家, while Mencius wavered between Taoism (―flood breath-thrust 浩然之氣‖) and Confucius (killing oneself to complete humanness 殺身以成仁). Later dictators adopted Legalist authoritarianism and Confucian family-ization of all under heaven, politicizing Confucianism into tools for Legalistic dictatorship (to round up all under heaven into my family), instead of Confucianizing politics. Why it went this way is China‘s sad mystery. Later development was also odd. Chu Hsi‘s thought-atmosphere was a mix of Confucius and Hsün Tzu and even Buddhist comprehensive theorization, Wang Yang-ming‘s was a mix of Confucius, Lao Tzu, and Zen, yet both rejected all those elements in them except their Confucian elements that they took as ―orthodox.‖ Thus they all displayed three features. One, ―mix‖ means ―miscellanies‖ of schools, with systematization less analytical, more scattered than Buddhism, while they all rejected extraConfucian schools, to perhaps show Chinese concrete penchant. Two, the debates, developments, and influences among them were less contemporary than historical; two contemporaries, Mencius and Chuang Tzu, never mentioned each other. China is historically profound, and so perhaps more stable. Three, Taoism may be a metaphysical base of Confucianism that strongly rejects it. Confucius kept reverent distance from matters beyond this world, while recognizing their importance. Taoism is Confucianism‘s supportive twigs and originative roots (the Yin) while Confucianism is Taoism‘s leaves and flowers (the Yang).

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as root to Confucianism. ―Village of Ultimate Virtue 至德之鄉‖ shows Confucianism as Taoist leaves. Taoism can survive alone; Confucianism cannot. Confucianism we can see proudly displayed; Taoism invisibly supports it.

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PIVOTAL To wrap up, let us consider why those few classical people are pivotal. Chan plausibly said of Confucius,462 Confucius (551-479 BC) can truly be said to have molded Chinese civilization in general. It may seem far-fetched, however, to say that he molded Chinese philosophy in particular— that he determined the direction or established the pattern of later Chinese philosophical development—yet there is more truth in the statement than is usually realized. ―Why is Confucius pivotal while others are not?‖463 We see four descriptive factors. One, he ex-presses—chants forth—what he discerns on living matters. Two, he has the ―seed‖-power erupting inside, to respond to fresh Classics handed down. Three, he is sensitive to goings-on seasonally shifting. Four, a tree reaches deep down to grow up high, but a tree must grow away from its root. Confucius nurtured by the root the tradition grew China high. It is envelopment in time. Confucius is wise, we say. Look at him, and we find no clues as to how wise he is. How is he wise? He was sincere, sensitive, and astute, to explicitly deny being knowledgeable 多識, but just trying to find one essential through its details (15/3); he denied being a bornknower, just a learner 學而知 (7/19, 16, cf. 16/9), and admired Hui who knew ten when told of only one (5/9). His silent life says ―failures.‖ Strangely, his stubborn silence shows he is all of a piece, ―sincere 誠‖ as the Doctrine of the Mean 中庸 says, and he shows it in lived words in lived silence. Enveloped, expressive, he makes an impact pivotal, total, and alive, all awesomely simple, and silent. Wu‘s brother emailed touching pictures of rabbits with deer touching, silent, powerful beyond chatter. Animals are charged enveloped; their calm is charged alive, their silence sings. ―Dad, it‘s quieter when birdies sing,‖ Wu‘s tiny boy Mark whispered. Mark felt with a poet of Southern Dynasty, ―Cicadas chatter, forests quieter; birds sing, mount deeper.‖464 So is Nature, silently shifting day and night, morning fresh, evening calm, in its seasons restful, restive—noted since back in time till Baby Mark today. Animals, trees, and stones are hushed powers. ―What says Heaven? Hundreds of things engender therein,‖ says Confucius, and so he wants to say nothing as well (17/18). He watches and discerns all silently birthing, and gets it, embodies it, and just expresses it in 462 463

464

Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963, p. 14. The same question can be put on Homer and Shakespeare. Why of all poets did Homer shape Greek culture and beyond? Why of all dramatists did Shakespeare shape British culture and beyond? No one seems to have asked such questions, much less pondered on their answers. ―蟬噪林逾靜, 鳥鳴山更幽‖ by a 南朝詩人, 林征明, was popular among poetry critics in China. Cf. 朱任生編著, 詩論分類纂要, 臺灣商務印書館, 中華民國六十年, pp. 245, 249, 253, etc.

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words so concrete, blandly embodying it, enveloped. Such bland expression is power so pure and simple. Nuclear bombs are atoms‘ fission into explosive disasters, splitting-melting things; nuclear root-power is fusion, envelopment stealthy, silent. Atoms are whole, uncut (a-tom) root nuclear-dynamo, not to be cut-apart (analyzed), only to be embodied-enveloped expressing (in) life, (in) words. Confucius and not-many classical sages are atoms of Nature charged with nuclear dynamo, enveloped expressed in scanty words, and later generations naturally rallied, and mold themselves in the few sages with few words. It is thus that Confucius calls forth our inner seed power, to grow our chi 機 of growing spring-power, enveloped, responding to weather shifting around. Living animals and plants silently express what they are, self-enveloped and inter-enveloped with Nature that changes in and out of season. We can/should be like them, self-composed-integrated, ch‘I 氣enveloped,465 chi 機-flowing with Heaven and Earth, unified into One Body.466 This is ―being alive‖ as we are alive now, simple. No wonder Lao Tzu said (70) these words are very easy to know and very easy to walk, and yet no one knows and no one walks it, i.e., on being alive as we are alive. Confucius is one of those few who managed to be alive, and to live as he was alive—as human—and that is how he turns out pivotal in China through its whole history.

465 466

Mencius (2A2) says ―氣, 體之充也 ch‘i fills up the body.‖ Mencius 7A13, Chuang Tzu 6/46, 33/74.

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Chapter 18

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A NEGATIVE EXAMPLE, WHAT OUR ELUCIDATION IS NOT The tradition our root handed over is familiar yet quite novel, and our effort at reaching this root to embody-reenact it, to grow up our way, is natural yet extraordinarily hard. Being familiar with it risks losing its extraordinary novelty, to turns us rootless, superficial. So, we now go a negative way. We [1] cite a peculiar predicament of Chinese wisdom on its own hermeneutics, to [2] react to an essay in three ways, to realize [3] what exposition means. [1] China intones in rhetorical persuasion. That is China‘s power to risk throwing around catchy phrase, throwing aptness and coherence to the wind. Propaganda-harangues, logically boneless, cant, rant, and bluster everywhere political and apolitical, all proudly settle on paper as (fiery) ―essays.‖ History prunes them as they crop up daily. This is why China tends to cherish ancient classics over writings today however welldone, and thus risks engulfing in traditionalism, another pitfall. We wish we could cite such ―hollow essay‖ without impolitely offending its writer still living today. We are still looking around. But suppose we have found him. Let us call him Professor Kung-sun. Perusing his essay, we have the following reactions. First, we are glad that Professor Kung-sun heads in the same direction as ours, but lament that his rehearsal of Chinese theme is routine, lifeless, shutting off Confucian vitality. He just drones on with tiresome clichés, never fresh in his own way, trapped in set Confucian moralism so vague, stale and moldy. Significantly, however, Professor Kung-sun did not develop argument as in the West, but stays there, stale and dead. This is the glory and predicament of Chinese wisdom staying enveloped. It is alive and growing ever afresh, or else getting congealed and stale dead. Chinese wisdom mirrors life; it is alive or dead, never developmental. We must take Dr. Kung-sun‘s academic praxis as our alerting mirror, and proceed to engage in thinking alive as our classical sages have been doing for millennia with us. [2] Dr. Kung-sun‘s negative objective lesson provokes us to think on how to envelop; everything involves everything else. This flower I see now is the first of all flowers I will see the rest of my life; every this is the first of all this‘s that come in my later days. So, one example can be cited for us to go on by themselves, in three ways. One, a classical writer cites ―one‖ notion to skewer all he sees. Two, a classical writer cites several instances to ―portray‖ a typical situation of, e.g., ―filial piety.‖ Three, classical

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writers‘ paradoxes in story-bits (―baby died young is longest-lived‖), or platitudes in storybits (―morning three‖ as 3+4=4+3),467 jolt us to realize the inexpressible actuality here now. These are three modes of presenting envelopment-thinking, by citing one or many instances, or jolting our usual thinking, to point, showing, alluding, illustrating, evoking, to envelop, not pointedly referred. Flatly saying out heartfelt emotion evaporates it, for feeling is globally enveloped in a context.468 [3] Two important points are here. One, we logically enumerated two sorts of thinking, development and envelopment, and three ways of presenting envelopment, alluding, illustrating, evoking. Our example-stories explained. We wonder if our explanations of presenting envelopment-thinking is envelopment or development. All this is a hotchpotch of both genres of thinking to present envelopment-thinking. Here, we present more than describe; we envelop more than develop. What we say is how we say, and what and how we say embodies and presents thinking alive. This is Chinese wisdom alive presented in our thinking alive here now. If Chinese wisdom is history-imbued, provoked by pivotal sages of the classics, then our presentation also reenacts such historical thinking in our way today, citing classical writers citing. History is contemporary, inter-involving with the past, time-envelopment here now, to be and to think alive, as Chinese wisdom today among us. Two, we are warned. ―Tao can tao, not always-Tao.‖ We have talked too much, bordering on not-Tao.469 We beg ―envelopment‖ for forgiveness to embrace our barbarism. We plead this way. Our risk is inevitable. When we say, ―Expression is no description; we must do exposition, not creation (Confucius), in wording of no word (Chuang Tzu),‖ this saying includes development and envelopment, and it is not-Tao.470 This risk is shared by pivotal classical sages. Lao Tzu said, ―Tao can-tao, not always Tao,‖ which is not-Tao; he forbad saying, and said. Saying, ―Exposition, not creation,‖ Confucius went to creative exposition. He said, ―I desire not to say. . . What says Heaven?‖ Denying saying, he said the denial. We also did so, self-aware. We did so, and then warn ourselves against its risk and recant it, as Wittgenstein climbed up his proposition-ladder and kicked it away. Our problem is selfinvolved. We said envelopment is not development, and described envelopment. But describing develops, development-of-envelopment is no-envelopment; our description contradicts what it describes. Now the problem remains, but without such self-contradictory description we would not know what envelopment is. So, in this venture of radical honesty of denying development in development, there appears envelopment all by itself, we hope, for we the developer cannot develop what envelops development. We cannot embrace the embracing that enables. We must use noenvelopment development for envelopment, the futility of self-deconstruction, toward ―envelopment.‖

467

―莫壽於殤子‖ is in Chuang Tzu 2/52. The story of ―朝三‖ is in Chuang Tzu 2/38-40. Heidegger comes close when he takes feeling as ―attunement‖ with the situation. Whitehead‘s feeling as ―prehension‖ is uni-lineal, developmental, while feeling in the original sense is enveloped. 469 Still, no-talk at all does not help Tao appear. ―No talk‖ will be considered soon. 470 Would saying so commit us to an infinite regress of saying the saying, etc.? It may, but such a regress would not be vicious but uninteresting (as 10 divided by 3 is forever 3.333 . . . that we know), for however far back we go, we know the judgment on it is what is said here. 468

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―But how does self-deconstruction go?‖ Well, we cannot help double-walking, development and envelopment, hoping to hit envelopment by development, denying development to let envelopment appear. ―How?‖ We must read the familiar classics forever afresh, as if yet to read, as if never read before. Reading develops, to re-fresh, reenact, to envelop. Confucius went through re-fresh-ing as he exclaimed, ―Now I can begin to talk [about] Poetry. Told what‘s gone, and you know what‘s coming! The one who arouses me is Shang [my dear student, you]!‖ Confucius was ready to be aroused ―three‖ by raising ―one,‖ demanding ―one to skewer all‖ on all students, everyone, into enveloping novelty.471 Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu say nonsense, non-sequiturs, and the obvious, to arouse us afresh into novel things (developed) in daily routines (enveloped). Envelopment happens in re-reading, redevelopment. Such a re-reading tarries, Lodging-in-Words 寓言, enveloping many things on many levels, contraries, and incompatibles, i.e., in Many-Layered Wording 重言, to thus compose Goblet Wording 卮言to tip naturally toward the as is. These three sayings are embedded 寓 in children‘s ―holophrase,‖ their short ―whole phrase.‖ Kids say ―doggie‖ to point-tip to 卮 ―Look at the doggie,‖ ―That‘s a doggie,‖ ―I love doggie,‖ and/or ―Bring me a doggie,‖ many-layered 重 meanings all tarrying in one focal ―doggie,‖ and then point to cat, giraffe, elephant, etc., and say ―doggie.‖ We see a Chinese whole phrase, ―wu 物,‖ concretely leading an ox 牛, to mean ―things,‖472 and China‘s many whole phrases crisscrossed into poetry of writings, as with unspoiled pre-Socratics‘ and Homeric epic legends. Their concrete crystallized impact is overwhelming. The West‘s linguists take ―holophrase‖ as kid‘s first stage of language acquisition, for its sense depends on the situation473; we adults want words of monothetic meanings, each word with only one clearly defined sense, situation-free; such a universal ―ideal language,‖ dreamed-up by logical atomism, exists nowhere, however. Living text lives in varied lived contexts as its subtext. Collingwood said a sentence is meaningful only as answer to question(s) asked, implicitly or explicitly, and so without knowing the question, the sentence is senseless. Not accidentally, Plato explicated Socrates in the dialogues of questions and answers. And then he said, questions assume a set of presuppositions based on ―absolute presuppositions‖ that express culture and history.474 All this is a roundabout way of saying, simply, that every sentence is situational, that is, actuality is meaning-index to sentences, concretely, compactly (in ―whole phrases‖)

471 472

Analects 1/15, 3/8, 7/8, 4/15, 15/3, and 9/11 are combined here.

說文解字詁林, 臺北市鼎文書局, 民72, 2:1082-1085. It begins by saying, 「物，萬物也。牛為大物，天地之數起於牽牛，故從牛，勿聲。」 Contrast this concrete ox-picture of a thing with Martin Heidegger‘s convoluted What Is a Thing? Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1967. 473 Cf. ―Holophrase‖ in The Oxford Companion to the English Language, ed. Tom McArthur, NY: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 481. ―Whole phrase‖ is Wu‘s interpreted coinage. 474 R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1940, Chapter IV and V. In fact, the whole volume explicates this theme of question and answer, with absolute presupposition as cultural and historical. For Collingwood, metaphysics is culture and history. I wish he knew of China!

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expressing actuality in ways described by Chuang Tzu‘s three sayings; each with more than one sense, situation-sensitive. All sayings are demonstratives; they are actuality-indexed.475 China prominently manifests sense as actuality-sensitive. Appreciation of a volume‘s ―sense‖ is incomplete until its author‘s biography and the circumstance of its writing is understood. In contrast, knowing that Russell is a world-traveler hardly increases understanding of his philosophy of mathematics. Here is a strange inconsistency in the writing-writer relation. Typically in the West, writing stands on its own to be judged on its own merit. In contrast, in China, to know writing we must know its writer; knowing nothing about the writer we would not be able to understand his writing. At least three reasons, interpersonal, expressive, and autobiographical, can be cited for this strange common sense in China. At an interpersonal level, China cherishes friendship. We cannot befriend someone totally unknown; friendship implicates personal knowledge via that person‘s writing. Writing clues us into knowing a person, and we can know writing only by knowing its writer‘s life (Mencius 5B8). Knowing a person is all-important to which writing is an aid, and knowing the writer helps knowing his writing. So, we must know the writer in order to know the writing. At an expressive level, a person shows oneself by self-expression, which has its own pattern; even a dog barks in its own pattern. The expressive pattern shows meaning; poetic pattern indicates some different meaning from prose-pattern.476 Writing expresses someone‘s personal pattern; we know a person by reading his writing in his personal pattern, and to know the specific writing pattern, we need to know the writer‘s life. Finally, as personal-expressive, writing is autobiographical. Russell‘s philosophy of mathematics can be read as abstract truth separate from Russell, but his being a worldtraveller, who wrote nothing noteworthy on Japan, Russia,477 USA, and hardly on Britain his homeland, deepens significance on his book-long impressions on China.478 Seemingly scattered, China‘s writings express vital coherence as personal life-or-death responses to the compelling flesh-and-blood circumstances. The Analects479 and the Mencius are dot-portrayls of Confucius and Mencius the two vibrant personalities. Historical biography is an integral subtext to Chinese literature, sayings situational, author-bound.480 Chinese culture is writer-literary and historical 文史.

475

R. G. Collingwood took the sense of a proposition to be known by knowing the question(s) it is an answer (An Autobiography, 1939, pp. 29-43), and took ―absolute presupposition‖ of sense as cultural (An Essay in Metaphysics, 1940, pp. 21-48, both published by Oxford University Press). 476 「歌與詩」 in 聞一多全集, 湖北人民出版社, 2004, 10: 5-25; 「詩多義舉例」，「詩的語言」，「日常生活的詩」，「論―以文為詩‖」 in 朱自清古关文學專集(上), 臺北宏業書局, 民72, pp. 59-100. 477 Russell‘s Bolshevism: Practice and Theory (1920) is on ―bolshevism,‖ not on flesh-and-blood Russia. 478 Bertrand Russell, The Problem of China, NY: The Century Co., 1922. 479 Hegel read the Analects as abstract pronouncements and found them tiresome platitudes. 480 ―Ultimately the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is. . . . What holds me is the enthusiasm of the writer for his field,‖ says William Zinsser (On Writing Well, NY: HarperCollins, 2006, p. 5). ―It was a terrifying ordeal, but I wasn‘t frightened‖ is odd, says P. H. NowellSmith (Ethics, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Pelican Books, 1954, pp. 84-87). But neither goes so far as to say we must learn of the writers‘ biographies before reading their writings, as China insists. Westerners seldom read writings as autobiographical.

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The above three accounts say: [a] the writing clues us into knowing the person, and the writing is known by knowing its writer‘s personal life, and [b] to know an expression we must know its expressive manner, and to know this manner we must know the person‘s life, and so [c] writing is author-bound. We have a circle here. Knowing a person requires knowing his writing, and to know the writing, we must know the person. This circle has a center, the person, toward whom the writing converges. In fact, Chuang Tzu says we must forget words, writing, before we can word-with persons. After getting the meaning from the writing, we must throw away the writing to befriend someone who means (via writing). So the center of gravity is now shifted to knowing the person to know the writing (to know the person), while knowing the writing alone would not know the person. Thus we can see what, how, and why of the book-author intimacy, how this intimacy increases our understanding of the book. In China, style and content, how and what, interpenetrate to make sense. What makes sense is its maker, the author. So, knowing the author initiates us into the sense, before the sense that produces the book; by the same token, what the book has and how it is written manifest its author. This is the intimacy between the book and its author.481 Therefore, to know the book we need to know its author.482 The History Record 史記 adds its depth-of-sense ineffable, with our knowledge of its author Ssu-ma Ch‘ien 司馬遷 suffering injustice, as knowing Confucius‘ life-frustration of inability to spread humanity in his inhumane days deepens the throbbing pathos of his Analects. If unable to know the author of a book, we want to know at least in what era and social milieu it was written, and attribute the book to a group/school of like-minded anonymous authors. ―Lodged wording‖ is sentences lodged in actuality to metaphor from one sense to another, heavy in implications layer after layer as ―layered wording,‖ and all this is ―goblet wording‖ situation-tipped, relevant to the situation and the situation as sense-index making sense in sentences.483 Thus, these linguists do not realize that business logo‘s and ads actually aim at producing apt sharp ―whole phrases‖ to attract attention. Besides, dialogue such as ―OK?‖ ―OK.‖, and the like, is a daily occurrence, nothing childish. More, poetry packs maximum implications in minimum words (Ezra Pound). Heidegger‘s ―one uncomposed poem‖ of a writer, of which all other sentences speak,484 is already composed in the child—who parents us adults.485 Kids all say without saying, say not-saying. ―It‘s quieter when birdies sing, right, Dad?‖ whispered my tiny Mark, as mentioned before. Birdies sing world-silence, as those sages say no-saying. Menuhin‘s violin hugs silence; the louder the violin sounds, the louder the silence sings. 481

Thus 文心雕龍 often deliberates on the writer before deliberating on the writing. Section 徵聖 precedes 宗經; 程器 goes before 序志 (器 depicts the person, 序 shows the writing). In 風骨 and 情采, 風 and 情 describe the writer, 骨and 釆 the writing. In 體性 the personality of the writer is stressed as indispensable to manifesting fitting writing. 482 William H. Pritchard in Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered, Oxford University Press, 1984, tries to demonstrate that Frost‘s poetry came from his life. 483 Kant‘s critical philosophy is shaped by Newton‘s absolute spact and time. Kant would have revised his philosophy according to Einstein today. 484 Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, NY: Harper, 1971, p. 160. Heidegger is here intuitively sensing the fact, without realizing that the fact is firmly established by children, poets, and commerce. 485 Kids fight, saying, ―I‘m OK! You‘re no-K!‖ We adults have not advanced that far yet.

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As every morning birds sing fresh as the first morning of creation, so every time we open a classic, we open ourselves into the world singing its first dawn, and we are privileged to join in their odes to creation. Reading a classic is a cosmic creative event; human piping blends earthly and heavenly, singing the silence of world significance; things are heard, not as random noises but as piping music. John Cage thoroughly enjoys the exquisite music—much better than all his compositions—that continues to emerge into his apartment in Sixth Avenue in New York City, in the 24-hour traffic and commotions. He must be the happiest man in the world! This is quite amazing, expressed in four questions. One, why are things musical pipings, not seen as painterly beauty? Does ―hearing‖ show total personal impact? Still, two, what does hearing mean that has no structure of the seen? Three, why are all sounds ―piping music‖? Music is an organized impact to enhance. Do all sounds in nature enhance? Finally, what does ―music‖ mean here? The nature-music is nonhuman out there, not out of our core of being as our music, yet no less intimate as human music. Why? In a word, Chuang Tzu claims that what affects me is total structured intimacy enhancing. This claim shakes the whole earth and heaven. But is this interpretation correct? But don‘t we all wish it were valid? Being a part of nature, our heartfelt wish itself may well be a piece of heartfelt evidence that it must be valid, for our heartfelt existence guarantees it. Who knows, it may well be true. Now, is all this reverie itself part of piping? Does it matter if it were human, earthly or heavenly piping, so long as it is piping? Confucius also said (6/23), ―The humane enjoy hills; the wise enjoy waters,‖ but does it matter who enjoys what, as long as the sages enjoy nature, and enjoyment is happy sonic resonance, sharing enjoyment with nature, each as the milieu of enjoyment of the other? These enjoyable sounds are loud in silence, as falling leaves on the steps sing autumn, wordless; they express. Description disturbs silence of existence expressed. Mencius insisting on human nature being good, all right in itself, echoes insane Gödel‘s ―But every error is due to extraneous factors (such as emotion and education); reason itself does not err‖486; reason is all right, proving one system by another. Mencius and Gödel express sense, not describe, for taken literally their words are senseless. Still, in saying so, calling human nature and reason good, we do hope our calling did not disturb the voices of silence, as the ancient sages did not. We hope so, having reenacted the ancient pivots in our own clumsy ways today; we hope we have executed historical reenactment. This is Chinese wisdom alive, living on today in us. All natural pipings of total impact are ordinary, and such thinking is extraordinary. A casual restaurant in USA, Panera, is a casual stopover. Its employees are there to make money, theirs is not a casual business for them to serve casual stopovers. How important is serving casual, unimportant stopovers? How could I aim at becoming unimportant, unless by aiming low (serving stopovers) I really aim high (making a living)? Chuang Tzu said (22/43-47) the lower we press, the more Tao reveals, as pressing the pig‘s bottom measures how fat it is, as the King of kings was born a lowly carpenter‘s baby in an animal feed-box. 486

Mencius 6A8. ―Kurt Gödel, 29 November 1972,‖ quoted to begin Introduction in Rebecca Goldstein, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, NY: W. W. Norton, 2005.

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Now the problem gets sticky. Do we look at the pig for pig‘s sake or for Tao? Is the baby a stand-in for the King, or is the baby himself the King?487 The low is so inextricably involved with—incarnate in—the high that questioning this way tears their unity apart. What naturally is one let no one tear apart. Such complexity of multi-layered involvement of Chinese wisdom alive! Let us put it another way. ―The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next,‖ says a fortune cookie. The saying probably refers to what in the previous days was laboriously worked out as a novelty, e.g., heliocentric movement of the earth, being accepted today as common sense. But such is not always true at all, in fact, belongs rather to exceptions, and the saying borders on being quite false. Just think of the classics, called ―today‖: childhood, politics, history, love, parenthood, humanness, animals, stones, trees, fire, nature, weather, here, now, death, toothache, hunger, and even myself, everything we think we know well, quite bland and familiar. They are all common sense we know thoroughly. Surprisingly, however, on looking into them, we find that they are bottomless, mysterious. The more we work on them the less we know them. They are forever fresh; poets and scientists labor on them. Poets, painters, philosophers, insane people, and children, are all sensitive to such truth, that every leaf fallen at this moment is mysterious. The common is uncommon, and the ordinary is absolutely extraordinary, shimmering with depths that make us dizzy whenever we look into. This is what we mean by being alive; to be alive is a mystery. Now, being alive is surely jovial, and the ―comic‖ often captures such joy of no-joy. Still, surprisingly enough, the comic differs in tone in different cultures, in the West, say, and in China. We must delve into this fascinating theme, taking clues from two typical comic thinkers of the two cultures.

487

Kierkegaard summarily relegated this aporia to the comic in Christianity. See Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, trs.-eds. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967-1975, 2:253 (1682), and The Humor of Kierkegaard, ed. Thomas C. Oden, Princeton University Press, 2004, pp. 35-36. Is his comic a shocker, not comical?

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Chapter 19

KIERKEGAARD AND CHUANG TZU IN THE COMIC Kierkegaard typifies the West as Chuang Tzu does China; they are juxtaposed here. The word ―and‖ in this section title has three aspects. First, we consider their similarities, then their differences, and finally their inter-enrichment.

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THEIR SIMILARITIES Both men are funny, funny and sharp, deep and irresistible; funny and fun are at the cutting edge of living, its epitome. They both hit at the core of life as they performed the comic, for even if living is not always ―fun,‖ life is at its peak when it is irresistibly funny. Kierkegaard in all his gloom is probably the West‘s funniest thinker, explicitly488 existentializing thinking since Socrates, as Kierkegaard lived life by making a comedy of it. Chuang Tzu single-handedly initiated and shaped the literary aesthetic tradition of China. Literary beauty mirrors and shapes life, so Chuang Tzu mirrors and shapes life in China, by practicing the comic and living comically. Yet there is the comic and there is the comic. Kierkegaard the funniest is not fun; bland Chuang Tzu is funny and fun. Why?

THEIR DIFFERENCES Kierkegaard explicitly theorizes about the comic, presenting its rationale and its position in life, and practicing it, laughing at himself and at us, living as we all do. Chuang Tzu just practices the comic, by mixing ironies, parables, humor, and tongue-in-cheek mock-phrases in mock-quotations. He is neither serious nor casual, touching the point without touching it, just alluding to them with a wink. Juxtaposing examples, superficially similar, taken from both thinkers, brings out their differences, stark to their assumptions. Kierkegaard said, The comic is always based upon contradiction. If a man tries to establish himself as a tavern keeper and fails, this is not comic. However, if a girl tries to get permission to establish 488

Nietzsche existentialized thinking without explicitly saying so.

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herself as a prostitute and fails, which sometimes happens, this is comic—very comic, inasmuch as it contains many contradictions. Oden said, ―The contradiction lies in the illegitimacy which tries to legitimize itself—that is funny—but even more so in that it fails!‖489 Now compare this story with Chuang Tzu‘s (2/79-81), Lady Beautiful . . . was captured by Chin. At first tears drenched her robe-collars. Led to the king, slept with him on square bed, ate grain-fed cattle, she regretted her wailing. How would I know the dead would not regret their initial wish to live? We at once feel an atmosphere contrast. The story of failed prostitution-applicant strikes us as dark, alien, unlikely, and cynical, designed to explain the comic. The story of Lady Beautiful evokes our sympathy, with unsuspected happy ending that sounds natural, surprising us further with an actual point edifying, on death.490 What‘s going on here? Kierkegaard‘s dark cynicism originates in staying up high above to look down on life we commonly live as contradictory, comic, not-right. Looked at in Platonic disdain, even the Christian Incarnation is self-contradictory, bordering on the comical, to match our self-contradiction down here, no less comical. Chuang Tzu, in contrast, takes pity on life we usually live, our self (24/64-65) lost in moralism or prodigality, and nudges coming home to our self-so in untoward undesirable events and death, with natural, likely, yet surprising stories to lure us to come-to-be truly natural as we originally, genuinely are. It is thus that Chuang Tzu leads us naturally to the extra-ordinary within the ordinary, while Kierkegaard is so anti-ordinary as to turn grotesque. For Chuang Tzu, the whole life in the whole cosmos is comically enjoyable. For Kierkegaard, the comic accompanies life‘s last stage before the leap of faith into the otherworldly Heaven, which is ―too earnest a place for laughter,‖ revealing itself to us in this comical world.491 Kierkegaard has a full-blown theory of the comic that is not comical in itself, while Chuang Tzu has no theory of the comic, and theory-like passages are said with tongue-incheek comicals; he can thus afford to be profound when frivolous, frivolous when profound.492 For Kierkegaard, human living is thwarted, self-contradictory, and comical in the Beyond‘s eye; it needs be saved. For Chuang Tzu, human living must return home to itself, for both ―life natural‖ and ―life actually lived‖ are comical, life is comical as it should be, and realizing so turns life actual at home in life natural, returning where is comical; it is so enjoyable. Thus for Kierkegaard the comic is not a part of argument; cut the comic, and the argument still stands. For Chuang Tzu, the comic ―argues‖; cut the comic, and the argument vanishes. Chuang Tzu‘s humor is light, hilarious, and deep, disarmingly innocent and simple, and his humorous thinking relaxes us into ourselves in sensitivity. 489

Journals, op. cit., 2:266 (1741), quoted in Oden, Humor, op. cit., p. 21. We need not duplicate the contrast in Franz Kafka‘s long dreary Metamorphosis of a nap dreaming to be a big green bug, against Chuang Tzu‘s brisk (2/94-96) dreaming ―last night‖ to be a butterfly, then wondering if he has dreamt to be a butterfly or he is now a butterfly dreaming to be he. 491 Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, eds.-trs. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967-1975, 2:272 (1756), 2:253 (1682). 492 Chuang Tzu ―is frivolous when he is profound and profound when he is frivolous,‖ said Lin Yutang, in The Wisdom of China and India, NY: Random House, 1942, p. 627. Cf. Wu, Metaphoring, op. cit., p. 566, Butterfly, op. cit., pp. 26, 403. 490

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Kierkegaard‘s humor has depth, slight hilarity, and no levity because he laughs at human folly. Sadly, humor without levity is no humor, so Kierkegaard can be said to have not humor but acid laughter at people, turning us listeners jumpy, cynical, and sophisticated—and perhaps turns our eyes Beyond-this-world. The comic moves lightly, yet Kierkegaard looks down on us from the divine beyond that does not move, laughing at the ―world among people.‖ Chuang Tzu moves with people and among them, romping frivolous-deep in the comic. This is because the comic is unnatural to Kierkegaard while it is in the natural for Chuang Tzu. The comic is contradiction to Kierkegaard, a provocative laughingstock. To Chuang Tzu, the comic seems contradictory to outsiders, but actually expresses what comes natural; contradiction and naturalness is joined joyous and moving, clearly visible to those who know. In Chuang Tzu the comic is levity hilarious without self-contradiction, going deep into things‘ self-so. His stories are, however painful, surprisingly enjoyable, softly provocative, and never offends our natural propensity.

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THEIR INTER-ENRICHMENT Their differences indicate how they can inter-enrich. Chuang Tzu could learn from Kierkegaard to be more explicit in reflecting on the comical tone and practice of his wording, and show explicitly, as Kierkegaard did not, how essential the comic is to the whole thinking on living in actuality and in its ideal. Kierkegaard could learn from Chuang Tzu on two counts. One, the comic is not a mere skill to call reader‘s attention to his theory unrelated to the skill, but essential to the theory, i.e., we must think and live comic-happy. The comic should show sunny composure, not cynical accusation in gloom. Two, Kiekegaard‘s pseudonymity must stay as Chuang Tzu‘s did, not touted into comical self-contradiction, existential or theoretical. There must be more, indefinitely more, which Kierkegaard and Chuang Tzu can interlearn to inter-enrich. For example, both are sharp intellectuals. Perception looks into the situation to adjust intellect that can cut too much. Kierkegaard and Chuang Tzu could interlearn to blend perception in intellect, to turn blandly, lightly, livable. Intellect must blend perception. No lawyer or doctor would textbook-perfectly do their jobs to bungle the case and kill the patient. A lawyer argues relevantly to the case, from precedents, to play by the rules, and a medical doctor counsels patients in their distinctly specific situations and adjusts resources of healing accordingly. All this responds to Confucius warning that learning alone loses us, pondering alone is risky, and to Kant warning that concept alone is empty, percept alone is blind.493 Let us take their concrete blending in ―love‖ that blend trying into not-trying, to let be. A lady told me, ―I‘m lucky to have Bobby. None of us is perfect, but we both work hard to make our marriage work.‖ This saying made me think long. What does she mean by their ―working hard‖ on marriage? Does love need a work-on? Obviously, love just comes in joy, it cannot contrive or work on, and yet taking love for granted surely breeds contempt in familiarity—to lose it. Love does not burn, yet love with no steady fire is no love; living can do neither with nor without love. Thus, twist and turn as we

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may, we cannot see whether to work on love or not. Love is a toughest cognitive aporia. I had to watch how their three angelic children draw pictures, as they love to, to draw life, and follow them to draw up a pastiche, as below. In the torrential cataract of lived time, co-swimming is needed yet it is treacherous. Coordination, breath to breath, to the throbbing heartbeat of the minutes, is required for survival together. Here is no ―help‖ but deft steering. Even ―tigers and wolves; they are ‗humane‘ as parents and children are mutually intimate.‖494 I must follow them in my desiring, letting no emotion injure me. My joy in steady love is no wildfire romance scorching me all over and all around, for tigers and wolves do not. Thus, in love, trying is my pleasure. As I try, my trying is trying no more. ―Is he heavy?‖ we asked a boy shouldering a big boy. ―No, he is my brother.‖ Another boy was huffing and puffing to carry a dog, ―Can I buy this dog here?‖ ―Mister! This dog is my dog, not for sale!‖ We are so moved. In love, labor is no labor at all; it is joy. These concrete stories told a point, we hope, i.e., ―in ultimate doing, gone is doing 至為去為‖ (22/84); here is ―no help 不助‖ (11/69), ―no emotion 無情‖ that is ―with no likes

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or hates to injure me inside 不以好惡內傷其身‖ (5/55-59); ―tigers, wolves, they are humane; among them parents and children are mutually intimate 虎狠仁也 . . . 父子相親‖ (14/6), and ―ultimate joy, no joy 至樂無樂‖ (18/11). These are Chuang Tzu‘s exotic phrases, so contradictory and scattered as to be difficult if not impossible to understand—on cognitive level. Yet, surprisingly, in stories of love, marital and caring, these phrases emerge so naturally to elucidate love, where striving joins notstriving, scheming-and-trying penetrates following-along, to unite spontaneously, and Chuang Tzu‘s recalcitrant phrases naturally fit as hand in glove to express lived situations, lightly. Life praxis is king here. We nod as we live sensitively to what goes on, being observant without observing, and alert unawares to things around. Here thinking joins living. We live fully by living perceptively and thoughtfully, to think alive. All this describes Chinese wisdom, thinking alive. Now, negative terms were used naturally here—―without observing,‖ ―unawares.‖ We must live in emptiness in some sense. We had better go into this fascinating theme.

493 494

Analects 2/15. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, B75=A51. I‘ve just quoted Chuang Tzu 14/6.

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Chapter 20

EMPTINESS (BLANK, SUFFERING, COMMON, VULGAR) ―Nothingness‖ is a fascination in interculture. The West since Parmenides rules it out as not even a surd or a paradox.495 Sartre‘s ―No Exit‖ today is meeting nothingness and no out, a terror being-milieu, trapped ―no exit.‖ Terror of meeting nothingness shows terror of no-exit, ―nothing‖ unnoticed by Sartre. Being unnoticed is the ultimate of terror. Sartre is trapped there and does not know it. Buddhism takes nothingness as a cosmic ―black hole‖ sucking all, including consciousness and the concept of nothingness, into a black mystery of—nothingness. To realize so and enter it is the bliss of Nirvana. In contrast, China accepts nothingness as being at home at ease, in peace. China allows no sucking into nothingness as bliss. No-thing is not threat but an agent to ―harmonize‖ life, in fascinatingly pragmatic-paradoxical ways. We call—we byname— Copyright © 2010. Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Chinese nothingness ―emptiness, hsü-虛,‖ to distinguish it from the West ―nonbeing, ouk on, me on,‖ and from Buddhist ―void, sunya, k’ung-空.‖ Greek ouk on is chaos agape, void in outer space; Greek me on is an active denial of onbeings, black hole in outer space. Did Parmenides consider and deny me on? Had he ever considered and denied ouk on? Buddhist synya seems to combine ouk on and me on, that is, ouk on with the power of me on. Here the power of black hole in simple ouk on is sheer Brilliance and Bliss Ineffable. Chinese emptiness, hsü-虛, in contrast, is rooming accommodation, a smiling ouk on with anti-me on to enable on, for existence all around to emerge. In this sense, architecture is critical for Lao Tzu (11), ―The door and windows are cut out to make a room; it is on its emptiness that its use depends.‖ Thus architecture is Demiurge-like creation of emptiness, to serve as dwelling for happiness of existence to thrive at home.496 495

―Nonexistent objects‖ was mentioned only to be brushed aside as nonsense (as nonexistent existent) in Roy Sorensen, A Brief History of Paradox: Philosophy and the Labyrinths of the Mind, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 30-31. ―Philosophy‖ and ―the mind‖ here are Western. 496 Amos Ih Tiao Chang, The Tao of Architecture, Princeton University Press, 1981, expands on this Lao Tzu chapter 11. Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness, NY: Pantheon Book, 2006, happily explains how houses can make us happy, but is silent on emptiness as rooming, much less as happiness. Cf. ―Wright‘s Influence Abroad,‖ ―Builder and Poet—Frank Lloyd Wright,‖ and ―The Early Impress of Japan on Wright‘s

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China since old leans on emptiness; it understates the case, avoids ascending to the top, and so on. We first A. look at eight life-examples in China, and then B. self-reflect on what realizing all this means, whether the reflection is itself empty or not. ―Rock‖ is where four cultures gather, the West, Christianity, Buddhism, and China. The West carves presidents into it and tunnels for traffic; rocks are materials to manipulate. Christianity rejoices in the Rock of Ages. Buddhism loves faces in rocks, human life as illusory images in no-human nowhere. China rejoices in rock-faces portraying harmony human-cosmos interfusing.

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[A] Eight Examples Here are eight life-examples on how significantly emptiness is active in living. One, being ―blank‖-minded and -hearted is bliss. Thinking nothing with eyes closed feeds and fulfills unawares; ―good music‖ does so. The child knows nothing, can do nothing, and as such is awesomely astute. Just to be with such child, vibrantly blank, fulfills me. Two, amnesia can moisten497; self-loss can gain and self-enrich. Asked how old he is, a toddler said, ―I don‘t know.‖ Asked what his name is, he said, ―I forget. Mom knows!‖ Then his brother said, ―O, he don‘t know noth‘n‘!‖ upon which they joined hands and ran away. I stood long, awestruck.498 Such vitality of amnesia! Three, happy ―holidays‖ in British are a ―vacation‖ in US, vacating life‘s clutters for rejuvenation, by being just blank, fooling around, in happiness whistling the breezy music of living. Four, amidst tyranny-disasters, Chuang Tzu (4/24-32) offered ―heart fasting 心齋‖ to vacantly listen with life-breath, for things to gather, to be home in what cannot be helped, to fly with no wings playing silly games with silly tyrant. We fast away mind-clutters, emptying the heart to turn nimble over tyranny. Five, heart-fasting happens every night in sleep, to come home to our self, in total absence of contrivance and consciousness, and replenish unawares. No wonder, the doctor, physical and mental, asks if we can sleep. Six, autism is Chinese ―self-closed disease 自閉症,‖ so strange to people that they call it a ―disease,‖ but is it we dissipated, or the autistic self-closed, who is ill? Seven, the world is full of those who are vulgar, stupid, and stubborn. Depressed Lincoln499 said, ―God must love common people, for he created so many.‖ Erudite ―Professor Higgins‖ in My Fair Lady said, ―She is deliciously vulgar,‖ and married her. Presidents Eisenhower, Ford, Reagan, and Bush were presidents because they were not clever. Eight, life‘s negative risks and challenges shape the self; they are a worst vacuum to work out our highest. Mencius‘ depiction is beyond improving (6B15):

Art‖ in Peter Reed and William Kaizen, eds., The Show to End All Shows: Frank Lloyd Wright and the Museum of Modern Art, 1940, NY: The Museum of Modern Art, 2004, pp. 143-158. 497 Oliver Sacks harps on woes of amnesia and ignores its bliss, in Migraine (1970, 1985), Awakenings (1974, 1987), A Leg to Stand On (1984), The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1986, 1987), Seeing Voices (1989), An Anthropologist on Mars (1995), etc. 498 This real incident was quoted on p. 20 to conclude ―A Preliminary Remark,‖ to begin Wu‘s entire volume, On Chinese Body Thinking: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1997. 499 Joshua Wolf Shenk, Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006.

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Emptiness (Blank, Suffering, Common, Vulgar)

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[Many notable people arose from circumstances of pain and poverty.] Thus Heaven descends on people with great tasks by first tormenting their hearts-and-wills, laboring their sinews-and-bones, famishing their whole bodies, emptying their lives to poverty, confounding-frustrating their behaviors at every turn. All this is in order to move their heart to toughen their nature to resilience, to enable what they were incapable before.

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[B] Is Reflection on Emptiness Empty? Now, to realize such as above, is this realization itself empty or not? It is neither, we can say. It is not empty, for it is a realization; it is not not-empty, for it is on emptiness, if not itself empty. This ―neither‖ is another sort of emptiness, meta-emptiness. Thus Chuang Tzu (2/59) declared, ―Great Tao declares not 大道不稱‖; Lao Tzu began tao-ing, ―Tao can tao, isnot always-Tao 道可道, 非常道.‖ This ―not 不, 非‖ is an emptiness of wisdom, China‘s wise no-wisdom. This is a strange wisdom that opposes wisdom to confound the world, protests all ―wise guys‖ who mess up things as a farmer pulling at the seedlings to ―help them grow‖ to wilt them dead, as clever weasel jumping into a trap.500 Instead, such no-wise wisdom kneels before vulgarity of ignoramus and ignoble pain under injustice. ―Do not interfere,‖ says Chuang Tzu‘s chapter, ―The World among People‖ that is no-peace at all. Medical doctors clean the wound before applying cure, but the wound is often what cleans life of its dross. ―Only the wounded doctor heals,‖ said Desmond Tutu who has suffered brutal apartheid long,501 for wounds heal life—by letting the situation to right itself. Things gone extreme are reversed, inter-nascent as internecine, for woe is where weal leans as weal is where woe lies.502 Thus goes religion. Even the most aggressive monotheist, Jesus, did not attack Roman tyranny, break Pharisaism, or feed and heal us all, but just called us to turn around to come to the Kingdom at hand. When horrors of this world come, ―lift your heads, for redemption is near.‖503 Does all this make sense? Sense-empty, isn‘t it? Our subjectivity says prayer (Christian) exercising blank (Buddhist) vacancy (Taoist), three in one. It is wisdom of no wisdom at work of no-work, 為無為—central to all religions. So, emptiness is powerful living. This approach—vacancy harmonizing with emptiness in this world—is invincibly positive, an empty judo 柔道 that absorbs and digests lifenegativities, to thrive on them. Emptiness feeds on pain, injustice, and deaths, to grow. Positive power of negativity is incredible, but China has lived on it for millennia till today, and even has the problem of overpopulation. China tirelessly records such experience in its so-called ―classics,‖ to which we now turn.

500

Mencius 2A2, Chuang Tzu 11/69, 1/45. See Desmond M. Tutu‘s Introduction to Mandela: The authorized Portrait, by Mike Nicol, Auckland, NZ: PQ Blackwell, and Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel, 2006. 502 物極則反, 相生相剋, ―禍兮福之所倚, 福兮禍之所伏‖ (Tao Te Ching 58). 503 Luke 21:28. 501

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Chapter 21

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STORY-LITERATURE THE CLASSICS Chinese classics are all story-literature, story-gems, where storytelling argues. Han Fei Tzu 韓非子 and Tung-lai Po-I 東萊博議 have stories arguing explicitly; Chan-kuo Ch’e 戰國策 and Ch’un-ch’iu Tso-chuan 春秋左傳 have peppery stories poignantly arguing without explicitly arguing, strewn with ―comments‖ of ―the princely man.‖ I Ching 易經, Analects, Mencius, and Huai Nan Tzu 淮南子 are historically story-argumentative, as tall tales of Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tzu. Here history, stories, and literature blend into disquisition inter-permeating to weave tapestries of arguments, some more explicitly than others, all sparkling gems compact, irresistible, convincing, and memorable. Logicizing closely trails actuality flexuous, unexpected yet definitely patterned, factually ineluctable and defying handy formulation; actuality-trailing logic is ever fresh, refreshing, surprising, and reasonable. Studying these literary story-classics leads us inevitably to reenact, re-actualize them today, and with them to guide life into more confident future coming with surprises, pleasant and unpleasant. We continue the story of history as part of it to continue it. This point cannot be repeated too often. We reenact history because we are history in the making in all its forward push of storytelling time. Chinese are history-conscious as we all should be; they are humans aware of dipping, drenching, in history that directs us all. So, beware! Paying no attention to history is not life‘s option. ―Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat and fulfill it‖ (Santayana), as did Hsiang Yü 項羽, lamented by Ssu-ma Ch‘ien 司馬遷, and as did Ch‘in Shih Huang 秦始皇, lamented by Tu Mu 杜牧.504 Classics as story-literature are our ready great access to history as life-sinews, life-reason, life-logic throbbing us into tomorrow, for we ourselves tell stories to us and others, we are stories of life to continue classics the life-stories of literary gems. History is essential to life, classics are gems of history, so Chinese classics are essential to life. We bypass them to bypass living.505

504

George Santayana, Life of Reason, 1905, vol.1, ch. 12. 司馬遷, 史記, 項羽本紀第七 (臺北建宏出版社, 2001, p. 300). Tu Mu 杜牧, ―阿房宮賦,‖ 古文觀止 (高雄麗文文化公司, 1995, pp. 604-610). 505 Those in China, who may not habitually recite classics everyday, always live in the shade of classics. While traveling there, I heard a young guide casually mumbling Lao Tzu‘s ―禍兮福之所倚; 福兮禍之所伏‖ (58).

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To read the historic classics is to understand history as the classics do. Thus to read the classics re-describes to reshape our life now, to shape our future. Being contemporary thus, history is future; the historic classics incarnate this fact beautifully, irresistibly, and inevitably. It is otherwise in the West where cognitive statements are literal and analytical, for they are abstracted from the concrete,506 difficult if not impossible to refer back to concrete actuality. How to bridge this ―broad ugly ditch‖ (Lessing) between pure ideas and concrete contingent life-world has been a constant and major headache. Chinese culture has no such ―ditch‖ because it is literature-and-history that is incorrigibly actual. How culture alive in literature and history can be called ―philosophical‖ is a distinct feature in China. We now consider this distinct theme, peculiar to China.

矛盾, 推敲, 三不朽, and 塞翁失馬 are always on their lips as well. Chinese people are routinely steeped in classics in everyday life. 506 Alive and pregnant with significance similar to China‘s sentences, literature in the West are yet usually excluded from the official thinking sentences, ―philosophy.‖ Mixing literature with philosophy, as Nietzsche and Kierkegaard did, makes an oddball in the West, although the trend is happily shifting, especially in France, where Marcel, Sartre, Camus, Barthes, and many others are thriving.

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Chapter 22

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CHINESE CULTURE 文化 AS LITERATURE-AND-HISTORY 文史 Culture humanizes lives; Chinese culture does so with literature and history, two in one, one in two, called ―literature-history 文史.‖ What are they? What is their ―logic‖? Let us look at literature, then history. First, let us look at literature in China where literary beauty abounds. Wisdom as ―philosophy‖ in China is a part of literature. ―What is its ‗logic,‘ thinking mode, its wording pattern, the way it expresses what it means and thinks? How ―philosophical‖ is Chinese literature?‖ The logic of literature in China is threefold. First, literature in Chinese is made of ―wen 文,‖ inter-weavings of lines,507 made as things‘ shapes and senses, things‘ goings ever shifting, interchanging and inter-changing, in a recognizable inter-pattern, ―wen 文.‖ Such interweaving begins to express what actuality is.508 Further, secondly, Chinese wen is a collection as literature, as interweaving such interweavings of things‘ notion-lines. Literature is a tapestry, a com-plex, many plies-together, of intricate integrations of layers of notions and meanings of things inter-changing. Such tapestry, many meaning-plies interwoven, mirrors actuality. Thirdly, this complex re-description of actuality amounts to re-enacting what is going on, its re-manifestation, re-presentation. Why does it have to happen? Sartre the supreme storyteller says it is because we are born storytellers. Let‘s quote him again,509 [A] man is always a teller of stories . . . he sees everything which happens to him through these stories; and he tries to live his life as if it were a story he was telling. . . . While you live, nothing happens. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that‘s all. There are no beginnings . . . an interminable and monotonous addition. . . But when you tell 507

―文,錯畫也, 象交文 . . . 黃帝之史倉頡見鳥獸褫迒之跡知分理之可相別異地, 初造契依類象形, 故謂之文 .

.. . 文象分理交錯之形, 因以為文字之稱 . . .‖ 說文解字詁林正補合編, 臺北鼎文書局, 中華民國七十二年, 7:1022-1025. 508 Wen Ido cautions that Chinese characters express things‘ sense, not paint things‘ shapes, in ―字與畫,‖ 聞一多全集, 步漢: 湖北人民出版社, 2004, 2:205-207. 509 Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, NY: New Directions, 1964, pp. 56-59. Cf. Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, Chicago: Regnery/Gateway, 1960, I:92-94. Both agree that human storytelling is something sinister. We disagree. The entire Chinese culture is built on it, because the entire humanity is such.

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about a life, everything changes; . . . events take place in one direction, and we tell about them in the opposite direction. . . I wanted the moments of my life to follow each other and order themselves like those of a life remembered. I might as well try to catch time by the tail.

Paton the Kant scholar adds that this storytelling happens in time,510 to make literature that makes ―history,‖ literature-in-time. Now, history has its logic, pattern, and style of human self-making reenactment,511 made in monumental literatures such as Tso Chuan 左傳 and Shih Chi 史記. ―History 史‖ in China unites 中-on-top and 又-below that hand-upholds, writing what happens. Top 中 has three implications, ―going through the center‖ without swerving or hiding, ―hitting 中‖ ―right 正‖ at the target, at the real situation and event, and it is such documents held by hand.512 So history-史 is record unswerving, unhidden, of events and words as occurred. Grand historians are naturally feared by people, and rulers use the historians to aid law-enforcement and education. Then historians themselves came to bother rulers, for historians were so zealous to faithfully report, evaluate, and judge even the rulers. We cannot repeat this extraordinary story often enough. One historian recorded, ―Ts‘ui Chu [our ruler] assassinated his ruler,‖ and was promptly executed; his brother came up, wrote identically, and there were two dead officials; then the third brother appeared, wrote identically—and the ruler relented and let the record stand.513 This is an amazing historic record of history by unnamed historians! Such power of words that record history, the power of journalism,514 to expose, evaluate, and judge rulers and people, has proved to be the backbone that keeps straight the brutal Chinese history. Words stand 立言 Incorruptible 不朽, to record and watch over the other two, virtues and achievements 立德, 立功.515 Thus China is the culture of history thanks to persistent Grand Historians and records, social conscience, reenacted in literature, written down. Without history, there exists no literature; without literary description of actuality, history is nowhere. Chinese culture is literature-history 文史 as ―concrete thinking‖ in three types, among others, descriptive, logical,516 and natural, Chinese wisdom alive.

510

H. J. Paton, The Good Will, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1927, pp. 16-17. There must be Chinese sayings comparable to Sartre and Paton on human nature as storytelling and creatively historical. 511 ―Re-enactment‖ is appropriated from Collingwood, of course (R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, Oxford University Press, 1946, 1993). The appropriation itself reenacts his proposal of ―re-enactment.‖ 512 513

說文解字詁林正補合編, 臺北鼎文書局, 中華民國七十二年, 3:1063-1068. 春秋左傳, 襄公二十五年. (台北三民書局, 2002, p. 1097) Burton Watson, The Tso chuan, NY: Columbia

University Press, 1989, pp. 143-148. Lin Yutang came close to this power of journalism but missed the historians as brave journalists (A History of the Press and Public Opinion in China, University of Chicago, 1936); Lin is himself a ―historian‖ here. Cf. The Wisdom of China and India, NY: Random House, 1942, pp. 695-698. 515 春秋左傳, 襄公二十四年. (台北三民書局, 2002, p. 1084) Chan, A Source Book, op. cit., p. 13. 516 Being ―logical‖ is more than following ―logic‖ Western way. 514

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Chapter 23

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CONCRETE THINKING We have two ways to bring out what living is. We can extract essentials of life and order them serially as unit-elements mutually exclusive. This is an abstract logic-thinking. We can also express living by describing daily routine in journals, poetry, and fiction. This is concrete thinking. Western philosophy has an example that almost replicates concrete thinking, Socrates‘ last days, captured in Plato‘s literary Apology. Its similarities with Chinese concrete thinking are four. One, Socrates‘ life-story argues against two indictments of being atheist (his whole life obeys the Delphic Oracle) and corrupter of youth (he honestly urged them not to pretend knowledge, and no father of them indict him). Socrates‘ story argues as Chinese thinkers. Curiously, no Western thinkers noted it. Two, Socrates was accused of seducing517 the youth into loving wisdom, i.e., yearning after knowledge, eros-union with truths, as Confucius step by step seduces-lures518 people to self-realization. Three, Socrates respected the Athenian society as his ―parents‖ too much to disobey it, as Chinese sages loved their society and failed to correct it. Socrates and Confucius turn to teaching, Han Fei 韓非 and Wang Ch‘ung 王充 to writing. Four, to Socrates (in Plato‘s pen) democracy is the worst government, mob rule, yet the Athenian democratic community parented and nurtured him. Socrates fulfilled the filial obedience (to death) of his society with which he disagreed. Similarly, all Chinese sages accepted their government while bitterly criticizing it, or, failing to reform it, went into reclusive hiding. Still, Socrates cross-examined his accuser analytically. Plato developed his logicrationality in the long expository dialogues, and the West left the concrete Myth (of the Cave) thinking for Divided (Line) analytical thinking.519 Unimaginable in China‘s concrete thinking, such has not happened in China. Comparison with Socrates brings out how Chinese wisdom peculiarly ―argues,‖ that Chinese wisdom as philosophy in literary texts 文學 that reciprocally create 對作520 517

R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1940, p. 45. ―循循然善誘人‖ The Analects 9/10. This 誘 is not luring-confusing 誘惑 but ingenious luring-to-good 誘善. Confucius was recorded twice (9/18, 15/13) to have exclaimed, ―It‘s over! I am yet to see anyone enchanted with virtue as with sex!‖ 519 See Plato‘s longest dialogue, The Republic VII: 514a-521b. 520 ―對作‖ is the title of Chapter 84 in 王充‘s 論衡. 518

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dialogical dialectics 論 of disputation 辯 and disquisition 議 by testing 驗, i.e., showingproving 證 what is the case to be so. Chinese literature inter-weave521 in story-argument.

WANG CH’UNG’S BALANCED CRITIQUES 論衡: For example, Wang Ch‘ung 王充 (27-90 AD) says that happening makes happenstance we meet, fortunes are fortuitous, and we must not disturb them with our concocted legends, our fantastic theories of, say, fortune-telling and co-resonance of nature with royal people, but instead must try our best to use education to improve ourselves, use law to prevent backsliding, and decipher sly men to promote honest employment. And so on. Nature makes an impact on us, not we on nature, as we follow seasonal turns, not the other way around. This is how Wang actuality-demonstrated 論 to level 衡 fantasies and falsehoods. Such is the gist of his monumental Balanced Critiques 論衡 to which he devoted 30 odd years to write,522 often couched in a question-answer format. Admirable are Wang‘s balanced critiques. He criticized Confucius (in 問孔篇) and Han Fei (非韓篇) but agreed (率性篇) that education (as Confucius advocated) and law (as Han Fei did) are twin necessities to nurture human nature. Criticizing Mencius (刺孟篇), he also shared Mencius‘ urgent passion for sociopolitical reform (in 對作篇523). He opposed the legends that the Change Classic 易經 was written by Fu Hsi 伏犧 and Wen Wang 文王, but agreed with legends that the Classic emerged from river water

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(正說篇).524 Impatient with political corruption, he portrayed sly subjects (答佞篇) and then compared respective strengths and weaknesses of administrative talents with those of academic ones (程材篇, 量知篇, 謝短篇, 效力篇). And the list of balanced critiques goes on over vast areas of communal life. Wang was thus fiercely independent, passionately correcting false opinions, cleansing fabulous beliefs. He bravely upheld ―truths‖—sober, actual, balanced, and reasonable. He was China‘s balanced Voltaire and Mencken, argued likewise in spirit, scope, and spicy poignancy, yet without their pan-iconoclasm. He did not try to knock down social structure or demolish classics, but tried to clean up sociopolitical corruptions. Neither Voltaire-Mencken nor Wang had a system or theories.525 Each chapter of Wang‘s coherently argues for a thesis, yet relates to other chapters only loosely, and the whole volume shows no systematic architectonic, but his balanced critical spirit permeates among many incisive ideas occasioned by busy critiques of vastly varied communal ideas, conventions, legends, traditions, beliefs, and prejudices, passionately urging sober reasonableness on actual cases, in sobriety of actual sense, common sense.

521

As explained in the previous section, ―文‖ means crisscross weaving, as ―text‖ means the woven. See 導讀 by 蔡鎮楚, p. 7 in 論衡 (臺北市三民書局, 民86). 523 It appears in the version published by 臺北三民書局, 民86, p. 1469. 524 He did not ponder on what the watery emergence means, any more than Thales of ancient Greece did on the significance of water as world Urstoff. 525 Guided Reading 導讀 to Wang Ch‘ung, ibid., pp. 1-51 repeatedly, mistakenly, touted on his ―system.‖. 522

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―Where is logic in all this?‖ Logic is bones in the living body, whose lively motions show its bone-physiognomy. Exposed bones cease to move, requiring surgical push-back into the body. Actual logic of China moves rhetorically, persuasively, in critical balanced sobriety of Wang after Confucius. Wang and Confucius had balanced critique, and in their talk (論) appears the logic of persuasion (論理), systematically alive; it is logic alive. ―Kids are cute,‖ we say, yet ―How are they cute? What is its logic?‖ silences us. Cuteness is indefinable, eliciting unending descriptions. Asked what his name is, Johnny said, ―I‘m cute,‖ for he kept hearing people say he was cute; that is cute. Overhearing people say she is kawaii-cute, Baby Mary angrily snapped, ―I‘m not kawa-nii!‖526 Now, that‘s also cute. Here is no point trying to logic-parse how ―I‘m cute‖ and ―I‘m not!‖ could both be cute. The logic of cuteness is bodied forth and demonstrated—shown and proven—in kids, to be caught. Chinese wisdom sensitively describes such living logic; both ―I‘m cute‖ and ―I‘m not!‖ are both cute, and we nod.527 China‘s logic of actuality is likewise, not frivolous but precise, thought not logic-rationally exact. With what he took as actual instances, Wang Ch‘ung confronted prevalent views, conventions, and taken-for-granted practices, to fearlessly ―correct illusions, promote truths,‖ with passionate rhetoric. As a veritable ―Ninety-Five Theses‖ of Luther, risking his life, Wang staked his life on his volume, provocative, protesting. Wang and Luther differ, however. Wang‘s happened much earlier in China, took Wang over thirty odd years to do it, appealing to no authority but actual instances and his intuitive sense of reason; life-reformation is steeled by reason that appeals to actual cases, natural, social, and historical, as far as Wang could see. This unity of actuality, reason, and passion to reform life, is the soul of Chinese Wisdom. Such dialogue 語 is a flowing rhetoric 論 as turning-wheeling 輪, interpersonal and ethical 倫528—to make Confucius‘ dialogues-in-turns 論語, the Analects. Such word-wheels 論輪 of discussion 語 turn around among friends-classmates 朊, contemporaries, latecomers 後生, with those ―prior enlightened 先覺.‖ Thus we quote from stories of past events, history, in our creative reciprocity to demonstrate our points among us—in wording 言, in writing 書. Such are 論語, the Mencius 孟子, the Hsün Tzu 荀子, the Lieh Tzu 列子, the Huai Nan Tzu 淮南子, the Moist Logic 墨辯, Kung-sun Lung Tzu 公孫龍子, Mr. Tung-lai’s Comprehensive Disputations 東萊博議, and the list goes on. Besides, they are so ineffably in-volved with—run into—actual Tao, walking It out,529 that they forget wording as they word, forget theit partner they word with, in spontaneous naturalness, in their sheer self-so as they are, where we no longer can tell apart wording from being. 526

―Kawaii‖ means ―cute‖ in Japanese. ―Kawa-nii‖ is its kids‘ corruption so cute. We did not define Chinese wisdom but described it, as we did not define cuteness but described it. 528 Chichung Huang suggested taking 論 as 倫 (ethical) (The Analects of Confucius, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 11-12). Taking 論 as 輪 (wheeling) is Wu‘s suggestion (Butterfly, op. cit., pp. 179-180). To Wu‘s knowledge, no one except Huang and Wu noted 論 in Confucius‘ 論語, since the first commentator 何晏 527

tackled it in 論語注疏解經序序解 (in 十三經注疏, 論語注疏, [魏]何晏注, [宋]邢昺琉, 臺北市臺灣古籍, 2001, pp. 2-3). Everyone takes only the 語 (as ―analects,‖ initiated by James Legge) and neglects the 論. 529 Chuang Tzu 2/33. Chinese Wisdom Alive : Vignettes of Life-Thinking, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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They do without doing, word without wording530; Taoists join Confucius who says, ―I desire not to word . . . What does Heaven word?‖ Mencius joins in, saying we are part of vast Flood-Breath of Heaven-Nature531; such is Chinese wisdom. Chinese people do not bring out actuality; they bring in actuality to live fuller, more truthfully, authentically, and more alive. Here is ―Drunk Nature-Spirits, the Fifth Time‖: Thatched hut in people-realm, Not hear horse and buggy din; Asked, ―How could you be so?‖ Heart afar, place itself turns-aside. Pick ‗mums under east hedge, Unhurried, see south hills; Mount mist, dusk-fine, Flying birds, together, encircling. In these is ―real‖-touched; Want to explain 辯, already forget words.

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Wu felt so happy at heart, having rendered it again into English, this time cleaner. A poverty-stricken loafer, T‘ao Ch‘ien 陶潛 (365-427 AD),532 composed it in poverty-stricken China. Loafers alone can be at home in this noisy dusty world. We are with him here now. That is Chinese wisdom alive, here now, for anyone anytime, anywhere. Wang Ch‘ung‘s Lung Heng is an example of how Chinese ―argument‖ goes. The Han Fei Tzu 韓非子533 are also exquisite ones, as well as The Hsün Tzu, The Mencius, The Lun Yü the Analects, inherited by Mr. Tun-lai’s Comprehensive Disquisitions 東萊博議. Compared with their compact vigor, the so-called Neo-Confucian corpuses, vast and impressive, impress us as logically and methodologically loose.

MO TZU’S LOGICAL DISPUTATIONS 墨辯 ―What sort of logic do ‗pure logical‘ writings in China have?‖ Graham‘s massive, authoritative, and incredibly complex studies of Mo Pien 墨辯534 tacitly assume that it is pure Western ―logic,‖ and ―logic‖ is the same wherever whenever it is developed. ―Concrete logic‖ is on this assumption an oxymoron, a monster non-existent. We would think otherwise. If logic is mode of thinking, culture is also mode of thinking, and the world has many cultures, then the world has many modes of thinking, and many sorts of logic. The West has an abstract sort of logic, and Mo Pien 墨辯 in China is a treatise on a ―concrete logic.‖ 530

無為而無不為; 不言而言. Analects 17/17. Mencius 2A2. 532 陶潛, 飲酒二十首, in 陶淵明集, 臺北市三民書局, 2004, p. 157, and in 十四家詩鈔, 朱自清古关文學專集(下), 臺北宏業書局, 民72, p. 28. 533 Exquisite 抱朴子 Mr. Hug-Block is here also (two volumes, 臺北市三民書局, 民90). 534 A. C. Graham, Later Mohist Logic, Ethics and Science, Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1978, Reprint Edition (distributed by NY: Columbia University Press), 2003, 605 pp. Mo Tzu‘s disarmingly down-to-earth reasoning is evaporated in Graham‘s logic-rational canonicity of disputation. 531

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The same goes with ―logicians‖ Hui Shih 惠施 and Kung-sun Lung 公孫龍. Statements of both these ―Chinese logicians‖ are logic-rationally odd, about concrete relations among concrete things, never abstract relations among abstract concepts; ―white horse, no horse‖ is not quite ―P horseshoe Q.‖ Demonstrations of these relations are always concrete and compact, ―borrowing things to obtain metaphor 假物取譬,‖ often too compact to be intelligible, to result in many sorts of interpretations. It is this concrete-metaphoring that makes Hui Shih eloquent and persuasive.535 A guest proposed to King Liang 梁王 to forbid Hui Shih 惠施 to metaphor. When the King urged him to talk straight 直言, he replied,

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―Suppose someone ignorant of what spring-bow is. If I said ‗Spring-bow is spring-bow,‘ would he understand what it is?‖ The king said, ―No.‖ He then said, ―Would ‗it‘s shaped as a bow, strung with bamboo‘ let him know?‖ ―Yes, it can let him know.‖ ―To persuade is of course to explain the unknown with the known to let people know. If your majesty stops it, then it cannot be done.‖ The king said, ―Fine.‖

Concrete disputation must metaphor from a concrete case to another concrete case. Moreover, their concrete demonstrations are for practical concerns, to ―right names 正名實‖536—correct conceptualization and argumentation—to straighten the world now messed up. Concrete demonstrations are always applied to practical affairs such as lawsuits and ―international politics.‖ Concrete scrutiny, not development of ―logical theories,‖ made Name School 名家. Later criticism of it was also concrete, that it produced more social confusions than concord. Its non-sequiturs were then attacked, adjusted, and attached with arresting ―story-bits alive‖ by Chuang Tzu to apply to actuality, who thereby fathered China‘s aesthetic tradition in painting, poetry, calligraphy, even the Taoist temper of living, and Zen. So they vainly criticized Name School of no positive impact. In fact, these ―logicians‖ were not logicians, but ―debaters 辯士,‖ straightening 正 the messed-up world 散亂 due to corrupted naming act 名 mismatching the named real 實. ―Straightening 正‖ means to discern classes of things 察類, to examine naming and namedreal 審名實 to watch on what we say 慎所謂.537 Obviously, then, [1] the ―debates‖ proceeded in flesh-and-blood dialogues, and that [2] the debates were not for debates‘ sake but incorrigibly concrete, so as to straighten the messed-up world. Debaters are always in re, true to the school of names to ―right naming,‖ to match the reality of actuality. Kung-sun extrapolated no less than eight concrete implications out of this terse pronouncement, ―White horse, no horse.‖538 Although ―horse‖ includes—and so ―is‖—―white

535 536

劉向, 說苑, 卷十一善說 (臺北三民書局, 民85, p. 381).

These words are in 跡庙篇 to begin 公孫龍子, pp. 2, 4 in the version of 臺北三民書局, 2004. Cf. The Analects 12/11, 13/3. Other Name-Scholars asserted likewise, such as 鄧析子 (民86, p. 7) and 尹文子 (民85, p. 2, both published by 臺北三民書局). 537 These key expressions are culled from 公孫龍子, 臺北三民書局, 2004, pp. 2, 4, 24, 102. 538 Ibid., pp. 27-39.

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horse‖ (Kung-sun did not say ―Horse, no white horse‖), ―white horse‖ of argument is not ―horse‖ of actual wisdom; analysis is not thinking, not ―philosophy.‖ Chuang Tzu took seriously this implication of concrete universality and, debating with debater Hui Shih, consolidated concrete reasoning to apply to everything there is and every life lived—life-nurture, naturalness, roaming uselessly in heaven and earth, and deepen Chuang Tzu‘s bites into actuality. The severity of their debates demonstrated the intensity of Chuang Tzu‘s reliance on Hui Shih, so much that Chuang Tzu (24/48-51) sorely missed him at his grave. Their dialectical relation shows how much Chinese thinking is critically based on its concrete logic dialogued and applied; it is musically rhythmic as Nature, Chuang Tzu shows.539 Chuang Tzu took over the debaters‘ wordings, such as 可 vs. 不可, 相與以不相與, 至矣哉.540 These typical words scatter all over concentrated in the last chapter, 名實論, of the Kung-sun Lung Tzu. Chuang Tzu took off where Kung-sun left, advanced the debaters‘ vistas, and soared to the blue skies across the fields of this concrete lifeworld. Chuang Tzu summed up as ―有分‖ Kung-sun‘s three chapters, 白馬, 指物, and 堅白, and summed up as ―物化‖541 Kung-sun‘s three other chapters, 通變, 名實, and 跡庙. Thus Chuang Tzu expanded on Kung-sun‘s rectifying endeavors toward heaven and earth, where humans nurture their nature. This point is too important to repeat too often. Hui Shih and Kung-sun Lung were not locked, as Western ―logicians‖ were, in abstract analysis of ―logical‖ niceties. On the contrary, they wanted to argue-explain 辯 as Mencius (3B9) also did to discriminate 辨 (―argue-explain‖ and ―discriminate‖ are interchangeable in China) to reform the actual world, as did Wang Ch‘ung‘s Arguments Balanced 論衡. Thus 論語 (Analects) speak-reasons 論; 道德經 Tao Te Ching taos 道. Chuang Tzu went to actuality by debating with Hui Shih to clarify and describe the ―unsystematic system‖ of cosmic actuality and activities. Chuang Tzu (24/48-51) missed Hui Shih at his grave to show how much Chuang Tzu took Hui Shih as means-materials 質 to shape and hammer out Chuang Tzu‘s meso-physics. Sadly, such is not what Graham saw. Our sad impression of his exposition on Mo Tzu‘s logic applies to Graham‘s impressive exposition of The Chuang Tzu. Closely studying Graham‘s comments, we realize the surprising peculiarity of Chuang Tzu‘s thinking far beyond Graham‘s ―logic.‖ Chuang Tzu thought ab initio, comprehensive, thinking at things‘ beginning, thereby embracing the whole cosmos. In Chuang Tzu, to think ab initio, always afresh, is to think comprehensively. 539

Mo Tzu 墨子 in musical rhythm attacks music (in ―Contra Music 非樂‖); it parallels Plato‘s attacks of Homer with Homeric beauty. See also 詩序, 荀子 (樂論), 文心雕龍 (樂庙), etc. The Change Classic 易經 is a magnificent musical score of the cosmic perpetuum mobile. 540 The Chuang Tzu actually records debates between Chuang Tzu and Hui Shih, but Hui Shih‘s volumes are all lost today except his bits of words; of Kung-sun Lung, we have only six chapters left in our hand. Since they debated alike, Hui Shih is here paralleled to Kung-sun Lung. The phrases cited are from 公孫龍子, op. cit., pp. 28, 33, 97, and 102. They are matched—with slight variations—by Chuang Tzu‘s respectively in 2/28, 40, 33, 6/61, etc. 541 ―有分‖ and ―物化‖ are the twin key terms that conclude Chuang Tzu‘s butterfly dream that concludes his magnificent Chapter Two 齊物論, musical, logical, and ontological. The applications of 有分 and 物化 to 公孫龍子 are Wu‘s.

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China‘s concrete thinking is thus inevitable and unexpected, necessary and afresh, ―dawn penetrative 朝徹,‖ as typified in Taoism deconstructing ―logic‖ in concrete logic of freefloating actuality, performed by Lao Tzu, Lieh Tzu, and Huai Nan Tzu. We are now readied to go into Mo Pien 墨辯, and then into The Chuang Tzu.

MO PIEN 墨辯, MO TZU’S LOGIC

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The whole Mo Tzu 墨子 is beautifully apt, punchy, compact, vigorous, and rigorous in existential actuality; its words, wording, and syntax are at one with its three concrete contents of logical, military, and thematic portions. Usually people only focus on his thematic portion, forgetting that the themes come alive only in life-or-death military performances and the thematic and the military are clarified logically, in musical beauty. Now, elucidation of this summary is in order. Military performances practically applies the inner principles of all-embracing love 兴愛 and contra-attack 非攻, similar to Sun Tzu‘s 孫子 art of soldiery 兰法 that uses armies to win over the enemy‘s hearts, not kill them. Further, both the principles and the performances must be clarified to be effective, and the clarification is what is often called Mo Tzu‘s logical portion. Thus, logic, themes, and performances are three in a unity in actual efficacy. This is concrete thinking in action, Chinese wisdom alive. In Mo Tzu‘s logical portion, citing and defining specific commonsense words and phrases as ―key terms,‖ all describe matter-of-fact conceptual relations, impacts, movements, and implications that arise and function in life-situations. The whole bit is concretely existential and beautifully exhibited in its architectonic, as follows. The logical portion has two parts: part one in seven chapters advocates the ―one‖ as principle in 法儀第四, 尚同 (第11, 12, 13) and 天志 (第26, 27, 28), and part two in six chapters on logical notions in the 墨辯 or 墨經, 經上, 經下, 經說上, 經說下, and 大取, 小取, 第40 through 第45 in all. This inner principle is advocated in the beginning and middle parts of the thematic portion, merged as structural reinforcement. Clarification of notions lies in the interrelations—logical implications—among notions in actuality, making up chapters 40 through 45 totaling 71 extant chapters. To begin, the succinct critical chapter, ―law as life-expression 法儀,‖ says that laws must be followed to accomplish any task. We have many laws embodied among our superiors, parents, teachers, and rulers, but ultimately, we must all have Heaven as our law 法天, one and only, applicable everywhere. ―What are the contents of the heavenly law?‖ The Law of Heaven is ―all-embracing love, all-embracing beneficence 兴愛兴利.‖ He demonstrates it—proves it by showing so—by appealing to historical precedents, actual and legendary. Mo Tzu is incorrigibly concrete all his logical way. For us all to have and obey the heavenly law of all-embracing love, we must ―reverently unify 尚同,‖ which is the theme of the three chapter with this title. We all need unification under the Law of Heaven, so as to stop conflicts. All-embracing unification begins at finding

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among people those wise and capable to counsel rulership, with which all people must identify themselves. This law of all-embracing love and beneficence is the ―Will of Heaven 天志,‖ the title of another cluster of three chapters that repeat and elaborate on what has been said, so aptly and compactly as to need no addition. These chapters remind us of Professor Strunk as remembered by his student.542 ―Omit needless words!‖ cries the author on page 23, and into that imperative Will Strunk really put his heart and soul. In the days when I was sitting in his class, he omitted so many needless words, and omitted them so forcibly and with such eagerness and obvious relish, that he often . . . shortchanged himself . . . Will Strunk got out of this predicament by a simple trick: he uttered every sentence three times. . . . [H]e leaned forward over his desk, . . . and, in a husky, conspiratorial voice, said, ― Rule Seventeen. Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!‖

So did Mo Tzu three times, actually, three times the second time in 尚同 (第11, 12, 13), and three more times the third time in 天志 (第26, 27, 28). ―OK. Mo Tzu is apt, concrete, comprehensive, and compact. Is he systematic, though? How is he so?‖ Our answer opens up an exciting aspect of Mo Tzu‘s ―logic‖ in his Disputations, 墨辯, its systematic flow in seven ways, as we see them, and then we will be surprised. First, we see its sevenfold systematic flow, as follows. One, concrete implications show in a descriptive definition of a term, called ―axiom 經.‖ E.g., the first axiom says, ―‗Condition 故‘ is what gains and then forms.‖ Here ―condition‖

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merges ―cause‖ in concrete gains to form an entity. Two, glosses 說 are inter-connected to develop meaning, as above seen. Three, one definition concretely moves to another. E.g., ―knowing 知 is ability 材‖ to ―deliberate 慮 to search 求,‖ to ―contact 接 things‖; ―knowing‖ is thus elucidated in three axioms step by step. Four, the first axiom is systematically connected to the final; the first axiom of ―condition‖ is filled with ―correct 正‖ content of ―no accusation 無非‖ of the final axiom. Five, axioms 經 are closely connected with their glosses 說. Six, all axioms and glosses are connected to all ―adopt-adapts 大取, 小取.‖ Seven, the themes of axioms move reasonably from conditions through knowing to intersubjectivity, behavior, living, etc. Thus, the axioms and their glosses proceed concretely, organically, structurally. So we think. But then, a surprise awaits us. At the conclusion of 經上 is an unobtrusive note, ―Read this volume by going sideways 讀此書旁行,‖ so Sun I-jang 孫詒讓 suggested to rearrange the first half of all axioms to parallel the second half, and read them together.543 Wow! How could the systematic flow be unscrambled another way? Would we have expected to see P implying Q to mean Q implying P?

542

William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White, The elements of Style (1935), Fourth Edition, Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000, p. xv. 543 See 墨子讀本, 臺北市三民書局, 民85, pp. 304, 575-582, for quotations from 孫詒讓‘s commentary. For something Western similar to (but not quite close) such stunning logical reversal, see Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979), NY: Random House, 1980.

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Whatever else it may mean, this surprising arrangement makes us realize that our seven speculations above on the systematic connections of axioms are just one possibility among many, that Mo Disputations 墨辯 is systematic in many possible ways, all concrete, dynamic, and reversible, as they are reader-centered.544 ―The returning is Tao‘s moving,‖ says Lao Tzu (40), who was just reporting Chinese common sense on cosmic causality that self-reverses Yin-Yang way, and all our logical reasoning mirrors so, to and fro. ―Loose‖ collections of discourses in China facilitate such moving back and forth, as Mo Disputations 墨辯 exhibits. All this is unheard-of in Western ―logic‖; no Plato or Aristotle, much less Kant or Hegel,545 would dream of reversing their arguments and systems. And then we remember that in China ―邏輯, loji‖ mimics ―logic,‖ something abstract and staid, while ―論理‖ that is elucidation 論 of the grains through the pearl of things 理 is ―principles within actuality,‖ something concrete and dynamic. Chinese people tend to confuse the two, of course, but they really should not. Compressing all this further gives us the ―paradoxes‖ and ―non sequiturs‖ of Hui Shih 惠施 and Kung-sun Lung 公孫龍. Mo Tzu assures us that they are illogical reasonableness of actuality, to demonstrate how ―logically‖ odd yet reasonable actual reality is, to call us out of our own unnatural ―logical‖ contrivance. Never try to ―logically‖ parse those ―logical‖ paradoxes and non sequiturs, but follow along and see. Graham is correct in his understanding of Hui Shih and wrong in his inference from this understanding. He said,546 The philosophy of Hui Shih is known primarily by a sequence of ten theses . . . in the last chapter of Chuang-tzu, ‗Below in the empire.‘ Most of them seem to be paradoxes designed to prove that one cannot make spatial and temporal divisions without contradiction (‗The South has no limit yet does have a limit,‘ ‗The sun at noon is simultaneously declining, simultaneously with being alive a thing dies‘). . . . This suggests that the point of the whole series to is to show that since division leads to selfcontradiction everything is one, other persons are the same as oneself, and therefore to be loved equally; . . . But it is clear that if he is taking this position Hui Shih has come dangerously close to discrediting his own tool, analytic reason . . . it will take only one more step to observe that all reasoning depends on making distinctions, and to reach the conclusion that we should abandon reason for the immediate experience of an undifferentiated world, transforming ‗All are one‘ from a moral into a mystical affirmation. It is in ‗The sorting that evens things out‘ that Chuang-tzu takes this step.

Graham is correct that ―division leads to self-contradiction,‖ but overhasty in drawing from it the conclusion of forcing Hui Shih to abandon reasoning that Graham thinks only divides; Graham falsely assumes reasoning as ―logical‖ division alone.547 Instead, Hui Shih could have drawn, and Chuang Tzu drew it for him, an alternative conclusion, that therefore [a] reason must distinguish heart-reason (living) from head-reason 544

A. C. Graham (in his detailed study, Later Mohist Logic, Ethics and Science [1978], Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2003), never has envisioned such possibilities. 545 Deconstructionism may portend ―bankruptcy of logicism‖ to ―end‖ philosophizing in the West. 546 A. C. Graham, Chuang-tzu, op. cit., p. 9. 547 Of course, Graham is correct to say that Chuang Tzu pushed Hui Shih further into actuality, though Chuang Tzu has no ―mystical affirmation‖ but is concrete beyond divisive thinking Graham subscribes to.

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(logic), [b] to result not in mystical love of all without distinction but in trailing concrete actuality of discreet things 有分 interchanging to inter-change 物化, two key terms to clinch Chuang Tzu‘s Chapter Two. Chuang Tzu‘s entire debates with Hui Shih consist in these two key points that make up concrete life-logic. Thus, Graham‘s comments on Kung-sun Lung and Hui Shih are partially correct. Those Chinese ―logicians‖ not only told us not to think in spatiotemporal mode, as Graham correctly saw, but also, by forbidding us to do so, promote containing ―logic‖ in all-embracing thinking-mode, embracing even imagined non-sequiturs, and this latter aspect is missed by Graham, to miss China. Chuang Tzu was pleased with this all-inclusive approach548 and practiced it in all his writings, calling it ―playful rambling 遊.‖ Huai Nan Tzu549 saw sages with animals who knew and took precaution with natural disasters before the disasters came. Fan Chung-yan 范仲淹 would later reenact the precognition in his worried sighs before the world worries.550 Huai Nan Tzu valiantly joins us humans with things and nature. ―Why do we have to bother with such spooky arbitrary relativism?‖ China‘s response is straightly twofold. One, we must repeatedly revise ―definite logic,‖ guided by actuality as we trail it, on pain of fatal irrelevance. Two, it is to follow actuality, ―relative‖ to Nature as our apodictic Law of integrity never relative. Mo Tzu‘s 法儀, 尚同, and 天志 chapters expressed it as Heaven as Law 法天, as revering-identifying ourselves with 尚同 Heaven‘s Will 天志, which can be mocked only at our own peril. Lao Tzu (25) echoed, saying, ―Humanity has the law of Earth, Earth, the law of Heaven, Heaven, the law of Tao, Tao, the law of Self-So.‖ The law of self-so is the law of existing as oneself, the law of integrity of self-identity, to be one stands by what one claims. Confucius put it negatively (2/22), ―I don‘t know what to do with one who does not stand-by-one‘s-word 信, a useless vehicle—big or small—with no handle [to go].‖ This is the law of integrity at the base of sociopolitical concord (Analects 12/11), ―Ruler, ruler, subject, subject, father, father, son, son,‖ for (13/3) ―notions 名 not apposite 正, then words not proper, matters not done, social fabric (expressed in ritual-music 禮樂) not arise, laws (of penalties 刑罰) not to the mark, and people not know wherewith to move hands and feet 無所措手足.‖ Logical propriety 正名 simply must be applied to actuality, human and social, for humans to exist and thrive. Both the Law of identity in things‘ self-so, and standing by one‘s

548

Our journalists today take over such radical and comprehensive probes into life. George Orwell‘s Animal Farm, say, was so outrageous that even sensitive T. S. Eliot rejected its publication; see Anne Skillion, ed., The New York Public Library Literature Companion, NY: The Free Press, 2001, ―The Editor Regrets . . . Shortsighted Rejection Letters,‖ pp. 310-311. ―Learn from animals, even from their cruelties,‖ Orwell alerted us. He inherited unawares the tradition of unity with animals. 549 So does Michael Pollan today who shouts, perhaps alone among all praises of food sciences, against food scientism to extract nutrients. Nutrients would act differently from, and often contrary to, what they do in their original state of being in the original ―foods‖ we must eat. (―Unhappy Meals,‖ a long article in The New York Times, January 28, 2007, and The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, NY: The Penguin Press, 2006.) Pollan sees the disaster before us all. 550 淮南子, ―卷二十: 泰族,‖ in the version of 臺北三民書局, 民86, pp. 1079-1080, 1145; the rest of 卷二十 elaborates and applies this principle of the resonant unity of sages, animals, and nature. See范仲淹‘s in 古文觀止 (高雄市麗文文化公司, 1995, pp. 819-826).

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words to be one‘s words, are the law of autonomy that is Heaven‘s Law; we must revere it and identify ourselves with it, on pain of our own perdition. This is not slavish uniformity but autonomy alive, rich in harmony with all things, what fortunetelling and Change Classic try to find, to achieve the unity of historical timing (Heavenly time 天時), positional advantage (Earthly benefit 地利), and social concord (Human harmony 人和). China‘s logic is an existential imperative—given by Heaven—never to be mocked.

THE LOGIC OF THE CHUANG TZU Human logical rationality is actualized to merge actuality, and deconstruct itself, into logos alogoi551 with logical rigor; in fact turning-actual enhances the reasonableness of our thinking, as in Taoism, typically represented in Chuang Tzu‘s wording, and his ―kindred spirits,‖ Lao Tzu, Lieh Tzu, and Huai Nan Tzu. We now enter Chuang Tzu in three steps, ten features, one portrayal, and critical dialogues with Graham.

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Step One: Ten Features Chuang Tzu‘s reasoning is the logic of actuality, not his own, ―logic‖ in the sense of wording, how orderly words express concrete things. This Chinese meaning of concrete logic differs radically from what Western ―logic‖ means, i.e., an abstract layout of thinking patterns for their own sakes. We see ten features in Chuang Tzu‘s concrete logic, his wording pattern. One, humor is integral to his logical argument, which collapses when humor is pulled out. His profound debates are frivolous play with arguments; his frivolous toying with images and story-bits are profound, pervasive, and penetrating. His deep words live in the air light and laughing, frivolous when ―profound,‖ profound when ―frivolous‖ (Lin552), joking in serious proposals, deep when fooling around. His frivolity digs deep, romping on the rough crest of disaster-waves. Chuang Tzu‘s humor is thus not silly as Cracker Jack jokes, or Kierkegaard‘s long-faced humor, thinly disguised argument that can stand on its own humorless.553 Chuang Tzu‘s humor is essential to his thinking, serious and uplifting, naturally inevitable, jovially reasonable. At the penetrating dawn 朝徹 of creation, humor in things dance in thinking, in intricate levels and landscapes. Two, Chuang Tzu hotly debated with master thinker Hui Shih (惠施). Chuang Tzu may have cherished the sharp clarity of logicizing and resented its rigidity, so the debates 551

This is to quote to our purpose Karl Jaspers, Reason and Existenz (1955), NY: The Noonday Press, 1971. ―[P]lainly. . . he was a humorist with a wild . . . luxuriant fantasy, with an American love for exaggeration and for the big. . . . [He is] frivolous when he is profound and profound when he is frivolous.‖ Lin Yutang, The Wisdom of China and India, NY: Random House, 1942, pp. 626-627. 553 ―What is the name of Snow White‘s brother? He is ‗Egg White.‘ Did you get the yolk?‖ is a joke in a box of Cracker Jack. For Kierkegaard‘s humor, see Thomas C. Oden, ed., The Humor of Kierkegaard: An Anthology (2004) and Parables of Kierkegaard (1978), both by Princeton University Press. We have compared him with Chuang Tzu. 552

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nourished his exquisite sensitivity, profundity, and clarity. Three, ancient legends fabulous drive around, to make his smiling point. Perhaps he fathered the hilarious Wandering Journey to the West 西遊記 yet he is solidly opposed to its nihilistic Buddhist theme. Do his fantastic stories metaphor? Well, he lets us metaphor. Four, ―What‘s the point of his bantering and fooling around?‖ The problem is that even this legitimate question is out of joint here. He is not pointless yet it is impossible to seek his point, for ―seeking‖ is what he discourages. His ―point,‖ if any, can only be expressed negatively, as not doing, not thinking, not desiring, etc. Is it spontaneity, then? Yes, but spontaneity is systematically elusive; it can be caught and nodded at, not defined as object. To seek spontaneity self-defeats. Besides, why does he want to point to spontaneity? Aren‘t we all spontaneous to begin with? What is its ―cash value‖? He is filled with our questions. Five, Chuang Tzu is stubbornly concrete in all his fantasies and debates; to miss this point sends us to a wild goose chase. Being concrete, he is dizzyingly complex, layer upon layer. He is a lake; its bottom can be clearly seen, quite concrete, yet as we get in, the bottom recedes, and we must retreat before drowning. It is depth complexity, driving us into our own living routine. Such is also Confucius, this time felt as an unreachable by his beloved student Yen Hui confessing,554 ―I often feel like quitting, I can‘t, because whenever it seems I‘ve reached my limit, something seems to rise before me, lofty and majestic. But however much I long to go there, the path remains a mystery.‖ Six, Chuang Tzu is so cuttingly, irresistibly, beautiful that he is renowned as father of the whole world of Chinese beauty. His literary beauty is comparable to Plato and Kierkegaard, he is as logical as they, yet he is not straightly ―logical‖ as they, but exquisitely, surprisingly, illogically, logical in his way, and yet again, odd as he goes, his oddity makes us nod and learn—about actuality we live. Seven, we find no ―contrivance‖ or ―strategy‖ in Chuan Tzu, as Watson said in unguarded moments; Graham is guarded yet insinuates Chuang Tzu‘s devices throughout.555 This is due to Chuang Tzu‘s complexity being orderly, step-by-step. He is not mystical (as Watson and Graham said) but mysteriously reasonable; he is orderly in chaos, chaotic while orderly, in complete unity uncontrived. Eight, Chuang Tzu is well-known for rampant paradoxes, non-sequiturs, and throwaway nonsense, yet they are never forced or scary as Kierkegaard‘s, but natural and revealing, inevitable yet surprising. His ―illogicality‖ is comfortably livable, for our bones feel that life is logically such. His paradoxes show the spontaneous integrity of self-identity self-forgetful 自忘, not self-abandoned 自棄, expressing persons as they are, self-so among things self-so 自然, naturally coherent in unexpected paradoxes. Nine, we say Chuang Tzu is a relativist. Close reading makes us feel this label fits him ill; ―relativism‖ is a Western label too set and definite, irrelevant to Chuang Tzu‘s lively slithering with actual ups and downs in self-so, self-integrity. So Lao Tzu declares (5),

554 555

Analects 9/11. (David Hinton, The Analects: Confucius, NY: Counterpoint, 1998, p. 94) ―One device he uses to great effect is . . . The other device most common in his writing is . . . Finally, Chuang Tzu uses . . . that deadliest of weapons . . .‖ Burton Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, NY: Columbia University Press, 1970, Introduction, p. 5. A. C. Graham, in Chuang-tzu, London: George Allen &

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―Heaven and earth are not humane 仁.‖ He must not mean the the universe is inhumane, ―red in tooth and claw,‖ but that nature is beyond human definition.556 If so, what mirrors nature must be also; Chuang Tzu mirrors nature must stop being labeled. Ten, Chuang Tzu walks around and sees things and events happen forcing no one, ―together without together,‖ ―do without doing,‖ ―say without saying,‖ ―not silent not speaking,‖ and he would join them by saying without targeting specific ―you,‖ to engage in seemingly ―reckless talks 妄言.‖ In this ineffable air of things as they are, he overhears ―little birds chitchat with a tall silent tree‖—on the nature of things.557 The notions randomly cited above are all inconsistent, and so they are ever on the go. Dynamics of things may be revealed here to sum up all ten features so far. Saying so reminds us how quite a mouthful the ten features are, and we need a coherent picture to comprise them all. We may try as follows.

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Step Two: One Portrayal The ten features above portray Chuang Tzu‘s modus operandi of expression, his threefold wording in his Chapter 27, com-plex layered wording 重言, lodged-tarried wording 寓言, and goblet-tipping wording 卮言. They are three yet one, many-plied, com-plex in implications, opalescent, one word lodging in one meaning to point to another, and thus complex-ing, lodging-pointing, his wording goblet-tips to what comes actually. These three expressive modes describe some typical ways of how Chuang Tzu trails actuality, or rather, describes how actuality alive ex-presses itself through Chuang Tzu‘s logic, that is, wording. The wording of actuality is not exactly Chuang Tzu‘s558 but using Chuang Tzu as tool to express the Way things go, their Tao. ―The Tao walks and forms it‖ (2/33), actuality walks Chuang Tzu to form itself as its own Way. This is the ―world with me in it 有我之境‖ merged in the ―world without me 無我之境‖ where things observe things 以物觀物 with the Chuang-self 以我觀物, where observing 觀 is an outlook looking out to compose the world 境,559 the realm and environ of things as themselves are, as roaming in their self-so most natural (Chuang Tzu‘s Chapter One). The world sings560 heavenly piping via earth among people (Chuang Tzu‘s Chapter Two). Unwin, 1981, extremely compressed Introduction, pp. 3-36, takes Chuang Tzu to logically argue, and logic is the most self-conscious of human contrivance. 556 Does Ruskin‘s pathetic fallacy alerting us against anthropomorphism mean so also? 557 See Wu, On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 2001, pp. 615-640. 558 Chuan Tzu is no Heidegger touting German and Greek, or Frenchman touting French, as exact replicas of thinking and reason. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 60, 125. W. H. Auden‘s Foreword to History of English Words by Owen Barfield (1967), NY: Barnes & Noble, 2009, p. ix. 559 境 or 境界 is realm, land, landscape, and its panorama. This is taken from 王國維 in his six short sections as he begins 人間詞話, and then suddenly departs from this fascinating insight. Its Reading Guide 導讀 in the version of 臺北三民書局, 民91, has a detailed explanation of this notion (pp. 12-50). 560 Maurice Merleau-Ponty caught it when he said, ―It would then be found that the words, vowels and phonemes are so many ways of ‗singing‘ the world, and that their function is to represent things . . . because they extract, and literally express, their emotional essence‖ (Phenomenology of Perception, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962, p. 187), but he is still in the mold of ―extraction,‖ abstraction. Nor did he pursue this fascinating insight.

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Chuang Tzu has word-forgotten while wording naturally, nature natures through him. Chuang Tzu words word-forgotten, not as a witch or sorcerer self-lost, though seeming so to outsiders (Chapter Seven). He is instead fully himself in nature his womb, at home, selfforgotten. Here skills cease and divine desires pervade as nature-cleaver dances carving out the ox of things—―thing 物‖ is an ox 牛 knifed 刀 out—fed-fulfilled in self-so (Chapter Three). This is the logic of actuality in things (Chapter Two) as Nature emerging in its logic-wording of self-so. We are all in things madly singing the world (Chapter Five); the world is alive singing piping, wording-logicizing. Unwittingly, Chuang Tzu‘s Seven Inner Chapters are just covered.

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Step Three: Critical Dialogues with Graham Chuang Tzu is not arranging mystical Tarot cards with far-out ―logic‖ out of this world, but has sober 3+4=4+3 (―morning, three‖), ordinary dreaming (―dreaming to be a butterfly‖), and the like, that we can understand as parts of daily routines. But then, does this portrayal still look irresponsibly random? If it does, Chuang Tzu would alert us to caution ourselves against being too used to analytical logic-rationality (mode of wording) to recognize the natural aptness of the logic (mode of thinking) of dynamic actuality. We should have, on the contrary, applauded how immediately at home Chuang Tzu‘s logic (manner of putting matters of fact) puts us, how useful his logic (style of expression) is as our tool of understanding the world, without having to adjust our thinking to nature or imposing our thinking on nature, as human ―science‖ had in history. One instance of such adjustment of human logic (mode of thinking) is offered by Graham, a sad case precisely because of his brilliant ingenuity. His contrivance and contortion demonstrate—show and prove—both his brilliance and human artificiality unfit for the nature of things and happenings. Graham‘s Introduction to his poetic translations of the Chuang Tzu is densely exquisite. His exposition of Chuang Tzu‘s ―logic‖ (Western) is packed in only 34 pages, endnotes included.561 Four critical dialogues with him shall pack and clarify our portrayal of Chuang Tzu above. One, Graham began saying (p. 3), ―We know very little about the life of Chuang Chou‖; as he pondered on what it means? Kierkegaard aped anonymity; Chuang Tzu lived it, to throw us back on ourselves; postmodern deconstructionism realizes that there is no ―authorship,‖ for ideas float around from readers. It is Chuang Tzu anonymous Two, then Graham described (p. 4) Chuang Tzu‘s writings as ―disconnected stories and fragmentary jottings,‖ obviously taking it defect. Are we sure? Aren‘t all writings in China disjointed jottings? Wu called this situation ―dot-pragmatics,‖562 with two meanings interrelated. [a] Fragments shows things are alive, opalescent with intricate layers of implications for us to dig out and connect; Graham was provoked to produce many connections and 561 562

A. C. Graham, Chuang-tzu: The Inner Chapters, etc., London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981, pp. 3-36. Wu, On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 2001, pp. 387-398. Actually, not many Western writings, ostensibly ―systematic,‖ are not jottings, either.

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implications—unawares! [b] Fragments implicate the vast universe that can only be haltingly dotted, to evoke its vastness and variety, haunting, egging us on to explore into vignettes. ―Are fragments designed?‖ Need we ask? Three, the concluding page 5 of Graham‘s Chapter One is revealing, three ways. [1] It speculates on how Chuang Tzu at first joined utilitarian Yangists then left them, and then joined logical sophists, and then left them again; how could he know this if ―we know very little about Chuang Chou‖? This is speculation. [2] Graham said the ―sophists . . . studied logical puzzles for their own sake.‖ Chinese thinker would never study logical puzzles as puzzle, as our above studies of the Mo Pien 墨辯 shows. China‘s ―logic‖ is concrete and practical, a guide and directive to live judiciously. [3] Graham opposes intuition to rationalism ―followed by the Greeks, but [China] did not take it.‖ He missed ―intuitiveness‖ as ―spontaneity‖ not separate from reason but its part (or is reason part of intuition?) focusing hearty attention, reason of the heart with its reasonableness to guide ―logic‖ that asks, analyzes, and sticks to verbal code. Four, Graham‘s next Chapter (pp. 6-8) is on ―spontaneity‖ with a good conclusion, but destroyed by its ―explanatory props.‖ He wants to ―learn‖ and ―train the Power in me‖ toward spontaneity, which opposes training and learning self-conscious. Graham admitted (7-8), ―But the only specific technique which he mentions, and that only casually, is controlled breathing.‖ His ―casual‖ comment demolishes him. Enough has been said by commenting on Graham‘s first pages 3-8; the rest would tiresomely repeat. Graham shows that, even such sensitive, seasoned, sympathetic, and exquisitely poetic interpreters of China and especially Chuang Tzu, understands Chuang Tzu exclusively in Western viewpoint. Graham‘s book jacket says, ―It is hoped that the effect will be that of a famous painting newly cleaned.‖ We fear that the cleaning may have been done with too much chemical cleanser made in the West. There is nothing wrong with being Western; it would be wrong to explain, evaluate, and judge China in terms of Western values, and take it as apodictically valid for China, as part of the West valid everywhere; it is all the worse to do so unawares for such a seasoned sensitive Sinologist as Mr. Graham. Still, to bring out the Western perspective in Graham‘s ―talk on Chuang Tzu the fiercely Chinese fellow‖ brings out distinct China and the West. To point out Graham‘s being Western manifests the West and China. We thank Mr. Graham for kindly serving such an intercultural catalyst. The key is his separation of reason from ―intuitive‖ spontaneity; does he not see that reasoning operates spontaneously? Does not 7+5=12 clicks in (as synthetic a priori) for our intuitive understanding, not computer operation? So, the reason of the heart-of-being is not the head-―logic‖ but includes it to inter-enrich with head-reason, and the reason of the heart-of-being is rhythmic-dotted, continuoussurprising, in short, alive. And so human thinking had better go likewise, as rhythmic, surprising, and dotted as actuality; dots are connected retrospectively, haltingly, into vignettes shifting. The Chuang Tzu embodies such logic-vignettes (mode of things and thinking) of actuality alive. We have gone through three thinkers, Wang Ch‘ung 王充 (and Confucius, Mencius, Hsün Tzu), Mo Tzu 墨子 (and Hui Shih, Kung-sun Lung), and Chuang Tzu 莊子 (and Lao Tzu, Lieh Tzu, Huai Nan Tzu). Wang shows descriptive thinking, Mo Tzu, logical, and Chuang Tzu a natural one.

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All three present three typical modes, styles, and types of concrete thinking in Chinese wisdom alive. There may well be more types, but this much is enough to clue us into Chinese wisdom alive as thinking alive, actual, historical, and incorrigibly, fascinatingly concrete.

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Chapter 24

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CONTRADICTION AS ACTUALITY-TRAILING ―But what does thinking alive mean?‖ It is not simple to answer this simple question. We might look again to Chuang Tzu (27/1-10) on three wordings. Complex wording 重言 is spatially layered and time-ly quoting authorities; Lodging wording 寓言 refers to other wording; Goblet wording joins both wordings to tip to actuality 卮言. So far so good, but here is a problem; they intra-contradict and inter-contradict. Since both inter-include, and are too complicated to attend to both, we just consider intercontradiction that is threefold, two mutual contradictions and a contradiction kicked up by referring to actuality. Being alive is far beyond imagination of ―logic.‖ We cite just five examples from Chuang Tzu. Example One is Mr. Hun Tun 渾沌 (7/33-35). The name, ―Hun Tun‖ may be made of ―hun 渾 (muddy) (or 混, mix)‖ and ―tun 沌 (turbid),‖563 to connote rich turgid Con-Fusion, not dark or bright, south or north, order or disorder, too stuffed ambiguously to systematize into any definitive order. Now, Mr. Hun Tun [a] must die, for ―Hun Tun‖ as ambiguous confusion cannot be clearly identified as such. Only as dead clear can Mr. Hun Tun [b] come alive as truly Hun Tun, an ambiguous none-knows-what, to [c] ―treat them very well,‖ where ―them‖ mean actual clarity as Speed, Efficiency, the two oceanic emperors. Let us go slower. We wish Hun Tun be identified as Hun Tun, unambiguously as not other two oceanic emperors, but ―identification‖ makes definite, unambiguous, and the ambiguous is Hun Tun, so identifying Hun Tun kills it. At the same time, by being killed, Hun Tun comes alive as such; death and life are ambiguously at one. Hun Tun treats even his death very well, in treating the two hole-diggers very well. Hun Tun is hospitality, no exclusion (of logic), to the ―bitter end‖ not bitter at all. Now Hun Tun-hospitality is everywhere every-when; the land is moistened with oceanic ambiguous breeze, oceans are ever halcyon with the peace of listless ambiguous land, and the emperors‘ seven holes see without seeing, sense without sensing, full of gentle hospitality toward all that come, all that go. Ambiguity is king, treating everything very well, all with all without all, pervading without pervading, all ambiguously. 563

These are just one possible interpretation. True to the Hun Tun-story, the meanings were variously taken but are roughly clear. Shu and Hu are speedy, efficient, and brief, Hun Tun is indefinite and ambiguous.

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The greatest fish is the smallest roe; the biggest bird is the littlest birdies with long wise trees, in silent dialogues; tigers fawn; oxen loosen; and Chuang Tzu is the butterfly dreaming—all living without living, dying without dying, happily at home in unhappiness. Such is life‘s end without ending. Mr. Hun Tun incarnates in Uncle Monkey (2/38-40) who, responding to the monkeys‘ furor at his initial offer of ―three, morning; four, evening,‖ offered ―four, morning; three, evening‖ to make them happy. Clearly, Uncle Monkey treats those monkeys very well, making them quite happy. This is Mr. Hun Tun in the ―one‖ and the ―heavenly balance.‖ Now, [a] clearly 3+4=4+3, but [b] the monkeys do not know the ―=‖ and [c] now that Chuang Tzu tells us this story, we are in trouble, for we are those monkeys who do not know what ―=‖ amounts to in the concrete world, even after Chuang Tzu tells us that it is ―one‖ and ―heavenly balance.‖ Wall Street ―monkeys‖ still insist on ―4+3‖! Example Two is the notion-and-word, ―nothing 無.‖ It is both a something and a nothing. [a] ―Nothing‖ is a something that exists as a saying, and a concept that refers, and concept and referring exist; yet [b] ―nothing‖ exists by virtue of referring to a nothing, and ―nothing‖ cannot exist. So ―nothing‖ is a thing and a nothing. [c] Now, ―nothing‖ is not something, not nothing, yet by saying-meaning ―nothing,‖ it is a thing and nothing. We are dizzy. Example Three is ―no-do 無為.‖ It is [a] to do nothing; it does not, and [b] it is to donothing; it does. [c] ―No-do‖ does both; we cannot figure out—cognitively—how it fares in actuality, yet agree that it occurs actually. Confucius also said (14/38) to ―know what cannot [be done] and do it‖—to no-act. He ―molded Chinese civilization in general,‖564 and Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia. We don‘t know what it is, and call it out of desperation, ―spontaneity,‖ or ―resolve‖ that ―non-does,‖ whatever it means. Example Four is Chuang Tzu‘s rabbit-trap (26/48-49); it is peculiar to China. Coleridge said, ―Few and unimportant would the errors of men be, if they did but know, first what they themselves mean: and secondly, what the words mean by which they attempt to convey their meaning,‖565 stressing words. Chuang Tzu said, ―After capturing what we mean with what our words mean, after catching the rabbit with the trap, we discard the trap the words for the rabbit our meaning.‖ The trap the word is thus used as useless. We now must find those who forget words to word with. Having trapped rabbits, we throw out the trap; having caught what we intend to mean 意, we throw out what we mean with, the words 言. China goes beyond Coleridge on wording, then. No problem so far, we think, but then we are trapped here unawares. [a] Chuang Tzu has used word-―trap‖ to throw out trap; this is contradiction-one. Then [b] what is meant, the referent, is not word, not no-word.566 The referent is not word but what the word refers, yet it is not no-word, for words must refer the referent to us. [c] Thus he must ask, ―Where can I find those word-forgotten to word with?‖ This is to join [a] and [b] to use the useless words; this is contradiction-two. Example Five is an existential contradiction of shrewd Legalist Han Fei Tzu 韓非子, with an impressive tome written in intense love of his state where he was out of favor. [a] All his 564

This is an almost literal quotation of Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963, p. 14. 565 S. T. Coleridge, ―Letter to Thomas Allsop; December 2, 1818,‖ quoted to begin Speaker’s Meaning (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1967) by Owen Barfield, an essayist quite sensitive to English language. 566 非言非默 (25/81).

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irresistible pages were about how for ruler to thrive and for subjects to survive. [b] His life was contrary to his proposal, himself was done in and murdered by a jealous craft of his less capable classmate, Li Ssu 李斯, died by his beloved ruler‘s order (maneuvered by Li Ssu).567 He died violating his own admonition of political prudence. [c] We have to ask, Why was smart Han Fei, who so ably expounded political prudence, defeated by his less smart colleague? Why did he continue in politics where he never got a hearing? Why did he fall and perish in the trap he himself so convincingly warned us against? So we hear Han Fei shouting with haiku poet Bassho 芭蕉, ―Don‘t imitate me!‖568 Now we can neither imitate nor not imitate them. This is self-recursive contradiction in life, subtly parodied by Chuang Tzu, declaring ―Great Tao declares not,‖ and by Lao Tzu tao-ing, ―Tao can tao, not Always Tao.‖ No wonder, Han Fei wrote two Chapters on Lao Tzu, 解老 and

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喻老. Their authenticity is demonstrated by Han Fei‘s own life-contradiction that mirrors the Taoist subtle expressions of it. All five examples show how inter-involved, inter-contradictory, life-logic is. Logic alive is inter-contradictory three ways: [a] neither negation nor affirmation is true, and [b] both negation and affirmation are true; all this is, so as to [c] refer to actually, and the referring is also in the twofold mode of neither-nor and both-and. They are tough to capture, portraying Mr. Hun Tun, the ―one‖ threading all to portray him, a life-story, a biography, a life-logic. This logic has three inter-involved logical moments. [1] Mr. Hun Tun the Ambiguous treats everyone very well, always. [1] Dug holes of clarity, he dies569; his hospitality causes his death, a cosmic example of a co-incidence of opposites, opposites happening together. [3] Mr. Ambiguous‘ death implies: One, he dies to be clearly defined with the ―name‖ Mr. Hun Tun, to be reborn into ―ambiguity‖; he is now truly Mr. Hun Tun. Two, so, not-Hun Tun is true Hun Tun. Three, point Two is due to point One, and both join to ―fulfill his identity,‖ as the Confucian death ―fulfills integrity 成仁‖; such circuity via opposites—life, death, life again—makes ―Hun Tun.‖ Hun Tun is we made of self and other. The self is Hun Tun, for self is most and least certain, and their combination makes up Mr. Hun Tun. One, nothing is more certain than oneself; it is me. Two, yet nothing is less certain than oneself, for I see nothing looking at me

567

Li Ssu 李斯 himself was promoted to the highest in Ch‘in Dynasty, and later was executed in half at the waist with his son, by a jealous official 趙高; 史記卷八十七, 李斯列傳 (中和市建宏出版社, 1995, 4:424). So was another legalist, Shang Yang 商鞅 (390-338 BCE), who also contributed vastly to the vigorous prosperity of his state, and then killed by official jealousy, and all his family members were destroyed (商君書, 臺北市三民書局, 民85, 導讀, pp. 9-13). Han Fei, Li Ssu, and Shang Yang, the pattern of these legalists‘ lives is the same, flashy glories, followed by tragic finale of violent deaths. (Legalist Shen Pu Hai 申不害 [d. 337BCE] seems to be the only exception; he may have died a natural death.) Do they recapitulate the fate of later dynasties that adopted legalism? But why did they all love brutally short-lived efficiencies of legalism? 568 Robert Hass, ed., The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa, Hopewell, NJ: The Ecco Press, 1994, pp. 47, 233. 569 The so-called ―chaos theory‖ in vogue today in the West is a case in point. ―Chaos‖ is a supreme instance of disorder; ―theory‖ is a supreme case of order. In such a theory, (1) chaos is just current complexity not known, to be known by some new clever way, (2) chaos left to itself will seek order by its internal logic not now known or even knowable. In any case, ―order‖ is involved in chaos theory, yet when disorder is thus ordered, ―disorder,‖ ―chaos,‖ vanishes in ―chaos theory‖; the theory destroys itself. The ―left to itself‖ in (2) cannot be theorized about, but can it be talked about? That‘s what fascinates the Taoists. All this is the death of Hun Tun; if he does not die, he is not Hun Tun.

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(Hume); I must describe my self-description, and I cannot finish describing myself (Ryle).570 The self is Hun Tun, then. Three, oneself is the other (Ricoeur571). Without the other, the self cannot exist; without the self, the other cannot exist. But if the self cannot exist without certainty-uncertainty, as described above, how can the self grasp the other? Thus, again, nothing is more certain and less certain than the other. The other is Mr. Hun Tun, then. The self and the other are both [a] certain, [b] uncertain, and [c] their unity, these three on the go. All this triune dynamics is dynamic logic of naturalness, an uncanny stand-in of Christ— hate answered-redeemed by love. All this is order in chaos, chaos in order, woe in weal, weal in woe, internecine, so inter-nascent, the Yin-Yang interactions, in Five inter-goings, into 64 Hexagrams of inter-changes. This is Chinese wisdom alive. Now, these three points are not smooth-going but what the West calls ―paradox.‖ The history of Western philosophy is a collection, adults‘ toy-box, of such paradoxes.572 Still Western philosophers do not realize what these paradoxes mean, as the monkeys do not realize what Uncle Monkey is up to. The meaning of the paradoxes that represent these three points is that Uncle Monkey trails actuality as no monkey does. Uncle of all beings is alone a muddled fool while all others are clear about what they want, as Lao Tzu says (20). Uncle Monkey follows all things as if uncouth, not as Plato‘s prisoner released from the cave of illusion. Instead, Uncle Monkey nonchalantly looks long at South Hills in the fine dusk where, in its fine air, birds together fly around. Seeing all this, he just mumbles ―in these are a touch of truth; desiring to explain, already forget words‖; he is Mr. Hun Tun who just worded beyond wording. ―Beyond wording‖ shows reason bankrupt; ―worded‖ shows reason come alive. Logic has to go bankrupt for Hun Tun to come alive; only as bankrupt and useless can logic be useful, as Hun Tun has to die before he can come alive. Now, have we noticed it? In all this inter-involvement, what pushes all this on the go is the ―contra-― in the threefold inter-contradiction in actuality-expression; the dynamo of lifereason is the Yin toward the Yang, the Yin of chaos, confusion, heresy, and woes forwarding the Yang of sunny order. Remember Uncle Fort573 who lost the horse and kept asking ―How do we know this would not make its opposite?‖? The cash value of Uncle Fort at the boundary of civilization lies in his ―loss‖ and his ―asking.‖ Remember Lao Tzu beginning his entire volume with ―Tao can tao, not Always Tao‖ and Chuang Tzu (2/59) declaring ―Great Tao declares not‖? The entire Tao Te Ching consists in this ―not Always Tao‖ that thereby manifests Always Tao. The entire book of Chuang Tzu is this Yin of declaring ―not declaring‖ to let the Great Tao declare itself. The nothing-

570

This Hume-Ryle point is synthetically described in Ian Ramsey‘s ―The Systematic Elusiveness of ‗I‘‖ in Christian Empiricism, ed. Jerry H. Gill, Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1974, pp. 17-31. Natsume Soseki humorously said as much in I am a Cat, 夏目漱石著, 吾輩は貓である, 東京新潮文庫, 平成八年, p. 154. 571 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, University of Chicago Press, 1992. 572 Roy Sorensen‘s, A Brief History of the Paradox: Philosophy and the Labyrinths of the Mind, Oxford University Press, 2003, demonstrates this point. 573 The renowned story of 塞翁失馬 asking, ―此何遽不能為[共反]?‖ appears in 淮南子, 人間訓 (臺北三民書局, 民86, p. 965).

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negativity of the Yin moves the world, but that is quite difficult to take, leading us into the intricacies of threefold inter-contradiction. That is logic alive.

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Chapter 25

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CLEAR PRECISION, MUSICAL FLOW We are after the mode of life-thinking, the dynamic logic of living. We see two contrasting modes of thinking, Western analytical abstractive logic-rationality, and China‘s actuality-explanation 辯 and presentation. Thinking is clear and precise, as shown in the West‘s ―logic.‖ How can China‘s thinking be as clear and precise? Actuality is unclear and inexact as Mr. Hun Tun, so its presentation is hard put to be clearly precise. To put in terms of exact ―logic,‖ explanatory thinking must be clearly notclear and precisely not-precise. Concretely, it must think clearly and precisely of actuality that cannot be thought about clearly and exactly. It is difficult if not impossible, however, to think here precisely and clearly. Mr. Hun Tun dies being drilled holes of clear precision; Hun Tun is no longer Hun Tun if he is clear. Luckily, Hun Tun ―treats everyone very well,‖ clarity and precision included. How does Mr. Hun Tun treat them? That is our question. Chuang Tzu says that Hun Tun is a land home for two oceans, Mr. Swift and Mr. Sudden. How does Mr. Ambiguous home clarity and precision? He does it with subtle poetic prose, clearly showing his own unclarity to let readers read with their own clarity and precision. Such subtle poetic blend of clarity and unclarity, precision and imprecision, is the landscape of Mr. Hun Tun. All this quiet blending is storytelling describing in rhythmic flow of actuality, Mr. Hun Tun. Story‘s flow as befit him is ironic, that precision and clarity are described as two turbulent oceans, and unclear imprecision as stable land. Ocean is turbulent, not precise or clear at all; land is usually surrounded by ocean, not home to ocean. Perhaps this irony is how Chuang Tzu lets the Hun Tun unclarity pervade the very story of him. All this soft pervasiveness is musical in three Pipings, Human, Earthly, and Heavenly; what these pipings are phases into how things pipe; we do not know where ―pipings‖ end and ―things‖ begin, to compose a veritable ―unison of things, thinking 齊物論‖ in the cosmic pipings of things and humans. Mo Tzu also musically alerts us to the misuse of music; musical performances idle political administration and popular farm-work, by conscripting those able young folks for music-making; it bypasses positive impacts of music. Hsün Tzu piped on irresistible music that moves personal depths, inner and outer, influencing education and socio-politics to control and shape to tune up whole persons, harmonizing whole community ethically; government is performed by music.

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The Great Preface to the Poetry Classic 詩序 elates in music as our soul-penetrating expression to shape politics, and the Music Classic 樂記 and Mr. Lü’s Chronicles 呂氏春秋 574 present music as rhythmic, pervasive, and cosmic resonance, from our heart-of-being to Heaven and Earth.575 Mr. Lü’s Chronicles576 cap eight chapters on music with the seasons of vigor, summer (仲夏, 季夏); the cosmic time-ly harmony with life-behaviors is the prelude-and-principle of life-as-music. Music arises from the Great One with measures of vicissitudes as the constant, contingencies as the fitting, in Yin-Yang interchanges (大樂), but we must be alerted to disorderly music of disorderly wayward living (侈樂). We must adjust our heart-of-being just right before we can enjoy the music adjusted just right; thus inter-adjusted, music goes through socio-politics to shape the world (適音). Music has this power to shape politics by replicating the beauty of resonances (the winds) and activities of nature, for us to ritualistically dance out, enhance, and praise nature (古樂).577 Besides, all this about music is told in poetic prose of musical rhythm, to which all human governance must conform. And the list goes on. Such is what always happens in Chinese writings. What music is always melts in how writing musically flows and throbs, to emerge as music alive. Such spontaneous flow is not irrational but is the fount of logic; the pulsating rhythm of nature throbs forth naturing reason. ―The water I give will be an artesian spring within, gushing fountains of endless life‖578 of logic, says the music of nature. Without this fountain, the human logic would have dried up. Such music pervades the Debaters‘ 辯士 writings, Hui Shih‘s or Kung-sun Lung‘s. Whenever an idea hits them, their hearts-of-being soar to the poetry of music (yüeh 樂) in joys (loh 樂) of the mountains and the skies. An idea, any idea, is the joy of music singing in me, through me to sing the world that sings in me; all this is Chinese wisdom alive, thinking the music of life. Music is the whole subject vibrating, inter-existentially resonated, with no sensory push as paintings do; poetry is vibration of the subject, intersubjectively aroused by poetic selfconfession. Poetry is thus music in words as music is poetry in sound; music says as words sing, to make sense poetic musical, reverently spreading-infusing myriad existents throughout Heaven and Earth. All this is a literal translation of exquisite words that begin literary criticisms, Poetry Critiques 詩品 and Literary Heart 文心雕龍.579 574

墨子 ―非樂,‖ 荀子 ―樂論,‖ 詩序, 樂記, and 呂氏春秋, Eight Chapters on Music. This is from 詩序. The same sentiment in same phraseology occurs in 樂記 and Mencius 4A27 576 The Music Classic 樂記 is neatly summed up (almost verbatim) in Mr. Lü’s Chronicles, so much so that what 575

the latter has is reputed to be perhaps an authentic (if not original) version of the former. We go to Mr. Lü’s Chronicles 呂氏春秋 now, then. 577 Four more chapters of 呂氏春秋, 季夏, 音律, 音初, 制樂, are omitted here. 578 John 4:14 (The Message by E. Peterson) is rifled here. 579 「氣之動物，物之感人，故搖蕩性情，形諸舞詠。 照燭三才，暉麗萬有；靈衹待之以致饗，幽微藉之以昭告。 動天地，感鬼神，莫近於詩。 . . .

宮商與二儀俱生 . . . . 清濁通流，口吻調利. . .」 (These are the words of ―詩品序‖ that begins 鍾嶸‘s (417?-519?) 詩品, on pp. 1, 23-24 in 臺北市三民書局, 2003.), echoed by Liu Hsieh‘s 劉勰 (465-521) chapter, ―Originating in Tao 原道第一,‖ to begin Literary Heart Dragon Carved 文心雕龍 (臺北市三民書局, 民83), i.e., ―writing from the heart of being, crafted into dragon-beauty‖ basing our heartfelt writings on the

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Both music and poetry join to make ―musical reason‖580 that vibrates existence interexisting, contagious everywhere every-when; musical reason is the universe vibrating. Musical reason lives, grows, and spreads as naturally as words that cannot be contrived, legislated, or enforced; it is born poetic with existence, as existence lives it, throbbing forward musical. This point bears elaboration. Literary Heart Dragon Carved 文心雕龍 begins specifying the cosmic Tao as the rootrationale 原道 of human writing. Nature of hills and rivers, animals and plants, are beauty of inter-weavings, winds go through natural pebbles, rocks, and cavities whistling music exquisite organ-rhymed. As the ―heart‖ of heaven-and-earth, humanity writes out its literature, patterning after 象 these beautiful sights and sounds of nature, its Tao-interweaving 文, and so human literature born of heaven-and-earth has power to move heaven-and-earth and regulate things, to form politics human and cosmic. Significantly, all this patterns the moving literature on music, taking the true writing as the incarnation of musical reason—unawares. ―Musical rationale‖ pervades the whole volume, from 原道 through 樂庙 and 聲律, to climax in 知音. Literature is music turned explicitly reasonable, musical reason incarnate. Musical reason sings visceral poetry before words, the poetic sense heart-throbbed, lungbreathed, so it is beyond cerebral ―knowing,‖ quite indefinable as music is. Thus, while for all disciplines, such as sciences, we can know what to study before studying them, poets alone do not know what to do in advance, for they are always drawn to the immediacies of the felt moment (Auden581). This is not to say that the poets are arbitrary, for they inspire us forward, and no inspiration breathing life can be irrational, but is beyond expected ―logic.‖ Poetry freely sings coherent music, with its own rhythm of musical reason life-fresh. That is why poets do not know what they produce, only confident that their product, poetry, throbs to breathe alive, musically reasonable beyond and before logic-rationality to enliven it.

cosmos (pp. 3, 13, 50, 64, 266, 298, 340, 387, 482). This chapter intones the unity of heaven-earth, writing, music, and ethic-politics. This volume then goes to 明詩, through 樂庙, to reach 詮賦, to show how poetry 詩 added to music 樂 produces extended prose beautiful (賦). The heart of all this is the music of our felt nature (385) that resounds to penetrate our flesh and marrow (64). Our felt emotion begins at seven cosmic areas to move its eight aspects 情感七始，化動八風 (64). (See also Vincent Yu-chung Shih, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragon: A Study of Thought and Pattern in Chinese Literature, NY: Columbia University Press, 1959) We heartily recite these words, and push further into ―musical reason‖ behind all this sensedynamics cosmic and heartfelt; musical reason is this throbbing dynamics of homo-cosmos. 580 Liu Hsieh 劉勰 assumes music-literature intimacy as he critically appreciates literatures with musical sensitivity, in one of his concluding chapters, ―Know Tune 知音第四十八,‖ ibid. Its literary resonance is strikingly vast and deep. Unfortunately, Liu does not probe into what the music-literature intimacy itself is. I see writing-thinking and music as one in ―musical reason‖ cosmic and heartfelt. 581 ―A medical student knows that he must study anatomy in order to become a doctor, so he has a reason for study. A future scholar has a reason, because he knows more or less what he wants to know. But there is nothing a would-be poet knows he has to know. He is at the mercy of the immediate moment because he has no concrete reason for not yielding to its demands, and, for all he knows now, surrendering to his immediate desire may turn out later to have been the best thing he could have done.‖ This is part of W. H. Auden‘s speech as he accepts the chair of Professor of Poetry at Oxford, later published as ―Making and Judging Poetry,‖ Atlantic Monthly, January, 1957, p. 46.

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Musical reason sings poetry so natural. Now, to etch forth such peculiar musical reason, let us compare it with logic-rationality.582 We compare Auden with Chuang Tzu. We enjoy Auden‘s ―Their Lonely Betters‖ that goes this way: As I listened from a beach-chair in the shade/ To all the noises that my garden made,/ It seemed to me only proper that words/ Should be withheld from vegetables and birds. A robin with no Christian name ran through/ The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew,/ And rustling flowers for some third party waited/ To say which pairs, if any, should get mated. Not one of them was capable of lying,/ There was not one which knew that it was dying/ Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme/ Assumed responsibility for time. Let them leave language to their lonely betters/ Who count some days and long for certain letters;/ We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep,/ Words are for those with promises to keep. Now we enjoy Chuang Tzu‘s poetic story, so casual, abandoned, and unrhymed583: Jittery Magpie asked Tall Dryandra-Tree,/ ―I heard from Master,/ ‗Holy men engage no business, go-to no benefit, avoid no harm, seek no joy, follow no road,/ not-say says, say no-say,/ to roam outside dust-dirt.‘/ Master took it as vague romanticism,/ I as exquisite Tao walked-out./ What do you think, sir?‖

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Tall Dryandra-Tree said,/ ―This is what Yellow Emperor, on hearing,/ would have puzzled about;/ how would Ch‘iu be up to knowing it?/ Now, you also are too impetuous./ Seeing eggs you seek night-time keeper (rooster);/ seeing pellets you seek roasted dove./ I just tell-abandoned;/ you just hear-abandoned./ Beside sun and moon,/ arm-clasp timespace./ Make them fit,/ gather harmonized,/ inter-slave, inter-respect./ People labor unceasing,/ holy men are fools,/ to mix myriad ages into One pure;/ myriad things all thus/ co-enfold./ How would I know/ enjoying life is [really] delusion?/ How would I know hating death is [really] the young enjoying exiles?/ (Then Tall Tree tells of captured Lady Beautiful relenting her initial tears, after sharing dinner-bed pleasures with barbarian chief, and of Chuang Chou dreaming to be butterfly.)

Auden and Chuang Tzu share timed nature alive, words (poetry) beyond words (birds, plants); yet their directions differ. Auden goes to human love, while Chuang Tzu soars beyond sages, beyond life and death, into nature. Auden uses wren and flowers to express the

582

The West in the classical period did notice the power of person-shaping in music, but this ancient view vanished later. There has been no music as thinking, no ―musical reason‖ in the West. See a convenient collection of theories on music, Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin, eds., Music in the Western World: A History in Documents, NY: Macmillan, 1984. 583 Selected Poetry of W. H. Auden: Chosen for this edition by the author, NY: The Modern Library, 1933, 1958, ―Their Lonely Betters‖ pp. 118-119. ―The Willow-wren and the Stare‖ pp. 138-139 could have also been cited. Chuang Tzu 2/73-94. I apologize for losing the original poetic punches in my translation. Wu, The Butterfly as Companion, Albany: New York State University Press, 1990, pp. 120f, 149f, 167, 175ff.

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inter-human, tacitly assuming its logic-rationality.584 Chuang Tzu lets small birds chitchat with a tall silent tree, tarrying in its silence, and go beyond sages to dwell in nature, simple and casual beyond life and death. The comparisons of musical reason with logic-rationality go under five headings, on the necessity, the tracks of reasoning, the rhythm, inducement, and other-acceptance. Under each heading we see how mutually different they radically are. We then, under the sixth heading, reflect on what this comparison amounts to. ONE: Logic-rationality has necessity that compels assent, allowing no slightest deviation, to kick up the problem of fate versus freedom. In contrast, musical ―necessity‖ shows how we take what inevitably arrives as ―destined‖; we are freely drawn and persuaded to assent that freedom is destined to its own destiny. TWO: Logical rationality is rigidly one-tracked or, as in many-valued logic, at most some-tracked but not too many, or else many tracks under a unified rule. Not too many routes of reasoning are accepted as rational. In contrast, musical reason opens to indefinitely various reasonable vistas and routes of reasoning.585 Musical reason includes contradictions and self-contradictions in co-incidences of opposites Yin and Yang, internecine as inter-nascent. The criterion of this seemingly random musical reason is historical coherence of actuality, in its reenactment through vicissitudes of time. THREE: Logic-rationality does have some rhythmic progression but it is accidentally added on, not essential. It ―prides itself‖ in self-evidence; it justifies itself by following its own route of reasoning. In contrast, musical reason is by nature the rhythmic throbbing thrust in time through praxis to permeate the heaven and earth. The thrust erupts out of itself; this rhythmic thrust charms and echoes whoever comes in contact. FOUR: Logic-rationality has scientific technical applicability that is not its essence. Logic-rationality stably stands on its abstract own, soberly solidifying itself. In contrast, musical reason induces, evokes, and educes—e-ducate—our interest and knowledge, training our aptitude toward praxis from the minutest concrete to the vast cosmic vision. Musical reason sings the cosmos, orderly togetherness. FIVE: Logic-rationality can accept nothing other than itself as ―logical,‖ as ―rational.‖ ―Logic‖ has no metaphorical move that is extra-rational, if not irrational; metaphor is concession to low intelligence of commoners. In contrast, musical reason accepts things other than itself, e.g., logic-rationality. Musical reason explains everything intelligibly, ―treating them very well,‖ freely moving on among them in metaphors, ironies, and paradoxes. SIX: Logic-rationality has clear-cut clarity and exactitude, sharp and stringent, closed to its opposites. In contrast, musical reason has its own clarity and precision, soft and subtle, enwrapping, allowing, letting its opposites to happen, open to actuality, to things imprecise, unclear, in parental smiles to allow ―kids‖ to make mistakes. It allows a Wilhelm Furtwängler riding on blurred edges into superb irresistible cascades of music, while also welcoming methodical punches of an Arturo Toscanini and H. von Karajan. 584

This fact is also confirmed by a commentator of his, that Auden is a traditionalist, who undergoes the conflict between ―heart‖ and ―mind‖ of traditional sort. See Justin Replogle, Auden’s Poetry, London: Methuen, 1969, pp. 91, 182-183, etc. 585 Leonard Bernstein wrote many volumes on the infinite varieties of music. One of them is The Infinite Variety of Music (1962), NY: Simon and Schuster, 1966. Music is the only infinity in our lifeworld.

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A most salient example of the unity alive of logic and music is Change Classic, I Ching, the ching 經 of i 易, the cosmic warp and woof (ching) arranged in gliding (i) mathematical terms, 64 hexagrams as 2 (Yin and Yang) to the power of 6, of the spontaneous (the i as easy 簡易) interchange (the i as change 變易) among things, even the inter-responding of humans and animal (the i as chameleon 蜴). This Change Classic is no theoretical treatise but a musical poetry, an anthology of 64 poems, one to each hexagram. It is musical, moving lustily; it is poetry, creating (poiesis) anew every time it draws us in, a meeting point, a node of all things inter-involved and presented systematically-logically and evocatively-invitingly. As musical poetry, it presents mathematics in music, the moving beauty of the cosmos making itself in time in persons. The cosmos is created by meetings of calls and responses and their unity, nature naturing, calling to humans to respond with performing of life; it is natural natura naturans at one with opera operata and operans on two sides, nature and humans. Thus Change Classic is a classical description-on-the-go of this grand meeting in inter-happenings here now toward future. Describing, it irresistibly nudges us to join in, to be a moving link in the interweaving process (ching 經) of the cosmic co-incidences (i 易) of opposite situations.586 The coresponding (呼應) is ―music‖ described by Classic of Music and Mr. Lü’s Chronicles. Change Classic is a classical incantation-incarnation of musical reasoning in heaven, earth, and humanity. The above description is itself an explanatory thinking 辯, belonging to musical reason that accepts logic-rationality as its part. Musical reason treats logic-rationality very well, explains it well, allowing it to be itself, while logic-rationality must reinterpret musical reason, converting it into ―logical‖ terms to understand it. Here thrive Arthur Wright who said China has no philosophy, only thought, and Chad Hansen who claims Chinese Tao to be all ―analytical logic.‖587 We would have concurred if they but slightly adjusted, saying, China has no Western philosophy but daily thought as its distinct ―philosophy,‖ its wisdom, and the Chinese Tao is understandable by analytical logic also. They did not; they are logic-rationally exclusive. 586

All this poetico-musical explication is developed out of poetic etymologies on 易 (8:366-376) and 經 (10:527-

528) some millennia ago, and as such are quite precious—as cited in 說文解字詁林正補合編, 臺北鼎文書局, 中華民國七十二年. 易 has several meanings. [1] 易 is wall-lizards that protect the house and other lizards at the pond (9 species?) good at self-change (chameleon). 易 [2] also patterns sun 日 and moon 月, Yin and Yang, and [3] day and night alternating. 易 means [4] easy (簡易) change (變易) unchanging (不易). 易 also is a picture of a town‘s flag 勿 under the sun 日 to conveniently (便易) change (變易) sunny heat into shade. 經 weaves vertically or tills the land from south to north, the first operation for 緯 to then weave horizontally or till from east to west. 經 is major, and can also mean path 徑 or to pass 經[過]. Akiyasu Todo ingeniously and plausibly explains connections of all these (藤堂明保著, 漢字語源辭关, 東京學燈社, 1965, pp. 458-459, 498-499). 易 pictures various lizards that are flat-thin without rise or fall, and can easily hide sideways in cracks, so the character came to symbolize ―easy‖; ―change‖ actually means a chain reaction to go from one hexagram-state A to another, B, then C (not color-change). This chain reaction bespeaks what we would call a rhythmic contagion of musical reason. 經 weaves a vertical axis-spindle for other threads to weave horizontally into a piece of cloth, and thus came to mean major 常 axis literature, the classics 經关, or meridian vein 經脈, or straight passageway 徑. 587 H. G. Creel, ed., Chinese Civilization in Liberal Education, University of Chicago Press, 1959, p. 141. Chad Hansen, A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought: A Philosophical Interpretation, Oxford University Press, 1992.

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―Does all this mean that musical reason is sloppy and illogical?‖ Well, it is not, as long as it accepts logic-rationality. Still within its own logical frame of throbbing rhythm, quite strict musical reason has indefinite varieties of modes of performing-and-manifesting its reason, its actual ―reasonableness‖ of actuality. For example, ―1+1‖ has its own additive rule, but its results are situation-sensitive. ―1+1‖ can be 2 (apples), but also can be 0 (spark added to explosive), or many (a couple generating kids). All this is historical reason, repeatedly reenacting the same additive rule in different life-performances, as performances inter-differ while performing the same music of life, ―one jade-grain of things in many variations 理一分殊.‖ Chinese wisdom is alive, flexibly reasonable in many different tracks in situational vicissitudes, as Uncle Monkey adjusts ―morning, three‖ to ―morning, four,‖ and Uncle Fort who keeps asking, ―Why can this not make its opposite?‖ Situational contradictions are part of the musical reason of actuality. The music of living is time-reason throbbing ahead, a forwarding life-thrust embodied by Confucius our paragon. Just read his sharply etched self-descriptions588 among many sketches of his life:

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Duke Yeh asked Tzu Lu about Confucius; Tzu Lu did not respond. Master said, ―Why did you not say, ‗His way of living is so striving as to forget to eat, so happy as to forget to worry, not knowing ageing about to arrive, and such?‘‖ ―I am not the one born knowing, [but one who] loves the ancient, [and is] quick at seeking it.‖ Master does not talk about the unusual, the overpowering, the disorderly, [or] the divine. Master said, ―Three people going, there must be my teacher[s] among them. I pick good one[s] to follow, one[s] not good to correct.‖ Master said, ―Heaven parented virtue in me, what could such Duke Huan of K‘uei do me?‖ Master said, ―Sages I cannot see; getting to see princely ones, it is enough. . . . Good people I cannot see; getting to see the constant ones, it is enough. . .‖ Master said, ―We have those who make [proposal] without knowing, but I am no so. I listen much, and then pick the better to follow . . .‖

Silence gives consent, they say. Confucius‘ silence shouts his consensual reverence to the Beyond, the Heaven, as he breathed silently to throw himself forward, ever toward tomorrow without fear because of Heaven beyond him. That is Confucius awestruck in his vital musical reason of life. And then Chuang Tzu comes along to match Confucius with the ambi-guity—driving around—of the Emperor Hun Tun in a Village of Ultimate Virtue the U-Topia, the Erewhon of ―nowhere‖ envisioned by Samuel Butler fooling around there in 1872. The Village is Nowhere because Chuang Tzu ends its description with ―Thus they walk with no tracks; things happen with no telling.‖589 Chuang Tzu would then wryly smile at Confucius that we both are heading for the Land of Emperor Hun Tun so ambiguous. Now we note that Chinese people talk about history on whatever they talk about, but they do not talk about their talk being historical. They exhibit in their massive collection of historical writings their mass-Akrasia in history, knowing the lesson of history to violate it, even lament over such violation, but do not note that such Akrasia exists. They are thus historical but unaware of being historically aware; they do not have philosophy of history. 588 589

They are in the Analects 7/18-22, 25, 27. This (12/83) ends one of Chuang Tzu‘s five visits, 9/7-12, 10/20-32, 12/80-83, 16/5-17, and 20/15-17.

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Similarly, Chinese people talk about musical beauty whenever they talk about anything, even about political implications of music and musical nature of politics, but do not talk about their thinking and writings as musical. They think musically but never describe musical thinking; they have no phrase, ―musical reason.‖ They have thus no ―philosophy‖ of thinking; they just have thinking, life-thinking, and life-as-thinking. This is a matter of course in living and lived thinking. We cannot paint ―beauty,‖ but must paint an apple in all its fresh glories, and beauty manifests itself there, unawares. We cannot sing the singing-beauty, but just sing, and its beauty is there, spontaneously. ―Don‘t say, show it,‖ demands our beloved nature, for love cannot be said but only be lived out, and it will show itself, all by itself. We on our part not (only) love music or logic but describe both; here we do not do Chinese wisdom-thinking, as describing physics does no physics, and so we can afford to describe the musicality of Chinese thinking, to etch forth musical reason by comparing it with the West‘s logic-rationality. Thus, we are not in musical reason or in logic-rationality as we describe both. To say things about beauty is not to beautify but to elucidate beauty and come close to being beautiful; to describe logic-rationality is not to logicize but to elucidate its peculiar rationality, and thus become akin to logic-rationality. By the same token, we do not describe logic-rationality per se while aiming at elucidating Chinese musical reason, presenting thinking, as distinct from logic-rational thinking. Description of musical reason is not musical reason or logic-rationality but is akin to both, and our description comes to be musical. This volume is after all an introduction to Chinese wisdom, not Chinese wisdom proper. ―What is this meta-level description? Is it musical or logical?‖ Our answer is the same as above: it is neither and both. What this monster is, is anyone‘s guess; we ourselves certainly would not know. We must stop here to stop ourselves going into an infinite regress of describing what we have described. Nothing is complete in this living elusive world, so self-referentially inconsistent and ―incomplete‖ as Gödel the supreme rationalist in the West rationally proved. Perhaps the best is not to say but to show, and keep showing, unawares or no, as China has been doing for millennia. Now, what is musical reason?

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Chapter 26

MUSICAL REASON: ITS WHAT, ITS HOW Musical reason includes music and motion, reasonable in life, distinct from and including logic-rationality that does not include motion or music. Our description of musical reason common in living has two sections, what musical reason has, and how it expresses itself.

ONE: WHAT MUSICAL REASON HAS Musical reason is a dynamic reason that moves, and changes with life and within life, with four features: motion and its two modes, change and its three features, music and its three characteristics, and musical reason inclusive of these three characteristics.

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MOTION AND ITS TWO MODES Motion usually means change of place and of itself, so tough for logic-rationality to parse that Zeno had to deny it and Aristotle had to dodge it, by taking it as ―here and not here,‖ a logical contradiction, or ―potentiality maturing into actuality,‖ quite messy and unintelligible. In contrast, motion as change—of place and of itself—is the heart of musical reason. Music moves on, or it is no music; musical reason moves on changing rhythmically, i.e., intelligibly-reasonably, or it is not musical reason. Its very reasonableness consists in moving on, changing intelligibly. How does musical reason handle change?

CHANGE AND ITS THREE FEATURES Change goes in three ways, change of itself, of others, and its spread, none of which logic-rationality can explain. Change of itself describes being moved to joy or rage, or being tuned up and refined. Change of others happens by provoking others to change or evoking them to self-change. All this happens because change is contagious, spreading pleasantly or unpleasantly, throughout the cosmos and history. Musical reason is at home as infectious changes.

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MUSIC AND ITS THREE CHARACTERISTICS ―Moving‖ in musical reason has three possible modes: musical ―movement‖ into other themes, reminiscent of locomotion, ―variations‖ on a theme and of the self varying musical, reminiscent of self-change, and ―inclusive‖ of dissonance (John Cage), clashes (modern music), and order (Bach, Scarlatti), reminiscent of traffic. ―Inclusiveness‖ here is synonymous with dynamic coherence, ―order‖ that changes [i] as it [ii] encompasses happenings in time, to [iii] compose a totality that is [iv] orderly-on-thego. Things arise, expected and unexpected, positive and negative, to [v] inter-cohere into an historical whole, and musical reason is this moving coherence [vi] with positive effects, beauty. Such inclusion is how musical reason ―handles‖ changes in all their modes.

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MUSICAL REASON INCLUSIVE OF MOTION, CHANGE, AND MUSIC The musical power of collecting such an amazing variety of miscellanies—motion, change, contradictories—into a coherent and intelligible beauty that moves, this synthetic rhythmic reason is nothing short of miraculous, yet natural is musical reason. Collection is logos, to breed logic of reasoning.590 Thus the reason of ―musical reason‖ is a verb, reasoning, as music is no noun but performing and listening. As we reason, our argument becomes a painting, which in China is a dynamic flowchart to enter to experience. A painting invites us to the music of experiencing; reason paints to invite us to the music of reasoning. A painting is an intelligible collection, an intelligible gestalt, the logos of the sense of things. Music is painting on the go in time. The musical in ―musical reason‖ shows how logical canon is a part of musical score, flowchart, to retrace in thinking, to perform reasoning. The eternity of musical score is a shadow of timed performances, and sages are paragon performers to partake of in posterity‘s own ways, not definitive paradigms to pattern after. Musical reason belongs thus to the music of changing situations, to inspire motion. Marching music moves hearers to march; musical reason moves those who reason to take apposite rhythmic action. Marching music can move people because moving is its own music that marches; musical reason moves reasoning to take action because things have their own musical reason to induce musically resonant actions. Musical reason sings and dances its thinking-things. This reason is musical, a part of music, as music-resonant is part of things. It thrusts and lives on to enjoy and sing life. Not eternally giggling, it is always passionate about things, even about tragedies, heartily wailing over them. Gödel was passionate about logic-rationality of everything; for him, everything has its reason,591 without realizing how musically beautiful the ubiquitous rationality (more than his logic-rationality) is, part of musical reason of things.

590

See Wu‘s Togetherness, op. cit., p. 162 and note 41, p. 334 and note 181, and Metaphoring, op. cit., p. 10, note 23, pp. 54-58. 591 John W. Dawson, Jr (Logical Dilemmas: The Life and Work of Kurt Gödel, Wellesley, MA: M. A. K. Peters, 1997) and Rebecca Goldstein, Incompleteness: the Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, NY: W. W. Norton,

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Chinese reasoning is musical, three-themed multi-plied. One, one argument in a story poetic leads to many conclusions; Chinese writings are full of ―one-line arguments‖ with many sorts of reasoning and conclusions. Two, many arguments can converge to one conclusion; varied arguments Confucian, Taoist, Legalist, tell of how to be human from different perspectives, different ways to become human. Three, many arguments reach various conclusions via routes historical, passionate, and storytelling—all musical. These features describe musical reason, music multi-tracked ―synthetic a priori,‖592 with rich connotations and implications of ―reason,‖ reasoning in perceptive symphonic sensing of actuality. Chinese reason 論 is multiple wheels 輪 of reasoning rolling in musical resonance with shifting situations. China has no phrase, ―musical reason,‖ but has its equivalents in ―li yüeh 禮樂,‖ ritualmusical beat 禮節 serving as maxims toward pleasant 樂 social order, and ―literature-history 文史,‖ an interweaving 文 of thinking to musically perform actual living to compose historical stories 史. They are all actual reasoning inter-rolling, story-forming; stories are various sorts of reasoning. Stories lodge wording 寓言 to lodge reasoning to convey, and the reasoning has multifarious implications, layer after story-layer 重言, goblet-tipping 卮言 to actuality. Chinese 論 (lun4, arguing) is homonym to 輪 (lun2, wheeling), goblet-arguments to wide varieties of situations, to compose stories of happenings, actual, likely, unlikely, counterfactual, and imaginative, to tip to actuality. The wildest imaginative stories of ghosts and goblins serve as the sharpest of indictments of corruptions ―today,‖ slipping through the most intense web of censorship. Strange Stories from Liaozhai 聊齋誌異 comes to mind, among many others.593 All this is a kaleidoscope of musical rounds, to compose history to teach us. Multifarious arguments in turn arise from the same stories, as our many variations and performances today of the same ―musical scores of living,‖ composed by past sages our life-paragons, for us to again compose our own life-music toward the future. These goblet-arguments are ―dot-pragmatics‖594; dots are stories. The Analexts are Lun2 Yü 論語 of wheeling stories 輪語 wheeled out many arguments. These stories remain daily story-dots, history-bits, daily mini-histories, journals. They became classics, ching 經, for us to weave 織 (經 is 織) reasoned living, our respective ways. Chinese characters in classics are

2005) constantly stress this life-principle of Gödel‘s passion for pan-rationality, though Gödel has never thought of thinking rationality as music. 592 This is to borrow Kant to our purpose. 593 清、蒲松齡著，聊齋誌異, 臺北文化圖書公司, 民85. H. Giles, Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, 1916. Pu Songling, Selected Tales of Liaozhai, Beijing: Panda Books, 1981. This is the sharpest of criticism of Ch‘ing dynasty under the severest censorship of the day. 史記 (滑稽列傳第六十六), 晏子春秋, and 文心雕龍 (諧讔第十九), among many others, have many more historical examples. Although these stories are on political reforms, I would not be surprised if the whole cosmos has a comic aspect, if comic music from our heart resonates through our flesh and marrow to move the whole cosmos (文心雕龍, 三民書局, 民83, pp. 64, 145, 186, 385) 594 Wu, Metaphoring, op. cit., pp. 387-398.

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audio-pictograms to mirror595 the sense of symphonic story-reasoning, multifarious, bursting at the seam of the tradition of historical interpretations. We learn of this tradition, as we appreciate typical patterns of calligraphy writing, and then undergo the experience of surprising nuances of each sentence 文 of each thinker, as we appreciate the calligraphy tablets left by historic 史 calligraphers after having familiarized with accepted conventions of the writing-manners; writings are traces of music of life lived and expressed, to relish and relive in our ways. Thus history, writing, arguing, and storytelling are united in one ―musical reasoning‖ in China. The notion ―filial love 孝‖ evokes Confucius to cite many concrete stories of tender sincere love of parents. The ―no use 無用‖ brings Chuang Tzu‘s short stories to end chapter one and ―useless space‖ supporting our stand. ―Saying, word-forgotten 忘言‖ ―discards rabbit trap after catching rabbit.‖ ―Contradiction‖ is ―spear-shield 矛盾‖ of Han Fei‘s vender with ―invincible spear‖ and ―impenetrable fender,‖ silenced by ―his spear used on his shield.‖ We have ―paint snake, add legs,‖ ―lips gone, teeth chilled.‖596 No logic-rationality can handle any of them so concrete, as no tape-measure can describe human faces or draw coastlines. Logic-rationality can only explain motion as ―here and nothere,‖ quite incoherent, and explain change only as ―from potentiality to actuality,‖ as explaining mysterious ―sleep‖ with no less mysterious ―soporific element.‖ In contrast, musical reason is naturally at home in living concrete situations that keep moving, in contradiction and dissonance, giving them rhythm, tone, air, joys and sorrows, felt sense, thrust, stress, vitality, and intelligible impact. In fact, no-dissonance deprives melodies but deepens them. Musical reason includes silence also, sonic non-being that composes music hugging silence; without non-being—calm, quietude—there would be no change. In short, no movement; no music, no rhyme or reason, not even life.

TWO: HOW MUSICAL REASON EXPRESSES ITSELF Musical reason presents motion and change to show its literary soul. Musical reason is reasonable beyond logic-rationality, mathematical logic is its expressive tool to explain what logic-rationality cannot, such as being ―cute.‖ Asked why fish has no umbrella, a little missy confidently said, ―‗Cause it has no hands!‖ Her mom was ecstatic, ―See, Tessie is so logical!‖ Her logic is cute as the question made for her. Such ―cute logic‖ no logic can parse, but only sings with her. Musical reason is at home here, just singing the story out, and people break out smiling and see, nod. Mind you. Musical reason ―just sings out stories‖; here to tell is to reason, to show is to argue, how musical reason does is what it is, in motion, in change, in music

595

Both Liu and Lin are adamant about taking characters as pictures, not realizing that these pictograms do picture and mirror the sense of thinking and reasoning, as Wen Ido said. (See James J. Y. Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry, University of Chicago, 1962, pp. 6-14, Lin Yutang, The Chinese Theory of Art, NY: G. P. Putnam‘s 1967, pp. 3-5. ―字與畫,‖ 聞一多全集, 步漢: 湖北人民出版社, 2004, 2: 205-207) 596 The Analects 1/6-7, 11; 2/5-8, etc. Chuang Tzu 1/34-47, 26/31-33, 48-49, etc. Han Fei Tzu 韓非子, ―難一,‖ 臺北三民書局, 民86, p. 547. 「畫蛇添足」 (p. 400) and 「唇亡齒寒」 (p. 406) are in 戰國策, 臺北市三民書局, 民87; they are routine sayings in daily conversation.

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singing metaphorical, storytelling, in outrageous logic to evoke understanding beyond ―logic.‖

MUSICAL EXPRESSIONS Here the very delivery of intended meaning is the sense, which is musical. All Chinese writings proceed so, the Analects, ―logical treatises‖ of Kung-sun Lung, and The Literary Heart Carving Dragon 文心雕龍, etc. The sense resonates rising-falling in beats 抑揚頓挫 of sentential tone-melodies. The medium is the message. How it sings is what it says; missing the tone or the beat, and we miss what it says. The Analects is yet to be rendered in English. Bare cognitive ―Chinese philosophy‖ misses Chinese wisdom philosophical.

METAPHORIC EXPRESSIONS, PRECEDENTS Naturally, musical reason appeals to metaphors to bring us to what has happened, what could have happened, and what is contrary to fact. The Mencius, Lieh Tzu, Hsün Tzu, Mr. Tung-lai’s Comprehensive Disputations東萊博議, etc., constantly reason with metaphors. Factual examples, imagined or no, argue; they are never ad hoc adjuncts to argument that stands on its own. No examples, no argument.

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STORYTELLING EXPRESSIONS Musical reason tells story-bits or long absorbing stories, likely, unlikely, sober, laughable, so literature and history are one in China where history powerfully tells stories to argue to make point. Histories of Tso Chuan 左傳 and The Historical Records 史記 are magnificent literature, as The Three Kingdoms 三國志 is touted as historical literature. Plums in Golden Pots 金瓶梅, an ostensibly elegant pornography, is a collection of stories of the day to warn of rampant corruption. The Journey to the West 西遊記 is a frankly delightful tale of profound Buddhist truths. Chuang Tzu spits out a mini-story or two at the slightest provocation, to wink truths at us. Significantly, Chuang Tzu‘s story of Emperor Hun Tun did not swerve to the ambiguity of Hun Tun nor to the clarity and precision of the two Emperors; while faithfully, intelligibly conveying the flowing gist of the story, the story itself keeps intact both the mysteries of Hun Tun and the clarity of two Emperors. It is thus that musical reason powerfully expresses itself in storytelling.

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LOGICAL EXPRESSIONS Musical reason often revels in logically odd expressions to evoke, even provoke, understanding. Mencius‘ strange expressions, ―help growth 助長,‖ ―four buds [of human nature] 四端,‖ ―tread body-form 踐形,‖ ―vast flood breath 浩然之氣,‖ ―the heart of notbearing people 不忍人之心,‖ and the like, are logically peculiar, to hit us at the heart-core 中心 of our being.597 Taoists are adept at those logically incoherent phrases to make point. Lao Tzu quipped self-defeated way, ―Tao can tao, not always Tao,‖ and then ―taoed‖ all his way through the entire Tao Te Ching. He must be winking at us, saying, ―Did you get the point? I say against what I said, that I should not say, so all I said misses the point. Now, what is the point of all this?‖ Chuang Tzu compactly declares, ―Great Tao declares not.‖ Saying ―I forget words‖ makes me unable to forget words, yet he says so; saying, ―I forget myself,‖ he cannot forget himself, yet he says so; doing ―no do 無為‖ does no ―not do‖598; in fact, saying ―nothing 無‖ violates what is said; what it says must be something, which is ―nothing.‖ So are ―use of the useless 無用之用,‖ ―I word word-forgotten 忘言而言,‖599 etc. These paradoxical sayings sound like those of logician-debaters 辯士, name-scholars. In fact, Chuang Tzu radicalized these Name Scholars 名家 to fulfill their intention to verify names 正名, i.e., to ensure that what we say conform to what is expressed in the saying, imbuing his discourses with their jargon, now concretized in his delightful exempla. Still, he is just one actuality-logician among such thinkers as historians and litterateurs, all hearty in what they say, lusty in how they ―argue.‖ Their logic goes against usual ―logic‖ to articulate actual logic. In any case, these four modes (musical, metaphoric, storytelling, and logical) with what they include (motion, change, and music) inter-shade to naturally interweave into history unceasing. Music performs; its how is its what, and its life-performances that accumulate into history are musical reason. History is musical reason. ―Is history a life-music?‖ Well, the West has offered views of history as cycles, evolution, and a self-recursive question-and-answer reenactment (Collingwood). Evolution is rhythm-motion; cycles bespeak dynamic variations; self-recursive reenactment shows coherent melodies back and forth in question and answer, as in musical antiphonies. Again, history is reason musical. However we look at it, history is a vast cosmic music on the go, in musical reason. China reputed to be history-conscious is thus intent on music in a cosmic heartfelt scale. History, music, and reason inter-resonate in the reflective lives of China. This is no irrational 597

D. C. Lau, e.g., is at pains to explain away those ―odd phrases‖ to suit Western taste today, and indiscriminately throws in his explanations as his faithful ―translations.‖ All this is in vain, pitifully wrong. 598 ―No do 無為‖ is not ―not-do 不為‖ but ―no do, and nothing not-done 無為而無不為.‖ How could it be? Simple. Tommy shouts, ―I don‘t wanna go to bed!‖ Now Mom knows he is ready to bed. So she says, ―Ok, Tommy. Don‘t go to bed; just sit on your bed, ok? I‘ll read you your favorite story, but don‘t sleep, ok?‖ Tommy nods. ―Once upon a time . . .‖ and Tommy at once hits the pillow. She did ―no do‖ in love. 599 Chuang Tzu 26/31-33, Lao Tzu 11, and Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living, NY: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1937, pp. 151, 323, story-explain use of the useless. Children say, word-forgotten; you ask them, and they say they don‘t remember what they said. They are alive.

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anything-goes, or rigid analytical rationality, but natural unity of freedom with reasonable inevitability going on to make history that makes us. We express such moving reason musically attuned to actuality by telling stories of what happened, what may happen, and what may not have happened, to inspire living vigorously. Is such storytelling of life, musical? Well, music is rhythmical, melodious, moving us at the marrow. If any story does not sing into our souls as music, rhythmically, it is no story but information to store away. Again, storytelling, history, music, and reason all roll in one in life. Musical reason thus moves on, lives on, until we storytellers join us story-hearers, to together become music ourselves, singing our souls, our community, to sing our fields and our vast skies, and our singings spread as history, storytelling life-reenacted, to posterity. Musical reason is ourselves living on as our heart rhythms, marrow melodies, into history as vast as the heaven and the earth. We apologize for getting drunk; how could we have helped it? We now sober up, and see surprised that there is no ―time‖ in sleep, so time is time-aware. The realization opens a new vista. Does the music of life include sleep? Let us look around. I go to bed when it turns dark; I wake up to see fresh brightness flooding, dawn-penetrating 朝徹 another day. I go into a train, a car, a plane, time-enclosed. And then I get out into time and see the place flood in, different, and then realize I have moved to somewhere else. Sleep is no-me gone through unawares to emerge time-aware. Thus time is time-aware, motion is motionfelt, while moving unawares. My heart-of-being pulsating unawares, and nature pulsates into me in season after season, in rhythms of undulating time. Time, motion, pulses, rhythm, and seasonal change, all make music in me out there without me, to make history outside in me, all thanks to me, thanks to

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them. I undergo 歷 living as riding on train to become the story recorded 史 as history 歷史. Motion in time, rhythmic pulses, seasonal change, musical history, they are different names, perspectives, and physiognomies of the me-situated situation-of-no-me, 有我之境 in 無我之境 that flows in time without me. ―Does a situation flow?‖ O, yes, for situation is in time; it is timed situation. Such is felt in China through the ages, retrospectively. Music thus includes me unawares, mesmerized. ―Being at home 安‖ and being there, Confucius cherishes it (17/21) as basic ritual and morality, and Chuang Tzu cherishes it as oneself naturally, securely (3/18; 4/42, 53; 6/52). This is Home where I freely tread my form 踐形 to breathe the Flood Breath 浩然之氣 of Heaven and Earth, where I can breathe myself (Mencius 7A38, 2A2). While I breathe, I ebb and flow South Sea and North Sea, in the moving music600 of the pipings of Heaven and Earth among Human piping, in the rhythm-undulating history of South Sea in North Sea, and North in South, in life vicissitudes. This is Emperor Hun Tun of moistening Musical Reason treating everyone well; it is Chinese wisdom alive.

600

Chuang Tzu was intoxicated with the sacred music of divine performance in the lowly kitchen fellow (3/4), music (―pipings‖) in nature (2/3-4) toward religious music (14/14, 18/37). Confucius is here, forgetting meattaste for three months (7/14).

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Chapter 27

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MUSICAL REASON, UNDERSTANDING AS RE-CREATIVE TRANSLATION Now let us see concretely what musical reason is and does. A series of notes turn melody and then are turned into many keys, rhythms, and variations, and become many sorts of music. The same tune, same melody, put in different keys, rhythms, tones, and variations, becomes entirely different music. It is then absurd to pull out only a bunch of notes and say this bunch is the essence of this piece of music; a series of notes are bare notes, no music at all. We might as well say the piano keyboard is the essence of music. By the same token, it is silly to impatiently bypass ―irrelevant literary trappings of nuances‖ to extract the ―gist‖ of an essay, for there is no such ―gist‖ independent of ―trappings,‖ as there is no ―music‖ independent of the specific key and rhythm and nuance of a specific composition. The key and rhythm are set by the situation often tragically unbearable; things imbalanced sound forth music of sorrows. Music is inherent in every sentence we utter everywhere,601 but distinctly so in China. It means that, first, Chinese as musical language is inherently intoned; the same sound in different tones have different senses, e.g., su1 司, to take charge, su2 俗, secular, su3 死, to die, and su4 四, four. Besides, one sound in one tone carries many senses, e.g., besides taking charge 司, su1 can also mean to think 思, to tear 撕, silk 絲, etc. Chinese words are meaningless without specific tones. So, secondly, literally every sentence in China can easily have singing beat and rhythm to rhyme and give sense. It is thus that music comes to be inherent in sense. To fail to catch the 601

―Music‖ as inherent in our being, thinking, and saying is admirably perceived by Plato and Aristotle. See F. E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon, NY: University of New York Press, 1967, pp. 98-99 (mousiké under kathársis), and Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, eds. G. Kittel and G. Friedrich, tr. G. W. Bromiley, Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1974, IX:304-309 (sumphonéo). Dewey, James, Santayana, and Whitehead are great writers who crafted their wording with compelling nuance. (Peirce and Royce are less so.) Few in the West note the critical point that the aesthetic how is part and parcel of the cognitive what. Blanshard, an essayist in his own right, incredibly faulted Santayana‘s beauty for obscuring the message (Brand Blanshard, On Philosophical Style, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1954, p. 50). Lucien Price, ed., Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), Boston: David R. Godine, 2001, is ubiquitously bypassed as of no philosophical significance. Plato and Schopenhauer are also lucid and precise, powerful and concise, yet none (including all these exquisite writers) noted how the style is part of the content, content part of style, much less considered why the what is part of its how, and vice versa. What a contrast this situation is to China!

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music in what is said misses what is said. This is why Confucius‘ Analects are yet to be translated, being specially compressed in beautiful cadence for oral chanting transmission, to survive burning of books in the Ch‘in 秦 dynasty.602 It is thus that prosaically fixated explanation-taken-as-translation603 loses that sense-inmusic inherent in Chinese writing, in fact, any writing. This is a scary discovery that follows. Let us repeat. Almost all English translations604 mix explanation with translation, and take explanation as extraction of the sense out of bothersome adjuncts of literary icing on the real cake, the solid rock-bottom sense that we want. Such an attitude kills Chinese sentences, tone entwined nuance, even before reading, much less translating. The result is nothing short of catastrophic. Confucius is now a flat tiresome mouther of platitudes. Mencius is a no less tiresome moralist of threadbare ―sophistry‖ familiar to us today. Lao Tzu is a mystical recluse with mumbo jumbo that we suspect he himself would not know what he means. Chuang Tzu becomes a simple relativist, ineptly repeating the Stoics in the West. A sorry state of affairs in primitive China this is, surviving as specimens in cultural archeology in museums of clarity and exactitude today. To correct this culture-chauvinistic mistake that devastates the West as well as China, we go into three subsections. One, we show the zing and depths of compelling actuality in Confucius, Mencius, Lao Tzu, and Chuang Tzu. Two, we cite some Chinese phrases routinely used in daily conversation, to show how musically alive Chinese sense and sentences are. Finally, we see ourselves understanding, and see that understanding is a re-creative translation that benefits both translator and translated.

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ONE: HOW MUSICALLY ALIVE THE FOUR PARAGONS ARE The four paragons here are Confucius, Mencius, Lao Tzu, and Chuang Tzu. We now go over them one by one, in the order just mentioned, to see how musical they say and are—each in his way. This is an exciting exercise that lifts our hearts soaring high in tone, nuance, sense and sensibility.

602 603

See 論語註疏 by 魏何晏 (註) and 宋邢昺 (疏), 臺北市古籍出版社, 2001, p. 2.

This practice of confusing explanation with translation, refusing to leave ambiguities ambiguous, is rampant in translations of Taoist writings. D. C. Lau valiantly confuses explanation with translation even on the Analects, as many others do, and they with Lau never hesitate to tread on thin ice of the Mencius, never even aware of the existence of thin ice. They fall into the ditch of illegitimacy, unawares. 604 Some of Arthur Waley‘s vast amounts of translations and some of A. C. Graham‘s translations of Chuang Tzu are sensitively discerning exceptions, yet Graham‘s translation of Chuang Tzu‘s Chapter Two is a mess, and Waley did not touch that chapter. They tend to go the other extreme to add their own irrelevances, even contrary to the originals, sometimes even cut important portions of the original. Seidensticker complains that Waley ―abridged‖ and add ―elaboration‖ to the original. Waley admits of being ―reproached‖ for failing ―terseness‖ of the original (p. vi); I note that he adds to brisk 26/31-33 (p. 3) and cut crucial 2/96 (p. 33) in Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China (1939), CA: Stanford University Press, 1982. Edward G. Seidensticker, The Tale of Genji, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976, p. xiv. We see no complaint on Graham so far, except ours on previous pages above.

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[A] We go to Confucius First We cannot help but cite again the first entry of Analects, saying literally, ―Study and time-ly rehearse it, not rather pleasant! Have friends come from afar, not rather delightful! People-ignored and not vexed, not rather princely!‖ It sings rhymed, in swinging rhythm, in crescendo. To study, time and again rehearse them, and then ponder on them with classmates, is joy fulfilled; such life-learning enables undergoing, unsullied, people-negligence, and this is the height of princely nobility indeed. Pondering alone must accompany studying with classmates, for studying with no pondering gets lost, pondering with no studies is risky (2/15). Unswayed while the world passes by (calmly giving oneself to heavenly destiny), such a one is ruler-worthy indeed, showing the climaxed maturity of studying to become truly human. All this crescendos, chanted with poetic pathos to set the tone of Confucius‘ whole Analects that follow—this is the self, fellowship, and maturity of integrity, three in one, tacitly trusting in Heaven. The crescendo is built from oneself to friendship, to culminate in the ultimate interhuman in negatives, for no positive terms can equal such princely apex of humanity. Ours is its wordy re-creation (not translation, much less explanation) of the sentiment packed in the chant terse, originative, and heartfelt. ―Could all this be expressed in sober non-musical way, though?‖ Well, the whole personal pathos would have been lost, the personal significance. Without this depth and weight, Confucius would have been reduced to a tiresome mouther of daily routines of studying, befriending, and just being shut up by people ignoring him; why does he have to utter all this abject humdrum? Isn‘t it what we all are? In contrast, vibrant poetic chants in silent nobility sparkle in daily routine. Thanks to studying-rehearsing, and pondering among friend, the artesian well of joy of integrity overflows worldly negligence. That‘s the secret of Confucius‘ invincible music of compact poetry in scant simple words. Music sings poetry, and poetry sings musical sense from the depths of the self among friends, in the chill of the world. Now Confucius‘ social-political life-failures scintillate high beyond life. We thought he was vaguely right as he gave vent to frustration, on matters we hardly need be told. Now we realize that we do not even know what it means to rejoice in heart, wherever and however we are. Have we soberly said all this?605 Yes, but we would have barely said it hollow, contentless, if we did not said so in our hushed excitement at Confucius‘ heartfelt intoned poetry. We were soberly fascinated, quietly aglow. Now we go to Mencius his supposed inheritor, and we see the same poetic musical surge at the center of his reasoning and saying. Poetic musicality it is that is the power, depth, and sense in all his expressions and reasoning.

605

Have we conveyed Confucius? If not, we have exercised futility. We hope we did convey him in all our clumsiness. If we have conveyed Confucius, have we replaced him? Of course not, for any conveyance of the original is ―clumsy‖ compared with the pristine original. Our clumsiness would hopefully incite people into Confucius raw, original, and authentic.

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[B] Mencius Mencius is renowned for peculiar turns of expression and penchant for passionate debate. His vivid memorable phrases are all wrapped in his debates told of in stories, so much so that without understanding the implications of the phrases his debates are senseless, and without referring to his debating passion, his phrases are nonsense. Just three story-examples are here: Mr. Fifty-paces laughs at Mr. Hundred-paces (1A3), pained at heart (2A6) in pity, and selfdevastation, self-desertion (4A10). China‘s common phrase, ―Mr. Fifty-paces laughs at Mr. Hundred-paces 五十步笑一百步 (1A3)‖ came from Mencius‘ response to King Hui of Liang who complained that his state added no people while the neighbor state had no less, though he moved his starved people to where foods were, but the neighbor state did not. Mencius said, ―The King loves war; may I use war as example? Drums rumbled, swords joined, when soldiers threw armors, dragged weapons and ran; some stopped after a hundred paces, some after fifty, and Mr. fifty-paces laughed at Mr. hundred-paces. What then?‖ King said, ―No good. He ran, only not [as far as] a hundred paces.‖ Mencius said, ―[If King lets people till the land, cultivate silkworms, and harvest in season, they would have plenty to enjoy and know morals. Dogs-pigs ate what people ate, and [food aplenty was] not collected; people starved dead on street, and [food stored was] not issued. People die, and you say, ―Not me; it‘s season.‖ How does it differ from stabbing people to death, saying, ―Not me; it‘s weapon.‖? Please, blame no season, and people under heaven flock here.‖ ―Pained at heart 惻隱之心‖ appears to us all when, suddenly seeing a baby about to crawl into a well, everyone would be alarmed and pained at heart, not to curry favor with its parents, not to gain relatives-friends‘ praises, not due to hating its cries (2A6).

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―Self-devastation, self-desertion 自暴自棄 (4A10)‖ sums up Mencius, saying, ―One who self-devastates we cannot talk with, one who self-deserts we cannot do [things] with. Talking without ritual [or] rightness is called self-devastation; oneself unable to dwell humane [or] arise aright is called self-desertion. ―Humane‖ is human dwelling in peace; ―right‖ is the human road of right. Vacating peaceful dwelling, not to live there, deserting the right road, not to go by it—how sad [it is]!‖

Mencius‘ original words and wording are compellingly musical. We apologize for Wu‘s above translations, though tried as literal as possible, to have failed to bring out fully Mencius‘ constraining lyricism with sense-impacts. Now, dialogical, musical, and didactic, Mencius‘ passionate stories make us realize all the more the tragic historic irony, that all his irresistible persuasiveness had failed to move a single ruler to his passionate thesis. The world of his days remained a bloody cauldron of inter-snatching butchery. Such powerful persuasion went on while such miseries persisted! Mencius was as convinced of the irresistible truth of his message as he was thoroughly frustrated, agonized and disgusted with the situation. The pathos is unbearable. We must read his stories in this passionate context. Akrasia, i.e., knowing, desiring and able to do something better, and doing worse, is here burning unbearably.

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An ―existential contradiction‖ points at the situation going against the statement the situation generates, with a historic twist that Mencius‘ most irresistible persuasion to humane governance, provoked by atrocities at the time, is matched by the same atrocities that persisted. What his world provoked, his world rejected; that is Mencius‘ historic existential contradiction. Let us tarry here. ―[I say] P, and I deny P‖ is not logically contradictory as ―P and not P,‖ but here is a twist. One, P is supported—enabled—by ―I affirm P,‖ so ―P, and I deny P‖ is ―I affirm P and I deny P,‖ which is contradictory, though ―I affirm P‖ is not expressed, so ―P and I deny P‖ is an existential contradiction.606 Two, ―existential‖ is situational, historical. Mencius‘ words were provoked by the situation, and the situation stubbornly contradicted his words. Such contradiction is thus situational. Later, every Chinese (except some tyrants) came to admire Mencius, but not a single Chinese, commoner or emperor, put his words into practice. Mencius is an historical person, history produced him, and history denies him, so all this is an historical contradiction. Thus existential contradiction implicates situational contradiction to compose long-term historical contradictions. Sadly, this contradiction existential, situational, historical, continues today. We read Mencius, we admire him as all Chinese do, and none of us practices his passionate message. We know, we desire, and are able to do what Mencius appeals us to—he even said we cannot help doing it, as even the callous King Hsüan of Ch‘i could not help but release a bull in mortal jitters being dragged to sacrificial slaughter—and we do not do it. This contradiction is a sad akratic contradiction, today. Mencius unbearably sensed our situational exigency. Aroused by this unbearable sense— saying ―I cannot help it 不得已‖—he so vigorously argued as to be dubbed ―given to debates 好辯‖ (3B9). Such painful situational tragedy so contradictory adds poignancy to his passionate phrases, already loaded with irresistible persuasiveness. A further irony of Chinese history is that, consistent failures of Mencius‘ passionate thesis turn his useless thesis into persistent historic nostalgia. His ideal constantly failed to implement, and precisely this failure has been fueling its nostalgia as ―official ideology.‖ Mencius‘ success to turn as ―orthodox‖ Chinese wisdom was wryly coupled with his complete failure in political praxis. All such multifarious ironies deepen the Mencius as incorruptible classic. Thus was the Ch’un Ch’iu 春秋 compiled, thus Confucius edit-promoted it, and thus Mencius followed suit—all to no avail; Mencius was hated by emperors and banned by Confucians in Japan.607 Wang Ch‘ung followed Mencius, trying as Mencius and failed as Mencius, to implement their passionate vision. Wang Ch‘ung devoted 30 odd years to writing

606

607

P. H. Nowell-Smith calls it ―situational oddness‖ in Ethics (1954), Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Pelican Books, 1965, pp. 80-82. Sadly, he confines its application just in theoretical ethics. Still, he claims that sentences are subject-bound, to complement R. G. Collingwood‘s claim that sentences are answers to questions situated in culture as ―absolute presupposition‖ (An Essay on Metaphysics, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1940, pp. 2148). Together, they claim that saying-and-thinking is situated. Discarded by the West for situation-free universality (Collingwood was dubbed a ―relativist‖), this claim understands Chinese wisdom as historical story-thinking, situation-imbued, i.e., as literary-historical 文史. See 黃俊傑著, 德川日本詮釋史論, 臺灣大學出版中心, 2006, Chapter Three.

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his massive Balanced Critiques 論衡, out of his intense aversion to empty delusions, to strive for solid authenticity 疾虛妄, 務實誠,608 all in vain. All such akratic pathos in pathetic existential contradiction with pricking significance of his stories, vanish as soon as we tell his story prosaically, as plain information of dead Mencius buried in the past, one of silly jobless roamers in tiresome sophistry we need not be told of; the pathos of Mencius‘ words is gone as soon as we lose sight of their ringing rhetoric and passionate rhythm in his akratically tragic life.

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[C] Lao Tzu The beginning quip of the Tao Te Ching—The Way and Its Power (Arthur Waley)—is poetically protean in sense. Four possible readings can be cited, among many, depending on punctuation. This is reminiscent of reverie-like music by Debussy and Delius, Hun Tun music interpretable in so many ways, thanks to fluid Chinese syntax. First, it can read, ―Tao can Tao, not Always Tao 道可道, 非常道,‖ the Tao that can be identified as such609 is not the real Tao. This is a common reading, and is enough to send us spinning. All that follows is then no Tao at all; we scratch our heads at what shamelessly follows amounts to, all ostensibly identifying what Tao is and how it functions, all futile according to this initial warning. The book simply destroys itself. Why does Lao Tzu do it, then? There must be some inscrutable reason, and that reason is what is meant, and worse, it is we who are given to find out, not to be told of as an immobile eternal truth. Evocation, involvement, and allusion are the whole purpose of this selfcontradictory instability here. Why is it so? Well, that is the gist of the whole Tao Te Ching. Now we can be briefer on the other readings. Second, it can read, ―Tao, can tao [as] unstable Tao 道, 可道非常道.‖ This gives our common impression—or is it against it?—that Tao is so inscrutable that we can take it as quite inscrutable, unpredictable, and surprising. It is a mystery as to why nature follows natural laws as we know them; it is a miracle that nature can be understood at all, said Einstein.610 Third, it can read, ―Tao allowed, Tao unstable, [is] Tao 道可, 道非常, 道.‖ It means that Tao can be both expected and unexpected, and the combination gives the complete picture of Tao. Lao Tzu goes beyond Einstein; Tao is not just what is unexpected but also ―expected,‖ against our taking it as ―unexpected.‖ Whatever this combination means is a mystery to us, however. This is the fascination of fortunetelling that is popularly taken as an offshoot of Lao Tzu. Fourth, it can read, ―Tao allowed, Tao not, [is] Always Tao 道可, 道非, 常道.‖ Tao allowable as the supreme Tao, and Tao not allowable as such, logically prohibited, both 608

See 王充, 論衡, ―對作篇,‖ 臺北三民書局, 民86, pp. 1469, 1475, 1477, 1494, etc. All his Mencius-like provocative phrases are regrettably omitted here. 609 This is our interpretation of the second ―tao 道.‖ All other ingenious interpretations are omitted here. 610 His dictum, ―The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility . . . The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.‖ (1936), is on the back-cover of Einstein: A Hundred Years of Relativity, by Andrew Robinson, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 2005.

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constitute the always-Tao. Verbally we can mouth such statement, but do we understand it at all? We doubt if we can, ever. Now, surveying all these four readings, we cannot help but ask, ―Do all these readings amount to the same thing?‖ Well, they are all elusive, so we do not know if an elusive-A is identical with another elusive-B or not. We are sure of one point: they have subtle differences in nuance, thanks to the fluid Chinese syntax poetically exploited to the maximum to our despair, devastating us. We feel also that some of these differences may be mutually opposite, as ―God is nowhere‖ is opposed to ―God is now-here.‖ The magic here is that all these are our understandings that are possible and acceptable. Such is the delightful magic and frustration of musical poetry, all inclusive naturally. Tao Te Ching thus weaves out 5000 characters, all fluid, all afloat, all puzzle-words goblet-tipping to the reader‘s respective inclinations that are part of the actual situation. Understanding originates in the reader to reflect the reader‘s inclination, so its translations are a legion. Worse, it is impossible to obtain the definitive translation among these bewildering varieties of translations. Tao Te Ching is a musical round, a perpetuum mobile as alive as Tao. Unless taken as the mobile music of mesmerizing perpetual round of life, Tao Te Ching would have been a vague unintelligible irrelevance of mysticism, reclusive and irrational.

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[D] Chuang Tzu Let us cite a simple story that begins and another that concludes his Seven Inner Chapters. The first story is about a small-huge Roe-Roc, the second story is about Emperor Hun Tun the Ambiguous. Both are fascinating, fabulous, and quite simple yet staggeringly hard to make out what they mean, although they do beckon us with what they mean that we do not know but feel in our heart of being. Here are the stories, summed up611 in the same poetic strain. Northern Dark Waters had a fish named Roe So big beyond knowing how many thousand miles long it was. Such Roe changed into a Roc named Friends So big beyond knowing how many thousand miles long it was. This Roc-Friends raged up and flew Up into the sky and saw things small below, Sprinkling, sparkling as dust. Etc. Emperor South Sea Shu-sudden, Emperor North Sea Su-speedy Tarried in the Center Land of Emperor Hun Tun the Turgid Confusion, Who treated them very well. Having mutually consulted in gratitude, both Emperors took turns digging holes Of sense-organs, one hole a day, Until the seventh when Emperor Hun Tun the Ambiguous died, [of clarity].

611

They are too involved to render in full, especially the first one. Both stories shade into the rest of the chapters to which they belong; we can roughly localize them as 1/1-9, 7/33-35.

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Both stories are clearly unclear, full of attractive yet elusive implications in all their innocence so disarmingly simple.612 Taken together, we see them mutually mirroring, mutually contrasting; both story-poems are with both hands embracing all seven Inner Chapters, elucidating them without enlightening them, barely basking them in the Shaded Light 葆光 of Tao. Unless seen as poetry that is fluid and mobile as music, with layer after layer of unfathomable implications, all elusive, ambiguous, and important, neither story would have been seen as profound frivolity of what is alive all around all over, anything but flat irrelevant relativism. Now, we hope enough has been described about the inherence of musical poetry singing the sense in what is said among the four Chinese paragons. Without entering such music and dancing its embodied sense with them, we would be forever out of their world, in sense, in life, and in musical reason of actuality.

TWO: COMMON CHINESE PHRASES CHERISHED AND RELISHED IN DAILY CONVERSATION

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Lest anyone thinks that musicality belongs only to those four great paragons in bygone days, it must be insisted that the paragons are just a tip—albeit distinguished tip—of vast China fertile, poetic-musical, singing all over. Not only is every treatise and every sentence in China tend to be an artwork, every sentence and every phrase lend themselves as quotable cherished, relished, and brandished about in daily conversation. Not accidentally, Mr. Feng a co-compiler of a two-volume Collection of Chinese Sayings and Their Origins613 waxed to musical height when he said (slightly modified), Many peoples and nations have no dictionary of quotable sayings because not many cultures are historically old enough to amass those instructive sayings. . . . Someone justifiably said that Chinese people are those who can best appropriate sayings. These sayings are rich in instructive experiences of long years. They serve to put the final touch of live eyes to the dragon painted, to suddenly enlighten, brighten, and enliven the point at a stroke when long drawn-out explanations are useless. They make us munch on their infinitely fertile implications, relishing them without ceasing.

He could have said that the ―history‖ in China is itself a treasure trove of memorable quotables and sayings, a symphonic delight to enter and resonate, and cherish. These sayings not only clinch an important point made, but also initiate polyhedral explorations into open territories, further yielding novel surprising insights as we live on. 612

Going into detailed pondering is purposely omitted here. Cf. Wu, The Butterfly as Companion, Albany, NY: New York University Press, 1990, pp. 35-112, and ―‗Emperor Hundun 渾沌‘: A Cultural Hermeneutic,‖ Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, September 2007, pp. 263-279.. 613 馮作民, 宋秀玲編著, 中國成語名言关源, 上集, 下集, 香港新時代出版社, no date, p. 1. Besides this twovolume collection, see 陳永楨, 陳善慈編著, 漢英對照成語詞关 Chinese Idioms and their English Equivalents, 臺北書林出版有限公司, 民81, 陳日朊, 金士杰編著, 成語故事三百篇, 吉林人民出版社, 1982, 陳蒲清 et al. 選編, 中國古代寓言選, 湖南教育出版社, 1982, Arthur H. Smith, Proverbs and Common Sayings from the Chinese (1914), NY: Paragon Book Reprint Corp. and Dover Publications, 1965. Without exception, these editors take delightful pride in compiling the delicious daily sayings in China.

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In fact, such are the stuff of which history is made. Smith‘s words in 1914 recur614:

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Not more sure is it that . . . the Chinese mind is represented in the Classical writings than that other and polyhedral aspects of the same mind are represented in their popular proverbs. Of no people, perhaps, is this more emphatically true than of the Chinese. . . . The nature of their language, especially its capacity for epigram and antithesis, the wonderful body of ancient literature which has preserved and unified the written character and idiom, the vast stretches of history through which the nation has flourished, its present extent and comparative homogeneity,—these peculiarities of China give to its proverbial sayings an interest and importance which is unique. . . . In the first place, the Chinese language embraces within itself a great variety of what . . . may be denominated ―styles,‖ from the high classical to the rude village patois . . . That which is not literary is su, common or colloquial. . . But when . . . the classical becomes also popularly current . . . [it] is not su, for it is classical; yet it is su, for it is common. . . . [It] is ―a ready-made expression‖ (現成的話) . . . part of a Verse (詩) . . . with . . . tones [and] definite rhyme, [to form] the ruling forces in the composition [as] a splinter of history.

The ―ready-made expression 現成的話‖ bespeaks its spontaneity; ―Common su 俗‖ shows its pervasion in daily routines; ―part of a Verse (詩)‖ expresses musical rhythmic flow thanks to the fluid grammatical ―style‖ of tonal Chinese language. All these features combine into sayings evocative in daily life. Undulating musicality pervades Chinese language in every village and town shaping and showing thinking, and its style can only be called ―musical reason‖ all over the sky and the fields. Musical reason permeates the commonest village colloquialism. People just love these sayings, ready to the mouth, pleasant to the ear, evocative of thinking in the field and in the kitchen. They are music; hearing them amounts to being in Broadway Musicals every time we meet and talk with friends. All such situation has continued for millennia to compose musical history of evocative reasoning. The evocative power is due to every phrase in China being colorful memorable shorthand for a story. The saying is brought out as a piece of mini-history to sing aloud. Story flows as the river of music in time, the flow of history. Even the alphabet language has colorful depths in etymology and in literature that no artificial language can match. Much more so does the audio-pictographic language of Chinese writings with its story-history in the back, singing the sense in rounds and in symphonies of stories.615 We have mentioned history, stories, poetry, rhythm, rhyme, singing, sense, and reasoning. They are all inextricably one, so much so that missing one of them misses all others. We are here especially intent on how singing is related to reasoning and its sense, exhibited in storytelling and historical records, actual or imagined. We reserve considering such ―musical reason as historical reason‖ in a later section. Let us take some examples. No need to belabor on phrases in well-known Taoist writings. Supposedly long-faced Confucius had bequeathed us many memorable phrases so vivid that 614 615

Smith, ibid., pp. 1-6. It was with difficulty that these rich pages were compressed. On alphabet language, see Friedrich Waismann, ―Linguistic Strata,‖ the first essay, Logic and Language (1953, Second Series), ed. Antony Flew, Anchor Books, 1965, pp. 226-247. On pictogram-language, see Wu, History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991, ―Sound, Sight, Sense,‖ pp. 125-173. On pp. 167-169 are a rose-shaped score of musical Canon side by side with a circle and two squares of characters; we can begin at any character on any line and proceed in any direction, to make a poem. They are circle and squares of bewildering numbers of poems, packed in circle and squares.

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they stay on and get quoted often. These sayings repeatedly appear, verbatim or in variations, in Chinese writings to deepen and enliven Chinese wisdom, almost beyond the extent to which Shakespeare is quoted in English writings. ―Step by step, alluring-to-good 詢詢善誘‖ pictures Confucius wheedling young folks into good, ―raising one to return three 舉一反三,‖ to entice the young to ―with one skewer it all 一以貫之,‖ pushing them into ―loving virtue as loving sex 好德如好色‖! Thanks to these phrases we are vividly shown how vibrant Confucius was and how vibrantly we should live as he did. They are all music, as he was music-drunk to forget meat-taste for three months, lustily singing in unison with anyone singing (7/13, 7/31).

If even our classical paragon is so musically vibrant as to be conducive to quoting and brandishing about in China‘s daily conversations, it is only natural that all classical and vernacular writings are ablaze with musical vivacity throughout history, to lead and exhibit Chinese thinking as musical reason.

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THREE: UNDERSTANDING AS RE-CREATIVE TRANSLATION All the above descriptions have unwittingly engaged in translations into English, hopefully apt and crisp, of delightful Chinese originals. The translations amount to trials at recreating comparable compact freshness that flows as aptly; the sayings translated are the original musical scores performed to re-actualize compellingly, convincingly alive, a new resurgence of Chinese beats and melodies, refreshed and etched forth clearly if not compellingly in today‘s English. Translation inhabits the original‘s verbal skin, to try out its gestures, its heart-rhythm and its peculiar breathing pattern in another language foreign to the original. The ideal translator must imagine how the original writer would have crafted the wording if English were her mother tongue. Translation re-creates the original in a new world the original writer has never dreamed of, an exercise of creative love as laborious as the original creation, if not more laborious, of new birth of the original. Further random samples of such phrases as above cited testify to the inspired labors to rekindle melodies and rhythms of Chinese phrases in English. Hu Shih‘s 胡適 renowned quip, ―大膽假設, 小心求證‖ can turn into ―Propose boldly, prove carefully.‖ The Yin-Yang 相剋相生 is ―internecine, inter-nascent.‖ Lao Tzu‘s long chant (58), ―禍兮福之所倚, 福兮禍之所伏,‖ could become ―O woe where weal leans! O weal where woe lies!‖ Confucius‘ (17/2) melodious ―性相近也，習相遠也‖ is ―Born alike, practice apart.‖ Mencius‘ admiration (4B12), ―大人者，不失共赤子之心者也‖ is now ―The Great Adults are ones who lose none of their baby-hearts.‖ His remarkable (7A38) ―踐形‖ treads forms of body-life, and his (1A7) heartfelt ungrammatical ―不忍人之心‖ is the ―heart unbearable at people‖ in pain. Sun Tzu‘s clinching quip popularized, ―知己知彼, 百戰百勝,‖ is ―Know us, know them, hundred wars, hundred wins.‖ ―前車之鑑‖ is ―front wheel‘s mirror-alert.‖ Hsün Tzu‘s ―青出於藍，而青於藍‖ is ―blue from indigo, bluer than indigo.‖ A poetic line by 林征明 of

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South Dynasty, ―蟬噪林逾靜，鳥鳴山更幽‖ echoes faintly our ―Cicadas chatter, forest quieter; birds sing, mount remoter.‖ All these are picked from among popular sayings so numerous beyond enumeration. T‘ao Ch‘ien sighed, ―pick ‗mums at east fence, look long to south hills, hill-mist fine in dusk, birds co-fly around—here is a touch of truth, want to say it, words forgotten‖; Blake said, ―a world, a grain of sand.‖ One crisp morning, I see a tiny butterfly, less than a quarter inch, fluttering among wayside flowers, less than a quarter inch, white moving among whites, while unknown birds chirp faintly far. Isn‘t this T‘ao and Blake? All translations are creations from and into creative life-flow in nature. Translation understands the original sentiment, creatively reenacting it to show it, to inter-enrich, sensitive to similarities and dissimilarities, never simple transference of words, but a sense-rebirth in reenactment, trans-forming original words into novel expressions of the original intention; the novel expressions are faithful to the original in a new language-medium yet differ from original words. Interculture is inter-translation of cultures. Our intercultural translation must see to it that the West enriches China as does China the West. Isn‘t all this another melodious interresonance of musical reason? We tend to attend to the West enriching China; it is time we focus on China enriching the West. ―Doesn‘t intercourse with foreign culture pollute China, though?‖ O, no, on the contrary, as juxtaposing yellow with red brings out yellow and red, so inter-translation brings out our refreshed realization of fresh profundity of the two originals, both cultures.616 Chinese Emperor Hun Tun treats well overseas Emperors of two oceans, and this hospitality is a contagion of musical resonance, spreading musical reason to the bitter end of death—to result in a rebirth of renewed vigor. ―But how concretely can China benefit from hosting-entertaining the West?‖ Well, one crucial benefit has been mentioned, our refreshed realization of the fresh profundity of accustomed Chinese originals, as if to look at them in the mirror of foreign language. The effect would be that of a famous painting newly cleaned. This is what is aimed at in all above descriptions. Another benefit is critical appreciation. To claim that Chinese sentences are musical does not mean that every piece of such literary music is equally exquisite. Not accidentally, we selected four great paragons, Confucius, Mencius, Lao Tzu, and Chuang Tzu, to describe literary musicality in China. China itself has traditionally made selection of excellence. We see noble classics distinct from usual literature, massive Chao Ming Literary Selections 昭明文選, Ancient Literature Supreme 古文觀止, 300 T’ang Poems 唐詩三百首, Eight Great Sung-T‘ang Masters 唐宋八大家, and so on. What selects excellent literature is perceptive critical appreciation of the musical quality of sentential reasoning; logic-rationality of the West can help us here. China has been making quality selections—as in 詩品, 書譜, etc.—without Western influence. How much more will logical sensitivity of the West help advance us here!

616

See Wu, ―World Interculturalism: China Written in English‖ in Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, June 2005, pp. 1-42.

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One crucial caveat must be entered here, though. Western logicality must be ―cured‖ by the ―smoking‖ of Chinese taste, China‘s historical tradition of interpretive taste, to be helpful without polluting if not destroying the genius of China. As a parrot does not speak human language, however fluently it emits language-like sound, so logical mechanics does not grade Chinese writings—until we music tasters embody logic-rationality thoroughly sensitized with Chinese sensibility, literary style, and musical taste. So, for cultural inter-enrichment to take place, we must go through both sorts of disciplines—to dip in Chinese musical reason, and to train in Western logical sensitivity. This disciplining sounds difficult but the comfort here is that such going-through is enjoyable, not a bore or chore, however much effort it requires. Effortlessness results from initial effort that is itself enjoyable. We can then hone in on some delightful critiques. Two examples come to mind. One, Po Loh 伯樂 a legendary horse-lover and expert has inspired many memorable stories through the ages.617 To be a Po Loh to judge respective merits among these stories is a delightful task none has engaged. We could do it today but would have to marshal all available historical and literary sensibilities plus critical acumen, a synthetic deployment of which would have to rely on help of the West‘s logical adroitness. For example, how Chuang Tzu frivolously plays and roams among various levels of wording and strata of reasoning can be parsed and appreciated with judicious Chinese uses of Russell‘s types, Gödel‘s incompleteness, Waismann‘s strata of ambiguity, and fluid deconstructionism.618 We could reenact their respective processes of reaching their conclusions, and then sensitively-synthetically use them to chart how Chuang Tzu plays and roams in musical reason in actuality and beyond. It is in some such ways that China can benefit from the West to deepen China‘s own appreciation and even deepen musical reason that mirrors actuality, reenact our paragons‘ past life-exploits, and thereby re-create the joys and sorrows of actual living. All this cannot help but deepen and enrich our life. The same can be claimed about the West benefiting from China. China would prevent the West‘s clarity and exactitude from falling into pure mechanics indifferently replaceable by machines and artificial intelligence. China can help the West preserve and enhance human reasonableness in its logic-rationality in ―dialogue‖ with machines. For example, psychology, a distinct Western invention of scientific incursion into the inner recess of human feeling and thinking, can immensely benefit from China‘s sensitivity here. How China can do so is up to the West to decide. The West can sympathetically appropriate and synthetically appreciate the musicality of reason in China, freely and spontaneously living in its personal-interpersonal sentiment of life. The West can be jolted to seeing how its logic-rationality can and does well to pervade with daily rhythm to turn alive, how ―alive‖ is not extra-logical term but its core, that logic without this living bite into actuality is hollow, meaningless. We must, however, be alerted to what should not be done.

617 618

See 馮, op. cit., p. 195. Russell, Gödel and deconstructionism need no citation. Friedrich Waismann, ―Language Strata,‖ How I See Philosophy, NY: St. Martin‘s Press, 1968, pp. 91-121.

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Professor Spring Chen619 claims two points in the introduction to his co-authored Chinese-English dictionary of ―idioms,‖ otherwise quite helpful. One, China is uniquely rich and deep in historic wisdom; two, English equivalents to Chinese idioms must be discovered, due to the highly compressed almost ungrammatical nature of Chinese idioms. Now, he is not aware that point two destroys point one; why bother with Chinese sayings if for every Chinese saying an exact English equivalent can be discovered?620 One of the examples he cited, No. 1179, is revealing. It is ―禍兮福之所倚‖621 translated—because of its ―highly compressed ungrammatical nature‖ (we wonder what is so ungrammatical here) as ―Every cloud has a silver lining.‖ OK, then, so what else is new in China? Besides, its other sober half is omitted, ―福兮禍之所伏,‖ to together make up China‘s peculiar readiness to adapt to life vicissitudes. Luckily he appends ―literal translation‖ but neglects to mention how uniquely Chinese the saying is. Of course it is brilliant to juxtapose ―禍兮福之所倚‖ with ―Every cloud has a silver lining.‖ What is wrong is to give an impression that they are totally identical, for they are not, and it is in this ―not‖ that China enriches the West. Dr. Chen should have cautioned the reader on this crucial point. Let us look into the Chinese-English differences. We see at least two. One, the Chinese saying here is a long sigh with a 兮 while the Western saying is a light brightening comfort to us. Two, this Chinese saying is a part, just a half, to go with another ominous half, another long sigh in an opposite direction, ―福兮禍之所伏,‖ to compose a complete couplet. Chinese people are forever cautious, cautiously optimistic, while the Western saying on the silver lining is complete in itself, ever so sunny. Nothing wrong with being sunny, but the difference here is glaringly instructive. So, in this saying alone, Chinese contribution to the West is threefold. First, China has a long sigh that takes such turning of events seriously, and, secondly, a balanced prudence to be ever ready for whatever might befall us—not over-joyful when sunny, never overrun by sorrow when cloudy. And, third, mind you. Chinese people put the woe-saying ―禍兮福之所倚‖ first. Chinese people are cautiously optimistic, and vibrantly optimistic in the end; China lives ―All is well that ends well.‖ The moral is clear enough. Simple juxtaposition of equivalents, however ingenious, eyeopening, and surprising, simply kills the Chinese contribution to the West. Sadly, the socalled ―Chinese philosophy,‖ today‘s and yesterday‘s, engaged by both Chinese and Western scholars,622 assumes this simple juxtaposition of equivalents. ―Anything Chinese is translatable into Western; so we just do West in Chinese jargon, no problem here,‖ say they. Anything peculiarly Chinese that appears on the West‘s screen can be and even must simply be explained in Western terms, to be ―really intelligible.‖ Clearly, such engagement is no China‘s contribution to the West. 619

陳永楨, 陳善慈編著, 漢英對照成語詞关 Chinese Idioms and their English Equivalents, 臺北書林出版有限公司, 民81, pp. 1-8. 620 Chill runs spine as we read Chang Chung-yuan ingeniously putting Heidegger into Lao Tzu. Do we have to read Lao Tzu if the West has exhausted him? (Tao: A New Way of Thinking: A Translation of the Tao Tê Ching with an Introduction and Commentaries, NY: Harper & Row, 1975.) 621 He said ―it is from 史記‖ with no chapter reference, but it is clearly from 道德經, Ch.58. 622 ―Chinese philosophers‖ among the Chinese are 馮友蘭, 陳榮捷, 劉殿爵, and many young Chinese scholars. ―Chinese philosophers‖ in the West are James Legge, A. C. Graham, Chad Hansen, Donald Munro, and many vigorous Western sinologists.

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This warning enables us to see how subtle China-West inter-learning is, how sensitive the engagement must be, as stepping on the thin slippery intercultural ice. We are trying our best in this ―introduction‖ to Chinese wisdom alive to present China as it is. With such wary sensitivity, though, we can harvest the happy result of a delightful handshake, smiling, ―nothing going against the heart of each party‖ as Chuang Tzu delightfully described it; both can be friends, respecting and learning from each other. Both China and the West shall cherish and relish mutual similarities and dissimilarities in musical harmony, chanting the symphonies of natural musical reason in nature inside and out. Now who said the Land flowing with milk and honey is still far off beyond us? Moses had to look far at it from afar, while we can enter it anytime, as long as we shake our hearty hands, China with the West. ―Wait a minute! ‗Musical reason‘ resonates here; doesn‘t it bespeak Chinese cultural chauvinism?‖ Thanks for alerting, my friend. Well, ―musical reason‖ here is much enriched and chastened a version than China‘s own. After our meta-caution and reflection, ―China‖ in our vision would be more than voluptuous wallowing in metaphors and rhetoric, China‘s metaphors and rhetoric are here carefully criticized and cleansed, made selfaware, without being hole-dug with logical clarity but remaining as sensitively hospitable as ever. ―Musical reason‖ here is thus beyond China‘s, thanks to learning from the West. The West on its part would feel much at home in China‘s Hun Tun musical hospitality to be truly itself as the West, none other than the West truly alive as the West. ―Could the West lose its sharp clarity when cuddled in musical rhyme?‖ Well, clarity can either be sharply exclusive of mistakes, as logic-rationality has been, or else it can be critically clear and discerning enough to include what is seen as ―mistaken,‖ as another interesting alternative, with perhaps some deep implications hitherto unknown. We can after all learn much from mistakes, after sensing them as such. That is what history is all about. ―Mistake‖ can be an invitation to further exploration, a cipher to our exciting future. It is thus that Western ―logic‖ can be sharpened further by Chinese sensitivity. Such is clarity ―cured‖ musically by musical reason. Moreover, an important point about ―musical reason‖ must be noted. This notion is adopted here because it exists neither in Chinese wisdom nor in Western philosophy, which yet can be understood by both,623 and so can be used to typify Chinese ―wisdom as philosophy‖ to the West. Besides, ―musical reason‖ is less provocatively confrontational than ―concrete philosophy‖ an oxymoron in the West, where thinking is thinking about matters, and so ―philosophy‖ can not logic-rationally be ―concrete.‖ Thus, to repeat; we cannot cap Western concepts on to ―Chinese philosophy‖ and think that our job is done. Confucius is no straight ―moralist‖ in a Western philosophical sense, nor is Mencius a ―sophist‖ in Western sense, nor is Lao Tzu a ―mystic,‖ nor is Chuang Tzu a ―relativist,‖ Hsün Tzu a ―linguistic analyst,‖ Kung-sun Lung a ―logician,‖ Tao a grand ―analytical logic,‖ and so on. China has no such Western names that, when capped thus onto Chinese thinkers, brings about blinding misunderstanding. Looking at China in these Western terms inevitably reveals

623

Both Einstein and Gödel loved music, without even thinking about music. They never borrowed books from the library on music, much less envisioned the possibility that reasoning can be musical, much less a part of music.

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―China as a poorer West,‖ childish and primitive, in need of much refinement, extrapolation, and revision—in the direction of the West. Simply put,624 using these Western terms to ―do Chinese philosophy‖ does not do Chinese philosophy; people just do philosophizing in a Western manner with Chinese words. China is just a local primitive region of Western thinking, nothing else. If this is no cultural chauvinism, we do not know what it is. This is a first step in a slippery slope into Western philosophical colonialism, exploitation, pollution, reshaping China to damage and destroy China. Such engagement does no good to Western philosophy, either, for the West thereby loses its counterpart to benefit and enrich itself in a new direction hitherto unknown in the West. Thus, we must instead, first, undergo the fire of the West‘s logic-rational training, to be sensitized and ―cured‖ musically reasonable by Chinese ―smoking.‖ And then we can openmindedly read and learn, absorb and live, in the air, tone, rhyme, and beat of China‘s lived thinking, and then ex-press the thrust, the sense, of such life-thinking in sensible reasonableness, dubbed ―musical reason‖ understandable to the West to vivify its logicrationality, and deepen China in turn. Schopenhaur‘s fascination with the daily concrete resulted in invention of the inexpressible ―Will.‖ Collingwood opposed naïve realism with logic of question and answer, and history as its reenactment. Wittgenstein kicked the ladder of his statements. Bergson‘s ―flow‘ is king; to Whitehead, what is interesting is more important than what is true, and ―the exactness is a fake.‖ Ortega has ―life reason‖; Derrida deconstructs. Heidegger‘s Being is poetic; for Ryle, coastlines is informally logical.625 All these voices are a strong protest to Western status quo, without proposing—much less developing—full-fledged lived logic and praxis in life. Western logic-rationality intimates China‘s musical reason, without knowing that China has been practicing such reasoning for millennia spontaneously without name or description. Western philosophy can help China to focalize it and articulate it systematically, without making it into a system to fall into another false package. Here is a concrete example of how to join China‘s musical-operatic reasoning to the West‘s logic-rationality. China reasons by storytelling, while the West argues in exactitude, which tends to corner itelf into small areas in microscopic inspection, to miss the forest for the trees. In this situation, comprehensiveness is achieved while interest in details is maintained, when clear exactitude of logic is poured into storytelling.626 How to do so can be found in watching how the West proceeds logical reasoning quite spontaneously, often storytelling way, for, interestingly, logic-rationality logically necessitates loose story-linkage, after Kurt

624

All this will be presented in a systematic way in our final section in Part IV, on ―let China be China.‖ Gilbert Ryle in his provocative compact Dilemmas (Cambridge University Press, 1946) says that the coastline zigzagging can be faithfully traced only after we are trained in geometrical line-drawing. Informal logic is thus manifested via formal logic. Ryle still leans on formal logic. 626 See Wu, The Butterfly as Companion, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990, pp. 67-68, 378379. 625

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Gödel proved that to prove a system necessitates extra-systematic proving; no system can prove itself.627 Extra-systematic proving bespeaks diverse sorts of linkages to others, and the diversity could be extra-logic-rational albeit quite convincing. For example, Einstein‘s relativity theories led to atomic-nuclear weaponry to destroy us and to nuclear-atomic generation of energies to serve our needs. Only historical storytelling makes sense to all this, for mathematics cannot formalize contradictory events. Thus scientific theorization makes concrete sense by joining with storytelling and thinking into musical reason. Admittedly, to describe all this seems logic-rationally loose, but that is the point, that logic-rational looseness can be reasonable, comprehensive, and compellingly compatible with logic-rationality that itself demands to be logically loosely linked—to be alive, that is, to be ―logically effective.‖ The story here is the life-story of walking together as friends, music and logic, as described in Chuang Tzu‘s Chapter Six, walking life‘s way, even the way of mortal illness. Such is human life that is a story, a history, in musical modulations of life-music. This is not a formal system that yet makes a sensible pattern, a system of no ―system,‖ an open system. This is also what Collingwood means by ―absolute presupposition‖ linked to history and culture, to lifeworld.628 An ―open system‖ seems an oxymoron, for all elements in a system must be coherently inter-connected, and ―all connected‖ describes a self-contained whole, a system that does not open. Growth is, however, an inter-connection connecting further out, coherence growing coherently, no cancer self-aggrandizing unsystematically to self-destruct. ―Open system‖ typifies growth opening out systematically-beyond itself,629 a system on the go. Living is system in the soil here now to grow out into the future. Biblical ―Adam‖ is in assonance with adama, red clod of soil. We are made of soil, in the Land of Central Emperor Hun Tun in the middle of turbulent oceans, Speedy and Sudden. This land is Eden, meaning the plain, the steppe, the enjoyment.630 Lifeworld, the Land, Mr. Hun Tun, Eden, they all describe our absolute presupposition of living and thinking. Staying soiled and soil-ed strengthens invincibly as Greek Antaeus who ―seven falls, eighth rises,‖631 as autochthonous Japan says unawares, and as China the Eden-Land tells of it innocently in the story of the Hun Tun. Hun Tun is the soil-ed land of non-separation; the state of non-separation is our soil,632 our actual living. 627

See John W. Dawson, Jr., Logical Dilemmas: The life and Work of Kurt Gödel, Wellesley, MA: A. K. Peters, 1997, Rebecca Goldstein, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, NY:. W. W. Norton, 2005, among others. 628 John Wild denies that the human Lebenswelt is a system, and later takes it as an open system, though he does not take it as the ground of the possibility of all systems as we take here, even though his description of the Lebenswelt implies so. See The Promise of Phenomenology: Posthumous Papers of John Wild, eds. Richard I. Sugarman and Roger B. Duncan, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006, pp. 3-10. R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1940, pp. 34-48. 629 Is this Gödel‘s incompleteness? 630 ―Eden‖ means ―the plain, the steppe,‖ and is homonymous with ―enjoyment,‖ says Speiser. See E. A. Speiser, Genesis, The Anchor Bible, 1964, p. 16. 631 Perhaps befitting the Greek agonistic mind, Antaeus is needlessly depicted as ―a Giant and a mighty wrestler‖ later killed by Hercules. Edith Hamilton, Mythology, Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1942, p. 234. ―七轉び八起き‖ is a common Japanese saying. 632 ―Soil‖ is undifferentiated Mother Earth out of which various lives spring. See Hamilton, ibid., pp. 41, 44, 78, 79, and Genesis 2:7, 19, and 3:19, 23.

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China calls such soil Emperor Hun Tun at the Center ―treating them very well,‖ including the no less earthy Japan that freely feeds on Chinese culture. Japan simplified Chinese characters into two sets of alphabets, katakana片假名 and hiragana 平假名, and absorbed Chinese characters wholesale—simplified a bit—into Japanese writings proper and its culture. Japanese kanji 漢字 is Chinese monji 文字 thoroughly Japan-ized, indigenized. Kanji are so Japanese-pronounced—kundoku-ed 訓讀—as to bear no resemblance to Chinesepronunciations, han-tzu, and even deviated a bit from its standard Chinese sense. These Japan-ized Chinese characters form a peculiar cultural symbiosis in Japan. On one hand, such kundoku would be hopelessly unintelligible and scattered without representing in kanji. ―Aki‖ must be stabilized in sense by 秋 as ―autumn,‖ 空 as ―empty,‖ and 厭 as ―bored,‖ etc. ―Kanji‖ has 18 different 漢字-equivalents listed in Koji’en 廣辭苑, such as 寒じ (chill), 感じ (feeling), 官事 (official matters), 閑事 (matters of leisure), 漢字 (Han characters), and so on.633 On the other hand, some kanji are used as ―ateji 當て字‖ that are senseless without pronouncing in peculiar Japanese, unrelated to the original meanings of kanji, such as ―yabo 野暮,‖ uncouth, insensitive. Some kanji-phrases are midway between ateji and usual meaningful kanji, such as ―kiwadoi 際どい,‖ within a hair‘s breath, ―際‖ meaning at the brink. Thus mere alphabetization of kundoku-Japanese is a prescription to losing usual senses in Japanese culture. In any case, Japanization of China is enabled by China‘s Hun Tun hospitality to anyone who comes. By the same token, lament as we do, we cannot help but admire the vast extent of Chinese Hun Tun‘s hospitality extended to the West, even to the point of analytically logicizing the whole Chinese wisdom as philosophy, by the so-called ―Chinese philosophers‖ today, Chinese and Western. As a result, we leave the lifeworld expressed poignantly by Chinese reasonable sensitivity. Hun Tun is our vast lifeworld diversifiable into many cultural worlds, even an ―anti-lifeworld lifeworld,‖ all enabled by Hun Tun. Interculturalism is a kaleidoscope of global village today. ―How are we sure we are still in the Lifeworld, though?‖ Moments of spontaneous smiles and tears can come out of the blue, out of which we think and act. Such spontaneous arising shows the vast tacit Lifeworld, the happy Land of Hun Tun that cannot be thought about, not even coherently expressed, but can be intimated in halting folklores and Chuang Tzu‘s story-bits, in, say, Sibelius‘ rugged forest-music, and Delius‘ casual dream-music of the Lifeworld. All such music is life‘s musical reason musically intimated. Musical reason typifies religiosity in China.

633

Takashima, Toshio builds his whole book, Kanji and Japanese People, on his lament that merely pronouncing Japanese, e.g., ―katei,‖ would mean nothing definite until written out in kanji, as 假定 (postulate) or 家庭 (home). 高島俊男著，漢字と日本人，東京文藝春秋，平成十四年。 What does his lament mean?

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Chapter 28

RELIGION, CHINESE RELIGIOSITY Chinese religiosity is a tough nut to crack because it is too soft to crack, but before we go into cracking this soft nut we must be sure what ―religion‖ is, and so this section has two subsections, what religion is, and what Chinese religiosity is, where we see how strange the latter is from the viewpoint of the former.

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ONE: WHAT RELIGION IS Both religion and science change things, but science aims at changing objects, while religion changes me. It is not that God does not work to change outside world for me, but that God does his own work, that is, his works are quite often quite out of my ―reasonable‖ expectations.634 I can only thank God for whatever happens, weal and woe, and my thanks shape me to change me, to become more fitting to his will of creative shaping, continual creativity, natura naturans, called ―love‖ in both Buddhism and Christianity. Thus Whitehead‘s quip, ―religion is what I do in my privacy,‖ jibes with Marx‘s quip, ―religion is people‘s opium‖635; both agree that religion cannot be used to change the outside world. Religion should not be expected, much less used, to change the world; once used as tool to change the world, religion turns into magical ―superstition,‖ as people today unkindly typify ―primitive‖ people‘s use of religion. This wrong characterization—for it misses their primal reverence toward things that mysteriously occur636—has a grain of truth, i.e., religion is not for changing the outside but me. Buddhism is awesomely consistent. It says that whether and how the world is created or how reincarnations occur are none of my business. Once I realize all as Empty, everything 634

This is always the root of atheists‘ attacks on religion, that religion is useless illusion. ―Do both refer, implicitly or explicitly, to Christianity?‖ Does it matter if they do or don‘t? This is because their quips apply to all religions, and we doubt if they would protest if we claim so for them. 636 It is so much the worse for people today to lose this sense of awe to the mystery of things happening, for science describes only how things happen, not why they happen as they do. Getting used to how things happen should not lead to losing awe toward things, any more than getting used to spousal love should take such love for granted, to lose gratitude, to cease cherishing each other, to destroy love. Similarly, to lose the awe to things makes for exploitation of things that redounds to disasters in nature—to destroy us all. 635

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tumbles into place. The key here is ―I realize all as Empty,‖ self-realization, to realize Emptiness as beyond my realization. Every volume in the massive ―Three Baskets‖ of Tripitaka and every school in all sangha-communities are just variations on this overall theme, often its repetitions. Buddhism concentrates on self-change. To reinforce this characterization of religion, let us look into Christianity where we would have expected its aggressive God the sole creator to change the world for us, but it is not so. Befitting its stress on ―repentance‖ my self-change, when about to be beheaded, Paul rejoiced that ―I know how to be abased and how to abound. Everywhere and in all things I have learned to be full and to be hungry, to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.‖637 ―Me‖ is all over here! Jesus never elaborated on God the Father‘s Creation; it was his background to urging people to repent to return home to God.638 Jesus turned the lawyer‘s question, ―Who is my neighbor?‖ to ―Whom is neighbor to [the victim]?‖ and upon receiving the correct answer, ―he who showed mercy on him,‖ said, ―[You] Go and do likewise.‖ Then, Jesus sided with Mary who received Jesus‘ teaching against Martha who served him; Mary was intent on being changed, while Martha was not. The story of Jesus‘ temptations tells us to rely on God, not to change the outside; Jesus‘ Sermons on the Mount makes no sense unless they tell us how to change ourselves to accommodate.639 We need not belabor on intensely self-centered Buddhism. I must be enlightened on the true state of the world that includes myself, that is, sheer emptiness, so that I can blow off my desire to exist and desire for whatever existents there are, so as to cease my needless suffering, and then go out to save many ―selves‖ from silly needless sufferings. All other religions fall within these two extremes, Christian being-religion and Buddhist no-beingreligion, and so all religions can be characterized as intent on self-change. In contrast, the business of science is quite clearly to change the other, the objects outside. I myself do not change; I change the objects out there. This objective stance applies to sciences of human beings, such as sociology, psychology, anthropology, medical sciences, and so on. To tell the scientists to change themselves is so insane as to be—if insisted on seriously—revolutionary. In psychology, counselor does not change, and so to insist on counseling as inter-counseling, in inter-listening to inter-change, amounts to a revolution. In medicine, the doctors do not change, so to insist as Desmond Tutu did, that only the wounded doctors heal, amounts to unintelligible mumbo jumbo, however profound. Where is the Thou in all this? The Thou serves as catalyst for change, changing the self or the object. In religion we have the Eternal Thou whose symbols are human Thous. In science we have Thous in the scientific community of co-researchers and inter-critics. Thus, in both realms above, the Thou exists ubiquitously, to change outside. ―OK, science is a tool and religion is not. So what else is new?‖ someone asks. Well, what is new is how to join the two without confusion, as our living must do. It is all too easy 637

This is the gist of his letter to the Philippians just before his beheading. It is an amazing letter indeed, more than Boethius‘ Consolation of Philosophy before his execution. 638 Likewise, in the Nicene Creed, God the Father‘s creation is a preamble to God the Son‘ salvation of us, i.e., changing ourselves, and the section on God the Holy Spirit describes how we are changed. The entire Creed is on salvation by faith, i.e., change of ourselves. The medievalists‘ speculations on creation amount to confusing religion with science, as Aristotle did metaphysics with science. 639 Philippians 4:12-13, Luke 10:25-42, Matthew 4:1-11, Luke 4:1-12, Matthew 5:-7:, Luke 6:20-45.

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to say a good servant makes a terrible tyrant, and a good lord makes a superstitious magic, but how do we join them without either pitfall? This question is not at all idle. We live in a terrible confusion of dual changes via Thous today. Let us forget ―Thou‖ for a moment and think of one example, suffering pain. Religion enables us to undergo pain, while science enables us to resolve it, or at least reduce it or manage it. Thou can either help us do the job of religion or of science, or else worsen pain. The whole situation is in a mess now. It is history‘s task to show us how in the past people have managed pain, so we can use history as our reference to manage pain. Thanks to history, we are not wholly in the dark when confronted with pain. Even science actually uses history in the sense of creating it in controlled experiments and in checking on past cases of similar incidents, so as to plot our strategy of managing pain. In consulting history, whether in scientific experiment or in reading religious books, we assume that we continue history by reenacting it, for after all we are history in the making. Two points appear here. One, history appears beside religion, science, and Thou. This is new. And then, two, history appears through many Thous; we rely on them to convey history to us. History and Thou are two elements in the dynamics of musical reason to manage change in change. Musical reasoning is dynamic logic, the logic of change in change, in actuality that is change. History and Thou catalyze mixing religion and science that must be distinguished so as to join to make living possible. We see how mistaken attacks are by philosophers of religion with scientific examination of the ineffectiveness of religion to change the world, as Moses inspecting the burning bush on how the bush of the self would not burn out in the fire of pain. Thus we must sharply distinguish, though never separate, religion from science. Specifically, we must not play god, taking human to be divinely inerrant. We must not use religion as tool, but offer ourselves-as-―tools‖ to effect religious ideals. We must not use prayer as tool of request alone but also as praise and gratitude. We must self-examine carefully when going into religion, checking on religious institutions with religious reverence, not with scientific efficacy. After distinguishing religion from science, we must inter-infuse them. Religion must enter science in ecological reverence, and respect of persons in business inter-benefiting. Science must also enter religion, seeing how a person is trained and toughened by undergoing unexpected and undeserved sufferings to undertake a great task, even the task of demolishing evil undertakings, international, national, or personal.

TWO: WHAT CHINESE RELIGIOSITY IS The above is a quick summary of glorified common sense about religion. What shocks us is that China‘s ―religions‖ do not go by this commonsense rule. We have to call what China has, not ―religions‖ but ―religiosity.‖ It is a tough nut to crack because it is too soft to crack. So far our description of religion is dominated by distinctions, religion vs. science, and change-of-self vs. change-of-objects. In addition, we can cite religious awe vs. scientific investigation, types of religions such as non-theism, monotheism, henotheism, polytheism, mysticism, exclusive vs. inclusive, personal vs. impersonal, all of which share Rudolf Otto‘s

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renowned description of them as imbued with the sense of the holy, the numinous, of mysterium tremendum et fascinans distinct from daily life. Amazingly, however, all these categories of distinction in religions, and religion-science distinctions, fall apart when we come to China. These distinctions do not apply to ―religions in China.‖ Chinese religions do not have irresistible awe and trembling; they are not nonreligious, non-theistic, or theistic in any sense; they are not exclusive, inclusive, personal, or impersonal. Three examples can be cited. One, Chinese li 禮 has no apt English equivalent. It is humanity in interpersonal ―social ritual‖ imbued with an overtone of ―religious ritual‖ to generate a solemn negative version of the Golden Rule, ―What oneself would not desire, give not to people‖ (Analects 3/3, 12/2). Li 禮 is solemn respect. Two, many folk religions in China have mumbo jumbos cooked up from folklores, Taoism, and Buddhism; Chinese people take them not seriously, not casually. Three, Confucius denied talking about ghosts, gods, death, etc., yet his silence did not deny them, for he freely called on Heaven in emergency, excitement, and dire sorrow, and insisted that without knowing destiny 知命, one has nothing with which to behave princely.640 All this is Paragon Confucius, taking the Beyond not casually, not blindly, not fanatically. Confucius‘ attitude to destiny 命 deserves studying. On one hand, he claimed to know destiny when reaching fifty (2/4) and insisted that without knowing destiny one cannot be princely (20/3); on the other hand, he seldom mentioned destiny any more than he did humanity 仁 (9/1, cf. 3/11, 5/8, 7/21, 8/16), for ―how could we know death when we hardly know life (11/12)?‖ ―Destiny 命‖ in China is significant; it means life 生命 (3/11), destiny 命運 (12/5, 14/36), and royal order 命令 (10/2, 11/18, 13/20), all rolled into one. It is the contact-point of three existential lines, our living, destined-going, and being-ordained. The notion is significant beyond casual mention, seldom to be glibly talked about; it deserves only to be embodied in one‘s living process. Thus destiny 命 is where life and death intersect, and to ―know destiny‖ amounts to ―treading our body-form 踐形,‖ as Mencius aptly said (7A38), as our walk 行 touches the road 路 to form Tao 道 the Way. ―Tao walks it and forms,‖ says Chuang Tzu (2/33), ―Thousands of miles of walk begins underfoot,‖ says Lao Tzu (64), and forms itself underfoot, too, say we, as we tread our body-form to walk out the road-of-life. In China, the road 路 and the treading 踐 have the radical of foot 足; the road is formed by our feet walking out, and our feet are where we touch the ground of our being, and both these points, our feet walking out life, and the ground supporting our walk to form the road, describe how our destiny is formed in the unity of our walking and the Heaven‘s Destiny selffulfilling. Thus destiny 命 describes the unity of our awed reverence to Heaven, on the one hand, and our proud stand up to the sky and firmly on the ground 頂天立地, on the other. Such unity of awed reverence and proud integrity, both equally stressed, is seldom seen in religion, either in Christianity or in Buddhism.

640

The last saying, Analects 20/3, concludes the entire Analects.

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Are Chinese people religious, then? Well, they have a sense of awe, a feeling for the Beyond, historically and pervasively in living, personal, interpersonal, political, and cosmic. Such awe extends in time-process. They love to be ―taught by the ancients 師古,‖ a phrase of the Grand Historian Ssu-ma Ch‘ien to lament over hegemon Hsiang Yü‘s 項羽 lack of it to result in tragic death. Is history China‘s religion, then? Well, Chinese people do not worship history that they take quite seriously. To understand ―Chinese religions,‖ then, the notion of ―religion‖ must be reexamined and reshaped. Emil Brunner‘s renowned quip, ―Through God alone can God be known,‖641 is a typical slogan of exclusive theistic religions. Chinese Confucians would have been incredulous, saying with Confucius (11/12), ―Yet to know life, how could [we] know death, [much less the divine]?‖ Let us tarry at this saying. This saying is two-pronged. One, ―how could we know death?‖ denies no death; in fact, Confucius frequently referred to death. Two, ―yet to know life‖ indicates that we are ―yet‖ to know life while living, thus both life and death are the Beyond. The Beyond is religious. Life now is our quest beyond us for answer beyond us; therefore the whole secular life of ours is religious. ―Religion‖ is the Answer to such our quest-beyond-us, and describes this beyondness as our daily concerns, and these common concerns are our ultimate concerns, such as health, business, plans, properties the ―pig 豕‖ under the ―roof‖ to make our ―home 家‖; remember Chuang Tzu‘s ―pig‖ that symbolizes Tao (22/46)? Religion in China is Responses to our daily concerns that we cannot help but always quest for but can never resolve perfectly, our daily concerns that are frankly beyond us. Thus Chinese people keep asking for help, for supplies. Never mind knowing God, whatever ―god‖ is. As a result, all descriptions of God, the numinous, various sorts of theisms, personal or impersonal, exclusive or inclusive, etc., are completely senseless in our daily concerns, for they are about ―gods‖ the mumbo jumbo that has nothing to do with our daily cares and toils.642 Still, all this does not mean we do not care for Heaven, whatever it means up there, blue or cloudy, but remember, Heaven helps those who help themselves; ―self-pulled woe, cannot survive; people must insult themselves before others insult them; never self-violate, or selfdiscard,‖ Mencius counsels us (2A4, 4A8, 4A11). Heaven refers to us-reverently-serious (―refer‖ is not ―same‖). Do we want to benefit ourselves? The best is to benefit ourselves, that is, self-cultivation in self-nourishment 修身養生. ―Never mind what people think of us, just be at home in ourselves,‖ says Confucius (1/1, cf. 1/16, 14/30); we just ―daily self-examine three times,‖ says a great Confucian Tseng Tzu (Analects 1/4), to ―thread life 一以貫之 with self-fidelity and other-considerateness-as-oneself 忠恕,‖ says Confucius (4/15). 641

This quip begins Emil Brunner‘s The Mediator: A Study of the Central Doctrine of the Christian Faith (1934), London: Lutterworth Press, 1949, p. 21. 642 Yü Ying-shih‘s characterization of Chinese religions as ―life-entering 入世‖ is significant. He may have misused the phrase; it is a typically Buddhist term that assumes someone entering this world from the other world. But his point is well-taken. He means the thoroughly this-worldly character of Chinese religions, whatever they are. 余英時著, 中國近世宗教倫理與商人精神, 臺灣聯經出版公司, 2004. I wish he used some other phrases, such as 在世 or 人間世. The book, patterned after Max Weber‘s Capitalism and the Protestant Ethic (unabashedly praised), rambles with interesting quotations to trace historical emergence/development of religions-and-commerce in late China, more informative than philosophical.

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If we think this is taking oneself as religion, we had better think twice. To be truly human 仁 is rooted in loving of parents and brethren (Analects 1/2), reverent to ritual and music in religion 禮樂 (3/3). Such describes the princely person 君子, socially on top of the people, politically prince-worthy. This is no pure narcissism but social love taken with religious seriousness—rooted in taking oneself seriously. Sociopolitical concord obtains where fathers are fatherly, sons filial, everyone in one‘s place, and the ―place‖ here means proper (i.e., matched by its ―name 名‖) interpersonal interactions that define and fulfill myself; so says Confucius (12/11, 13/3). We love wealth and sex; just share, let others also have wealth and wives (Mencius 1B5); we must love virtue as we love sex (Confucius 9/18, 15/13), caring for our old and young as they should be, to extend to others‘ old and young folks (Mencius 1A7). Mo Tzu 墨子 (in ―opposing music 非樂‖) and Wang Ch‘ung 王充 (in many chapters in Balanced Critiques 論衡) objected to wasteful religious rituals, not object to this ritual-route to humanity, the Tao. They warned against superstitious extravagance that wastes our energies and deviates from this proper route. True religious piety lies in realizing this. All this while, ―many prominent people arose from humble toilsome circumstances. So it is that Heaven, when about to confer a great task on a person, must first pain his heart‘s intent, labor his muscles-bones, starve his body-frames, empty his life, confound his deeds, to shake his nature into resilience, to enrich-enable what he was unable before. People make mistakes before they can correct, can do something after being trapped in worries . . . to come alive in calamity, to die in ease.‖ (Mencius 6B15) This passage is significant. In the West, religion changes oneself while science changes objects. In China, religion changes the self within the untoward world, to change the world that is nothing ideal. Here religion and life are all of a piece, for religion is life‘s ideal, essence, the world‘s really real, and the pervasive goal both of the self and the world. What does this sentence actually mean? Religion pervades life to raise life to the heights of humanity, for religion is the power and root of life, called ―heaven.‖ Do Chinese people take suffering as religion? Well, they take suffering so seriously as to link it to Heaven, and even take pathetic suffering that is quite unbearable as an ominous and auspicious sign from Heaven. Confucius‘ bottomless sorrows at his cherished young disciple 顏回‘s death were wailed, ―O Heaven loses me! Heaven loses me!‖ He vowed to his curse at meeting the adulterous Nan Tzu with ―Heaven disgusts it! Heaven disgusts it!‖ Even hegemon Hsiang Yü‘s long sigh repeated before committing suicide was ―Heaven ruins me! Heaven ruins me!‖643 Religion is linked to life through suffering, justified or no. Again, history is thus the Judge of all, supreme, absolute. Although Chinese people never worship history, those who are taught by the ancients are the holy, the sagely 聖賢. All this amounts to the historical secular as sacred. All life-nourishment, self-cultivation, ethics, and socio-politics are reverence-filled, ritual-filled. ―Ritual 禮‖ unites religious reverence and respectful sociality, well-nigh impossible to render into English that separates Li 禮 into two unrelated, religion and society. 643

Confucius‘ repeated curses (6/28) were ―天厭之! 天厭之!‖ His repeated wailing (11/9) was ―天喪予! 天喪予!‖ 項羽‘s repeated sigh was ―天亡我!‖ 史記, 項羽本紀第七 (臺灣中和市: 建宏出版社, 1995, I: 296, 297, 300).

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The Canon of the Middle-of-the-Common, Going-through-Common 中庸, describes the seamless intimacy between oneself and the cosmos. The Canon of Vast Learning, to keep learning 大學, describes the intimate, laborious, and musically harmonious existence-route from inner self to Vast World Concord, Cosmic Camaraderie. Thus China in all its thinking and living are religious, i.e., reverent and ritual-filled, where any ―religion‖ (folklore, Taoism, Buddhism) is accepted that promotes such pervasive religiosity. Thus, being religious is not a concern with religion of any specific institutionaldenominational sort, but ultimate concern in life personal and together. ―But there must be something that can only be called ‗religion‘ here that just is not daily life. What is it? Is it monotheistic, personal, exclusive, numinous, or what?‖ Here we go again. To such question as this, Chinese people would give a blank stare. It is not that they do not want to answer; it is that they do not know how to answer what it is. Chinese religiosity is uncanny but not numinous, ineffable because it is untouchable as 電氣, the thrust ch‘i of elusive lightening we casually call ―electricity‖ that Benjamin Franklin dared to try to capture with his kite. We remain today ignorant of ―electricity‖ as we are of ―sleep.‖ We common folks are only aware of how it powerfully works but not what it is. All the ―subatomic wavicles,‖ particle-energy that is supposed to explain electricity, is just superstitious mumbo jumbo; the West‘s elusive science is simply superstition to China‘s common folks, a dangerous magic. That question of what ―religion‖ is, as the question on ―God,‖ is a dead-end corner in our daily concerns. We are too busy for ―such stuff.‖ We are in it, we are it, and so we know not what ―it‖ is. Chinese folks are actually justified in looking askance at ―wavicles‖ whose common and natural equivalent, ch‘i 氣, vapor-breath energy of things, has been in routine use for several millennia, and ―breath-vapor energy of lightening, 電氣,‖ is used today in China for ―electricity.‖ In contrast, a less common equivalent ―elements, stoicheia‖ in ancient Greece, in use for a while, vanished today.644 Thus we, so Chinese people would say, are religious; we are so, live so, act so, including our frequent failures to be-act-and-live so, as judged by history. In contrast, usual studies of religions focus on ―religion‖ as a noun to lug around as ―denominations, isms, social movements, etc.,‖ to miss all this religious living and its failures. Being religious is a situational life-verb, quite mundane, pragmatically this-worldly as trans-worldly, but not other-worldly. Being religious is a pervasive tonal attitude in which we perform our being-music, matter-of-factly. Chinese people are incredulous at noticing Buddhists and Christians busying themselves making their religions ―relevant‖ to living. To try to make religion relevant to life bespeaks the gulf between religion and living. The gulf is impossible in Chinese religiosity of living. Amazingly, even ―teaching‖ in China is religious. If being religious is to be aware of being imperfect to head toward Perfection Beyond, then teaching is essential in China for learning incessantly to become human ever out of reach. Confucius the supreme teacher always learned from his learners, our ―學生, learning-lives‖ today. Teaching is predicated on 644

Joseph Needham said that ―chhi‖ is better than ―wavicle‖ without giving explanation (Science and Civilization in China, Cambridge University Press, IV.i:135). Maurice Merleau-Ponty proposed ―element‖ as ―a general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being . . .‖ (The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964, p. 139).

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growth, growth on imperfection that envisions perfection beyond the status quo, the beyond is religious, and so teaching is a religious activity. Confucius was an imperfect teacher raising one, and his young folks rushed in back with 2, 3, 10 (Analects 5/9, 7/8, 16/13). He immensely enjoyed the new inchoate ideas bubbling up in this manner out of the old texts he reverently and joyously edited. He was always busy asking, sifting, pondering, and questing, so much so that he was unaware old age is about to come at him. ―Perfect teacher‖ is actually a pretense, for no one is perfect; he is a bore, a turnoff. We would avoid a walking encyclopedia, a proud walking Google, to which we can go ourselves. An ideal teacher is a Confucius—and Socrates—who keeps asking and alluring young minds into fascination with the matter under discussion, quite skillfully ―corrupting, seducing‖ them to educe self-growth, to induce character-formation step by step 詢詢善誘; we call it ―education‖ that could have been ―seducation.‖645 Teaching is thus a life-verb, a dynamic logic moving in life-actuality to actualize lifematurity beyond life-actuality. It can take unexpected surprising route, a new creation every step of the way, full of dissatisfactions, complaints, objections, critiques, bumps and bruises of failed half-baked ideas tossed up to vanish in midair. Exciting and frustrating, fascinating in all failures, teaching is equivalent to learning research, an exploration filled with deadends. Half-baked ideas are imperfect teachers luring us on. Teaching is an open-ended quest together of the Beyond. The quest is filled with uncertainty; quest together worsens the adventuresome uncertainty, and increases its fascination. Teaching is inter-teaching between teachers and students, their inter-learning, inter-stimulation toward the Beyond, quite humanly religious. Teaching is thus learning646 to shape life. No wonder, Confucius (9/23) confessed to being awed at the late-comers-in-life 後生可畏, while teaching by alluring the young, step by step (9/11), toward the ancients to become human, failing again and again to reach the human beyond human. Confucius is the great teacher of millennia 萬世大師 because he was a supreme learner so imperfect. He was keenly aware of his own imperfection going after perfection beyond reach. He was human, all too human, and, therefore, so much beyond human. All this is teaching as learning, all this is being religious. It is proto-religion, the womb of all religions.647 Buddhists for example would find it congenial to join in with Confucius‘ reverent silence. ―How could Chinese religiosity womb forth the Greek defiant fights with gods— theomachia—on one hand, and the Judeo-Christian ‗hear God and obey‘ piety, on the other?‖ Confucius‘ tacit pervasive reverence to this-worldly Heaven may be home to the Judeo645

善 in 善誘 (Analects 9/10) is both an adverb, tempting us well-善, and a noun, tempting us toward the good-善. Tempting-誘 here is analogous to Socrates‘ ―corrupting the youth‖ where ―corrupting‖ (―diaphtheironta‖ Apology 24b9) was so unsavory in implication that it invited his death penalty. (―Perhaps there was a kind of justice in the allegation that Socrates, the great master of this method [to probe one‘s absolute presuppositions], ‗corrupted the young men,‘ where the word translated ‗corrupt‘ was the same word which, when used of a girl, meant ‗seduce.‘‖ [R. G. Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1940, p. 45]) (see ―diaphtheiro‖ in A Greek-English Lexicon, Oxford, 1996, p. 418) Crucially, Socrates denied seduction of youth while Confucius promoted it—toward character-formation. 646 Significantly, ―teaching 教‖ appears much less often than ―studying-learning 學‖ in the Analects, where teaching inter-learns. Learning 學 is a Confucian correlate to practice 習, unheard of by Socrates. 647 All this supports ―Confucianism as Religion‖ in Wu, On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 2001, pp. 504-509.

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Christian piety, and Confucian humanism may be congenial to Greek virile realism. On the latter, read the following Schenker-Wu conversation: Long time no communication, David [Schenker, a classicist at University of MissouriColumbia]! I‘m sure you are thriving as ever!SOS on Antaeus and Hercules! Are they opposed in etymology also? Is Antaeus related to Mother Earth—genealogy-wise, etymology-wise? What is Hercules' etymology?I would appreciate your input to link Greeks (to Genesis-China)—to our dear Mother Earth—if possible.For I just saw a similarity in ―soil‖ in Genesis (2:7, 19; 3:19, 23) to Chuang Tzu‘s ―great clod‖ (2/4) and Central Emperor Hun Tun of the Earth (7/33-34).Thanks, David, as usual.I feel bad about asking for help so often. Please use me in any way, if I‘m usable at all!Kuang-ming

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Dear Kuang-ming – So nice to hear from you! Much these days of what they call adminsistrivia. The past three days, for example, on a review board for the School of Natural Resources. Why me? A favor to a friend, and I learned much.But I was just lecturing on Hercules and Antaeus on Monday in my myth class. Here's a quick answer, but I'll have to look more deeply: Herakles, the name, is most often interpreted as meaning the glory of Hera (see book by Philip Slater by that name, a Freudian analysis of Greek myths). Hera + kleos. Is the name meant to have ironic overtones, since she so hated and tormented him throughout his life? Interestingly, he comes to acquire that name -- at different times in different versions -- after being called originally Alcides. When adapted by the Romans, so the linguists suggest, the consonant cluster kl in Herakles caused problems, leading them to insert a u and drop the a, hence Hercules (and compare nucular for nuclear!). Genealogy: the son of Alcmena and Zeus -- should we go back farther? Antaeus is indeed the son of Gaia, Mother Earth, and that is central to the story of the wrestling match with Herakles. But what does his name mean? Something about opposition or competition maybe?Have you read Hesiod's Theogony on Gaia? And I think there is even a brief Homeric Hymn addressed to Gaia. And a passage in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo on the monster she gave birth to.Shall I dig deeper? It's always a pleasure. All best,David________________________________ This is fascinating, David, raising more questions—you know how inquisitive— naughty—I am. Why, e.g., gentle Mother Earth gave birth to that Wrestler Antaeus? What is it that made Hercules fight with Antaeus? What does fight mean in Greek myths? Etc. I thought etymologies may give me answers to such questions as above, but they seem to deepen my wonder more than answering them. Kuang-ming I wonder about the origin of a gentle mother earth? Hesiod has her as the firm foundation of all, the origin of all other gods, but also says that her plan to castrate Heaven was a wicked trick (Theogony, line 160). She then conspires with Rhea to trick Cronus and save baby Zeus. Then she turned on Zeus by giving birth to Typhoeus, and setting the Giants against him and the Olympians. And there‘s an interesting etymology: Giant from gegenes = born from Gaia, the earth. She gives birth to many other monsters and famous

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criminals. But of course she is also primevally wise: as in line 2 of Aeschylus‘ Eumenides. She is much like Poseidon, I think, in embodying the possibilities and the dangers of the earth (for an agricultural people) and the sea (for seafaring people) -- a real ambivalence, love and fear, of those two. (And Antaeus is often said to be the offspring of those two.) The Homeric Hymn to Mother Earth emphasizes how kind she is to those she favors -- is there a subtext about those she does NOT favor? The Roman version, Terra or Tellus, is much sanitized into the nurturing woman, child at breast, cornucopia in lap. Heracles fought with Antaeus because that was in his nature. Heracles encounters Antaeus, just comes across his path, as Her. is performing his labors, penance for murder. And, being Her., when he encounters any challenge, he meets it. Or you could say that he had to kill Antaeus or die -- it was Antaeus‘ aggression that started the whole thing. Why the fighting in Greek myth? There‘s a question! Gods v gods suggests an unsettled world, no? One that is open to possibilities, still in flux. No dogma, no single allpowerful force from the start. Rather, multiple powers have to fight it out -- this seems to be a mythical model borrowed from the near east. And Hesiod takes great pains to convince us that Zeus, after all the fighting, is in charge to stay. But human v divine struggle, theomachia, seems to suggest flux at a different level: recalling a time when humans and gods were on a more equal footing, but then fell away. I have some notes on this somewhere -- I'll try to find and send. The orthodox view is that the divide between human and god is great and fixed, and that the many incidents of theomachia -- in which the god ALWAYS wins and punishes the humans -- these incidents reinforce the divide (as in tower of babel?). But why so many examples? Why does it keep coming up? Maybe that human/divine gulf was not always thought of as being so wide? David

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You have answered all my queries, David. Thanks for flexing your great mythological muscles on these (to me) important questions. What I got from your profound expositions is threefold: [a] Life is an ambiguous mixture of gentleness and ferocity, nurture and perdition, human and beyond-human. [b] We humans don‘t like such ambiguity and try to find an answer by fighting it out, not knowing what ―it‖ here means. So, [c] Greeks are incredibly realistic and sober. These 3 points have renewed my profound respect for the ancient Greek mind. Now, my job begins—on how to collate and contrast such profound Greek mind with Biblical and Chinese minds. I wish you would help me. Kuang-ming

Biblical and Greek religions are perhaps bridged over by Chinese religiosity, typified in Confucian reverence. His reverence is a ubiquitous (cf. 5/16) cluster of life-attitudes, pervading his whole life. Reverence is religious or it is nothing.648 Confucius was reverent throughout life (16/8), so he was religious or he was nothing. Let us tarry here a while. 648

A renowned classicist Paul Woodruff caught ―reverence‖ as important for Greece and Confucianism in his haltingly seminal book, Reverence: Renewing a Forgotten Virtue, Oxford University Press, 2001. See its review by Kuang-ming Wu, Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, June 2006, pp. 293-298.

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Confucius‘ disciple asked, ―As Confucius was wont to hear about the political situation upon entering a state, was the information requested by him or given to him?‖ Another disciple said, ―Master got it with gentleness, goodness, deference, and humility. Isn‘t it perhaps that Master‘s request differs from people‘s request?‖ (Analects 1/10) Reverence is virtue-contagion; his request deferential of information was itself the state‘s pleasure to give. He heartily understood rightness 義 on seeing profit (4/16. 19/1). I owe heartfelt respect to parents my being-roots innermost. Their ages cannot be left unknown, to rejoice in, to tremble on (4/12); I nourish them with respect not due dogs, horses (2/7), deferential countenance is hard to keep up, not just doing things for them, letting them eat first (2/8). Observing my father‘s intention while alive, pondering on his deeds when not, I deviate not from his comportment for at least three years (1/11, 4/20). ―What if he were to be mistaken?‖ Well, I would softly and tactfully remonstrate with him; seeing he not following mine, I still respect without opposing him, worrying without complaint (4/18). A ―straight fellow‖ in village hides his father the sheep-thief as the father hides his son.649 Among three people walking must be my teachers to choose good to follow, not-good to correct (7/21); he stands awed at those born later (9/23), ever enjoying learning with/from them. Such is reverence. ―Learning‖ extends in three ways. Confucius dreamed and kept yearning after the beloved Duke Chou of old (7/5) historic paragon. He asked about everything on entering a temple (3/15), reverently present at divine presence in sacrifices (3/12); ritual 禮 is religion spread socially (1/12) and deference is ritual (1/13) on which social harmony is based or harmony is nothing (2/5). Finally, learning is all-life and lifelong (1/1, 7, 14; 6/2, 17/8), where teacher learns (19/22) in all joys (1/1, 6/9). Such is reverence. Mind you. Confucius was happy while in opposion, risking life, ever frustrated. His maxim through all these is ―not to contend‖ except for competition imbued with respect (3/7). Mortally threatened, he appealed to Heaven; ―Heaven begat virtue in me, what could Huan T‘uei do to me?‖ (7/22) He wailed at the young disciple Yen Hui‘s death he so cherished, saying, ―Heaven perished me! Heaven perished me!‖ (11/9) He grabbed through window the hand of his virtuous disciple Po Niu who was mortally ill, and said (6/8), ―Hard to survive it, it must be Destiny 命! Such man with such illness! Such man with such illness!‖ The concluding entry of the Analects (21/3) is significant, ―Not knowing Destiny, none can be princely persons. Not knowing Ritual, none can stand. Not knowing Words, none can know people.‖ Knowing, Destiny, and Ritual interpenetrate with Words to compose our life and our society. Chinese religiosity pervades humanity. The above examples are of course illustrative, not exhaustive, but all this is enough to show how he was so respectful of matters, of responsibilities (1/5, 16/10), and of people, that he wanted just silently to show himself as Heaven silently shows itself birthing (17/19); lifereligiosity naturally, aesthetically (7/6) blends Nature, in enjoyment of water and hill (6/23). Chuang Tzu heartily echoes this sentiment. ―OK. Chinese religiosity of reverence is Mother Land of Emperor Hun Tun warmly entertaining Greek and Biblical religions. Does Chinese religiosity itself have religious ‗cash

649

Analects 13/18, cf. Mencius 7A35.

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value‘?‖ Well, besides Confucius‘ li 禮 as socio-religious ritual and teaching as cultivation toward the Human beyond human, we see Chuang Tzu‘s yaks mighty, gentle, and earthy. As Chinese people take history as the final arbiter, so they take Nature as their final home. History and Nature are twin cash values of Chinese religiosity. Nature is our home in Chuang Tzu. His Chapter One, ―Leisurely Roaming 逍遙遊‖ in nature, ends with ―yaks‖ solid as bush, moving without moving, even in blizzard. They are not a casual flock but a grove forever there, shaggy and planted, yet ready to move anywhere anytime, unmoved by blizzard. Blowing white cold blends blurred shaggy black of their coats, all parts of Nature Almighty; yaks are at home in itself and in Nature, cold as hell. That‘s the windy snow wheezing without sound, mixed with a pack of yaks, mighty as Nature, shaggy black in snow white, fearing no one, no one cares. Is there anything new? Nothing new, but how invincible, how inviting they are! We are not here yet here admiring them as Nature, our dear Nature cold as hell. Such poetry of Nature is felt in our marrows, so rough, so rugged, unmoved ready to move anytime anywhere, blizzard or no, imagined or no, yaks or no; today dawns the rest of life, hell or no. Now we can sleep with carpenter Jesus knowing nothing about sailing, in a skiff in an unpredictable lake, tossed about by a sudden squall sweeping down from menacing hills, sending his fishermen—who know waters as their palms—to mortal panic. We can armpillow as Jesus to sleep like a baby rocked in a skiff. Give me this solid faith, O Carpenter Jesus, who knows nothing about sailing, who cited nothing about carpentry, without skill or trick but tough as yak in blizzard. Jesus is the hero in the West; Chuang Tzu is China‘s air. They join hands smiling, come what may, in tossing waters or in blizzard. Both demonstrate being at home in oneself in untoward circumstances, not moving while in motion, risky or not. This is how we ought to live to be at home in ourselves in nature. It is here that is China‘s religiosity. We have three examples, variations of moving manifesting not-moving, not-moving thanks to moving. One, yaks can move anytime anywhere, can afford not to move anytime anywhere, so strong as to be themselves anytime anywhere. Two, Jesus not-moving while moving in a sudden shaking skiff, at home in himself while in mortal danger beyond control. His not-moving sleep shows how more than a conqueror he is; at his (later) command the wind stopped. Three, Nature is always in its elements. ―Don‘t you like the weather? Wait a minute.‖ Chill and wind are what we dislike, but Nature is no nature without chill or wind, and our waiting—not moving—brings us to Nature we like. Nature moving and our not-moving bring about Nature-we-like. Is this naturalness? Calm yaks, sleeping Jesus, Nature in its elements, all describe Chinese religiosity where we are at home, in Mother Land of Emperor Hun Tun called Nature. Chuang Tzu‘s nature and naturalness is womb to Confucius‘ socio-religious ritual and teaching-learning human-beyond-human. This Chinese religiosity is the womb of world religions, exclusive or inclusive, personal or no, fighting with gods or godly-pious, numinous or magical, mystical or nirvanic—or whatever. In China, being religious is being at home reverently in Nature, come what may, to spread reverence worldwide. Do we overhear a casual boy plunging a menacing cataract, now up whistling on his way, his hair streaming in breeze, and Confucius was fascinated? In Chuang Tzu‘s story of that

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young man (19/48-54), Confucius and Chuang Tzu are at one in that young man, vivacious, obscure, and alive in the cataract and out. Enthralled and reverent, Confucius sang through life in hearty unison with young friends ancient and current, and his life far from rosy was now an intense paradise of composure, studious sensitivity, and joy ever in quest. Calm and princely, he came to shape China as none else did. Unfinished, full of lusty appetite for life, Confucius is Chinese Wisdom Alive. Now, we have gone through story-thinking. But then, how does story-thinking operate? One concrete way to show how story-thinking works, in life as we live on, is ―folklore‖ active as our life-milieu. This fascinating theme is looked into in Appendix below, slightly swelled story-way, to clinch this Part II story-thinking.

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APPENDIX: FOLKLORE-THINKING IN CHINA What ―folklore in China‖ is must be considered under two interrelated headings, what ―folklore‖ is, and what ―folklore in China‖ is. We would then see how these two themes are intertwined to compose one culture, China, to typify human living.

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What Folklore is ―Folklore‖ is no simple static noun lying around somewhere as a piece of mental furniture, but alive with interesting ramifications quite amazing, a ―net‖ flexuous and inclusive, interwoven with myths, mythology, legends, culture, and history, all alive. We now consider them one by one. Dictionaries650 give us the following information. ―Myths‖ are stories rooted in ―history,‖ developed out of history; those ―stories‖ take off from facts. ―Mythology‖ is a body of myths and legends of a particular people. ―Legends‖ are also stories from the past, historical yet often unverifiable. Persons or things can be called ―legends‖ in that they inspire legends. Myths, legends, and historical stories, factual, fictive, counterfactual, all entwine to compose ―folklore.‖ Studying myths, we meet folklore; attending legends of a people, we see folklore; hearing historical stories, we hear folklore. ―Folklore‖ is folks‘ lore, and ―lore‖ is an accumulation of beliefs preserved among a group of people. Here is a vast pool of traditional legends and stories of a particular community. Folks and lore interfuse into folklore. Some of their ―persons‖ are legends, too, revered as part of their traditional beliefs and ideals, cherished as the critical treasure trove of their lived knowledge. Whatever and whoever noted as noteworthy is thus kept up, concentrated, memorialized, and transmitted among a community of people through time. These legendary paragons compose people‘s admired folklore that stays on as ―history‖ in common folks‘ hearts and minds. While the West searches for archaic customs, folklore is lived as ways of common folks since old, alive today; folklore is archaic and today. Folklore is thus spontaneous, irresistible, and powerfully pervasive through time among a group of people. Folklore is not a thing but a thing-dynamics with definite impacts to define the life of a particular people, historically shaping them, packing them into a specific ―culture,‖ that is, a particular style of life with a specific way of living and thinking, to distinguish them from other peoples and other cultures with other folklores. Folklore is thus a ―folktale‖ that tells of specific ―folkways,‖ customary tales (also as dances and arts) preserved among a people, timeless-placeless stories, to compose their priceless folkways, i.e., their traditional ways of thinking, feeling, viewing things, and behaving. Their tradition bespeaks a particular culture and no other, such as China, unique to China, and no other.

650

The Oxford English Dictionary (2001) and Merriam-Webster‘s Collegiate Dictionary (2008) tell of these key words.

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We now look at myths that reveal folklore. A kid our teacher said, ―A myth is a story that‘s true on the inside, but not true on the outside.‖651 Let us develop this wonderful insight. The core here is ―true inside.‖ Myth has a twofold description, ―true‖ and ―inside.‖ ―True‖ here is a verb, the power to make true; ―inside‖ is a dynamo, the beginning here in me. Together, myth means an explosive exploding from inside me toward outside to make things true; myth true inside me may not be true outside yet, through me living it to make it true, to others. Myths welling up from inside must spread as well-water, begging to share; what is true inside is true only because it wells up from inside. Welling up from inside true cannot stop. Repeated, myths are shared anew again and again. Explosive ―inside‖ of ―truth‖ of the myth is growing power of the seed silently wrapping the milieu where we live; it is milieu of life. The truth of myths is this explosive dynamite—in living them, and we cannot help it; without them we die. But there are myths and there are myths. The so-called ―primitive peoples‖ have succeeded in making their myths come true by living them, while we the ―advanced civilized peoples‖ are lagging behind struggling to live up to our myths. Our myths spread inside and often well up into revolutions, French Revolution, American Revolution, China‘s Cultural Revolution after so many in its history, and revolutions seem to be the only visible form of fulfilling our dream myths, irresistible and inevitable but not always consciously chosen. Nine features describe myths ambiguous, indefinable, and then dialogues clinch the matter. One, we see myths inside in Freud‘s psychic complexes with mythic names. Two, myths are ideas explosive. Three, history is more than a collection of myths. Four, arts and music are myths the tyrannical governments fear. Five, myths are ideologies. Six, myths are cultures. Seven, myths shape our inside and outside. Eight, myths shift. Nine, myths are corrected by myths. ONE: we see myths-inside in Freud’s psychic complexes with mythic names: A most handy example of myths as stories that are true inside us is Freud‘s discovery of psychic complexes with names of Greek mythical figures. He intuitively (i.e., without explanation) used Greek myths to name our inside, to confirm myths as our inner truths. Psychology is archeology of mythology; we are today swept by ―myth of the machine.‖652 George B. Shaw says, ―You see things; and you say ‗Why?‘ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‗Why not?‘‖ That questioning is the power of ―mythology.‖653 Asking ―Why not?‖ keeps us going, as this dream-question spews more dreams, more myths, to generate more questionings. Dream questions are the humanity‘s dynamo, their scientific spirit. This questioning is ―mythology‖ at the basis to support and egg on our intellectual explorations. The Oedipus complex, say, reveals the structure of our inside. ―What about Freud‘s ‗penis envy‘? Many females deny it.‖ Well, such ―envy‖ may express (with castration-myth), female desire as much as Freud‘s own inner fantasy. So, such envy is still true in some such senses. ―Myth as true inside‖ may thus mean an inner revelations, real or denied, that provoke 651

Eric Helm Meade, Tell It by Heart: Women and the Healing Power of Story, Chicago: Open Court, 1995, pp. 12. 652 Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: I. Technology and Human Development (1967), and II. The Pentagon of Power (1970). 653 George Bernard Shaw‘s saying is in Back to Methuselah (1921), Pt.1, Act 1, and is quoted in Jesse Reklawy, Dreamtoons, 2000, Boston: Shambhala, p. 68. Dream is a ―why not‖ push.

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hearers‘ reactions, themselves revealing of hearers‘ insides, real or fancied, even consciously denied as such. ―Can Freud‘s or the West‘s myths be used to explain China?‖ We could answer, ―Yes, with caution.‖ Yes, Western myths, Freud‘s or others‘, can and must be used to appreciate Chinese myths, because myths are true inside exploding outside, to China. But we must be cautious. Western myths must be used to appreciate china, not to understand it, much less explain it. The West differs from China as two persons; mother caring for baby is not mother becoming baby. It is the difference that enables caring. Intimacy bespeaks difference; the sooner and intense-er we are aware of the difference and appreciate it, the truer the intimacy turns that enables each to be oneself, never imposing an interpretation of one on the other. Mutual EastWest appreciation happens only based on appreciation of mutual differences. TWO: myths are ideas as explosives: Ideas we have inside; no one can see them; ideas cherished inside are our dear myths. Ideas have their own structure, however, and cannot be ignored, to silently mature to explode. Ideas are live explosives. Education is the seedbed of ideas, and higher education is greenhouse and experimental station where ideas are cooked up, tried on a small scale, criticized and grown, to be readied for praxis. Myths are created in our ideas, experimented on in greenhouse of university, to give birth to revolutionize the world. Ideas carefully nurtured, tried on in light of history, in the experimental stations, and explode into the street, as the May Fourth Movement in China, made by university intellectuals, changed the course of Chinese history. Intellectuals in the West are no less revolutionary. The seed-ideas of Rousseau grew French Revolution as the seed-ideas of Locke harvested American Revolution and the seedideas of Karl Marx yielded Communist Revolution. East or West, ideas and myths are dreams that empower to explode into social actions. THREE: history is such myth-collection and more: History is the course of such mythexplosions and myth-revolutions, their collection, by being written from a specific perspective, and rewritten constantly to throw light on our present situation, and thereby to shape what we are now in a specific way, and this ―specific way‖ is our myth. History is thus the very stuff of myth, for myth is revealed in the vast canvas of time sequence, history, and both myth and history are invisible and powerful, to explain the present, supportive of the present situation, so as paradoxically to supplant and reshape ourselves, and revolutionize today. History is a subversive myth-collection. FOUR: arts and music are myths the tyrannical government fear: Works of arts and music reflect what we are now to remold what we are now, another subversive operation. Arts ask the question, ―Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of all?‖ that we all want to have answered, and in asking it subtly bring us to self-realization to reshape us. Music redirects our vision, awakens our latent power to be ourselves, nourishes our inner strength, and thereby liberates our cramped, clamped, and cluttered life-orientation. At the same time, music is the least tangible, the most fragile and perishable, of all artworks. Music must be performed each time to become present, come alive, to us. Worse, every performance is different.654 Thus music is the most powerful and most perishable of artworks.

654

The fact that music comes alive differently at different performances may be related to how China differs from the West. How the two are related is a mystery for now.

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Innocent-looking artworks are thus slyly seditious. Music is particularly sinister, for music vibrates our whole being and whole rhythm of life. Any government that wants to control its populace into docility has historically been zealous of controlling the arts and music, since Plato. Inheriting the tradition of government by music, Confucius was also eager to govern people by rites and music. FIVE: myths are ideologies: ―What is true inside spread out to be true outside‖ can be disastrous, or can be just taken for granted. What disastrously spreads as ―true‖ is dictatorial ideology such as Nazism. It began inside Hitler; after World War disasters and Hitler‘s demise, Neo-Nazism still props up here and there today. Similar stories, more nebulous yet as disastrous, are racism such as anti-Semitism. What is taken for granted widely as ―true‖ nebulously covers a vast demographic territory, almost worldwide as mores that are our collective myths, conscious and unconscious, that people seldom complain about. Democracy, world peace, mechanism, ecological protection, law and order, war on poverty, pollution, terrorism, and injustice, are some of worldwide ideologies today. H. L. Mencken and Lewis Mumford fought all their lives against sinister ideologies. Ideologies are ill-defined because they are indefinable, extremely nebulous, useless in concrete practical terms, and make us no money. Still, no one has even thought of opposing them, much less dares to oppose them, even much less propose to demolish them. They are our cherished—consciously or no—ideals and directions we think the world should go. Either disastrous or taken-for-granted, ideologies can become our passionate devotion to harvest, as any extremism does, quick results and fast demise. Or else, either sort of ideologies can linger on without much result, with much frustration, as people‘s mild migraine for ages. Ideology is a headache-myth; we cannot live without it, we cannot live with it. We are stuck somewhere without knowing where or how to handle it. Artworks are vivid expressions of our ideologies quite invisible from outside. Ideology in its widest sense can be taken as tacitly taken for granted habits of mind and style of life, and so merges into mores, culture, the cultural air in which we breathe. Culture-shock is also ideology-shock, then, private myths shocked by collective myths-ideologies, as rural people are shocked to hear about casual divorce and remarriage, or no-marriage cohabitation, or adoption of kids by homosexual couples, or lack of church attendance, and so on. Ideology is thus the myth we live, live by, and live in. It is the stuff we are made of, the smell of what we are. Scratch the surface, we are all barbarians, with barbaric ideologies, meaning we are as ruggedly human as our cavemen forefathers were—so they say, at one extreme. The other extreme says that that raw layer of our being is to be covered over and enlightened by conscious ―ideologies‖ of human decencies. In this dispute, the dispute over myths comes about. We reserve this point for point Nine. SIX: myths are cultures: So, we live most handy myths called cultures made of haphazard collections of ideologies half-baked and cultures have tons of myths, so much so that myths and cultures intersect and intermingle. They—cultures and myths—are often tacitly accepted by the people within these culture-milieus. Whether ―primitive‖ or ―civilized,‖ young or old, educated or no, we all live in such myths, such cultures. Not only do ethnology, history, and cultural anthropology study such ingrained cultures we live, but also all histories, linguistics, and philosophies describe culture as our life. Without such culture-myth no one can exist, that is, live and grow, so much so that we can say culture is the bone of all bones and flesh of all flesh, of human life. Without culture we

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can never understand what humanity is, and culture is multifarious, and so without the diversity of cultures and myths there exists no humanity.655 SEVEN: myths shapes our inside and outside: Myths as ideas, history, arts, ideology, and cultures are ―true on the inside‖ of us to shape us into truly ourselves, inside and out. What does saying so mean? Socrates says he was born and raised by his beloved parents, the Athenian society. This is his myth, as shown by the following facts. He never ―defined‖ what this society really is, in fact or in ideal, how he was raised so much so that what he proposed and advocated came to be opposed by his ―parents,‖ again so much so as to be condemned to death, whether or not that condemnation itself—the process by which the condemnation was delivered—was correct and just, and so on. He just obeyed. His simple unquestioning obedience even to death shows that he was irrevocably shaped by his myth he believed in, that the Athenian society was his parent. Strangely, we cannot ask him whether or not his obedience to the Delphic Oracle—or rather, his obedience to his interpretation of the Oracle—was shaped by his myth that the Athenian society was his parent. The fact that he was condemned by his beloved Athenian society showed that his obedience to the Oracle clashed with the desire of the Athenian society. Socrates never probed this clash. The clash was that of two myths he held dear, his absolute piety and his no less fervent love of his Athenian society. This fact shows that ―shaping‖ by myths is by no means clear-cut, the shaping can mortally clash, as it did to Socrates‘ life. The same can be said, mutatis mutandis, of Jesus who was crucified by his beloved tradition. Chinese history is full of loyal subjects executed by their beloved rulers. Myth can cost us dearly. EIGHT; myths shift: What complicates the matter is that the very myths we live on shift, so much so that yesterday‘s ―good guy‖ is today‘s ―bad guy,‖ and today‘s ―bad guy‖ turns ―good guy‖ tomorrow. We today smugly pass judgment on yesterday, not knowing that under yesterday‘s circumstances we would have been in the same dilemmas and may have bungled more clumsily and turned ―worse.‖ Myths are the standard we live by. As the standard of judgment changes, the atmosphere of justice and sense of appropriateness change. The change, moreover, can come overnight, as it did in the small island of Taiwan under the colonial rule of Japan—during the WWII. Many people are sacrificed as a result. Such volatile situation is quite common in Chinese history, so much so that the recluses were counted ―wise and sagely.‖ Confucius himself was a half-recluse who devoted his unemployed life to education, a harmless avocation in the eye of the dictators. Many sages and ―wise diplomats‖ follow suit, and wanderers in wilderness have been common, written to amass the treasure trove of wise essays and treatises. Even today the ―politics of democracy‖ in USA goes unusually bewilderingly fast. Even within the short period of four or at most eight years, presidential popularity goes up and down precipitously, and his policy-changes, often overnight, cost financial and cultural stability of the entire nation, even the whole nature, to reverberate worldwide. This is a tough way to live. Shifts of myths are one more factor in life‘s suffering.

655

For more reflections on culture as togetherness, see Kuang-ming Wu, On the “Logic” of Togetherness: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1998, pp. 27-87.

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NINE: myths are corrected by myths: If myths shift often out of the blue, and myths are our standards of living, we may seem to be committed to hopeless relativism of dead leaves blown about in haphazard winds of the times. Our human history of myths tells us quite otherwise, however. In China, myths are treasured as ―names 名‖ to which we struggle to make actuality 實 to conform. Father must be fatherly, i.e., must behave to deserve the name of fatherhood, as the ruler must be as the name ―ruler‖ demands. Confucius advocated this ―correction of names 正名‖ to criticize his society, and the logician-expositors 辯士 followed suit, offering critiques of their social situation by arguing with historical precedents, historical stories. Now, arguing with stories and history is an exercise in myth, for arguing shows belief in intangible wording and history, and belief in intangibles is an act of mythmaking. This amounts to relying on myth-acts to decide on the current myths held by the current society. Myths are corrected by myths, as perceptual illusion is corrected by perception. This is a matter of course. We remember a little missy who defined for us a myth as a story that is true on the inside, and we considered ―true‖ here as meaning, to ―make true.‖ Myth-correction—to set a myth on its right direction and right course, whatever ―right‖ means—must be made by more myths! We see myth-correction happening today in life. Story-therapy is to gently heal the person, suffering from painful myths, with healing myths, health-enhancing stories. Social theories—social myths—have not been lacking in history to straighten social suffering under the ill-myths of dictatorship, from Plato‘s rule of the wise to Locke-Hobbes‘ people-contract and Lin Yutang‘s ―Chinese democracy.‖ And we are waiting to see myth-correction by the myth of all myths, history, to come about. History-correction has been practiced for millennia in China via constant appeals to history by all sages, not least by official historians. We must see to it that myth-correction by appealing to history be practiced worldwide today. This completes our brief survey of nine sketches of myths and stories. All these nine illustrations—not meant to be an exhaustive theoretical treatise—of myths suffice to show how surprisingly complex, variegated, wide-ranging, and life-tenacious ―myths‖ are. Being ambiguous, touting tautologies (―of course!‖, ―so what?‖) and falsehoods (―what?‖), being indefinable (nebulous) and more-and-more (spread), myths are human dandelions that can be either taken as beautiful weed or taken in as nutrient and medicine. We must not be unaware of myths, or take them for granted, much less despise them, but always be alerted to their presence. The key is how we deal with them, for myths are the root of life, the power of reason that directs life, and we take them for granted at our own peril. Myths are an overruling nisus that tacitly, quietly, and non-obtrusively steers us into one sentiment or another attitude subtly deciding life‘s course. ―Wow! This is too far-fetched. Be realistic, my pal, don‘t fly around in intangible willo‘-the-wisp.‖ I appreciate your honesty, my friend. I must now clarify myth-points so that they do not seem fantastically out of touch with reality. After all, ―myth‖ is so intangible it tends to connote unreality. Here is my response. I said myths are the root-power of what appears out of nowhere to exist, and the root cannot be seen by naked eye, as Freud‘s ―complexes‖ are invisible, but they—complexes— are no less real, and likewise the root-power is no less real. Myths as root-power of reality is what makes real the ―reality‖ you are after.

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In fact, what you said expresses your myth, saying, ―only the tangible is the real,‖ and this expression is itself intangible. You want ―solid facts‖ that are literally factum, what has been done and made. You want the product and reject the producing power and process. That‘s your myth, in need of being supplemented by mine, to wit, production is at the root of product, and ―production‖ is a myth intangible. You and I are both mythical, then, and to realize so is to be ―realistic.‖ To be realistic enables us to be in the world without being trapped in it. ―What does it mean?‖ Let us watch Baby Didi. Didi is fully immersed in the present while living the future, the not-present unseen that guides his present hours. That is how Didi lives in myths, always playing and playacting, and knows he is playing games when he playacts a doctor on his doggie his play-patient. And he enjoys his enactment and reenactment of such myth every moment of his day. His life is a continuous series of enjoyment of myth-acting, mythmaking. That is how Didi lives. That is how he grows. To play and know we are playing is to be Didi, and it is healthy, it is sagely. Play and myth are alike here. We live (in) play as we live (in) myth, often unawares, and we had better become aware of it, and live it, enjoy it as Didi does. ―Get it?‖ says Didi. ―Is myth the same as story?‖ Well, story is myth verbalized, made aware of, and myth is story rehearsed in life, actualized, unawares or no. Myth is the root-power of life, as stories are myth expressed in words, in theory, and in practice. Theories are stories and myths are habits of our mind, private and corporate mind, our culture. Our life-world is myth-shaped and story-structured. ―Are the primitive people aware of their myths as myths?‖ The American Indians have been told their myths to be myths, and they still go on cherishing them, practicing them. We the ―advanced civilized people‖ are, in contrast, not told about our myths as myths, and, when told, angrily refuse to heed the information. We are arrogantly less aware of our own myths than they the ―primitives‖ are of theirs. We are more primitive than they. ―Still, don‘t you think myths and playing games are so frivolous, beneath our serious living and consideration?‖ On the contrary, the myths‘ ―frivolity‖ bespeaks their profundity we can ignore only at our own peril. Besides, the frivolity of myths is absolutely serious as well. Our dear Didi fights for his game-play, fights over ―foul plays,‖ while fully knowing it is a game, but it is not just a game. I name a spot, ―Mr. Flower Power,‖ where a tree used to stand that sprinkled flowers all over the walk in the wood. Soon later the tree was chopped off, and even its stem was dug up, leaving a bare spot. On that spot, my ―flower power,‖ I tarry every time I walk by, everyday. That ―Flower Power‖ keeps giving me power to flower all over things, including things I worry about, including my weaknesses and illnesses. I cherish my ―flower power‖ as I cherish my life. I live my flower-power myth. We had better realize that myths are our ―flower power.‖ Myths we cannot see as my Mr. Flower Power is just an empty spot where I tarry to meditate and make wishes, and walk on, often in tears of gratitude. Myths are our Flower Power, unseen, unnoticed, to give to give, and to keep giving us ourselves in all our wishes, words, and works. The flower power myth flowers us. Myths flower us. This flowering power is the power that makes everything true with what is ―true on the inside,‖ through living that flower power of our cherished myths. As long as we cannot live without living myths, we had better live them to make things come true as they are true on our inside.

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―Do we see any philosophical cash value (never mind the odd-sounding ring) to myths interpreted here by our little missy?‖ Well, does anyone see moving logic here? ―Moving logic‖ is the logic of the myth, the logic of the Flower Power that empowers everything, one at a time, enabling them to become another ―flower power‖ to empower many others they meet on their life‘s way, again, one at a time, despising the pain of being chopped down, dug up, and vanish. ―Can you make a pink elephant fly ‗on the outside‘?‖ None but a boor could ask such a question, my pal. Moreover, none but kids, and kids of all ages, would care to probe what ―pink elephant‖ is, and what ―fly‖ does here. The pink elephant is ―This road—/no one goes down it,/ autumn evening.‖ (Basho) Frost we remember dared to take this road that is ―less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.‖ Taking this road of the pink elephant would make all the difference, in fact, make a revolution, I assure you. I‘ll give you just one concrete example. I used to walk by and look up at a tall tree, dead, proudly overlooking the lake. One day the park crew came; it took them three long noisy days to saw it down. I stopped to chat with them, who told me it was cottonwood, and it must have taken forty years to grow that huge. Now, not even its stem is around; a bare spot was left overlooking the lake. I stand there every day as I walk by, calling it ―Mr. Cottonwood.‖ He said he would give me forty more years to live on. Now, folks often tarry there to enjoy the lake-view. I keep wondering if they knew Mr. Cottonwood at all. He is my ―pink elephant‖ who revolutionizes my whole life. Do we need to repeat? Myth is a story that is true on the inside, but is not yet true on the outside. Our whole life, our whole life‘s worth, depends on working on this ―not yet‖ as we live the myths already true on our inside. As long as we cannot live without living myths, we cannot shirk this life-responsibility on which our life depends, and on which others‘ lives depend. Living up to myths people share is to live popular folkways, folklore that makes culture. Now we are in a position to look into folklore in China as such, what it is, how it works, and how intimately involved Chinese folklore and Chinese culture are.

What Folklore in China is The folklore in China is part and parcel of Chinese culture, exhibited in daily conversations and business engagements among the Chinese people. Folklore in China is the bloodstream of daily life-world in China, what invigorates living in China through thick and thin for millennia, a time-tested tonic in the culture, a customary thinking and viewing among common folks in China. Folklore in China thus describes the Chinese way of life. We have several ways of considering this wonderful theme.

1. China in Folklore Folklore in China is the world‘s longest experiences compressed in the fewest words, to spread to the widest community of people the longest in history. Such compression makes for the punch, the bull‘s eye hit at the point. Mencius said we must ―old‖ our old [folks] to reach people‘s old [folks],‖ as we say, ―I baby myself to baby people.‖ Han Yü said, ―Those entering China are to be China-ed (―countrified‖).‖ These sayings are much punchier and more concrete than loving neighbors as myself.

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Folklore thus compressed is extremely concrete and particular, freely implicating tons of connotations, to facilitate universal applications in life all over. Folklore in China is thus particular and universal, specific and free, historical and communal, all at once. Such thinking shapes the way Chinese people say things and live life. Folklore in China then comes to shape a way of thinking, folklore-thinking among all folks common and scholarly, rich and poor, princely and plebian. Thus studying folklore in China would reveal China otherwise hidden to other lines of research. Folklore in China thus contains contingencies, contradictions, untoward situations, to produce history of those events in literature describing them. History and literature of a folklore-sort are peculiar to the culture of China. Chinese people use folklore to tell stories and make a point. Folklore in China thus story-argues; China folklore-thinks, and its folklorethinking irresistibly story-argues. Such story-argument is actually all too natural to human thinking, and so the PreSocratics argued in compressed story-poetry, folklore-way. Socrates himself argued against false accusations by compactly telling his life-stories, centered on the compressed Delphic oracle. Sadly, the Western philosophy—the orthodox ―thinking‖ in the West—subsequently departed from this folklore-thinking, while China sticks to it for millennia till today. Chinese culture is thus made of its folklore-thinking compressed, concreted, and punchy. Usually, cultures use words to talk about their folklores. In contrast, words in China are themselves a compression of its folklore, its concentrate to lug around in life that is shaped by it. This is made possible by Chinese words themselves being pictographs of the senses-ofthings. These concrete senses-of-things are told in stories handed down from ancient days, and stories-handed-down-from-old are traditional folklore; folklore is made of concrete stories, with Chinese characters and sentences that are themselves colorful concrete stories, concentrated life. Chinese characters and sentences are thus folklore-filled, and Chinese thinking is folklore-thinking, story-thinking. Chinese people do not use a general notion of ―deep pondering‖ but mention ―push, knock,‖ derived from a story of a writer, Jia Dao 賈島, who was alone debating between ―a monk pushing a moon-lit door‖ and ―knocking a moon-lit door,‖ until he bumped unwittingly into a horse that carried the literary official Han Yü 韓愈. Jia Dao profusely apologized and confessed to the cause of bumping into the illustrious carriage. Impressed, Han Yü chose for Jia Dao, ―knock the moon-lit door.‖ Such examples can be multiplied ad infinitum; the point is clear. Chinese culture is made of concentrates of folklore, compressed out of concrete stories inherited from old, as the inherent ingredients of thinking; we call it folklore-thinking. Tales from old are folklore, on which Chinese people‘s daily conversations turn. Pull out folklore, and Chinese thinking and talking vanishes into thin air. In contrast, the West‘s concept, such as ―behavioral conditioning,‖ stands intact apart from the story of ―dog, food, and saliva chain‖ that merely adds on to decorate the concept. In short, Chinese culture is made of folklore. Chinese language is made of phrases that are folklore-concentrates. Notions are phrases of folklore-concentrates. Conversations and arguments are made of folklore-concentrates. Pull out folklore-dynamics, and Chinese culture collapses. Folklore is no window-dressing to decorate the real stuff; folklore is the real stuff.

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Folklore is the bones that structure intention, to push and knock and lead living in China. China is made of story-thinking, folklore-thinking. Now we must unpack ―folklore-thinking.‖ It is story-thinking that is storytelling, storyhearing, and story-adding. ―Story‖ is a web, and the web includes things as it flexes with things. The story-web includes things that are so varied and miscellaneous as to be sometimes mutually contradictory. For all this comprehensive inclusion, story-comprehension of those varied matters still makes sense—to make history. A system that opens out is precisely what story-making makes, to make of things some coherent sense that still can yet accommodate what comes from out of the coherent system the story makes; it is ―sense‖ on the inside making sense on the outside. This is to ―spin a yarn,‖ tell a tall tale, as one yarns an artifact to indefinite length, while the yarn stays as this yarn and no other, a coherent whole, open. Such is story-system that comes out of time-system, contingent and unexpected, and out of spatial context, unpredicted concatenation of incompatible elements, as our lifeworld is full of such unpleasant contingencies. Story-thinking can accommodate all life‘s surd-elements and makes historical sense, ―folklore.‖ China‘s story-thinking open conduces to its folklore that is a solid gem spreading its brilliance all around through time (history, tradition) and space (folk conversations, common arguments). All this story-operation that makes folklore is incorrigibly concrete as story spins sense out of things miscellaneous, incoherent. There is nothing abstract or theoretical about making a sensible story-system spun out of surprising contingencies. This is because we live on by such story-system-making; failing to make such story-sense that we keep making, our life dissipates into senseless bits and pieces, and goes insane. Folklore-thinking in story-thinking moves on with the constantly moving situations quite unpredictable, to make sense out of senseless contingencies. Conversely, moving thinking is folklore-thinking on what has been the case since time immemorial, to compose its history. Chinese tradition is settled as a moving-on; moving thinking differs, however, from set thinking, set according to the eternal law of thinking, ―logic‖ thinking. Folklore-thinking thus moves on in two ways, moving on from history till today into tomorrow, and moving on constantly now with the current shifting situations. ―Is there any non-arbitrary ‗grammar,‘ any ‗rule,‘ any ‗logic,‘ any ‗norm,‘ to such moving thinking?‖ Yes, it does have one such ―principle,‖ ―folklore‖ enshrined in the tradition of communal history. ―Our legends‖ of ancient days, whether stories of the paradigmatic events or of paragon individuals, set the standard of our moving thinking. This standard is solid because it is time-tested, communally certified, and publicly adhered to for centuries. Here is a true ―democracy of time and tradition‖ called ―folklore.‖ This solid tradition of folklore watches over the moving thinking shifting with the shifting situations of the day. At the same time—and this is what is precious about folklore that is set and shifting—if anyone has different opinions about the established folklore custom, they are entirely free to protest and renovate the status quo. It is the trend of the times that creates such a rebel, and it is also such a rebel that creates the trend of the times. Time and individual mutually influence and create, and they—time and persons—gather to establish another novel ―folklore‖ to lead common folks on. That is how folklore goes in history. Things are always moving to always set, set and settled in motion of contingencies, and folklore does justice to this unpredictability to make history our standard of living.

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Such a situation of set and free tradition of folklore is quite crucial to human life. Our life being alive at all depends on such a making of dynamic story-system, solidifying timehonored folklore-sense forever time-shifting. It is thus that China engages in folklore-thinking to live on. To put it another way, to study folklore in China helps us make sense of our own life, now made coherent, and folklore-thinking is what Chinese folks live by and live on for ages. Studying folklore in China gives us access to how China lives on in its own folklore way, leading a distinctive Chinese way of life for millennia. And, to repeat, please never forget this point. Such folklore-thinking is forever alive. Anyone can challenge it, however difficult it is to challenge it. Persistence and sensibility shall win the day. Someone must stir up chaos to lead us all to order, as they find chaos in the order, making China‘s way of life. At the same time, we must not forget this point, either. The very thought-form with which someone rebels and protests the status quo with deep dissatisfaction, this thought-form with which to rebel against tradition, they have to inherit from the folklore tradition that raised them. They rebel against tradition with tradition. Confucius and Socrates did so. So, tradition shapes people to shape tradition, because tradition is what is handed down to us, and anything worth handing down must be excellent, anything excellent must differ from the humdrum status quo, and such ―difference‖ amounts to rebellion against the traditional status quo. Again, folklore-thinking revolutionizes folklore. The establishment is established—solidified—by the anti-establishment ethos that has been raised in the establishment. Here ―establishment‖ means establishing the ―folklore‖ people live by and live on. Folklore is the air in which we breathe so as for us to cleanse the air. This is how story-thinking accommodates anything from outside story-system. Accommodation is not without protesting travail and bloodshed. Generosity is always selfsacrifice, the price paid for being alive. It is time to take stock. Tradition, folklore, storytelling, and renovation, they belong together, and ―togetherness‖ here is something beyond our ―logical‖ expectation; their togetherness is a mystery beyond our planned praxis. Still, we do know that every ounce of vitality of life and historical progress depends on this togetherness, this togetherness is part and parcel of ―folklore‖ truly so called. We must obey it as we protest it, and protest it as we obey it. To live in folklore is thus not at all an automatic sliding-along but the life-struggles of constant vigilance and effort, yet our effort is not a jack-rabbit dashing in fits and starts, but ever restful, in tradition. In folklore we are restful as we are restive; we protest the folklore as we protect it. This is what all our legendary heroes Confucius and Mencius, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu did. This is also what Socrates did; he obeyed his parent the Athenian society to death while protesting to death its pretense to knowledge and inauthentic living. His move has been controversial through the history of Western philosophy that has no room for such ―illogical‖ thinking. In China, folklore-thinking is thus folklore-living, the folkways that depend on folklore as the folklore-living protests them, to renovate them. This move is entirely different from blind revolt for petty selfish gain. The latter sort of revolt would be crushed by folklore-culture in the end, however much the selfish selfproclaimed ―hero‖ blusters that it is ―fate‖ apportioned to him beyond him. World history is world judgment. History, as part of folklore, repeatedly proves this point.

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2. China as Folklore Now, such modus operandi of folklore in China composes China, and we must look into China to understand its folklore, for such an intimate match between China and its folklore has a legitimate cause, nonexistent elsewhere, and this peculiar cause must be ascertained to benefit our living. To begin, myths, stories, and history are not synonymous but inter-involved into folklore. Especially they inter-cohere intimately in China to compose its culture, its ways of living and thinking. China is its folklore and its folklore is China. Thus a common saying, such as ―sour grape‖ in the West cannot quite qualify as part of Western folklore but at most at the borderline of common saying, though the saying originates in ancient Aesop‘s fable, for the West cherishes clear-cut thinking, cutting legend from folklore, and folklore from gnomic sayings and common phrases. They are so mutually distinct as to be separately classified among scholars. The West has thus no intimate inter-coherence between legend and folklore, on one hand, and daily engagements and thinking-patterns, on the other, as seen routinely existing in China. In China, then, a ―gnomic saying‖ shades into a common saying, both compressed from a legend, and both can be taken as part of folklore and folklore-thinking. This fact justifies our taking such common phrase as ―spear shield‖ as part of Chinese folklore and treat the phrase as an example of folklore-thinking all too concrete. Intrigued, we cannot help asking why this intimate inter-involvement happens in China but seldom elsewhere. What is it that induces China and its folklore to inter-intimacy among its myths, storytelling, conversation, and history? We then discover that China‘s writing system, expressive mode, and thinking pattern originate the world‘s closest inter-referrals of mythology, story-thinking, and historiography. It is thus that folklore in China reveals China; folklore clues us into the peculiarity of China‘s culture. At the same time, we see how China presents the niceties and essence of folklore that thrives in China. Folklore and China inter-mirror and inter-intimate to interexhibit. Looking at China, we see its folklore, and seeing its folklore, we see China. We see two points here: one, causes in China for China-folklore intimacy, and two, interrevelation of China and folklore. We go first into causes in China for China-folklore intimacy, and then inter-revelation of China and its folklore. The China-folklore intimacy comes from China‘s peculiar penchant concretely to portray the concrete senses of things concrete. This penchant is facilitated and expressed vividly in Chinese writing system of characters rather than alphabets. Chinese ideographic characters are the world‘s only surviving writing system of its kind, and even thriving today after all other pictographic civilizations (in Mesopotamia and other areas) have long died out. Chinese ideogram-characters are not pictures but snapshots of things‘ senses656; as the thing‘s sense is concrete, so is the ideogram that portrays it. In contrast, digital alphabets abstract a meaning, from concrete situation, to describe conceptualizing thinking opposed to folklore-thinking. 656

See Wen I-do on ―characters‖ painting sense as distinct from ―painting‖ picturing things, ―字與畫,‖ 聞一多全集, 步漢: 湖北人民出版社, 2004, 2:205-207. He sums up 許慎‘s 六書 (指事, 象形, 形聲, 會意, 轉注, 假借) and what 毛詩序 has as 六義 (風, 賦, 比, 興, 雅, 頌). Cf. an elegant briefing of how 文字 originated and how文字 formed文章, in 漢文學史綱要, 第一篇, 自文字至文章, in 魯迅全集 (上海人民出版社, 1981) 9:343-349.

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Besides, the portrait of a thing‘s sense is condensed as an actual thing is not, as a picture is a compact snapshot of an otherwise diffuse situation; a concentrated portrait of a thing‘s sense singular yet multifarious, implicating many connotations, all open-ended to branch out, yet centripetal, concentrated as this one character-phrase. Such ideographic language has no explicit ―parts of speech‖; distinctions among nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs, and so on, inter-exist, interchange to inter-change freely and fluidly as the situation requires, which constantly shifts to turn the way the same word is used this way and then that. The change, grammatical and syntactical, is so natural—because it changes with the situation—that we instantly understand the specific meaning of the word each time it is used in a specific situation. Chinese characters are thus situation-sensitive, context-dependent657; this is part of what it means to be concrete, and is just another description of being alive as life is. Moreover, Chinese ideogram is audiogram tone-structured; many tones determine and distinguish many different meanings. Tones are essential to senses of the words in China; pull out a specific tone to a specific character, and that character loses all its meaning and connotations.658 It is thus that various shapes and tones are part and parcel of Chinese expressions of senses, as concrete things express their varied senses with their specific colors and sounds. Such colorful-dynamic sense-expression mirrors the dramas of things so concrete. The drama is called ―history.‖ Chinese culture is thus intrinsically historical. So far, we have described four peculiar features of Chinese language, characters as portraits of things‘ senses, devoid of explicit parts of speech, tones as essential to sense, and such dramas of sense-expressions as history. These features inter-involve and intertwine to compose the peculiar Chinese language. It would be exciting to consider how such inter-entwining of the four features harvests unexpected results, how they mutually influence to exhibit a fascinating workout of China‘s expressive functions, to result in a folklore infusion of Chinese culture, Chinese way of thinking-expressing. We call this situation an ―inter-revelation of China and its folklore.‖ The best way to elucidate this concrete inter-revelation is to cite a concrete example and unpack it. Let us look at one example closely. China has no abstract ―contradiction,‖ only a concrete ―spear shield 矛盾.‖ The West‘s ―contradiction‖ is one diction-A (proposition P) that denies another diction-B (proposition not-P), and asserted together; it is abstract, without concrete content and indifferently applicable to all situations of contradiction, whatever they are. Han Fei (280-233 BCE) has a concrete story of a vender selling ―impenetrable shield‖ and ―all-penetrating spear,‖ when someone asked what would happen if his spear is to use on 657

Words that are situation-dependent—such as ―here,‖ ―I,‖ ―now‖—are called in the West indexicals, demonstratives, and so on, and treated separately in Western ―logic‖ as a peculiar ―logical‖ phenomenon. See e.g., Palle Yourgrau, ed., Demonstratives, Oxford University Press, 1990. In China, all words are likewise situation-sensitive, though Chinese people do not use the word ―indexical‖ because such phenomenon is so ubiquitous it is silly to mention it specifically, as if mentioning that we exist. 658 Impatiently to bypass all tones and nuances to get at the ―gist‖ of an essay is as silly as to claim the piano keyboard to be the essence of all music; it is an obvious fallacy of compositon, taking the whole as its components. Buddhism would of course say such a fallacy is no fallacy but a correct understanding of actuality, and all music of sense ceases. Silence is bliss unspeakable.

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his shield; the vender was silenced.659 This story is [1] so memorable and concrete that it was [2] compacted into a two-word phrase, ―spear shield 矛盾‖ to [3] lug around and apply in all sorts of arguments, as Han Fei applied it to oppose Confucian praise of sagely governance, [4] throughout the ages. There is nothing abstract in these four features; such Chinese concrete and specific storythinking manages to universalize what is meant among all people in all ages. These four features make up the style of Chinese story-thinking and folklore-thinking. What enables such free fluidity is Chinese mode of expression. Single things are captured as notions—―spear,‖ ―shield‖—that are then combined to turn inter-dynamic, such as ―spear shield‖ that are now turned a verb—where spear and shield interact to become verb (to contradict) and adjective (contradictory), and other grammar functions to express the fluid situations. It is thanks to characters that mean as they mean, each distinct of all others, as things staying as they are mutually distinct, that those words and sentences shift parts of speech, one into the other, to make up free floating expression ―custom-made‖ to the specific shifting situation. Distinctness is the key to inter-change. This subtle point is brought out in another ordinary story, ―dreaming.‖ Chuang Tzu dreamed to be a butterfly, quite sure he was a butterfly, until he awoke, realizing that he was a man quite sure of being a man. This is assured distinction. On second thought, he was no longer sure. Was he a man having dreamt to be a butterfly, or was he a butterfly now dreaming to be a man? Either dream, inter-differing, makes sense. It is butterfly-dreaming inter-changing man-dreaming in distinction (有分), so things change (物化). This is Chuang Tzu‘s legendary story clinching his Chapter Two, significantly titled ―sorting things, thinking 齊物論.‖ This story came to become China‘s folklore compressed in a phrase, ―Chuang Tzu dreaming butterfly 莊子夢蝶,‖ pregnant with tons of implications and life-connotations. ―Dreaming‖ is no delusion but the crucial dynamics of life and death, interchanging to inter-change, for ―butterfly‖ is a symbol of life-after-death in all cultures, as the story-context of his Chapter also indicates. This interchanging inter-change is birthing, birthing, without ceasing, which is changing, changing, without ceasing. This inter-change is avidly captured in traditional China in the concrete legendary metaphors of the Yin and the Yang, internecine, inter-nascent, that walk out in five thing-powers, dynamically walking from one thing-power to another, to walk into the first thing-power. All thing-situations walk from fire-power to water-power, and on to wood-power through metal-power to go to soil-power, before walking to—not back to—fire-power. My arrangement of these five thing-powers may slightly differ from the Chinese tradition that also has several different arrangements of five thing-dynamics. What is important is that the five things are five powers to five-walk 五行, walking out the Yin and the Yang, and then thus combined, i.e., inter-changed, they compose 64 (2, yin and yang, to the power of 8) hexagrams (each being 2 three times over). Here is the poetry of mathematics of beings and the mathematical being-poetry that is the revered folklore of China, compressed as China‘s Change Classic 易經.

659

This story and its application appear in 韓非子，難一 (臺北市三民書局，民86，p. 547).

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This is folklore; this is China. Here existence is dynamic inter-existence. Existential time and its space are modes of inter-change,660 where interchanging inter-change depends on distinction,661 and inter-change is inter-existence. Folklore expresses this Chinese thinkingmode, perpetuating its folklore. Thus folklore and China inter-reveal indicating an interchange between China and its folklore, to make up the Chinese history of story-thinking in Chinese folklore. How is all this formed, however?

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How Folklore-Thinking is Formed Folklore infolklore-thinking is formed as story-thinking proceeds. This compact answer must be unpacked; fascinatingly, it is how legends shape up. Story-thinking proceeds to form legends, folklore-thinking proceeds to form tradition and history, and all these processes go on to form China that has been alive since legendary times immemorial. Concretely, it is how Chinese people discern connotations unlimited gushing out of the artesian well of legends that form folklore. The characteristic here is story-thinking, i.e., storytelling, story-hearing, and story-adding to deepen storytelling, in four levels, [1] textual, how the story goes, [2] exegetical, what it amounts to, [3] exposition-wise, what it means, and [4] hermeneutical, what it means for us. Levels 1 and 2 are storytelling, levels 3 and 4 are story-hearing662; all these levels add on to the story. Addition spreads wide yet centripetally focused on the original story, which is now a legend, folklore. Folklore differs from plain story in that a story can have all these four levels, while in folklore the first two levels, textual evidence and exegesis, wear off as time wears on, to turn a shiny gem rubbed sparkling for so long by so many people. Folklore has thus only two latter levels, expository and hermeneutical, through ages of being lived on, showing how people dig out long to reveal implications, or even create connotations and novel applications. Thus folklore is alive through people‘s long use and new additions, as people are kept alive and vibrant by their folklore, ever ready to use and made afresh and shiny. Four ready examples come to mind. ―Spear shield‖ was proposed by Han Fei to argue how incompatible sagely ruler is with sagely ruled, who is rendered dispensable by sagely rulership. The existence of sagely subjects shows the world‘s need of them, to indicate the absence of the sagely ruler. Such incompatibility makes the existence of both equal to ―spear shield‖; people later applied it to countless situations. Another famous example is ―Three Incorruptibles 三不朽,‖ a concentrate of a conversation recorded in a legendary history, Tso’s Commentary on the Spring-Autumn Annals.663 Against someone citing hereditary succession as something un-decaying, Mu Shu said, ―I heard, ‗the highest is to let virtue stand, the next is to let work stand, the next is to let words stand, through long-time not gone, called Three Incorruptibles.‖ 660

Einstein‘s relativity theory also discovered it, where time warps into space. The West‘s concept of ―wavicles,‖ particles as energy waves, lacks this interaction between distinction and inter-change. 662 Wu‘s seminal article, ―Chinese Philosophy and Story-Thinking‖ in Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, June 2005, pp. 217-234 is rifled and take off to apply to folklore and folklore-thinking in China. 663 春秋左傳, 襄公24年, 臺北市三民書局, 2002, 中卷, p. 1084. 661

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Chan is so impressed, saying, ―Chinese belief in the immortality of influence has not changed since ancient times, and is still the conviction of educated Chinese. It is remarkable that a simple and casual utterance made when Confucius was only a child of three should have remained an unalterable conviction for the Chinese for 2,500 years.‖664 A third example is this story of noble tragedy. Three brother grand historians 太史官 braved executions to keep on record the five characters, ―Ts‘ui-chu assassinated his lord

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崔杼弒其君.‖ Two were serially executed by Ts‘ui-chu their lord; the third one came forth and calmly wrote the same five characters! That made Ts‘ui-chu to relent and let the record stand. Another historian was about to take off to take their place in case the third one was also executed. Such extraordinary loyalty to historical objectivity deserves historic commemoration!665 Sadly, this self-sacrificial loyalty to historical objectivity, ringing throughout history, has often been sacrificed for facile subjectivity of contemporary convenience, royal or otherwise, although some falsified recordings were corrected subsequently, under ―textual criticism,‖ under Ch‘ing tyranny 清代, until today. A fourth example is Confucius‘ saying that sings through time (17/2), ―Born alike, practice, apart 性相近也, 習相遠也,‖ and bred two different interpretations into two developments mutually opposed. Mencius took it to mean we are innately good, so we must nourish our sensitivity to people‘s pain. This is a Confucian approach. Hsün Tzu took Confucius‘ saying to mean we are originally bad, so people need education to be shape ―good.‖ This view developed to controlling people with law, Legalism. All these four examples out of countless others show how memorable stories of memorable sayings and events arouse posterity to keep them firmly in mind and continually ponder on them, to interpret and apply them to concrete living, in quite diverse ways, sometimes even contradictory ways. Such is folklore-thinking in China entwined with storythinking. As people live on, they ponder on the impressive stories of old and draw lessons in their own ways, and folklore in China is formed. Mind you. All this happens in history and as history. Story-thinking proceeds in history to produce folklore. Folklore is the bloodstream of history, as history is the milieu in which folklore-thinking moves and has—forms—its being, as it keeps telling stories to add to stories, to make up living from ancient times till today. That is folklore; that is history. In China, everything is distinct to inter-change into folklore-living, into history. Folklore makes history; that is how history makes folklore-thinking-and-living. We see two features of folklore in China, or better, China as folklore, here. One, folklore is story-thinking, two, folklore inter-changes in our lifeworld to grow. First, ―story‖ is made by storyteller and story-hearers; pull out story-hearers, and the storyteller turns idle babbler of nonsense. Similarly, ―folklore‖ is made with ―folks‖ without whom ancient stories peter out into past. ―Folks‖ are breeder of folklore, carriers of culture of mores and modes of behavior by

664 665

Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book of Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963, p. 14. 左傳讀本, 襄公25年, 臺北市三民書局, 2002, II: 1096.

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bearing oral tradition of folk art, folk dance, folk medicine, folk belief, etc. that wombs forth folklore.666 Secondly, folklore inter-changes in our lifeworld to grow, in contrast to a typical Western thinking. Northrop famously described the pattern of Eastern thinking as ―undifferentiated aesthetic continuum.‖ ―Aesthetic‖ here is just an emotional throw-in; he really meant ―undifferentiated continuum.‖667 Northrop thus entirely missed China by impatiently shoveling China away from the West, where clear-cut ―postulation‖ lives triumphant. China has nothing like ―undifferentiated continuum.‖ China sees our lifeworld as made of things differentiated, one from the other, each as itself, discontinuous, thereby interchange to inter-change. Northrop missed things actual inter-changing. To repeat, here is nothing like staid unintelligible ―undifferentiated continuum‖ but all things concrete inter-distinct to inter-change, Chuang Tzu dreaming to be a butterfly, a butterfly dreaming to be Chuang Tzu, changing, changing, without respite, birthing, birthing, without ceasing, as life throbbing on. This inter-changing is what handed down from of old as folklore, to shape daily living. Folklore is alive and growing as our living is alive, never staying put but continually transforming, one situation into another, from the revered archaic old days till today, here now, all over community all over China. How does this throbbing transformation of folklore-as-China take place? History with its modus operandi is an answer, for after all history makes folklore as folklore composes history. History repeats itself without repeating itself; things happen once and for all, and at the same time the old unique events somehow recall and renovate the new. Collingwood calls it ―re-enactment.‖668 Folklore reenacts in the throbbing history of Chinese community. Seeing Chinese history, we see its folklore; seeing Chinese folklore embodied in its literature, we see Chinese history. Both Chinese history and its folklore-literature present China. Now hear this lore before folklore; it is what folklore in China means. Not dark, no light, not clear, not vague, no idea, not vacant, and it dawn, ―Let there be ideas!‖ The dawn owes its voice of no voice to ineffable Hun Tun silently hugging the dawn the inspiration the pre-idea, birds yet to sing, soft breeze yet to stir, baby asleep yet to move to coo, yet to begin to ye to begin, not nothing, no thing. It is the pregnant concrete yet to concretize, the Hun Tun. O dawn before dawn, we on our knees nestle, nestled! Chinese wisdom alive here today senses how Hun Tun ―treats very well‖ Swift-Sudden folktale behind life-activities, shimmering in Confucian family gestalt, Taoist forgetting let-be, applied by Legalism quite lethally with brutal laws craftily enforced—failed application.

666

Cf. ―folk‖ in The Oxford Companion to the English Language, ed. Tom McArthur, Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 408. 667 F. S. C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West, NY: Macmillan, 1946. See also The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities (1947), Cleveland: The World Publishing, 1959, ―The Possible Concepts by Intuition and Concepts by Postulation as a Basic Terminology for Comparative Philosophy,‖ pp. 77-118. 668 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, Oxford University Press, 1946, 1993. I wish he connected history to folklore reenacting itself in a community. After all, he was a veteran archeologist.

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It is in such repeated failures that Hun Tun dies again and again while treating them all very well, again and again.669 Chinese wisdom is thus alive today, and this story can only be told in metaphor, folklore in China, as has been told above.

669

See K. Wu, ―‗Emperor Hundun 渾沌‘: A Cultural Hermeneutic,‖ Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, September 2007, pp. 263-279.

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PART III: HISTORY-MUSIC IN WORLD-INTONING Life thinks in story-thinking. Part II portrayed ―life‖ story-thought; this Part III considers ―thinking‖ in story-thinking. This tautology that story-thinking thinks, makes us think. There is story-thinking and there is logic-thinking. The more ―logical‖ thinking turns, the less it includes and turns barren, for the more ―logical‖ thinking turns, the more things ―illogical‖ must be excluded, to end up thinking absolutely logically about nothing. Thus logic-rational clarity of thinking closes in on itself detached from its womb, home, and vitality, i.e., actuality that nurtures thinking, including thinking clearly. After all, how can thinking be clear without contrasting itself with its Hun-tun womb not-clear? But isn‘t the contrast here both logic-rationally clear and beyond logic-rational thinking, both logicrational and beyond it? Isn‘t the situation here a Hun Tun that treats logic-rationality, swift and efficient, very well? To present Emperor Hun Tun we have no better way than to tell a story of how the whole situation transpires, and munch on what this story means. Such road was once trod in a fourfold story-way.670 We are here to story-think on what such story-thinking is. Storythinking reaches to include all, things logical and illogical, so that we under-stand and comprehend all things—the actual (factual), the no-longer actual (historical), the not-yet actual (future), and the had-better-be actual (imagined). In the above description the word ―include‖ and its cognate ―com-prehend‖ appear. Our attention is glued to how comprehensive inclusion and its comprehension fare in storythinking. As intimated in Parts I and II, story-thinking as life goes musical. It is made of ―moments musical‖ to montage into life-vignettes ever shifting; it is history as music intoning the world. Thus story-thinking turns music historical throughout the Heaven and the Earth, singing it to the mountains and rivers. Here every noun is a verb, for every event and entity makes sense musical, in overall rhythms cherished, revered and lived, objectively subjective and intersubjectively objective, musically dissonant, joys interblending sorrows, to make intercultural morals, validities, and histories. Such ―music of reason‖ is performed constantly and routinely in political and mercantile managements. All this makes up an exciting life-saga reasonable beyond unreason. It is the 670

Wu, ―‗Emperor Hundun 渾沌‘: A Cultural Hermeneutic,‖ Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, September 2007, pp. 263-279.

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Pipings chanting everywhere every-when, the Net formed naturally, coarse-meshed, leaking nothing in story-thinking, story-doing.

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Chapter 29

CHINESE REASONING AS REVERENTIALLY MUSICAL Chinese reasoning differs from logic-rationality.671 To characterize reasoning in China, here are three subsections. First, China‘s reasoning as musical and reverential is compared with logic-reasoning. Then, musical reverent reasoning is portrayed. Finally, we see logicrationality in musical reasoning, invincible, as roomy flexible, is storytelling.

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MUSICAL REVERENT REASON AND LOGICAL RATIONALITY Chinese thinking is ―reverentially musical reasoning.‖ Seven points explain this simple but subtle statement. These seven points are individually distinct and mutually involved—one run into the others—to compose the music of symphonic reason. Is it the reason-music in seven movements or is it made of seven symphonies by a single composer called China? Does it matter? One, China‘s reason is musical. This sort of reasoning sings; it puns in subtle modulations, melodies, and rhythm; it moves, balanced, and goes with many parallel points in assonance and even dissonance, and comes back. It varies on a theme or two, playing openended, performing living, to ―play‖ with arguments, performing thinking. All this is extra―logical.‖ No logic-rationality does so, yet turns its sinews to flex with it. Two, this musical reason is reverent, ritualistic, on what is, and self-knowing, noncontentious (does not fight), modest, and self-transcending (going beyond status quo). Again, all this is extra-―logical‖ flexing in musical reason. Three, music and reverence share reasoning on the move all-embracing, inspired and inspiring; though again extra-―logical,‖ Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Marcel sense its importance. Four, logic-rationality is digital, analytical, exclusive as true vs. false, coherent vs. incoherent, consistent vs. contradictory, thereby it is abstractive, coercive, and universal. Musical reason embraces falsehood; the true-now turns false-later, to grow true again. Incoherence is in coherence that turns incoherent, consistency is alive in contraries.

671

Both logic calculative and reason musical are ―logical,‖ which includes ―logic.‖

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Five, musical reason is accurate as logic-rationality, even more apt and precise, for it is part and parcel of actuality to subtly, delicately, mirror actual life-ongoing. Its actualityexactitude takes in logic-rationality as assistant to understanding actuality; logic-rationality thus comes home to its original aim of interpreting actuality coherently. Six, all these features compose the tone of musical reason in poetic rhythm as its sense. Its tone is its sense; to miss its tone misses its sense, for Chinese language is inherently ―tonal.‖ Tone-as-sense presents actuality in throbbing rhythm, indescribable beyond words that describe. So, paradoxically but inevitably, actual rhythm is to be indirectly intimated, pointing, evoking; ―direct expression‖ is ineffably indirective. We must forget words for actuality to word expressively. Seven, we see six concrete spin-offs. Spin-off One is this. As a joke explained is joke no more, so an ―exact sentence,‖ original and poetically packed, vanishes in prosaic ―translation.‖ Losing the original tone and rhythm loses its sense, to miss the point in the Analects of poetic tone, the Mencius in actuality punch, the Tao Te Ching ambiguous, the Chuang Tzu playing. They cannot transfer into English unless re-created poetically and musically, reborn in target language parallel to the original, to be their companions.672 Spin-off Two is this. Logic-rationalizing Chinese thinking turns it into a part of Western philosophy. What is new in such ―Chinese-Western philosophy‖ Western philosophy lacks? If there is none, then this hybrid philosophy has no value. If there is some, then this would be new Western philosophy provoked by Chinese thinking, still not Chinese thinking. Spin-off Three is this. Musical reason can explain ―health‖ as the personal tone, air, rhythm and poetry of psychosomatic unity, a wholesome person resonating with other persons. Here medical sciences reside in personal counseling and are guided by it; counseling should never be principled by physical medical sciences as it is to be today. Spin-off Four is this. Physics is now a cosmology. It is not meta-physics 形上學 but a meso-physics 形中學, the ―music of the spheres‖ of four seasons, as Pythagorus, Vivaldi and others have tried faintly, and as Tung Chung-shu 董仲舒 tried to get trapped in magical mathematics, a dead-end, by logic-rationally analyzing and parsing the cosmic music in neat charts and diagrams, not in reverential musical reason. Spin-off Five is this. We humans, with myriad things, live cosmic music, cosmic weather, heavenly breath-thrust 天氣,673 musical reason. We humans are aware of it, and so we are the Geist (spirit, mind) of myriad things 萬物之靈. We are microcosmic music reverently echoing the macrocosmic music of heavenly piping. So, Chinese medicine is correct in taking human health as cosmic weather writ small mirroring it, breathing it.674 Not adjusting cosmic weather, we adjust ourselves to it. ―Weather‖ is another word for music all around in which we all have our being, to live intently, reverently, i.e., to nourish the self‘s vitality until it grows up to the cosmic cyclonic thrust in the self養吾浩然之氣 (Mencius 2A2). 672

Wu‘s Butterfly as Companion is a series of Meditations on the Chuang Tzu, not a commentary of Chuang Tzu‘s text. See his Prologue and Epilogue, The Butterfly as Companion: Meditations on the First Three Chapters of the Chuang Tzu, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990. 673 English word ―weather‖ originally means ―wind.‖ 674 A helpful explanation of this point, health as weather, is given by Ted. J. Kaptchuk, O.M.D., The Web that has no Weaver: Understanding Chinese Medicine, Lincolnwood, IL: Congdon & Weed, 1983. See also Daniel Reid, The Complete Book of Chinese Health & Healing (1994), NY: Barnes & Noble, 1998.

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Spin-off Seven is this. ―Religion‖ originates in ―religiosity‖ musically understood; the former section on Chinese religiosity in Part II is an example of musical reason reverently understood, musical reason in self-transcendent reverence to the Beyond. ―Every note is special in music.‖ (Terry King) The word ―special‖ has two meanings. One, each note has its specific sense only as related to all others and to the composition it composes; the same note differs in tone, air, and feeling in different tune-phrases, melodies, variations, and compositions. Two, a composition is com-posed of notes picked for this composition; pull any note off, and the composition collapses into senseless chaos of noises. Besides, a composition is determined ―in the key of‖ a specific note. Notes and the whole music interdepend to inter-compose. Music is thus radically dia-logical and symphonic, whether it is a deep subtle sonata, a resonant chamber ensemble, or a grand symphony. The same piano-keys enrich various compositions that in turn enliven those keys. Existence, notional or physical, is inter-tonally inter-existential. All in all, we have elucidated—thrown light on—China‘s musical reverential reason that sings the life-world as it thinks; it begets logic-rationality and invigorates it, which cannot cover musical reason without killing it, as Emperor Hun Tun the Ambiguous was killed by speedy clarity. Such musical reverential reason is subtly accurate, precise, and relevant to life actuality as human and, living humanly, we participate in Nature to enhance natural beings as we are enhanced by them.

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PORTRAYAL OF MUSICAL REVERENT REASON We can now portray music, reverence, and musical reverential reason, in this order. We begin with music. Any cluster of sounds gathered in any set of beats and rhythms, long and constant, makes music. This is how Bach‘s magnificent ―Musical Offerings‖ inspired by a random set of notes, and Beethoven‘s variations on Mozart‘s little tunes contrived, all so irresistible, are composed, put-together. Language is also born this way to exert impacts on us. Frost says,675 It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if its lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound—that he will never get over it. That is to say permanence in poetry as in love is perceived instantly. It hasn‘t to await the test of time. The proof of a poem is not that we have never forgotten it, but that we knew at sight that we never could forget it.

Frost says good words inflict on me mortal wounds; we add that ―good‖ wounds make us whole. Music cuts me to make me; language as music cuts me to shape me. Words cease to ―cut‖ as they come in as logic-rationality, for music pervades and pulses the whole person wholesome, while logic-rationality cuts apart things into analytical bits. Doing ―logic‖ is not being ―logical‖; doing music is being in music, being musical. 675

Frost, ―The Poetry of Amy Lowell,‖ in Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays, NY: The Libraryof America, 1995, p. 712.

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A baby is captivated by nursery rhymes repeated countless times. Kids caught me to watch the ―yellow brick road‖ of The Wizard of Oz seven times, and ―Doe, a deer, a female deer‖ of The Sound of Music ten times. We are all held captive by musical tunes, tones, and rhythms self-forming its own pattern, a unique set of sense, each time different, inevitable, open, and alive. Its possibilities are limitless; its fascination immediate and boundless. We yet remain unmoved when confronted with ―P horseshoe Q.‖ Of course we can be fascinated at numbers, e.g., the ―pie‖ (=3.14159 . . .), in a Pythagorean mysticism, but then these numbers are no longer ―logical‖ items but elements of the Music of the Spheres. Loving ―logic‖ is not a ―logical‖ condition for doing ―logic,‖ but loving music is composing, performing, and listening to music. This point is worth repeating. It is impossible to do music without enjoying it; such is an ―existential contradiction.‖ Doing ―logic‖ with or without enjoying ―logic‖ has nothing to do with logicizing. ―Enjoying logic‖ is extra-―logical,‖ while enjoying music is intrinsic to music, for music is living in music, en-joying music en-livens it and living. We enjoy living by enjoying musical reason that is life. Any sounds, tones, in tunes, beats, and rhythms and rhymes—they make sound-patterns called ―music,‖ pattern is intelligible, so music is reasonable, and has musical reason. Since life is made of sounds, tones, in tunes, beats and rhythms, life is lived in musical reason. We are naturally captivated by music, babies and seniors all, and so have to love musical reason. Assonance of sounds calls for assonance in sense and then, in response, senseassonance calls further sound-assonances, and the delightful process of inter-resonance goes back and froth among sounds and senses, senses and sounds, and the world sings with humans the pulsing music of beings and sense-in-sounds. Actuality is such resounding pipings, the human and the earthly in the heavenly. Actuality is musical reason-ing in dia-logic with the rhetoric of puns and parodies, playing with argument,676 contrapositive-contrapuntal, assonance dissonant, dissonance assonant, music-making in rhythm of sense and senses all around, echoing through time. China‘s language and perception are made of music; its fascination induces reverence. Music in rhythmic reverence shows life-reason, musical reason. All Chinese people‘s thinking is musical and religious, cherished, diffused yet inevitable, open-ended and precise, accurate to ordinary actuality, all necessary and compelling, yet so casual, for it comes and goes at a moment‘s notice. Who said freedom clashes fate? They go together naturally, inevitably. Such reason excludes nothing, as any cluster of sounds show musical reverential reason that is simply interested, not bored dead, for falsehood is captivating. Musical reason as reason discerns what is false—so, logic-rationality is useful—and then assesses its lifeimplications. In contrast, being correct can be deadly. I asked a doctor, my distant relative, if she could suggest any pain-killer, for I was in pain, barely surviving on ibuprofen. At once she said point blank to go to an emergency room (it was Saturday), for she had not ―seen‖ me, and ibuprofen is so damaging to kidney that she always forbids it. I said I know of no kidney problem; she said everyone says so until checked by doctor. She effectively shut me off. 676

On playing with arguments see Wu, On the “Logic” of Togetherness: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1998, pp. 150-215. 劉勰 constantly uses puns to define critical terms in 文心雕龍, as 臺北市三民書局, 民83, pp. 50, 73, 115, 120, 128, 145, 147, 156, 156, 180, 186, 340, 481, and the list goes on.

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I almost said, since every chemical and drug has undesirable side-effects, and since no one knows oneself except doctors, all drugs should be taken off the store counter. She was correct to the ―t,‖ and O how cold, how bereft of medical helping hand, she was! Being ―correct‖ is often brutal, inhuman, and incorrect. Now, smilingly admitting falsehood stretches warm human hand to co-suffer. So I say, ―All those in pain are good guys.‖ Falsehood in mind and pain in body are cognates, and both spell shared ―interest.‖ What is interesting (if false) is more important than what is correct (and cold); ―correct‖ is more wrong than ―false,‖ for ―correct‖ often wrongs people while ―false‖-admitted is conscientious enough to take care not to hurt. This must be part of Kierkegaard‘s ―Truth is subjectivity‖; I add, ―subjective truth‖ is often not-true, and admitting so is the royal road of truth, for false-interested-and-admitted is the truth-road, and of course truth-road is part of truth. In short, ―subjectivity‖ is really ―truth.‖ So, it is not enough to kill Hitler quickly.677 We must in addition learn from him on how he came to hate a random human bunch (why not Italians? Chinese?), and why an entire civilized race followed him. We must know why he was wrong, why the most barbaric atrocities could have arisen out of the noblest human culture, how to stop ―he‖ reemerging— what lessons he gives us, etc.678 Therefore, in musical reason discrimination does not mean discrimination-against, that is, separation or rejection of what we discriminate. As dissonance is an essential part of musical harmony, so enemy is to be loved; Sun Tzu claims that the victory is to win over the enemyhearts, not to kill them off. Could we have changed Hitler to clean up Jewish ghettos? Contradictions are essential contraries in life‘s homeostasis, lions (for survival) and lambs (for eugenics) inter-depend, and pain is in the ecology of living; death, despair, disappointment, and failures are the ―unreason‖ of imbalance 不平 to provoke the soundingforth 鳴不平 of music of life, its musical reason, as Han Yü wrote his friend at the bottom of disappointment.679

LOGIC-RATIONALITY AS INVINCIBLE, MUSICAL REASON AS STORYTELLING A little caveat must be entered here. Contentions between Taoist bum Chuang Tzu and renowned debater Hui Tzu are quite often not about particular themes but over (overall efficacy of) ―logic‖ itself. This is a radical debate, cutting into the very base of the debate itself. Two examples suffice. Having jostled on whether difference prevents the self (Chuang Tzu) from knowing the other (fish), Chuang Tzu declared, bluntly, that he knows fish self-enjoying ―by being [here] over the Hao,‖ out of the ―logical‖ blue. Again, when Hui Tzu ridiculed all Chuang Tzu‘s 677

It is of course urgent now to kill him quickly to stop his mass murder at once, but quick killing should not end the Hitler-matter. Sadly, all ―heroes‖ think and do so, even at the cost of their lives! 678 I wonder if Hannah Arendt noted this point when she wrote that fateful Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), NY: Penguin Books, 1994. 679 韓愈 begins his letter ―送孟東野序‖ with 「大凡物不得共平則鳴」, 古文觀止, 高雄市麗文文化公司, 民83, pp. 696-703.

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words as useless, Chuang Tzu responded that knowing-being useless is the precondition for talking about the useful, a ―logical‖ non-sequitur, on strength of the spaces walked-used dependent on unused-useless spaces.680 Now the actual use-useless musical harmony, with Chuang-fish co-joy resonance-music, beyond ―logic‖ while including it in extra-―logical‖ intelligibility. So music-actuality includes ―logic‖ that includes no music. This is not to reject ―logic‖ but to reject its claim to universal efficacy over actuality. The book of Chuang Tzu is filled with debates with debater Hui Shih, all music fascinating, ―logic‖-devastating. For ―logic,‖ to disprove it has to be itself ―logical,‖ so disproving ―logic‖ establishes it. ―Fishermen never die, they just smell that way‖; nor does ―logic,‖ it just goes on that way. So, the ―debates‖ in the Chuang Tzu disprove no ―logic,‖ ―horse ear, east wind 馬耳東風‖; all this ―east wind‖ of music-devastating-―logic‖ touches ―logic‖‘s ―ear‖ not at all, invulnerable, tautologically self-enclosed, indifferently co-existing with music.681 We have yet to draw implications out of strange self-enclosure of logic-rationality. Musical reverential reason, on its part, is concretely enfleshed in storytelling, which has seven features. The first three features are similar to logic-rationality but distinctly storytelling; the other four are unique to storytelling. All features interpenetrate to make storytelling that goes musically, joyously, coherently, and reverently. Feature One of storytelling is that it gathers scattered happenings into a coherent pattern new and sensible. Superb storyteller Sartre must again be quoted,682 . . . [A] man is always a teller of stories. . . . he sees everything which happens to him through these stories; and he tries to live his life as if it were a story he was telling. . . . While you live, nothing happens. The scenery changes, people come and go out, that‘s all. There are no beginnings . . . an interminable and monotonous addition. . . . But when you tell about a life, everything changes; . . . events take place in one direction, and we tell about them in the opposite direction. . . . I wanted the moments of my life to follow each other and order themselves like those of a life remembered. I might as well try to catch time by the tail.

We are born storytellers; we create new order by telling stories; we love our created order so much we live in it, we live it; it is thus that we create our own life our own way, in our own order we create, by storytelling. All this is ―coherence‖ similar to ―logical‖ coherence; in fact ―logical‖ coherence is an offshoot of story-coherence. As such, however, story-coherence differs from ―logical‖ coherence solely mathematical, while story-coherence inheres in each story that has its own specific coherence distinct from the others. Story-coherence is various as life is lived variously; ―logical‖ coherence is one straightly, abstractly mathematical.

680

The two examples appear in Chuang Tzu 17/87-91 and 26/31-33. Thus we disagree with William Barrett‘s title, ―Irrational Man,‖ to describe ―existential philosophy‖ (NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1958); existential philosophy is logically rational, so nothing can be ―irrational.‖ 682 Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, NY: New Directions, 1964, pp. 56-59. Cf. Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, Chicago: Gateway, 1960, I:192-194. Incidentally, both thinkers agree that storytelling is a sinister selfdeception. We wonder what non-self-deception is, if spontaneous storytelling is self-deception. Sartre, Marcel, and Camus are all superb storytellers and philosophers, yet they seem not to realize, much less ponder on, the tension between storytelling and logicizing. 681

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Feature Two of storytelling is that such telling has its own necessity. The coherence of a story requires, necessitates, that such and such should be the sequence and the consequences, and no other. Again, this story-necessity is reminiscent of ―logical‖ necessity; both are coercive. Still, logical necessity is mathematically coercive, universal, and impersonal, while storynecessity is actual, inevitable, and historical; it could have been otherwise if things happened otherwise than as happened. Counterfactual supposition is not ―logically‖ contradictory but a perfectly legitimate exercise, even instructive, of thinking, and is often required in thinking in the concrete. Chinese storytelling in so many volumes constantly performs factual and counterfactual thinking, inevitable and open. Feature Three of storytelling is that the telling is sharply focused and punchy,683 so poignantly concentrated as to cut into the reader‘s heart, as evinced in historical descriptions, factual and fictive. Logic-rationality is also clear and focused in argument, and often uses stories to buttress its argument. Still, we see three differences between ―logic‖ and storythinking. One, it is the characteristic of storytelling that it cuts into the reader; it is not a good story if it does not inflict mortal wounds. In contrast, logic-rationality avoids all this by arguing for the case fairly, objectively, ―logically,‖ without emotion irrelevant; if the hearer gets excited, it is a byproduct, not part of the argument. Two, in storytelling the story itself argues; pull out the story, and the argument collapses. The story is never a window-dressing of a separate argument that can stand on its own, but that‘s how logic-rationality uses stories to support its argument, itself independent of stories. Three, the aim of logic-rationality is solely to have clear and exact sequence-steps of argument to tightly lead to a conclusion. In contrast, storytelling often purposely opens out into regions too deep for thought and expression, evoking in the hearer something or things beyond exact clarity. In addition, storytelling evokes mood beyond conveying specific points. Feature Four of storytelling is that the telling is often metaphorical, colorful, and rhymed, as Chinese characters, words, and sentences are actually intoned, colorful, concrete, and rhymed. Storytelling especially in China is often poetic, the least words expressing the most content overflowing the words. ―In this is a touch of truth 真意, desiring to explain-andargue 辯, words are already forgotten,‖ says, or rather, sighs, the heartfelt T‘ao Ch‘ien. Stories especially in China are often rhymed and rhythmic. After all, storytelling tells stories often so compact and memorable that they can be lugged around in unforgettable quips that sum up significant incidents. The storyteller sings out his stories and we the audience often swing our heads and hearts to sing (silently) with him. Storytelling is packed with apothegms and metaphors in musical rhyme and rhythm, so incisive they stay with us. Such cutting enthrallment is intrinsic to storytelling; stories without this cutting power are not bad stories but no stories at all. ―Logic‖ spellbinding, if any, is extra-―logical,‖ irrelevant to ―logicizing‖ or its validity. Feature Five of storytelling is that the telling often stretches far into the past, explicitly and implicitly in hearers. Storytelling is historical actual, imagined, likely, or unlikely. We go back again and again like children to dig up ―implications‖; histories are written in story-form to ―inspire us,‖ as people say. 683

Often the storyteller purposely makes the story diffuse and vague, punching us with our own reaction of anxiety, wondering what the whole plot, if any, is up to. Here storytelling is punchy with no-punch.

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Inspiration of a story means not just that it reminds us of the past but also provokes us, with past precedents, to tell-and-caution us about our own plans and our daily performances. In Confucius‘ teaching, he cited histories and past classics to induce young students‘ excited comments on their own daily lives. Feature Six of storytelling is that it is thus that the telling is open-ended, open to the past, to the future, to the audience now, and even to the plot and content of the stories told. It is here that storytelling resembles music, composition, performance, and enjoyment. We can add, subtract, make variations, do whatever we like to the stories told, all to our heartfelt satisfaction. The vast blue sky of our ingenuity is the limit to such story-thinking. This is life-music freely heard, composed, performed, and refined to re-perform and re-enjoy! This is life lived in miniature vignettes, as the game of battle is battle lived in living room. Life is a game of battles and of struggles, and we invent the games as we tell stories to rehearse our lives, to make ―experiment‖ on life for its future. In fact, as Sartre also realized, we are born tellers of stories to create our own lives, to try to live up to our own stories. History is made as we live on because we are part of history on the go, and history is stories of events; stories are made as we live on because we are part of stories on the go. Feature Seven, the final feature, of storytelling is that the telling is thus always on the go, moving without ceasing. And the moving of the storytelling is not random but musical and orderly, pulsating, open rhymed and rhythmic to whatever comes. If such ―moving‖ is not musical reason on the go, we do not know what it is. Besides, the moving of storytelling cuts into us for us to ―enjoy,‖ not eternally giggling but pathos-filled, memorable, reverently cherished, as parents cherish their children‘s leftovers as mementos of their lives, sweet and sour, full of smiles and sorrows, so much so that they hug in tears after their kids are now grown up and gone. Such is reverence to lifemusic toward the future. Such is musical reverential reason of living on. Surveying these seven features of storytelling, we cannot help but be struck by the relation between storytelling reason, musical and reverent, on one hand, and logic-rationality, clear and exact, on the other. They are related but distinct, and we must see how related they are in what distinctness they respectively have. Storytelling can embrace logic by vivifying it, enriching it, as ―logic‖ often use stories to clinch the argument, and use counter-examples, often short stories, to rebut alternative views. For all this, however, ―logic‖ could not care less about stories, for stories are too loosely ―illogical.‖ ―Logic‖ might as well leave storytelling alone, for ―logicizing‖ stories objectifies them, turning the first three features of storytelling—pattern, inevitability, and concentration—to mere ―logical‖ coherence, necessity, and clarity. This is to flatten storytelling, abolish penetrative Features Four, Five, Six, and Seven. Storytelling is killed by ―logic,‖ as Chuang Tzu‘s Hun Tun; the story bears repeating (7/33-35): Emperor of South Sea is Shu; Emperor of North Sea is Hu; Emperor of the Middle is Hun Tun. Shu and Hu oftentimes meet at Hun Tun‘s Land. Hun Tun treats them very well. Shu consults Hu on how to repay Hun Tun‘s hospitality, ‗People all have seven holes to

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see, hear, eat, and breathe; this [person] alone has none. Let‘s try and dig them.‘ Daily one hole is dug; seven days, and Hun Tun dies.

Now, the fact that we read this story of the death of Hun Tun, the fact that this story still stands fascinating us, shows—intimates—that storytelling is alive as killed, as Hun Tun is alive as killed. This fact shows further that logic-rationality can enrich musical reason by killing it in gratitude, in reverence. Seven holes of living-sensing were dug in gratitude into Hun Tun the Ambiguous. Ambiguity dies of ―sensing‖ dug into it; ambiguity sensed clearly (as ―ambiguity‖) ceases to be ambiguous, so Hun Tun dies; yet ambiguity sensed clearly is ambiguity sensed as ambiguity, and so by dying, Hun Tun comes alive as ambiguity. Hun Tun comes alive by dying, true to its name, ambiguity. From now on, Hun Tun the ambiguous will be clearly sensing matters-ambiguous as ambiguous, as the Outer Chapters and Miscellaneous Chapter do the book of Chuang Tzu, making these two collections of chapters valuable. Everything is revalued; nothing is devalued. Human life is ―drunk-lived, dream-die 醉生夢死,‖ thereby drunk-died, dream-live, with Chuang Tzu dreaming to be a butterfly. This is to say, we can now reason clearly in ambiguity, and become ambiguously clear. We must be subtly precise, accurately ambiguous. All this is possible thanks to the ―gratitude‖ of clarity-exactitude of ―logic‖ to reverently repay the hospitality of ambiguity. Ambiguity remains as does exactitude and clarity, mutually benefiting and invigorating, even through death. ―How do we do it?‖ That is the question. We must realize our how as we do it, with one condition—gratitude. Never fight but treat each other—logic-rationality, musical reason— with respect and hospitality, and gratitude. Never lord one over the other, saying that Ambiguity is nothing but ―analytical logic‖ in the hide, or that Logic is a truncated abstraction, irrelevant to actuality.684 We must instead treat each other with respect (in reverence) and gratitude (of music), so as to inter-enrich. That is the existential imperative of inter-existence of two sorts of reasons, logic and music, grateful and respectful; and then there will open out an open way, the way of open arms, one toward the other. But, then, all this is about the relation between logic-rationality and musical reason. What about musical reason confronted with the ―unreason‖ of actuality? Here, logic-rationality cannot help, for ―logic‖ just cuts off illogicality and would have nothing to do with it; all arguments against religion (―unreason‖) stem here. Musical reason can contain unreason, and must struggle with unreason in actuality; we think, and ask, ―But how does it do it?‖ We are in for a surprise. Musical reason thrives in unreason in actuality. Struggle of reason against unreason in music is not denied, but the very struggle constitutes thriving—in music, for music thrives in dissonance that is part of music.

684

We may have said so for ―clarity‖; we apologize.

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Chapter 30

MUSICAL REASON IN “UNREASON” The above description of musical reverential reason sounds beautiful out of this world. The description seems preached freely with a Socrates in marketplace, concocted with a Descartes in armchair before fireplace, and written quietly with a Kant in small peaceful town. Actually, musical reason was wailed out of bloody unreason, dipped and hammered out in the smelly selfish mess of this ugly cruel world. The high lotus flower-music of reverent reason arises out of unsightly mud,685 never like mud yet even the very ―never like mud‖ arises because of the mud. Four points portray such reason within unreason: pain, miracle, tension, and saying.

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ONE: PAIN China is thoroughly drenched in suffering, human and non-human. Pain breeds pathos to sound forth dirges and lamentations, in rituals, in letters, in life. All writings in China are provoked by unreasonable pain; Maxine Hong Kingston (The Women Warrior, China Men) and Iris Chang (The Rape of Nanking) tell of countless stories of China‘s unspeakable pain today. Her own stories too dire to bear, Iris Chang committed suicide. Here are historic ―classics‖ recited through the ages. Southern Ch’u Laments 楚辭 and northern Poetry Classic 詩經 inter-influenced to compose China‘s tragic literature. The Tso Commentaries 左傳 chronicle the world‘s bloodiest cutthroat histories. Provoked by frustrations at constant intrigues and injustices, Confucius turned to shape Chinese culture. Forced to retire from brutal world, Taoists turned cultural undercurrent hammering out deep thoughts on life in cosmos. Han Fei 韓非 had to write the substantial Han Fei Tzu 韓非子, out of royal favor, poisoned later. Ssu-ma Ch‘ien devoted life to massive Historical Records 史記, due to unjust punishment by royal court he loved. Wang Ch‘ung 王充 had to devote half his life (30 odd 685

「出淤泥而不染」, says 周敤頤 of his beloved 蓮花 in ―愛蓮說,‖ conveniently cited in its entirety in 諸橋轍次著, 大漢和辭关, 東京都大眾館出版社, 昭和三十五年, IV: 1130. Musical reason is the lotus flower out of the worldly mud, and belongs to it.

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years) to Balanced Critiques 論衡, after first half of failures at world-reform. Adopted ―official doctrine,‖ politicized, Confucians fought losing fights against their ―protection.‖ All great volumes have subtext of bloody biography. History is tragic.

TWO: MIRACLE

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Naturally many pages tainted sweat and blood have been lost, destroyed. Miraculously they are found and compiled again, often under great poverty, stress and persecution. A strange phrase characterizes this strange continuity.686 It is remarkable that‖ a phrase, casually tossed out during a dialogue ―when Confucius was only three, should have remained an unalterable conviction for the Chinese for 2,500 years. The phrase is recorded in the Tso Commentaries, Duke Hsiang 24th Year, the Three Incorruptibles 三不朽, Virtues, Feats, and Words that Stand through the ages 立德, 立功, 立言. Virtues and feats—good and bad ones—were transmitted to later ages through words, the least incorruptible of the three. We call the word-transmission, ―history,‖ the least useful and most perishable, which sound and sing forth in repeated exigencies. They are scratches on the sand that miraculously stay through time, lost and then recovered, and lost again, and then discovered, again and again. This is an incredible ―immortality in this world‖ through pain. No one knows how all this has happened. Lieh Tzu the Taoist, whose volume has gone through so many rounds of ―lost and found, and found mutilated‖ in its own history, crystallized our wonder in a crisp allegory, saying,687 Power asked Fate, ―How would you be effective as I?‖ Fate said, ―How would you be so effective as to compare with me?‖ Power said, ―Long-lived, short-lived, honored, humble, rich, poor, these are what I can-make.‖ Fate said, ―Father P‘eng was not wise above legendary Yao, Shun, and lived to 800; great Yen Hui was not inept below people, and lived to 18; Confucius was not less virtuous below dukes, and was trapped in dangers; . . . If your power is capable, how did you make this one long-lived and that one short-lived, humble the wise and honor the inept, impoverish the good and enrich villains?‖ Power said, ―If, as you said I am ineffective, things are as such, then is it as you control it?‖ Fate said, ―Being said ‗fated,‘ how could there be ‗control‘? The straight I push, the crooked I let be, long-lived of themselves, short-lived of themselves, . . . How could I know about it? How could I know about it?‖

Power is reduced powerless, Fate is ignorant, and the mystery of things as they are remains. What is more, unreasonable ups and downs, utterly maddening, should be recorded and transmitted to us to provoke our anger, and provoke ancients into paragon.

686 687

Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963, p. 13. 列子, 力命第六 (臺北三民書局, 民82, pp. 191-192).

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THREE: TENSION

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We have seen how all thinking in China has been provoked and performed in turbulence, some lifelong, to death. All history records such turbulence, and such thinking and proposals—oral and recorded—were made in turbulence. Let us repeat. These records were made, then lost in fire and in dusty oblivion, repeatedly, and recovered, repeatedly. What we see here is the tension of reason with unreason, within unreason. Suffering inexorable and unreasonable provokes wailing incontrollable, which leads to writing boundless. The Great Preface to the Poetry Classic 詩序 must be repeated here. It says, roughly, that Poetry is what our intention arrives. Intention forms 為 in the heart, to issue in words to form poetry. Feelings move at our core 心, to take form 形 in words, but wording out is not enough, so we groan it. Groaning is not enough, so we intone to sing it. Singing it is not enough, so our hands dance, our feet tap, unawares. Feelings issue in voices, voices crisscross to form music 音. Governing the world to make it at home 安 in music, such governance is in concord 和,688 but then quite often music and dance turn tragic beyond words, beyond expression. Such struggle, such revolt, is king of all. In lifetime, reason suffers defeat; beyond lifetime, through history, musical reason continually sounds forth, often muffled by wailing and sobbing. Occasional sonorous lament of musical reason can be heard, however. Tu Mu stood, and wailed at the burnt ruins of the magnificent Palace built by Tyrant First Emperor of Ch‘in 秦始皇 out of denuding many hills,689 Oh, those who destroyed the Six States were Six States, not Ch‘in. Those who gutted the families of the Ch‘in were Ch‘in, not people of the world. Alas! If the Six States were each to love their people, it would have been enough to repulse the Ch‘in, and again if Ch‘in were to love the peoples of the Six States, Ch‘in‘s hegemony would have extended from three generations to myriad generations; who would have been able to gut the Ch‘in? The people of Ch‘in had no time to lament over themselves [before they were exterminated so soon], so later generations lament for them. Later generations lament over them and do not learn from it as the mirror [of life], to let later people lament over these later generations. The felt tension here is unbearable, reason in unreason, lamenting-history reenacted in such tragic lack of reflections, so often blood-drenched, to breed musical reason, lifelong, dead serious.

688

This is from 詩序. The same sentiment in similar phrases, expanded politico-cosmically, appears in ―樂記‖ of禮記 (臺北市三民書局, 2004, pp. 513-551) and Mencius 4A27, shortened to a phrase. 689 Tu Mu‘s blood-dripping laments appear in his ―Prose-Poem on E-p‘ang Palace‖ that the First Emperor of Ch‘in 秦始皇 built, only to be destroyed soon after by his people who toppled him, 杜牧, ―阿房宮賦,‖ 古文觀止, 臺南麗文文化公司, 1994, pp. 604-610.

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FOUR: SAYING So, musical reason is a life-verb, a historic drama dead serious, lived-serious. Taoists say jokingly, ―This is no joke! Be at home in these inevitabilities through which we cannot help but go.‖ ―Back off one step; vast ocean, sky high,‖ and we freely ―roam and soar‖ far.690 Confucians on their part chant, ―This is no joke! Better die a violent death in rightness!‖ And then Confucius was laughed at by ―insane people‖ to whom he rushed to talk with, but they eluded him.691 The admirable resolve of Confucians, the laughter of the Insane recluses, Confucius being sensible enough to rush to them to learn from, and their eluding him, thereby teaching him with their eluding, are all quite significant, and, mind you, the significance is provoked by sufferings unreasonable, quite rampant. The point is this. All these sayings are actually the soundings forth, the chanting-singing, of musical reason. The Great Preface to the Poetry Classic comes to mind again—chanting in suffering, for we simply cannot help it. Han Yü was right: Exigencies make music.692 When things do not obtain their balanced-peace 平, they all sound-forth 鳴. Grass, trees are voiceless; wind shakes, they sound. Water is voiceless; wind agitates, it sounds. . . . People with words are also thus; they cannot help to utter-words. Their phrases have thoughts, their cries have pathos, whatever comes out of the mouth as voices are all imbalanced 不平. Music is [thus] an overflow of what is pent up inside with what is good at sounding-forth 鳴. . .. Such music is musical reason all too tragic and reverential, not cynical or self-abandoned. We are awestruck at ―reason‖ within unreason, reason nourished and strengthened by bloody unreason. We do not understand. Is it the life-force that pushes us forward, come what may? Is the life-force among humans, never a brute fact but keeps emerging, sensible precisely provoked by senseless antagonism? If so, such life-force beyond our thinking and understanding is what enables us to make sense. Unreason is the sense-making power, the music-making reason, the musical reason beyond human reason—in which we move, live, and have our being. We are awestruck indeed. The king of all this is what is ―beyond‖ us, which means ―we do not know.‖ The heart has reason that reason does not know, says Pascal; the heart of things has music that our ears do not hear, says China. Little Mary scribbled on paper and asked me, ―Daddy, what is this?‖ I said, ―I don‘t know, dear. What is it?‖ ―It‘s a design! Don‘t you know?‖ ―Oh I‘m sorry. I did not know that.‖ Years later, she said, ―I like David, Dad.‖ I said, ―Oh, good. When are you getting married?‖ ―Dad! You don‘t understand!‖ As baby or as grownup, Mary is beyond me. I have much to learn! ―Natural science‖ is a blanket name for our toil at knowing, hearing, and understanding things, all beyond us. The word ―insanity‖ shows our chauvinistic refusal to admit to those who are beyond us that they are indeed beyond us. They beat the drums we cannot hear, much less follow. 690

―一宅而寓於不得已,‖ ―知共不可奈何而安之若命‖ appear in Chuang Tzu 4/30, 43; 5/20). ―退一步, 海闊天空‖ is a popular saying. ―逍遙遊‖ is the title of Chuang Tzu‘s Chapter One. 691 The incident was so famous as to be recorded in two different places, Analects 18/5, Chuang Tzu 4/86-89. 692 ―大凡物不得共平則鳴‖ begins 韓愈‘s sigh, ―送孟東序,‖ 古文觀止, 高雄麗文文化, 1994, pp. 696-703.

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―On hearing Tao, the upper people assiduously practice it. On hearing Tao, [it is] to the middle people as if there, as if not-there. On hearing Tao, the low people laugh greatly at it. No laugh, not enough to be Tao,‖ said Lao Tzu.693 It is low people‘s laughing that alerts us to profundity of the Tao; it is chauvinistic label ―crazy‖ that spots the profundity of the special people. To say all this assumes that there is nothing without its own music of reason, and many pieces of music are waiting for our attentive listening. We are constantly surrounded by strange music. For John Cage, the street noises in Manhattan are music more exquisite than any that he composes. We envy him. Saying so does not mean that all music is happily enjoyable. Laments and dirges abound around us as well. The point here is that, sad or no, nothing is without music, music is sensible, sense is reasonable, and so nothing is without reason although many things are beyond our small reason to capture. Now, we must not think it special to accommodate special people, for they actually train us to accommodate all people and all things beyond us, and everything is actually beyond us, deserving our special care and treatment—children, utensils, air, water, trees, birds, grass, trash, everything. Therefore, our special responsibility to special care for all things is not something dispensable; we cannot shirk it. It is required of us, our life-imperative, for this reason. We ourselves are shown what we ourselves are, upper people, middle, or low people, by our reactions to things-outside beyond us. Our reaction expresses ourselves and judges us; this thought is so scary. ―Insanity‖ exposes our chauvinistic insensitivity, our being low and uncouth; ―special people‖ indicates that we must ever be ready to learn, be nimble and patient not occasionally but as our abiding feature of daily living, and all this should be cultivated as our generosity that promises our growth to nurture their growth. Special people are ever ready to train us to become noble cultured people, authentic humans. The special people are heaven-sent special teachers we cannot afford not to study under, with care and reverence. Their ―special music‖ keeps calling us to learn to listen with care, so that their profundity translates into our lives, enriching us. Their music cannot help but spread everywhere. It only requires of us to stop our chauvinistic insensitivity, to let their special music spread, and the musical spread translates its throbbing rhythm into us, from whoever willing to listen to impress another who is willing to listen.694 After all, it is the nature of music to spread, to translate. Now, translation is a fascinatingly tricky idea, and at the same time, a ubiquitous necessity of life. We must consider this subtle, slippery, and difficult task of our life, to constantly translate one ―insane‖ idea into another we can grasp, one mode of thinking and living into another, on pain of our own impoverishment if not demise.

693

―上士聞道, 勤而行之. 中士聞道, 若存若亡. 下士聞道, 大笑之. 不笑不足以為道.‖ 道德經 41. See also 1 Corinthians 2:14, Matthew 7:6. Kuang-ming Wu wrote on this theme, Nonsense: A Cultural Meditation on the Beyond, 587 pages, yet to publish. 694 See Part IV, Appendix II: Counselor as Poetic Pediatrician-Mother.

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Chapter 31

TRANSLATION Music spreads from its composer to its performers to its hearers. So does reason. Let us call this spread ―translation‖ in the widest sense. Logic-rationality translates itself in argument. Musical reason translates in all modes thinkable in life, life-translation of sense, rhymed in sense and rhythmic in heartbeat. Six features are here among many others,695 translation from thinking to writing, from me to you, from one culture to another, from past to now, from now to future, and from life to after-life, various modes of translation. We thus see what translation can mean, how translation transforms life, and so how important translation is. It is the nature of music to spread, and so to think of translation in this way amounts to probing the actions and effects of musical reason on life, reverentially.

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ONE: TRANSLATION FROM THINKING TO WRITING Translation at the root is life-potentiality giving birth to actuality, by giving birth to the mind‘s half-baked ideas, brooding thoughts, first firmed up in verbal expression, and then confirmed by the hands. O, how exciting it is to see the grandiose nebulous ideas floating midair to take shape, crystallized, on paper, under my very eyes! I am surprised to see that I had such and such ideas at all, and I now realize how good they are, however ―bad‖ they are ―objectively,‖ for they are me myself, and I am ―good‖ beyond good and evil. And then, I realize how, and how much, they remain to be refined. These crystallized ideas are my other, myself other than myself. These ideas on paper are my child; they are mine yet not mine, to be re-created further. From potential me to actual me, and then from my actual me to my better me, these two stages compose my inner existential translation, musical reason singing myself out in the objective open, to let me see.

695

None of the typical essays on translation in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, eds., Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, University of Chicago Press, 1992, has such a wide and deep vista on translation, being limited as they all are by logic-rationality toward exact clarity.

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TWO: TRANSLATION FROM ME TO YOU Writing out is for me to show to the other, first to myself-as-another, then to the other-asmy-alter-ego. Translation is musical reason singing out to appeal, surging up to persuade, to invite interpretation and refinement. My writing is translation from me to you; you try out your understanding for confirmation and refinement, for perhaps I was putting things that way to invite misunderstanding, or to invite realization of what I have not thought of. Musicians often do so, as writers. Joseph Joachim the violinist suggested improvements to Johannes Brahms‘ Violin Concerto, as did Zara Nelsova the cellist to Samuel Barber‘s Cello Concerto.696 Translation is inter-translation in musical co-resonance. As performers improve on compositions, so readers improve on essays. Readers are inter-musicians, co-composers and co-performers. Mencius gave us an extraordinary inter-life translation. The mortal pain of a bull was translated into the King Hui‘s visceral feeling for a fellow living being that Mencius urged the King to spread—translate—to human families of the King‘s ruled people. Ethics and sociopolitics are inter-existential inter-translation. Ethical-social-political obligations of common humanity that Mencius translated out of our deep recesses were then written down for posterity-readers, and ―writing down‖ is translation, through time.

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THREE: TRANSLATION FROM ONE CULTURE TO ANOTHER This is usual ―translation‖ from one language into another. Here what has been noted, refinement of what is actualized, translated out of my mumbling mind, to communicate, comes to a head. The necessity of refinement shows the gap between what is intended and what is accomplished, inherent in translation, from one culture to another, although fidelity, not refinement seems to be at stake here. What is the relation between fidelity and refinement, however? Once Wu was lecturing on Japanese Haiku, when Dr. Barabtarlo, professor in Russian literature, insisted that no poetry in its mother language can be translated into another language. Wu retorted that if that is true, no poetry would be understood, for understanding is a sort of understanding in another language-of-the-hearer, and the point of writing poetry would be lost; we are sealed in solipsism. A fussy Name-scholar Hui Tzu asked Chuang Tzu how he could know fish self-enjoying if he is not fish. Asked if Hui is not he, how Hui could ask him how he knows fish being happy, Hui answers he knows—though he is no Chuang—Chuang is not fish; that bankrupts Hui. So Chuang says, ―Let‘s trace back to the root of the matter. Your question shows that you are not me and know me enough to ask me, as I am not fish and know fish enough to feel their joy. So, you question really asks how all this happens. I say, I know fish on this river

696

Joachim‘s advice in close friendship with Brahms is too well-known to document. On Nelsova‘s friendly suggestions to Barber, see the booklet accompanying Zara Nelsova: Decca Recordings 1950-1956, 5-CD set, 2004, p. 11.

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Translation

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Hao, by being here now with the fish, as you know me on the Hao with me.‖697 Being ―with another here now‖ is enough to know the other and convey the interpersonal scene heartfelt. We today also can understand the ancient Hui-Chuang debate millennia ago, and so historical translation is feasible but it requires historians‘ reconstructions of the ―here now‖ of the days past, as we read today the Chuang Tzu reconstructed by textual criticisms. Their reconstructions are the accounts given698 of the old; they may differ yet we can discern their convergence to the identical scene ―here now,‖ as performers differ in their various performances of a composition to convey the identical composition. Likewise, our readings of the above debate may differ, yet we know they are not Confucian but typical of Chuang Tzu. Many histories on an identical scene could be juxtaposed to help inter-correct, as many performances of the same compositon could elucidate the genius of that composition, yet these performances cannot be spliced. A composite history is no mechanical splicing of performances, which would be a monster. Armed with such consideration of how we can understand the past ―here now‖ with historians‘ reconstructions, let us rethink of Wu‘s response to the impossibility of translating poetry, to advance our understanding of ―translation.‖ Looking back, Wu now realizes that both sides are extremes; the truth must be a mixture of these contrary poles, as Robert Pinsky said,699 Translation, always, is a matter of degree. Even the most methodical legal document, expertly moved between languages, will lose some nuances and create others. . . . At the other extreme, the most wildly innovative writer cannot be absolutely original. The work, even if by defiance or annihilation, translates what came before it. But then where is translation in constant make-over? Since translation of one language into another is always a sort of transformation, yet translation aims at fidelity of conveyance, translation requires ―faithful transformation,‖ an oxymoron. Only copying can ensure fidelity, and transformation cannot be copying. Thus translation has to engage in a re-creation of the original in a new linguistic world, re-creating the sense, sensibility, and sentiment that is as close to the original language as possible, in another language. In ideal translation, we transfer a set of nuances to another set in another linguistic world, similar and new—that‘s true translation. Translation is a musical transposition; musical reason alone can understand to execute this musical-literary stunt of reenactment.

FOUR: TRANSLATION FROM PAST TO NOW Re-creation of a composition is what ―history‖ does to us. Collingwood calls it a ―reenactment‖; history is we-today asking the past to answer us. His ―logic of question and answer‖ is revolutionary: the meaning of a statement is its answer to a question; a statement means nothing till we find the question it was meant to answer. Similarly, history means 697

This story in Chuang Tzu 17/87-91 aptly concludes the profound Chapter Seventeen, ―Autumn Flood.‖ This is Confucius giving account of old 述 (7/1). 699 Robert Pinsky‘s words appear on the back-cover of Poetry: The Translation Issue, April 2007. 698

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nothing till it answers our question to the past.700 It is Socrates‘ dialogues writ historical in today‘s translation. For all the revolutionary implications of Collingwood‘s ―history as reenactment in answer to our questions,‖ it is too narrow for our purpose here, to probe what translation from past to now means. We ―translate‖ the stories of the past into our life today so as to learn from it to live our lives today better and more sensible, more than sentences. As we face our formidable problems today, we are not left alone helpless, as long as we have history at our side to consult with. Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, Santayana warns. So, translation from the past is our life-reenactment—not just in thinking, as Collingwood would have it—of the past experience to ―fit‖ somehow into our experience today. Interestingly, Bultmann in his conscientious historical reconstruction of Jesus‘ ―words‖ (for he thinks words are the only thing the historians can reconstruct), he announces three methodological points: we are in history, we are history; we question history that answers and teaches us; history is left to us via words that live in history.701 These three points existentially agree with Chinese view of history. Still, in the thicket of the concrete, Chinese history and China‘s reflections on history do not say such meta-points. China only skewers ancient words, never thinking on what skewering 貫 and going-through 通 amount to. They never think of what reflection means, or what history really is, but just this or that classic really means, how best to compile history books, what proper uses histories are to put to, what sort of scholars deserve to write history, etc.702 A view must be expressed different from the traditional on ―forgeries 偽書‖ in textual criticism. The word implies that the fabricated books parading as authored by notables were a plague to be exterminated, yet the fabrications could be regarded more beneficial than a nuisance, for two reasons. One, we must remember that in some cases, we would have nothing of the famed author without such fabrication. Teng Hsi Tzu 鄧析子, the renowned pioneer scholar of Names 名家之祖, would have been completely unknown today were it not for the fabricated miscellanies that pass today as his writings.703 Two, later additions and emendations can be less obscure, unorganized, scattered, or miscellaneous than the originals, for later writers have clearer retrospective sense of what the original writers intended, and can clarify if not elucidate the gist of the matter. As a debit side, 700

R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiograpy, 1939, 29-43, An Essay in Metaphysics, 1940, pp. 21-48, The Idea of History, 1946, 1993, pp. 485-487, Oxford at the Clarendon Press. 701 Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus and the Word (1934), NY: Charles Scribner‘s Sons, 1958, pp. 1-10. 702 Confucius studied ancient wisdom 學而識 by 一以貫之 (15/3). 劉知幾(唐) wrote 史通, while 章學誠(清) wrote 文史通義, as 司馬遷 evaluated 春秋 to write 史記, 班彪 and 班固 evaluated 史記 to write 漢書, 劉勰 in 文心雕龍 (史傳) surveyed all historical writings up to his day, 晉書 (the 83rd volume) evaluated many historians, and 隋書 (經籍志) evaluated many history volumes. See 許凌雲 in 中國史學名著評介 (倉修良主編), 臺北市里仁書局, 民83, 1:537. 703

It gives pain to read the disparaging tone in 導讀 thrown all over the beautiful profound text in 新譯鄧析子, 臺北三民書局, 民86. Such ―standard treatment of forgeries‖ is understandable because of Chinese reverence of historical authenticity, but it is also somewhat un-Chinese because the ―forgers‖ are also historical personage who voluntarily stayed anonymous, without self-glorification for all their efforts at restoring the originals by mimicking them.

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however, later additions and emendations can often lose the multivalent implications and connotations or the vigorous originals, and/or run into extremes, losing the original balance in emphasis. We have such examples in the book of Chuang Tzu that has three divisions, the Inner 內篇, the Outer 外篇, and the Miscellaneous Chapters 雜篇. The Inner Chapters are allegedly from Chuang Tzu‘s own hand, vigorous, multivalent, balanced, and obscure. The Outer Chapters are clearer, punchier, and sometimes one-sided. The Miscellanies are so clear as to be one-sided often. The latter two clusters clarify the first cluster. So, after discerning authenticity or fabrication of what is handed down to us, we had better take a kinder view than calling ―fabrications‖ the later writers‘ efforts at making additions to the original classics. They are posterity-writers‘ reenactment of renowned past, trial at re-creating hand-down of tradition, a sort of translation-in-time. We today in China owe much to those ―forgeries.‖

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FIVE: TRANSLATION FROM NOW TO FUTURE As we go from past to now, so we go from today to tomorrow. We constantly translate our present into the future, by learning the past to teach today on how to plan on the future. Life is learning or it is nothing, and there is no learning without teaching; teachers learn as they teach, and students criticize what they learn and read. The best teacher is the best learner, and the best learner is a best critic of teachers, to inter-evoke and inter-learn, as inter-students and inter-teachers. Confucius cites one-now, and his students rush in with 2, 3, 10, of the future, and such inter-evocative dialogue produces a sheer joy of rounds in mutual respect between now and future.704 Translation is wisdom transformed as it goes from one party to another, a musical chair moving from now to future.

SIX: TRANSLATION FROM LIFE TO AFTER-LIFE All the above modes of translation show that life is a living-through of various translations. Life is lived translation, translation alive to go beyond life, in history beyond history; we realize translation beyond history within history. This is hua 化 of metamorphosis—not pien 變 of change—in China. In pien-change, one thing disappears to make room for another to appear, as a lamb is changed into a lion. In huametamorphosis, one thing remains itself as it grows-transforms itself, from seed to plant, from chrysalis to butterfly. Growth deepens identity, not evaporate it. Such is translation in a most radical sense, where refinement and fidelity come together. We are however in for a more radical metamorphosis of translation, existential translation, translation from life to beyond-life, even after-life. ―Butterfly‖ is a ubiquitous symbol of transmigration from one life to another, and Chuang Tzu captures this mystery in the most mundane of our daily experience, dreaming. 704

Analects 5/6, 7/8, 16/13; 1/15, 3/8, etc.

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We know we are not butterfly, awakening is not dreaming, knowing is not not-knowing, and yet we don‘t know if we are dreaming now or awakened to a dream-before, if we are human having dreamt to be a butterfly or a butterfly now dreaming to be human.705 This ―we know‖ describes distinction that stays 有分; this ―we don‘t know‖ describes the process of life-translation, hua-metamorphosis 物化.706 Here the very self-identity translates one (man) into quite another (butterfly), as if reborn, while alive. In the Confucian world, the Heaven the trans-worldly translated itself into Confucius, as he in his this-worldly life silently acknowledged its influence in profound reverence. This self-translation is understood in terms of the task to be done. The humans translate their ―thisworldly lives‖ into serving Heaven the trans-worldly when they undertake Heaven-given mission, and they are now the sages, while remaining as they are, dead and alive. The Bible uses the word ―metatithemi‖707 to describe this mysterious process, translated consistently by King James Version as divine ―translation‖ of us out of this life, as God did Enoch.708 The Taiwanese Bible aptly puts it as ―poan-sóa 搬徙‖ and ―chhian-sóa 遷徙,‖ to move ourselves, and thereby shift us. This is an existential translation, life-translation to the beyond-life felt at our core here now. Now, we must realize that this six-point journey makes no sense in the realm of logicrationality, because all this means transition, a spread of reason out of itself as music spreads irresistibly, and ―logic‖ does not spread but only inspects. Once it spreads in actuality, however, nothing can stop it. The whole process is compellingly sensible and reasonable, yet without coercion. This is the nature of musical reason of life all too reverent—in a process called ―translation.‖ What has been insisted on deserves recapitulation. To concretize it, we take the hardest of all translations, to translate a poem, as a paradigm for all translations. Here one must not— one cannot, anyway—transpose words from one language to another. Instead, one must recreate the original, and reenact the original history of that poem. All this would usher in a new era, yet remain in the original poem-world. New ushering-in of old is old objectivity written in new subjectivity, new heaven and earth in the old cosmos. Is it strange? Yes, and yet it is not at all. All existents are thus, for they all constantly stand-out of old, parented to new birth. Any birth is new out of old, the new existent as different yet not different from the old. Every existence is a translation, reenactment and new creation in the old. China calls this new birth hua 化, shifting metamorphosis. Every change, pien 變, is a part of trans-form-ation, a hua 化 of metamorphosis. China says that every catastrophe is evolution, for there is no evolution without sudden mutation. Evolution out of old happens, erupts-in-happenstance, in mutation in novelty. Evolution must happen in revolution; system comes in dots and jerks, and smooth is sudden if not 705

See Wu, The Butterfly as Companion, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990, p. 493, index on ―butterfly.‖ 706 Chuang Tzu 2/94-96. This irresistible story concludes the no less irresistible Chapter Two. It is so awesome, echoing the story of Emperor Hun Tun (7/33-35) that concludes the whole Inner Chapters. It would be fun to delve into their interrelation. 707 Greek ―metatithemi‖ means to ―put over (to another place),‖ i.e., transpose, change positions, transfer, turn away, change mind, change the use of words, turn away from evil to good or from good to evil, etc. See H. G. Liddell and R. Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996, p. 1117. 708 Colossian 1:13, Hebrews 11:5. They are most amazing passages in the Bible.

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random. Here (sudden) childbirth parents (sensible) adult into parent, while the new (surprise) parents the old (routine). That is translation; that is life; that is poetry. Life is poetry; reason is musical. Music and poetry are processes of translation, for life is. Why do we need music and poetry if we are alive, poetic or no, anyway? Well, poetry expresses musical reason to present life, to mirror it for us to see and shape our life further. Do you remember translation of me inside into me on paper? Seeing and shaping are the essence of translation, and are part and parcel of what it means to live as human existence. Music and poetry render precisely such service to us.

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Chapter 32

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JOY AND MUSICAL REASON Here we go again, joy has come back. We should never forget. Whatever else it is, musical reason is music, and music樂-yüeh is homonymous with joy 樂-loh. The flowchart alive is bloody pain in time-vista that sounds forth music, yet it remains an ode to joy spreading. Let us see how ―joy‖ clinches the whole existential panorama we have been through—reason, pain, music, and spread. Han Yü 韓愈 wrote a consoling letter to a dejected friend of his, Meng Tung-yeh 孟東野, on how things sound forth 鳴 music-樂 when imbalanced 不平. Why would such description console Mr. Meng? A moment of reflection would let us realize. Sounding forth music-樂 sounds forth joy-melodious-樂 inter-homonymous; Meng imbalanced Han sounded forth in letter, the music came about, and joy arrives. Han Yü was a literary genius. His letter concretely exemplifies—performs—how musicreason spreads from his beloved Meng to him, the spread sounds forth to make music to spread joy, in six stages as described above. Pain and sorrows of Meng could not help but sound forth by resonating in his friend Han‘s heart, to sound forth, to make the music of friendship-in-the-letter, to spread joy from Meng to Han, Han to Meng, and then from these friends to readers of later. The movie, ―The Sound of Music,‖ portrays this process of life beyond life—the von Tratz family was sustained by the impossible ideal of independence of Austria under powerful Hitler—within their lifetime. The family survived, and the story was portrayed in sheer music. This story in Austria has been repeated countless times in China, and is being repeated today throughout the world. This music is part of bloody history of the painful days in music—of joy. Thus the history of pain must also be the history of joy, because of pain. Musical reason is the lifepower aroused by pain to reach joy-spreading. Pain is often unreason; joy is often reasonable. Unreason provokes reason of joy—of music. ―Are you shooting breeze?‖ Well, Yes and No. Yes, because music in pain gives me breeze. No, because what is said above has some solid rationales, both conventional and Chinese as Chuang Tzu expressed it. Let me begin with conventional wisdom based on experiences of life. Advertising ―I am normal‖ shows I am abnormal. If so, to confess ―I am off decency‖ is my first step toward decency, and so confession is good for the soul. Similarly, indirection

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expresses inexpressible actuality. If so, direct description closes off anti-actuality, i.e., pain and sorrows. Sorrows let out, pressed out and expressed in lamentation, heal sorrows by making a clean breast of them. Lamenting expression of sorrows is a poetic catharsis. Let me repeat this point another way. The ―paradox of happiness‖ says that pursuing it chases it away,709 as joke explained is joke no more. If so, confronting unhappiness makes it vanish, and making explicit injuries, anger and sorrows chases them away, for naming sorrow objectifies it to drain its power. Naming sorrow fixates it to an It. ―Performing‖ pain thus parodies it, mimicking it to demystify it, and cut it to manageable size. In sum, happiness disappears when pursued; theft vanishes when exposed. How do we expose pain? We wail our pain, shout; kids do it all the time. Pain then goes away. Now, the shouting and the wailing, aren‘t they music? Is it music of pain or joy? Isn‘t it their union, transforming pain into joy? Music is the pivot of hua 化, the transformative union of distinct opposites. Such is conventional wisdom. Chuang Tzu‘s poetry sings reverse tunes, ―Lord of Life-Nourishment 養生主.‖710 This punchy chapter begins with an amazing story of a nameless kitchen-man, ends with another amazing story of illustrious Lao Tzu‘s funeral, and is strewn with sharp sayings and stories. It begins: Do ―good‖ (as we know it), near no name; do ―bad,‖ near no cane. Just follow the spine-meridian (of nature), and life can complete, nourishing the intimate. Stories that follow explain this ―lord‖-principle of ―nourishing life.‖ A nameless kitchen-man‘s knife (of pain) cuts an ox (of things) as it dances with the ox, to life-nourish (養生) his lord (主). An officer one-legged is heaven-given, human-partaken. A wild pheasant, ten steps a peck, hundred steps a drink, trails the spine-nature, vigorous beyond feeling good. In contrast, Lao Tzu respected, his years complete and released from life-tangles, shirked no ―name‖ in ―good‖ words and sadly courted ―canes‖ of being missed in tears of pain among the disciples. Thus, good-in-nourishing nears no name (as kitchen-man), as a wild pheasant in simple steps to pecks and drinks without fancy cage. The officer does well to take his mutilation as partaking of heavenly gift, not near ―cane.‖ Beware of courting ―canes‖ of being missed in teary pain due to Lao Tzu‘s ―good‖ words, despite his completing years, released from tangles. Such way of life portrayed here dissipates ―pain‖ as it is gone through. This Chapter sings poetry as a nameless kitchen underling danced ritual music. Let us now move a step further. Reason is joy-spread through unreason. That is the lifepower of life-reason, joy out of pain, and its name is music. Such musical joy cannot—in pain—be frivolous, for pain cannot be frivolous; so musical joy is reverent. Thus pain in unreason, sound-forth of music, and joy that spreads, are sensible, reasonable, and awesome. This is life dynamic called musical reason in reverent joy spreading from the heart of my being through my family to ―Within Four Seas, all brothers,‖ all heartily gather, where the humane enjoy hills and the wise, waters, where Confucius sighs, ―O, what‘s going is like this—day and night unceasing!‖ to join river stream the throbbing bloodstream of hills alive, chanting the cosmic music of joy. 709

Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide, Boston: Wisdom, 2008, is significant in this context, though we are unsure of the author‘s actual ―performance‖ in the book. 710 Here we continue Wu‘s meditations on this Chapter in Butterfly, op. cit., pp. 281-359. Chinese Wisdom Alive : Vignettes of Life-Thinking, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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Lao Tzu‘s refrain, ―O woe where weal leans! O weal where woe lies!‖ is chimed in by Huai Nan Tzu‘s Uncle Fort at life‘s limit, ―How could this not make its opposite?‖; he reverently lives on through events ―beyond now.‖ Meanwhile, a skull by the roadside of the cosmos is ―making springs and autumns with heaven and earth,‖ empty-dried through seasons of enjoying the supreme joy with no frivolous joy.711 These stories are the cosmic perpetuum mobile, the music of the spherical reason, awesome, resounding. It is thus that China‘s tons of poems and essays relish and praise Nature, not in happy circumstances but because they enjoyed nature while in pain, to forget pain. Again, the poverty-stricken T‘ao Ch‘ien 陶潛 summed it all up for us:

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Thatched hut in people-realm, Not hear horse and buggy din; Asked, ―How could you be so?‖ Heart afar, place itself turns-aside. Pick ‗mums under east hedge, Unhurried, see south hills; Mount mist, dusk-fine, Flying birds, together, encircling. In these is ―real‖-touched; Want to explain 辯, already forget words.

Mr. T‘ao forgets words ―not hearing din of horses, buggies.‖ It is joy that forgets joy, flying with encircling birds up beyond life, here now. To say, ―already forget words,‖ says something. What is this ―something‖? Go over again what he said; you will get ―it‖ in what is said but cannot say, forgotten. ―Explaining‖ it evaporates it. Thus, saying it gets out of it, whatever ―it‖ is. So Taoists oppose Confucians touting morality, for touting gets out of being moral. This is what Brigand Chih thrashed Confucius on.712 ―Saying all this about not-saying‖ feels odd, yet it feels good to say so. Does good feeling sigh my contentedness? Does ―good feeling‖ undermine T‘ao Ch‘ien? Sighing, patting one on the shoulder may not be ―explaining 辯‖ it. Good feeling sighs to confirm; explaining evaporates it. Letting in a hint helps us nod at the joke and smile. Aren‘t ―saying‖ and ―feeling good word-forgotten‖ valid, so long as we are contented? Any composition is fine as long as it is honestly composed and happily listened. In short, to forget or not to forget, that is precisely not the question, is it? We must forget the problem of whether to forget or not to forget! Now, we have quoted repeatedly the same stories and passages to hear different tones, connotations, in different ―musical keys‖ of context, situation, and meaning. Same passages reappearing amounts to same themes in variations in time-music. That is the music of history reenacting in these pages. What does all this mean, however?

711 712

道德經 58, 淮南子, 人間, (臺北三民書局, 民86, p. 965), Chuang Tzu 18/22-29. Chuang Tzu, Chapter 29, 盜跖.

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Chapter 33

NOUN IS VERB Music moves. We must now understand this major feature of musical reason, ―moving that pleases.‖ Five points portray it. One, the West warns itself against noun-izing, while China verb-izes; two, truth is an active musical verb of inter-existing; three, music has its own tradition of patterning; four, moving is an inter-appearing, fit and pleasing; five, musical reason moving is life-drama of Tao Reasoning.

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ONE: THE WEST SELF-WARNS AGAINST NOUN-IZING; CHINA VERB-IZES Western thinking abstracts from actuality to have objects, nouns of abstract concepts, for observation and analysis. Aristotle initiated making objects by setting up Physics, Ethics, Analytic, Metaphysics, etc. Western philosophy is noun-philosophy. Recently in the West arose a movement against essentialism. Whitehead has the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. Ryle debunked ―the concept of mind‖; Rorty did ―the mirror of nature.‖ Derrida deconstructed logocentrism, i.e., melted down logicism making nouns. Drury continued Wittgenstein‘s iconoclasm by warning us against ―the danger of words.‖713 The West is lost, losing its noun-centeredness. China freely moves in and out of nouns, to verb-ize nouns, adjectives, adverbs. The West attributes grammatical fluidity to immature ―lack of grammar,‖ not realizing China‘s grasp of language alive and mobile. A sentence in Change Classic, ―The-Divinenoun-verb is what subtlesverb myriad things made-into words‖ is well-known and hardly intelligible. Chu Tzuch‘ing well explored this saying,714 yet blunts its poetic punch; our common ―divinely subtle 神妙‖ is on excellence of exploits, divinely human.

713 714

M. O‘C. Drury, The Danger of Words, NY: Humanities Press, 1973. Other examples are familiar to us. See 朱自清‘s ―「好」與「妙」‖ in 朱自清全集, 臺南市文國書局, 1996, pp. 87-100.

說文解字詁林正補合編 has etymological explanations on 神 (2:86-88) and 妙 (11:1149, 1184, 1317) (臺北鼎文書局, 民72). On ―divine 神‖ see Wu, Butterfly, op, cit., pp. 319-321, cf. 482 (index on ―shen 神‖). Chinese Wisdom Alive : Vignettes of Life-Thinking, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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Then, the Classic has ―The formnoun-verb and-[or]-to above is called Tao; the formnoun-verb and-[or]-to below is called implementnoun-verb‖715; this saying is unintelligible as rendered here, for it is untranslatable, and is poetry. All sayings in the Change Classic are poetically untranslatable, for they trace the music of the cosmos, as cosmic music sighing human words. Confucius told us to (12/11) ―Rulerverb rulers, subjectverb subjects [as] fatherverb fathers, sonverb sons.‖ Mencius proposed (1A7) to ―Oldverb my olds to reach people‘s olds, youngverb my youngs to reach people‘s youngs,‖ thereby to (1B1) ―Sameverb joys with people‖ and (1B2, 1B5) ―sameverb these with people,‖ as the royal road to true rulership. In (2A2) the ―breath-thrust of flood-so 浩然之氣,‖ every character is a verb moving into every other; even ―of‖ is a verb moving-into. Lao Tzu‘s ―tao‖ in his ―Tao can tao 道可道‖ is both verb and noun. Han Yü‘s ―Originnoun-verb-adjective Tao 原道‖ is well-known. In a common phrase, ―pine wind 松風,‖ both characters are nouns, adjectives, adverb, and verbs. T‘ao Ch‘ien‘s ―heart farverb-adverb, place selfnoun-adverb asidenoun-adjective 心遠地自偏‖ is so complex and compact, and therefore so punchy. And the list goes on. Thus, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs are turning verbs. All words in China are actionwords. ―Reason‖ in China is ―reasoning‖ as ―music‖ is a moving, a life-verb always in flux quite sensible. ―Sense‖ here is being sensible, sensitively sensing, and sensitizing, all at once, always flowing in and out of nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, conjunctions and prepositions; they are verbs as verbs are nouns, etc. Such ―mobile musicale‖-reason is reasoning-as-verb.

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TWO: TRUTH IS A MUSICAL VERB OF INTER-EXISTING This reasoning musically sensing is called ―beauty.‖ Beauty appears ineffably as an apple, say, is truthfully painted as observed, and then appreciatively observed as painted. Here beauty is a verb, an apple-beauty there that comes to be living-lived in me here, observing, appreciating, painting—even when my hand is not painting. The truth of actuality comes lived ―subjective,‖ and appears ―objective‖ as lived subjectively. An appearing of actuality, an apple, is thus an inter-existential spread of beauty from apple-object to me-subject, thereby from subject to object to inter-subjects, to and fro, back and forth, sensibly, reasonably, and musically. This music-―verb‖ of truth-beauty appears as culturally patterned, for ―culture‖ is collective inter-subjects.

THREE: MUSIC HAS ITS OWN TRADITION OF PATTERNING Music inter-subjectively appears, in musical rhythm set-free. Each musical piece, as each musical movement, has its own pattern to be this piece of music and no other. This pattern is what makes the music reasonable; this moving pattern is what makes this reason musical. 715

―神也者妙萬物而為言者也‖ (朱, op. cit., pp. 127-128) and ―形而上者謂之道, 形而下者謂之器‖ appear in 易經, 第六章 and 繫辭上傳, 第十二章 (臺北三民書局, 民85, pp. 571, 526) Just look into 魯周公世家第三 in the 史記 (op. cit., 2: 508-546), and we find eight nouns at least (國, 臣, 風, 相, 冠, 內, 私, 因) that are used as verbs, three of which (國, 臣, 相) are used in two or even three different verb-senses.

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In addition, a cluster of pieces of music come to share a certain pattern of their respective patterns of rhythms and modulations. The music in the West has a certain pattern of patterns, a certain air peculiar to the West; so does Chinese music a certain Chinese air.716 This pattern makes a historical tradition-of-understanding in a culture. Each culture comes to have its own interpretive tradition of its reasoning in its writings. Each culture has its own history manifesting a specific sort of pattern of intelligibility, a certain musical air of sense that cannot be verbalized explicitly but can be caught as invincibly there. How do we ―catch‖ it? It is there, so be there. How are we to be there? To understand music, we must just listen; to understand a poem, we must read it aloud. We have two examples, negative and positive. First, we go a negative way. We ponder on three questions raised in the insert to a poetry magazine,717 ―What are the poems about? How do the poems mean? Who needs these poems?‖ We thought the questions too cognitive, and changed them to ―What is a poem? How do we get poems? Why do we have poems?‖ Even then these questions are madding-ly less than useless in China. Well, we will ponder on them in a Chinese way, anyway, as follows. What is a poem? It is heart-voices heart-echoing, where ―heart‖ is the heart of being, going from heart to heart, echoing from poet to me, and to you. How do we get poems? We need not read many poems to get them. We only need to resonate deeply with one poem at a time, by reciting it aloud, again and again. Why do we need poems? Now, do we need to answer it? How could we live without poems if they resound as music in us? Who needs poems? Well, who needs to live as deep as being-human? How do we read poems? The vast ocean does not need to be drunk up to be known. We only scoop up a small cup of its water, and touch and taste a bit of it, and then scoop another small cup of it from another place of the same ocean, and touch and taste a bit of that. And so on. The small anthology in a Poetry magazine is a Western gem of collection of small cups of water from many varied spots of the vast Atlantic Ocean. Translation scoops a cup. A cup is always shaped, with a smell, to shape the smell of the ocean water scooped. These poets ―translated‖ life, these translations translated those translations. Reciting them, we translate them into us. Remember recycling that does not pollute? Are these translations truthful to the originals? Well, does it matter? Does the translation misunderstand the original? Well, the ―original‖ is me deep inside. So it matters much that we all translate, and there vanishes the ―problem‖ of misunderstanding. We simply scoop, from the ocean, and from one another scooping. This anthology begins the scooping, our reading group continues it. Poems spread to diaries, to journals, and then to fictions, and essays, in China as in Japan. Poetry is these writings, the heart-voices heart-echoing, spreading the musical reason of awed life. Poetry must move on this way, the Way, the Tao, that is musical reason. Sadly, this anthology collects poems that mostly read jagged, aggressive, and hurtful. It has one Swahili 716

Cf. ―China‖ in Willi Apel, Harvard Dictionary of Music (1972), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977, pp. 151-157. Menuhin has high regard for pervasive influence of music in China, in The Music of Man, Toronto: Methuen, 1979, p. 30, etc. Sadly, no Chinese writing on Chinese music specifies its distinctness. 717 POETRY: The Translation Issue, Chicago: Poetry Foundation, April 2007.

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poem, one Korean poem, and the rest are Western. All this is a Chinese reaction to this Western anthology of predominantly Western poems. Secondly, here is a positive example of cultural air. Yehudi Menuhin (violin) and Louis Kentner (piano) played together Brahms‘ Violin Sonatas. They take time, to hug time, to hug silence, to feed us. Menuhin has sensitive vibratos and rubati, to trail long into silence, and lets loud be up loud (never attacks it), but himself stays here low. That is why the louder he goes, the louder his silence sounds. We on our part enter the music and are nourished, for silence is roomy; we are at home here, at ease in us, refreshed. It is thus that German Brahms is understood in Jewish chants of Menuhin, unlike Arthur Grumiaux‘s straight Belgian rendering,718 even though Grumiaux studied under George Enescu as Menuhin did. Now, all above admiration is thoroughly Chinese, a Chinese relishing Jewish chanting of German music, dipped in the Chinese air of musical reason appreciating German music, played in Jewish and European ways. How do we understand the Chinese air? Watson‘s words on how to understand Chuang Tzu apply also to all Chinese writings. He said,719

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In the end, the best way to approach Chuang Tzu, I believe, is not to attempt to subject his thought to rational and systematic analysis, but to read and reread his words until one has ceased to think of what he is saying and instead has developed an intuitive sense of the mind moving behind the words, and of the world in which it moves.

To ―develop‖ is to grow into an understanding, by ―moving‖ with Chuang Tzu‘s wording, with the words—nouns as verbs, adjectives as verbs, etc.—of Chinese writings. ―Moving with‖ the wording is how we come to musically understand writings in China. This is an understanding of patterning of patterns of writings, musical patterns of reasoning. This pattern of patterns is the cultural tradition of interpretation that must be caught before we can understand Chinese musical reason in Chinese writings. Richards applied Western analytical pattern to try to understand Mencius‘ writings. Fingarette noticed something ―spooky‖ in the ―ritual‖ of Confucius in social intercourse, not like Western ―social ritual‖; he had to call it ―magic,‖ ―the secular as sacred.‖720 Both forgot their own Western interpretive tradition, to miss Chinese pattern of thinking, sober, reverent, spontaneous, lived, moving, and joyous.

FOUR: “MOVING” IS AN INTER-APPEARING, FIT AND PLEASING Let us see how beauty appears in the Chinese pattern of appearing. A beautiful apple is the manner of that apple appearinng-to-me; it is an ―apple‖-appearing-this-way, and a ―thing‖ is a specific way-pattern of appearing as this thing, the Tao of things, apple and such.

718

Menuhin-Kentner recorded Brahms‘ Violin Sonatas on EMI label (LP records, no CD) in 1956-1957. Arthur Grumiaux, Gyögy Sebók (piano), ―Brahms‘ Sonatas for Piano and Violin,‖ Philips, 1995. 719 Burton Watson, The Complete Writings of Chuang Tzu, NY: Columbia University Press, 1968, p. 7. Emphases added. 720 I. A. Richards, Mencius on the Mind: Experiment in Multiple Definition (1932), Richmond, England: Curzon Press, 1996. Herbert Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred, HarperSanFrancisco, 1972.

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Things appearing is co-relative, inter-active, synonymous with ―thing-ing things 物物 and not thingedverb in/by things 物於物,‖ quite inter-subjective. I must appear in conformity with things as appropriate to things appearing-to-me. This is what Confucius and Hsün Tzu mean by ―righting names 正名,‖ to ―rulerverb rulers, subjectverb subjects 君君, 臣臣‖ patterned after ―fatherverb fathers, sonverb sons 父父, 子子.‖721 Now, in all this, ―[a] thing-ing things 物物 and [b] not thingedverb in/by things 物於物‖ goes on. Let us consider [b] first, then [a]. ―Not thingedverb in/by things 物於物‖ has three possible meanings. One, it can mean not to be thing-ed by things, not to be overwhelmed by things-appearing as to vanish my selfhood in them. ―Thing-ing things 物物 and not being thing-ed by things 物於物‖ is thus a maxim of inter-dealings with things, such as the Wheelwright disparaging722 ancient writings as useless scum,723 fearing that they turn—noun-ize—lived engagement with things to turn thing-ed by things, to become a set rule. Two, ―not thingedverb in/by things 物於物‖ can mean not to ―thing‖ things, turning things into objects to handle. The Taoists warns the Confucians‘ moral efforts of this danger. Three, ―not thingedverb in/by things 物於物‖ can mean the self overwhelmed by things to dissolve in things and things in the self. Things-self engagement must have both distinction 有分 and inter-transformation 物化. All such describes being natural, becoming-as-nature, self-so 自然; it means my self is now myself and things are thing-selves, myself-as-myself as thing-selves-as-thing-selves. This ―as‖ in the middle is the ―so‖ of ―self so,‖ and this ―as‖ is the ―and‖ in the middle of the two selves. Being natural is thus, to thingverb things. Now all these, including ―not thing-ed,‖ amount to describing ―thing-ing things.‖

FIVE: SUCH MUSICAL REASON IS THE LIFE-DRAMA OF TAO-REASONING This is to say that music is being composed by natural sensible interactions among self and things, and the taking-place is living, being-alive. To be thus natural and musical is sensible, sensing-sensed, and reasonable. In short, music is reasonable, reason is musical, and all this is shih 適, i.e., fit and comfort. Chuang Tzu punches out the point.724 Feet forgotten is the fit of sandals; waist forgotten is the fit of a belt; knowledge forgotten of Yes and No is the fit of the heart; ―in‖ not changed, ―out‖ not followed, is the fit of events met; to begin at fit and[-until] not without fit, is the fit of forgotten fit. Life‘s fitting comfort is shown in comfort forgetting the comfort, even forgetting myself enjoying myself, just being natural. Love just lives on and does not burn; only romance burns. Chuang Tzu (18/22-29) does not realize he is living until meeting an abject casual skull by the 721

Chuang Tzu 20/7. Analects 12/11, 13/3. 荀子, 正名篇 (Burton Watson, Hsün Tzu: Basic Writings, NY: Columbia University Press, 1963, pp. 139-156). 722 He ―disparaged‖ ancient writings, in order not to be thing-ed by them. 723 Chuang Tzu 13/68-74. 724 Chuang Tzu 19/62-64. The whole punch here is magnificent crescendos into de-crescendos!

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roadside, rejoicing ―with Heaven and Earth to make spring and autumn‖ seasons, in comfort of the comic fit. Both he and the skull smile together into the casual beauty of this story; we read it again and again in amazement. The fit shows itself in forgetting the very fit. Fit and forgetting go together, playing into each other in me, in things, and in situations. Besides, playing in such fit self-forgotten is how I grow into myself. No wonder kids play to grow and change, amazing the parents. This moving and this change is co-resonance in the co-vibration of life so pleasantly self-forgotten, including death and life. ―Playing‖ sounds forth the changing growth, in which hands dance, feet tap, as the Great Preface to the Poetry Classic chants and as Mencius mentions (4A27). The nameless kitchenman danced; ox, cleaver, and the man, the three synchronized to dance to the ritual music of Mulberry Grove 桑林 and Neck Head經首, to loosen the ox, and Lord Wen-hui served by the kitchen-man was fed, all smiles, pleased with this Tao of nourishment, this musical reason.725 All this is indeed life itself sounding forth music with death, the musical drama of Tao in metamorphosis between life and death, to and fro. Life composes music; death is decomposes, composing the music of decomposition into ecological cycles. All this round of life and death, change 化, nourishes the person beyond life in life. When life ends, death comes. But death means ending; death ends all, even itself. So, when life ends, death ends, too, and life begins all over. That is the enjoyment of casual skull casually tossed at wayside, quite unknown, enjoying itself in pillow-talk with Chuang Tzu, who is thus so happy, ultimately happy 至樂. Let me repeat this amazement. After life, death comes to end all, even itself, and that is the casual skull tossed casually by the roadside, to pillow on, to dream-talk with, in delight. With Heaven and Earth, a roadside skull—death—unhurriedly (從然), happily (至樂) makes springs, autumns; so Chuang Tzu confided (18/27) as he pillows the skull sleeping, so natural. The drama is got in heart, hit with hand 得心應手,726 in the whole unit of act in the wheeling-rhythm to chisel forth a life-wheel. That is the fit of music, the accomplishing reason of life. Heart-got, hand-hit, not too fast-to-slip, not too slow-to-catch, musical reason chisels forth our wheeling life with Chuang Tzu‘s Wheelwright (13/68-74). Modern physics says all particles are wavicles; China says all existents are wavesthrusting 氣 music. An ox‘s mortal jitters made the duke jitter, who then had to let the ox go, Mencius noted (1A1-7). Silent pain resonates from victim to torturer sympathetically. Pain ―magic flutes‖ away pain (Mozart) as we all shiver, ―people-sensitive at heart 不忍人之心‖ (Mencius 1A7). ―All this is ancient, too remote to life. Do you have concrete example today?‖ All right, let‘s learn from children learning. They enjoy singing what they learn; they sing their learning. All is danced out in singing rhymes and rhythm, hand waving, foot tapping. They call all their learning ―play.‖ They grow as they play; they play their learning every moment, to grow enjoying singing. Life grows learning singing in rhythmic joy, made of musical reason of joy, reason that fits, dances, playing reasoning. Kids enjoy stories singing. ―Once upon a time, Oceans Sudden and Speedy are nourished-manifested in clarity and exactitude,‖ thanks to Slow Sloth Emperor Hun Tun‘s 725 726

Chuang Tzu 3/2-12. See Wu, Butterfly, op. cit., pp. 279-359, and expanded a while ago. The original says, ―得之於手, 而應於心 got it in hand, and meet in heart‖ (13/72).

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Land, for ―Hun Tun treats them very well. Sudden and Speedy gratefully repaid Hun Tun by digging holes of clarity and exactitude, and Hun Tun vanished into them; Slow Sloth died, was no more.‖ This story of Chuang Tzu‘s (7/33-35) can be recited, simple and subtle. It can be chanted as a nursery rhyme dancing. Confucius the kid grows as he likes, unhampered by rules, chanting in rhymes (2/4), ―At 15 I decided to learn; 30, I stood, 40, unmoved, 50, knew Heaven-destined, 60, ear smooth, 70 and I follow what my heart desires and not step on rules!‖ Learning at 15, growing in 70, this is Confucius singing reason, tapping joy, awed; this is musical reason of life, reverent in joy. ―Come on, you‘ve stressed ‗reason‘ repeatedly, but do you have any definite rule of how things go in this reason? Is there tangible ‗logic‘ to all this?‖ Here we go again, my friend. You want a set of logical rules to life‘s growth; you demand a ―general geometry of human faces.‖ Human life has a definite but subtle pattern, an indescribable facial feature, as music has its own. Such musical Hun Tun-reason has its cash value; it feeds and invigorates us, this way. Idleness727 nurtures my infinite energy reserve. ―Felt, and then answer, forced, and then move, cannot help it, and then arise,‖ there is no jack rabbit, no knee jerk reaction, in the one who is a Hun Tun, who is reluctant to move, as a fully charged fighter-cock, steady as a wooden cock, and all cocks run away at just glancing it.728 It is this ―idleness‖ in oneself that made Confucius so excited he forgot to eat,729 so happy he forgot worries (7/19). This is the joy of self-fullness, relaxed and ―idle,‖ that freely goes as one desires without overstepping rules; this is the joy so full as to naturally discern, and whatever comes agrees with the ears‘ hearing (2/4). Confucius would smile at T‘ao Ch‘ien 陶潛 whose ―Mr. Five Willows,‖ at every meeting of minds in reading, is so happy as to forget to eat.730 Such idleness that can afford to skip meals! The idleness that charges me ―up with inner energies 德全‖ is how Emperor Hun Tun envelops everything in relaxed hospitality. It was this pan-hospitality that so unhurriedly welcomed an ox that it loosened itself to the kitchen-man‘s dances to the cosmic sacred music.731 ―Raison Musicale‖ is unhurried, accommodating, and so perfectly practical that it feeds life. Musical reason is life reason. As music is acquainted and appreciated only by going through it, so lived reason is acquired only by living through life, and cannot be tabulated logic-rationally. Machine does not live through and so cannot be virtuous or capable of applying human kindness to specific cases. E.g., to be kind means sometime the door must be closed, some other times it needs be shut, and the ―sometime‖ cannot be logic-rationally legislated exhaustively.

727

See Wu, ―Tanizaki‘s ‗Theory of Idleness (Randa no Setsu)‘ and ‗Japanese Philosophy,‘‖ Why Japan Matters! eds. Joseph F. Kess and Helen Lansdowne, Victoria, BC, Canada: University of Victoria, 2005, pp. 703-716. 728 Chuang Tzu‘s story of a fighter-cock (19/46-49) was added on to Emperor Hun Tun to describe him. 729 Confucius‘ ―forgetting to eat‖ is at higher, more charged level than Zen masters‘ principle of ―no work, no eat‖ or St. Paul‘s rule, ―not willing to work, no eating‖ (2 Thessalonians 3:10). On Zen‘s ―no work, no eat,‖ see 余英時‘s rambling 中國近世宗教倫理與商人精神, 臺北聯經出版公司, 2004, pp. 23-25. 730 陶淵明, , 古文觀止 (高雄麗文文化出版公司, 1995, pp. 548-551). 731 Since we quote Chuang Tzu‘s story of Emperor Hun Tun, the notions and the phrases here are all from Chuang Tzu‘s book, 15/11, 19/46-49, 3/2-13.

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Here the so-called ―common sense‖ must take over that we get only by apprenticeship in life. Machine has no common sense. This is why Confucius has said that one who has ―learnt‖ is one learnt to be humane. Socrates‘ ―Can virtue be taught?‖ is thus a wrong question. Of course, virtue can and should be taught, for that is what ―teaching‖ means. The question arises only after ―teaching‖ is confused with inculcation of operational rules of a machine. The ―definite rules‖ exist in both mechanical operations and human life-conducts, but ―definite‖ in mechanical rules differs from ―definite‖ rules of human conducts, and ―teaching machines,‖ programming some operational rules into machines, is a clumsy analogical extension from ―teaching a person,‖ personal apprenticeship to undergo living. Logicrationality spins off from machine-rules; musical reason typifies lived reasonableness. Both are sensible though quite different. We must somehow relate them after seeing their distinctions; their interrelation is effected by China-West inter-learning, seeing that the West is adept at machine-mathematics, while China has been practicing in musical reason, with reverential joy. How they come together is another question.732 We have just realized its necessity. ―In fact, China has been practicing musical reason,‖ said above. Let us see what Confucius did, no need to cite Taoists who are naturally musical. Aside from the lowest limits on whom he sadly gave up, an old ―rotten wood beyond carving‖ (5/10), ―small persons, and women beyond cultivation‖ (17/23), he avidly gave ―one‖ to induce two, three, and ten (5/9, 7/8, 16/13). He just loved, cherished, and understood each person, and ―taught‖ them accordingly tailor-made according to their respective needs, to give different pushes, even inter-contrary. Tzu Lu asked, ―On hearing it, do I do it?‖ he said, ―Father and brothers are alive, how could you hear it and do it?‖ Jan Yu asked the same question. He said, ―On hearing it, do it!‖ Asked why he answered so differently, he said, ―Ch‘iu is withdrawn, so I urged him; Yu has the energy of two men, so I restrained him.‖ (11/20) By the same token, ―loving parent 孝‖ has no single general definition, but is manifested differently in various concrete situations, always relevant to the situations.733 No concrete theme had an identical general principle from which to deduce specific applications. The princely person is perfectly human, no mechanical implement (2/12). Learning learns to be truly human734; book-learning learns from the past classics on sagely life-experiences, an apprenticeship under the ancients on how to live human. ―Learning‖ consummates the human awesome. Just a look at this person convinces us that this person is ―virtuous,‖ ―princely,‖ and ―sagely.‖ This feeling cannot be pinned down into a formula, but not nebulous, for we feel overwhelming authority 威. ―Among three people walking, there must be my teachers‖ (7/22); how delightful! So ―virtue is not alone but must have neighbors‖ (4/25), and ―where princely persons reside, how could it be uncouth?‖ (9/14). ―Princely person‘s virtue is wind; people‘s virtue is grass. The wind over grass must bend the grass.‖ (12/19) Confucius thus performed reasonable music that inter-fits to inter-resonate. For Taoists, such aura of authority of virtue blows all over; ―teacher‖ vanishes among students, as Confucius had desired not to talk as Heaven was silent (17/19), always just 732

See our concluding section in Part IV, ―Let Chinese Thinking be Chinese.‖ Analects 2/5, 6, 7, 8, (11/5, 19/18). 734 Ibid., 1/1, 6, 7, 14, 5/28, 6/27, 14/24, 17/7, etc. 733

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saying ―I don‘t know.‖735 Taoist Chuang Tzu constantly learned from birds, trees, dreams, artisans, criminals, the insane and the crippled (born or punished), even the tyrants.736 The human blends in Nature.737 Someone pouches his mouth. ―I still don‘t like the whole bit, full of half-baked ideas, though interesting; they are incomplete, requiring more explanations. Don‘t wallow in imperfections.‖738 Thank you, my friend. Tell me what those half-baked ideas are, and they will be explained as much as possible. But, you know, to be aware of imperfections and relish them, entirely differs from being satisfied with imperfection as if they were ―perfect.‖ Your disappointment is an indispensable push into the latter, so you are thanked and requested citing half-baked ideas to bake them better. To bake better half-baked ideas we need others to critically point out where half-baked what ideas we have. After realizing half-baked ideas as half-baked, however, there is nothing to prevent us from relishing them (not satisfied); in fact, it is necessary. Let us put it this way. Your warning comes close to warning against relishing half-baked ideas, which amounts to warning against relishing half-finished life. But how else could life be? Finished life is life no more, is it? It would be full-baked, finalized, dead, is it not? Since Chinese wisdom alive is thinking alive, life thinking itself, and thinking alive is always thinking in half-baked ideas, thinking in China cannot help but relishing half-baked ideas, fully realizing they are imperfect. Our description so far is enjoyable, mirroring such relishing of life itself on the go, fully aware that the lived ideas are imperfect and to improve, and improvement is enjoyable. Relishing imperfections on the go is to ―grow‖ as kids, keenly aware of their imperfections and, being aware, relish them, play their imperfections, and thereby grow into themselves. Relishing and playing with imperfections are how life grows, and growth is life dancing itself in its music sensible. Life continually grows from being imperfect to being less imperfect, always delightfully struggling to improve on imperfections. Life is thus always dipped in imperfections. Imperfections, life, joy, and growth belong together. Pull out one, and the rest collapse into senseless pieces. Thus, incredible as it may sound, imperfections belong to reason, as long as life as growth out of imperfection in imperfections is sensible. The life-vigor of such musical reason manifests in a striking sentence from striking Psalm 8:2, ―Baby babbles buffet enemy talk.‖739 One reason is that baby babbles, enemy‘s babies or no, go deep into the heart, deeper than enemy threats because babies have no ―enemies‖ who are grownups, no fresh beginning of life but caution and enmity. 735

Analects 2/22, 3/11, 5/8, 5/19, 8/16, 9/8, 9/23, 11/12, 11/24, 14/1, 14/35, etc. Ibid., 18/5, 7 as Confucius also tried, and as Chuang Tzu described it (4/86-91). Chuang Tzu has Chapter Five and others devoted to the crippled and insane as holy. The entire book of Chuang Tzu is devoted to this panlearning to pan-blend into Nature and all things. 737 On the Taoist learning see Wu, ―Learning as a Master from a Master, etc.,‖ On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 2001, pp. 615-640. 738 A similar complaint was voiced earlier to Wu‘s Butterfly, op. cit., p. 393. See Wu‘s responses there (393-395). This is an additional response. 739 The New English Bible says, ―Out of the mouths of babes, of infants at the breast, thou hast rebuked the mighty, silencing enmity and vengeance . . .‖ The Israeli culture is closer to China than to the West. 736

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Besides, what babies babble forth are half-baked ideas, to be parsed only by Mom. These baby ideas are invincible, irresistible. ―How come fish has no umbrella?‖ ―‗Cause fish has no hands.‖ Wow! How can anyone rebut that? No wonder her Mom was ecstatic; ―See, how logical Tessie is!‖ Now, how compelling a ―logic‖ that is, in all Tessie‘s ―half-baked idea‖ confidence! Half-baked-ness thus betokens the emergence of novelty, and as such of course harbors dissatisfaction; how many babies are self-satisfied as they are? Such dissatisfaction is worth celebrating, and its fledgling novelty deserves relishing. Kids are precisely so, preciously so. They complain about themselves while dancing their now, playing today, singing today as they are, heartily and lustily, as if nothing were the matter. Kids need not be ―Socrates‖ to be ―dissatisfied‖ to be ―better than pigs satisfied.‖ Kids want to be 4 to run better to play better with other kids, but they still play, forget they are 3, and shout and stumble and play so well as they are 3 today. Kids are wonders of the unity of self-dissatisfaction and relishing living-now; they are so natural, and so they grow so playfully healthy. Not just Taoists smile at the kids. Even Mencius sighs, ―Great Adults are those who lose no baby-heart of theirs.‖ Even Confucius confesses he is ―too excited to eat, too happy to worry, not knowing the ‗getting-old‘ about to come.‖ They are both kids, indeed.740 What does all this portray? ―There is no ‗perfect kid‘‖ is nonsense. Can you find perfect music or perfect word anywhere? Kids are music in their wording; they are just active, on the go, all pulsating. Kids are kids everyday, every minute, as music is every moment, words are every scene, words beyond word, silent music in silence, and kids are asleep. Words, music, and kids are ―perfect‖ beyond perfection and imperfection. Poems are worded music, as music is wordless poem chanting. Life is poetry of music as kids are dancing life-poetry. Dancing, poetry, music, and words, they all make sense in rhythm; they are musical reason reasoning, moving and growing kids. Life is then the kid of musical reason, where ―perfection‖ often makes no sense and is nowhere, and yet perfection is there in imperfection, and life has only imperfections, for life is imperfect. Perfect life is dead, no life. ―Perfection cannot be death; perfection must be life!‖ All right, we agree. But then, since life moves, perfection must move. But beware; there is moving and there is moving. If we think that perfection is so perfect that it does not change but just moves around in the same way, making no difference, it would be dull zombie-dead perfection, no moving perfection at all. Perfection must then be a verb, continual perfecting, as ―grace upon grace‖741 said of incarnation of divine Perfection. ―Grace upon grace‖ must mean in our life to better the best. But then, ―bettering the best‖ must mean ―bettering the best now‖ to make sense, and ―the best now‖ is ―imperfection as of yet.‖ So, perfection must include moving imperfection to be perfection moving and alive. Living perfection is dancing imperfection on the go. 740 741

Mencius 4B12, Analects 7/19. John 1: 16 (New American Standard Bible). The Message has ―gift after gift after gift.‖ Raymond E. Brown cites three renderings: ―love in place of love,‖ ―grace upon grace,‖ and ―grace matching grace.‖ (The Gospel According to John I-XII, The Anchor Bible, Vol. 29, NY: Doubleday, 1966, I:15-16). Any of these renderings fits our sense here.

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All this dancing imperfection portrays solemn intoxicating music of life-reason. Imperfection is as much of an erupting growing verb as musical reason is a growing kid kept up in the great growing adult. Now-disliked, now-relished, we say, ―We relish imperfection‖; it is kid-growth that belongs to ―the Great Adults who lose none of their baby-heart‖ of being! Now what else is new? There is nothing, for kids are everywhere, and yet, Oh, what a new world this is! Now, how did we know all this? It is because we adults compared ourselves with noadults, the kids we admire. Kids live in world different from ours; they are of culture distinctly their own. This leads us to consider comparison as interculture.

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Chapter 34

INTERCULTURE, COMPARISON

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One more point must be added to all above, that musical reason, as music, spreads. We now look into musical spread as made of interculture and comparison, as distinction in interchange and inter-change742 in distinction, Chuang Tzu‘s twin verbs that sum up the wellknown story of his dreaming to be a butterfly, saying ―I Chou and the butterfly must have distinction 有分; this, we call it things inter-changing 物化‖ (2/96). The musical spread has three aspects, expanding, penetrating, and inter-enriching, as the music of life spreads from inner being to other beings, and back, and from one lived culture to another, and back, and cultures and persons inter-expand, inter-penetrate, to inter-enrich. Such spread is natural, inevitable, and mutually beneficial; to stop or oppose the spread kills all parties involved. We have had occasions to describe personal-interpersonal spread. Here we pick up intercultural spread, China-Japan and China-West.

CHINA-JAPAN INTER-SPREAD To begin with, we see China-Japan inter-spread. Japanese literature that is the ―seeds in the heart‖ began with distilled poetry (waka 和歌, Japan-singing) of the heartfelt experiences, grows into diaries (nikki 日記, daily jottings), then journals that follow writing brushes (zuihitsu 隨筆), to reach tales (setsuwa 說話, talks) and fictions (monogatari 物語, tales of things).743 Of course we add, ―And then essays and treatises,‖ and we ask, ―Is China any different?‖ China on its part also offers evocation 興, metaphoring 比, and prose-poems 賦 in lodged saying 寓言, layered saying 重言, and goblet saying 卮言.744 We ask again, Is Japan any different? China and Japan are after all close neighbors geographically and culturally; they share deeply similar sensibilities on matters of life, natural and human. 742

―Hua 化,‖ previously rendered as transformation or metamorphosis, is here rendered as inter-change, interchanging mutual changes. This is to add one more implication to that pregnant word. 743 Donald Keene, Seeds in the Heart: Japanese Literature from Earliest times to the Late Sixteenth Century, NY: Columbia University Press, 1999, pp. x, 8, etc. 744

吳光明, ―中國的議論の美的側面,‖ 日本漢學研究, 第三十三號, 平成五年, pp. 23-37.

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And then we realize how much indebted Japan is to China in literary sentiment.745 Chinese language has been learned repeatedly since old days. Chinese characters had been used to write Japanese poetry and essays. Chinese characters had been adapted into two sets of Japanese alphabets. Chinese modes of thinking, Confucian, Taoist, Buddhist (and Zen), has pervasively infiltrated into Japan. And then we realize how much indebted China is to Japan, no less extensively. Chinese people are now learning Japanese language in droves. Many Chinese phrases imported to Japan are now re-imported, Japanized, into China. Chinese ―liau-li 料理‖-managed affairs, now ―riori 料理‖-cooks dinner. Chinese scholars go to Japan the treasure trove of Chinese documents, to do research on China. Japanese manga漫畫-cartoons conquer China as they do the world, not just comic strips but in all advertising strips. In short, China-Japan interculture inter-enriches both.

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CHINA-WEST INTER-SPREAD Now, we look at China-West inter-spread. The story is not as happily thorough a one as China-Japan inter-spread. To begin with, the Western penetration of China is extensive. Denial of anything other than ―logical analysis and proof‖ as ―rational‖ or ―civilized‖ is taken for granted all over China. The so-called ―scientific method‖ and ―democracy‖ are taken as the universal criteria of rational sanity, to be applied even to Chinese thinking. If it is not ―scientific thinking,‖ it is not thinking, whatever ―it‖ is. Thus ―Tao‖ must be ―analytical logic.‖ ―Scientific thinking‖ is exclusively founded by the West to apply worldwide, to apply to technologies, to business management, to Chinese wisdom, and literalism and ―logical analysis‖ must be practiced at all levels of life. If this is not blatant cultural chauvinism, we don‘t know what it is. Sadly, howover, Western respect of law and order, considerateness to others, and literary sensibilities, are scarce in China today. This pathetic cultural imbalance is sadly balanced by the scarcity of Chinese penetration into the West. No genuinely Chinese mode of thinking is seen in the West. This is one reason for this volume‘s appearance. Psychology is witnessing a boom in ―multiculturalism‖ or ―cross-cultural counseling.‖ Holistic medicine in its infancy is dabbling in Chinese medicine. Health food fashion today may not have Chinese origin. All this is scanty on China but not much more trace of China is evinced in the West today. Why is it ―sad‖ to have this imbalance of China-West interculture? It is sad because the imbalance robs both cultures of chances to inter-enrich, and instead fosters the feeling that monoculturalism—in this case Western culture—should be the rule of the world.746 Monocultural colonialism kills both victor and victim.

745

Just leafing through pp. 1194-1195 of extensive Index on ―China‖ and p. 1196 on Confucianism, in Keene‘s survey of ancient Japanese literature alone (ibid.), would convince anyone of Chinese pervasiveness in Japan‘s sensibility. 746 One sad example is the ubiquity of Western music, American jazz and European classical music, and no Chinese or Japanese music to speak of in China or in Japan, much less in the world.

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It kills the victor-culture as it commits prideful suicide of cultural incest, in the ―conquest of the world.‖747 The victims on their part are robbed of their distinctness, to inspire shame of even being themselves, as was tried on Taiwanese by Japan during its colonization of Taiwan, and by Hitler on the Jews by labeling them ―rats.‖ Mentioning nourishment of ―distinctness‖ in interculture brings us to our second theme, comparison. Comparison vivifies every culture as it inter-cultures with others. We are thus reminded that interculture is one means, one mode, of comparison praxis. In other words, ―comparison‖ properly appears only in the sweat of intercultural praxis, not in an armchair juxtaposition. This is because distinctness comes to its own only in inter-changes with others, taking turns infiltrating into the other to enrich and deepen each ―self.‖ Comparison allows, no, facilitates, each element compared to stand-out (ex-ist) as itself, distinct from all others, each mutually different in their mutual similarities. Thus interculture manifests comparison, which strengthens each culture in interculture; both comparison and interculture are mutual, and must be mutual. At the same time, comparison inevitably works at a meta-level of a sort, of a sort because of three aspects. One, comparison must be fairly executed beyond elements compared. Two, still, comparison tends to be done in terms of one element compared. For example, comparing China with the West must be done beyond favoritism of China or of West, and yet we tend to compare either from the Western perspective, or from the Chinese point of view as this volume tends to do. Three, seeing that the above two aspects are inevitable, we must be aware of the inevitability of above two biases, to manage comparison as comprehensive and balanced as possible. Being in one culture or another, the person doing comparison tends toward one‘s inborn culture. Comparison is delicate, difficult, as interculture inevitably goes on. The praxis of comparative interculture is inevitable, for every culture is born of miscegenation, already composed of intermixtures of cultures. There is no ―pure culture‖ today. Moreover, the world today is a small Global Village where chickens crowing and making commotion are heard resounding. Many purists have tried cultural purification in history, and harvested horrid bloodshed, as with Japanese national purists (國粹主義者) during World War II, and ethnic cleansings of Hitler and Milosevic. They do not know that indiginization involves cultural miscegenation. As a result, ―What is culture-A?‖ is always a labyrinth, involving a complex pursuit not of a particular culture but ―a particular blend‖ of many cultures. What complicates is that the quest of ―what culture-A is‖ is not just natural but necessitated by the very comparison-interculture in which we live. Here it is fatally easy to make ethnic cleansing and colonialism. Such a move, let us repeat, destroys both victor and victim. Victor is devastated by its own effort, for inbreeding destroys as cultural incest commits suicide, to harvest its own ethnic cleansing of itself, while victim is devastated. Ethnic cleansing cleanses itself to defeat all around, no victor. For all these pitfalls, however, interculture and comparison do not spell chaos and turmoil. No home can divide against itself but must be itself to stand, and being culturally itself must be composed of interculture and comparison. The matter here, distinction and 747

The article, ―How Shakespeare Conquered the World,‖ Harper’s Magazine, April 2007, pp. 37-46, inspires horror. It is absolutely anti-Shakespeare, lethal to Shakespeare and his scholarship.

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inter-change to become itself, is treacherous and complex, and yet unavoidable, and does not necessarily forebode chaos. ―Why is interculture not necessarily a chaos though quite risky?‖ We cannot be at home in ourselves without inter-being and inter-communicating with not-we; ―in‖ must be in ―with,‖ ―with‖ must be with ―in.‖ But, let us repeat, this blend is insidious and ineluctable. We must join ―in‖ and ―with‖ without falling into cultural chauvinism or abject otherworship. Now, does this reflection on cultural inter-blending itself, involve ―interculture‖ and ―comparison‖? Of course it does, but the involvement is quite involved; it is in and meta-in relation to interculture and comparison. We had better stop ourselves, not go any further, lest we be sucked in a maelstrom of meta-levels and get lost. This reflection is dizzying because it is an offshoot of the systematic elusiveness of the self as we look into it. If truth is subjectivity, we had better stop pursuing it, lest we get lost in it, sucked in the black-hole of continual self-referential inconsistency. But how can truth not be subjectivity? How can we live without truth? We are hopelessly caught here somehow. This is the penalty of going out of innocent praxis. Praxis, with a healthy dose of spontaneous common sense, can perhaps save us here where there is certainly no musical reason of life, for we cannot sing, much less dance, here. Is ignorance bliss, then? Well, to know when to stop knowing is a healthy knowledge-of-ignorance, isn‘t it? That is life. Confucius knew of it, so did Chuang Tzu. ―Wait a minute! There must be something wrong here,‖ we just caught ourselves. We check back and see it. We tried to be both beyond the world in a meta-level, and involved in cultures we compare. We cannot be both in and out of the world. We then compound the trouble by trying to be neutral; there is no such place in concrete life. What we should do instead, then, is to be aware of all above, and go all the way into the world of cultures. We compare China and the West from a Chinese viewpoint, and let someone else compare the West and China from a Western perspective—and then we learn from each other. The result, whatever it is, is the comparison we want. Here we see comparisons inter-compare, the very comparisons turn intercultural; interculture is the mode of comparison. Interculture initiates and leads comparison, while comparison strengthens interculture. Here metaphysics is meso-physics, i.e., the metaphysics of the world is the worldly inter-physics. This is the music that blends various cords, tunes, modulations, and rhythms to chorus together, to realize comparison, reason in inter-reasoning, to spread musical reason. ―Does musical reason sing and dance here?‖ Yes, of course. We reason together by singing together in different tunes blended in, we wave our hands and tap our feet differently to our own tunes, rhymes and rhythms, and somehow we blend in. How? By respecting one another‘s different joys and sorrows, tunes and turns, and inter-enrich by inter-learning various takes of this common world that sings musical reason!

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Chapter 35

OBJECTIVITY WITHIN SUBJECTIVITY Another way of looking at the intercultural mess is to see it as an inter-involvement of subjectivity and objectivity. We had better look into their inter-involvement. Both ―objectivity‖ and ―subjectivity‖ are unavoidable, riddled with dilemmas unavoidable and devastating. We here think through both to hopefully have a breakthrough to an unexpected resolution and perhaps, at least, a theoretical solution to ecological disasters today. First, we think of inevitabilities and risks in both objectivity and subjectivity, and then realize ―objectivity within subjectivity‖ on reflecting on our thinking, and then realize the great potentials in ―within‖ to resolve our life-problems. This is a typical Chinese manner of going deep into dilemmas, not flying away, to find a way out. Sinking into problems to swim with them to float to resolution is China‘s way, Chinese wisdom alive at work.

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ONE: INEVITABLE RISKS IN OBJECTIVITY AND SUBJECTIVITY We live in both objectivity and subjectivity, for we are subjects confronting objects in front of subject. Unavoidably we must deal with how to deal with objects and how to conduct ourselves as subjects. In doing so, we are beset with risks. Let us consider risks in objectivity, and then risks in subjectivity. Objectivity originally means letting objects be as they are, as objects, but it is easier said than done. First, letting object be object is one thing, objectifying things is quite another. Letting an object be object is to allow it to be as itself, facilitating an appearance of its integrity, never ―separate subject from object, survey and analyze-dissect it and could not care less on what our dissection does to it.‖ Yet, secondly, while treating objects as objects, we imperceptibly objectify everything, environment, people, and ourselves. We objectify people and ourselves to destroy the subjects that can never be objects, and thereby destroy the objects that exist in relation to subjects. We must then, resolve our problem by respecting objects as objects, never treating them as mere objects, manipulating them to our advantage, e.g., for ease of inspection, for our benefit. Again, it is easier said than done. Subjectivity is also unavoidable in life because we are subjects, but we tend to forget that subjectivity is not being subjective, being self-authentic is not being self-obsessive, and being self-ish is not being selfish. Being subjective, self-obsessed, and selfish spells chauvinism,

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gender, national, cultural, and species, and ends up destroying nature and destroying ourselves, our subjectivity. ―Protect nature for our future generations!‖ inspires horror. Anthropomorphism kills nature and humankind. What both objectivity and subjectivity warn us is that both can destroy us with selfserving anthropomorphism. Still, we cannot avoid living through both temptations of both kinds, for they compose life. We are in despair, when, suddenly, we ―step a step back, and find ocean wide, sky vast 退一步海闊天空.‖

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TWO: OBJECTIVITY WITHIN SUBJECTIVITY AS RESOLUTION Purveying all above glorified common sense, we suddenly realize that all the above reflections is made in the context of ―objectivity within subjectivity‖ for we are the subjects thinking about both matters. Our reflection so far is itself an exemplification of ―objectivity within subjectivity‖ and could serve to exorcise the ghosts of Scylla-objectivism and Charybdis-subjectivism. As we have gone through subjective-objective thinking to find difficulties on both ends, so we can live through it to find our way out of both difficulties. For now, we see six examples of such living-through in which difficulties of objectivity and subjectivity can resolve themselves. Example One: We see that this ―objectivity within subjectivity‖ is a model of the objectifying West and must interculture with subjectivity-tending China to inter-enrich. We remember, Emperor Hun Tun in his Land, surrounded by Southern Emperor Speedy, and by Northern Emperor Sudden, ―treated them very kindly,‖ so much so that both Emperors mutually consulted on how to gratefully repay Hun Tun.748 Personable hospitality is typical of Chinese subjectivity that embraces things foreign to it. We have considered what Hun Tun‘s resultant ―death‖ means several times, how the death is vanishing of ambiguity, how death is alike to life in ambiguity, to enrich ambiguity in definiteness if not clarity, and so on. At the same time, speedily sudden logic-rationality is humanized with subtle sensitivity to things. This is ―objectivity within subjectivity‖ at its best and mutually beneficial. Example Two: Hun Tun is personification—subjectivity-ization—of ―acceptance‖ of all in life, objectivity in subjectivity concretized. It concretizes ―object within subject‖ where ―within‖ is the key, for everything is within everything, and ―within‖ is the definition of what ―everything‖ is. Thus mutual acceptance is essential in living. Tillich said that Christianity is human acceptance of divine acceptance; we say that all religions are such mutual acceptance, divinehuman and human-human. Acceptance, however, is attended with risks, as Hun Tun‘s acceptance resulted in his death, reminiscent of Jesus‘ death who also accepted all in need. Open arms are open to hurt by what they embrace, even mortal ones. Acceptance is also quite difficult. Many levels of struggling scholarship—textual, expository, interpretive, hermeneutical—are often sealed up within themselves, resisting

748

Chuang Tzu 7/33-35.

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intrusion of others, each separate as far as each mount is from others. Each scholarship jeers at the other as idly munching on words and phrases, as ―not sick, just groan.‖ Inter-rejection contributes to inter-impoverishment. We must respect fields other than ours. Respect of others begins acceptance and invitation into us, yet respect of difference is difficult, but deserves trying; this struggle to respect, accept, and embrace shall redound to enriching ourselves and others. Example Three: ―Objectivity within subjectivity‖ is also concretized in friendship. China has many beautiful stories of friendship. The legendary friendship of Han Shan (寒山 Cold Mountain) and Shih Te (拾得 Picked) was so intimate and precious as to be revered as reincarnations of bodhisattvas. Ssu-ma Ch‘ien‘s 司馬遷 intimate friendship with General Li Ling 李陵 occasioned Ssuma‘s punishment and writing of the monumental Records of History 史記 that tells of the gripping story of Pao Shu-ya‘s 鮑叔牙 friendship with Koan Chung 管仲. Han Yü 韓愈 sounded forth his beautiful friendly letter upon the imbalance in his friend‘s life Meng Tunyeh 孟東野.749 The world of China is dipped in friendship and sings it loudly all over. Confucius (1/1) chants it; Chuang Tzu praises it (6/45-97). In the West, Haydn‘s monumental successes owe much to his generous friendship to anyone, even those who despised and mistreated him. Bruckner‘s multiple versions of many symphonies owe to his friendly acceptance of colleagues‘ ―revisions.‖ Friendship is ―objectivity in subjectivity‖ that bears much fruit in appreciatively approaching nature; friendship is essential to scientific research.750 Example Four: Thus music of Haydn and Bruckner has no hang-up. Music shows subjectivity, as Mozart shows his impish hang-up, Beethoven his violent-tender hang-ups joined. Both Confucius and ancient Greeks looked to music to have ennobling and corrupting influence on human character. Music also expresses actuality in those subjective aspects. For example, Trevor Pinnock expresses the violent, Ton Koopman the classical, von Karajan the methodical, Hermann Scherchen the deep, Adam Fischer the sonorous, and Antal Dorati the crisp aspects of, say, Haydn‘s music. Music shows object and subject inter-pervading to express actuality. Research should proceed in musical fashion. Example Five: Learning is interesting in this context. Chinese phrase, ―learning life 學生,‖ is loaded in significance. It can mean, subjectively, the learning life, and objectively, the learner of life, or else, perhaps less plausibly, learner learning life and learner as life. Here, learning and teaching fuse into one. As was mentioned previously, Confucius was delighted, in fact, enthralled, by learningteaching with his young students, taking learning to be growth in life-as-truly-human 仁. Interestingly, ―learning 學‖ occurs much oftener than ―teaching 教‖ in the Analects; Confucius loved learning; his teaching was learning. 749

The friendship of 寒山 and 拾得 is legendary. 司馬遷, 史記, 附錄: , 卷六十二, 管晏列傳第二, (臺灣中和市: 建宏出版社, 1995, V: 703-718, III: 594-596). 韓愈, , 古文觀止 (高雄市麗文文化, 1995, pp. 696-703). 幼學瓊林, 朊友賓主, has more examples of friendship (臺北市三民書局, 2005, pp. 119-129). I have collected many more. 750 Michael Polanyi in Science, Faith and Society (University of Chicago, 1963) stressed how essential camaraderie is among researchers, but he did not quite extend that friendship to the objects of research.

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This is why he cherished his young student Yen Hui 顏回 who incessantly enjoyed learning to live-as-human, and he (7/19) himself so enthralled forgetting meals, forgetting worries or ―aging‖ about to come. Joy forgets meals, worries, and aging-coming, ultimate joy forgetful of everything—that fits.751 Learning enjoyed cherishes everyone as ―teacher,‖ as researchers cherish the investigated objects as their teacher. Example Six: Writing and wording are one. Socrates rejected writing for wording, for writing cannot dialogue, that is, defend, question and respond; writing is as good as dead. And then Plato wrote all this down as dialogue of Phaedrus; Socrates wrote without writing, then; he wrote wording, worded writing. Chuang Tzu seems to radicalize it, saying that, as we throw away the trap after catching the rabbit, we throw away words after getting the meaning—and then asked, ―How can I find one word-forgotten to word with?‖ He needs words without needing words. And then his wheelwright confesses to dead people‘s words as scum dead, for experience cannot be conveyed dead, only ―hand got, heart met‖ now; the whole lived experience cannot be worded, much less written; then he wrote down the whole bit! He forgets words to word it; opposes writing to write down the opposition. Socrates and Chuang Tzu worded without wording, wrote without writing, in subjectivity via objectivity and proceeded subjectivity within objectivity, as Kierkegaard wrote objectively, ―Truth is subjectivity.‖ Likewise, we cherish our objects as we do objective research of those objects, and cherishing is subjective. Now, let us look at culture. ―Culture‖ makes up what and how I look, think, and take things; it is subjective—yet culture is in the open, publicly shared, widely discussed, and grows into history; culture is objective. So, culture is subjective in the objective, and risks cultural chauvinism and cultural privatism. We can get out of both risks by thoroughly going through cultures, going over cultures. Concretely, we can all be proud of distinctness of our respective cultures, while eagerly welcoming other cultures to enrich our own. In short, interculture both solves problems of subjectivity and objectivity, and harvests inter-enrichment worldwide. This situation is a mutual melting without melting, a rainbow. The public is now personal (melting) because each is distinct (no melting) to enhance and be enhanced by the public. The world will be a melting pot in rainbow coalition. This is true subjectivity in objectivity, an interculture worldwide. All this begins at a lady and a man; each is bone and flesh to the other, and one cannot live without the other, precisely because one is herself, not him, as the other is himself, not her, each quite distinct from the other. This lady-man relation initiates a family, extends into a community, and the world emerges with the same structure of subjectivity in objectivity that was the lady-man relation. All this is mystery ordinary. We forget words as we talk with words. We write without writing, thinking solely about what we convey. We think as we talk and write, not thinking about talking and writing. We also discern writer and talker‘s personality (subjectivity) by the way that person writes and talks (objectivity). Object and subject are distinguished and this distinction lives within their complex, never their separation. We must distinguish one from another to interact, one in another, as lady-and-man. 751

Chuang Tzu 18:, 19/62-64.

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Such is the point of the Golden Rule of all cultures, as Jesus says,752 ―Whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.‖ Such ―pro-self attitude applied to pro-others‖ is the Law, i.e., the sum-up, inner principle, and attitude of our behaviors; this sums up all Prophets, all attention-calling to our conducts.753 Much earlier, Confucius negatively enunciated this Golden Rule,754 ―What oneself desires not, render not to people‖ (12/2), as ―like-heartedness 恕,‖ humanity 仁 (15/24). Violating these sayings violates the ecological golden rule into environmental extinction of many species toward human extinction. ―Objectivity within subjectivity‖ turns out to be the key, the existential imperative, to inter-thriving co-survival of all with/in all. Now, to say that things inter-thrive by being within one another, objects in subjects, is just a part of saying that contradictions exist in coherence, enmity in neighborliness, victory in compassion, ineptitude in wisdom, in short, contradictions in contraries to co-thriving together. It is a big claim beyond any logic-rationality to understand. Such pan-inclusion must be poetic. How is musical reason related to poem?

752

Matthew 7: 12 (New King James Version). Thus to go quibbling over how to modify the Golden Rule to be a better rule of conduct with comprehensive coverage and validity, barks up the wrong tree, for these modifications mistake an attitude and principle as a specific rule. Cf. Marcus G. Singer, ―Golden Rule,‖ The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards, NY: The Free Press, 1967, III: 365-367. 754 As typically Chinese, Confucius puts an emphasis in his affirmation by negatively stating it. Chan (Chan, op. cit., p. 840, index on ―golden rule‖) sees positive aspects of the Golden Rule in China. 753

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Chapter 36

MUSICAL REASONING AND POEMS

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Music includes dissonance to dissolve itself into objectivity within subjectivity, turns dissonance into resonance subject-object melodious, and so music has the power to turn dissonance among things into elements of musical reason, for melodious resonance is harmony that is sensible, and sense is reason. Now, reason is often expressed in words, so music is wordless poem and poem is worded music; in both is melodious resonance. Still, we must be careful. Musical reasoning in melodious resonance is poetic but not exactly a poem. What does it mean? Let us see how thinking relates to poems, saying, ―Thinking is poetic but not a poem.‖ This theme has eight points (some of which are exploratory queries). One, poem differs from being poetic; two, thinking is not a poem; three, being poetic can be not a poem; four, logic thinks about things but musical reason thinks in things; five, is thinking-in the same thinking as thinking-about?; six, on ―Do not imitate me‖; seven, we must thinkabout in think-in; eight, is our reflection thinking or a poem?

ONE, POEM DIFFERS FROM BEING POETIC Poem has a set form, with a visible versification or no, while being poetic must move people. Poem thus can be a mere form, and so not-poetic, while being poetic can be not a poem but deeply moving, though both can be rhythmic. Being poetic can be coherent, while a poem can throw coherence to the winds of surrounding air, mood. Poetic or poem, its main thrust is thrust—to the heart of actuality, of our being. Poem minds saying, while being poetic does not, and can say no-saying. Birds sing, but a morning dove coos, not singing, not silent; being poetic coos, too, not saying, not silent, but just sinks in us. ―Morning three,‖ says Chuang Tzu. We see no monkeys, no Uncle Monkey, we do not even know ―three‖-what; we just remember his monkey story, and nod, and do not know what we nod at or about. Chuang Tzu is poetic. I often dream, not knowing what it means.755 Chuang Tzu says it means I am unsure if I am me or the butterfly I dream. I nod, not knowing ―I,‖ not knowing what at. Chuang Tzu is

755

Freud tried and failed here, imposing all his own hang-ups and prejudices as ―interpretations of dreams.‖

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being poetic756; he just sinks in. Boy Jesus says, ―Don‘t you know I‘m in my father‘s house?‖ The words sink in Mother‘s heart (Luke 2:51). Boy Jesus was poetic. We call sinking-in ―thinking‖ as well, but is it poetic?

TWO, THINKING IS NOT A POEM Thinking is indeed poetic, for it rhythmically sinks in, but it is no poem, for it needs no poem-form to sink in. Now we are at a loss. Can poem, sinking in or no, be made without thinking? Besides, some folks hate thinking; they live on, respond to what happens, moved by it, without thinking. Are they poetic? But can anyone really live on without thinking, are they plants? We can of course see ―thinking‖-thinking as distinct from ―not-thinking‖-thinking, but the latter sort of thinking may not be thinking at all, as Socrates chided poets spewing wise sayings without knowing what their sayings meant? But then if ―not-thinking‖-thinking is not thinking, why do we still call it ―thinking‖? We are lost.

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THREE, BEING POETIC CAN BE NOT A POEM Being poetic can make no poem, perhaps because being poetic shows the whole existence—whatever it is—as a poem. Here, we ourselves are so much a poem as not to see a poem, as a child is so much a child as not to realize that she is a child. To realize I am poetic I must be beyond being poetic, must not be while being poetic, but then I would not know I am poetic if I am not poetic. To realize ―I am a person‖ I must be beyond being a person while being a person, much as to realize that a car is moving (while being in a car) I must get out of the car, and so I must be in and out of a car. All this describes impossibility. Being poetic is impossible to self-realize as oneself beings oneself is, and even when told by others that I am poetic, I can only respond as a non-believing parrot. Writing a poem is in contrast clearly visible to all, including myself who write it. Is being poetic so mysterious, though? Again, we are lost.

FOUR, LOGIC THINKS ABOUT THINGS BUT MUSICAL REASON THINKS IN THINGS Point Two says there may be thinking that is no-thinking; point Three says I cannot realize I am being poetic. These two points can perhaps be understood if we divide—divide and conquer!—thinking into two sorts, logic-rationality and musical reason. ―Logic‖ thinks about objects as it gets out of the matter thought about; it even thinks about life in which logic is enabled to think. In contrast, musical reason thinks in the matter, and in life. Musical reason does not think about an object but thinks with the matter, thinks in 756

Wu, Butterfly, op. cit., pp. 22-31.

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it, as that matter. Musical reason thinks by even forgetting thinking-of, uttering words wordforgotten. Joke explained is no joke, poem explained loses poem, and Confucius explained evaporates him; explanations (paraded as ―translations‖) turn Confucius into an insipid platitudes-mouther. Spinoza proposes to think about anger when angry, and anger vanishes. Lover warns, ―Do not say, show it!‖ You live in me; it‘s love, otherwise it is not, and ―saying‖ is ―otherwise.‖ Music-reason ―thinks without thinking‖ as we say without ―saying.‖ Still, we must be warned. Thinking thinking-forgotten is not thinking not-thinking. Thinking thinking-forgotten still thinks in what is thought, not thinking about it. Thinking-of―not-thinking‖ can be synonymous with such thinking, but it can be simple unwillingness to think at all; it is not thinking at all, although still conscious, not sleep-walking. ―Thinking thinking-forgotten‖ thinks; ―thinking not-thinking‖ does not think.

FIVE, IS THINKING-IN THE SAME THINKING AS THINKING-ABOUT?

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Is ―logicizing‖ as much reasoning as musical reason is? Is there a thinking-reasoning that includes ―logicizing‖ and reasoning? What sort of thinking or reasoning would this be? We are short of words here, for we know of only these two sorts of thinking and reasoning. Shall we say it is ―understanding,‖ standing-under the situation to under-go the experience of living through it? But then what name should we put it? Is it being poetic? Such life-understanding may be called reasoning-in-life, but then is this life-reasoning distinct from reasoning without thinking, whatever it means? How distinct are they? Is there such an activity as spontaneous reasoning, thinking-unawares? Is it to be called ―culture‖ or ―common sense‖ that we presuppose—unawares—while we engage in thinking of whatever sort?

SIX, ON “DO NOT IMITATE ME” In this connection, let us consider Basho‘s poem, ―Don‘t imitate me;/ it‘s as boring/ as the two halves of a melon.‖757 We are trapped here, mumbling, ―We can then neither imitate you nor not-imitate you.‖ If we imitate you, then we would not ―imitate you‖ as you told us; if we do not imitate you, our ―not-imitating you‖ amounts to following what you said, imitating your injunction. But on second thought, we are trapped because we think about this saying. Basho‘s saying means not to think about it but just follow it, seeking what it seeks—and then we will create on our own as he creates on his own. This ―as‖ is not-imitating him, for we are as creative as he, reenacting, not repeating Basho, that is, not-imitating him. We are here imitating Basho without imitating him, then. It is thus that we get out of our trap of neither-nor to really follow Basho. We are kids who are copycats, not Xerox-copiers. Isn‘t the Golden Rule similar? To love others as I want to be loved means, not to impose what 757

The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa, ed. Robert Hass, Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1994, p. 47. Cf. ―Learn about pine from the pine, and about bamboo from the bamboo,‖ ―Don‘t follow in the footsteps of the old poets, seek what they sought‖ (p. 233) as his favorite Chuang Tzu.

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and how I personally want loved, but to love as they want loved, in the same way as I want loved. The Golden Rule is poetic-caught. Is it being poetic? We write no poem; we are a poem, we are all poetic. Some poets churn out poems without being poetic; sages can be enthrallingly poetic without writing a single poem. Musical reason is musical without composing a song; ―Mr. Chao not drum, not string, is Mr. Chao drumming, string-ing,‖ Says Chuang Tzu (2/43-44). It is thinking-reasoning without logicizing-explaining. Isn‘t Chinese wisdom alive such musical reason? Isn‘t it what ―alive‖ means? Similarly, a Cretan‘s saying, ―All Cretans are liars,‖ would be a paradox only if taken objectively, thought about in abstraction. If taken as a confession, a sigh, that Cretan ceases to be a liar but a prophetic sage initiating a reform of the fellow Cretans. To take a statement as a sigh is to situate it. Sadly, ―The statement on the reverse is true‖ written on paper that has ―The statement on the reverse is false‖ is a dilemma because we cannot situate the whole bit here, for writing it down on paper cuts off the sayer in situ. . It would be interesting to go over the list of various paradoxes to see if we could not sort them out in two groups, those in situ and those not. Can we say, though, that all paradoxes are found and concocted by us human who are situated, and so all paradoxes can be resolved into those in situ? ―Thinking machine‖ generates many paradoxes as we marvel at human ingenuity that creates the machine. Some paradoxes may be so complex as to turn out a joke, e.g., ―Of all things I‘ve lost, I miss my mind most.‖ In any case, it remains true that Chou Tun-i‘s beloved glory of a lotus flower is out of the worldly ―mud,‖ yet the lotus‘ world-transcendent beauty is wholly humanly discerned and this-worldly. Such complexity shows how much inter-involved abstraction and being in situ are, and yet for all their complex intertwining we must distinguishe one from the other while wondering at the wonder of human thinking alive. By the same token, no abstract commentary can be made on Chinese thinkers. We can only create an engaged companion to Chuang Tzu, and to Confucius, and so on, because all Chinese thinkers think and write in situ. Isn‘t Chinese thinking, because it is incorrigibly situated, such companionship of not-following following, thinking-in without thinking-about?

SEVEN, WE MUST THINK-ABOUT IN THINK-IN Thus, we need to think-in within thinking-about, and think-about within thinking-in; we need be sensitized to objective accuracy and fairness, to have objectivity within subjectivity. We need to join Chinese wisdom with Western philosophy, reasoning with ―logicizing.‖ We must be poetic even without writing poems, and thus be thinking-thinking while thinking forgotten. We need to be fully human, before we can see Buddha in every person on the street. We see our goal now, but do not know how even to begin walking toward it. In short, how poetic think-in, logical think-of, and folksy no-think yet not retarded are related, has been bothering us. We are lost.

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EIGHT, IS OUR REFLECTION THINKING OR A POEM? Perhaps a bit of self-reflection could help us out. Is our description so far itself a poem or poetic, a thinking or a poem? Well, it is situated at their border, without a spot to stand in, so it covers both. The above description is made of dots, markings-down758; we have seven so far, there must be more. These dotty markings are not thinking, not poetic, and yet somehow make sense, and make sense of living. They are somehow coherent without a coherent form, so they are somehow thinking and poetic, and yet they have no coherent form, not ―logical‖ thinking, not poems. What does all this mean? Let us take a look around at nature. Nature dots around us with many animals, and we humans comment them into ―creationism‖ and/or ―evolutionism‖ to make ―sense‖ of them who remain silent, dotted. Day and night dot each other to make life-sense that also remains dotted. Chinese people follow nature and dot their thoughts down for posterity to ―comment‖ on the senses they found. Sym-phony composes—puts together—rhythmic music out of bits of sounds. Dots compose music as animals and days come-gather to com-pose the music of nature. The human heart throbs in rhythm and the lungs breathe in rhythm, to gather to walk out our life, one foot forward at a time, in rhythm. Such walkout form a Tao-Way 道, which portrays a human face walking, the Tao of living. We at once see five points here; they are so obvious that they require no elaboration. One, Tao is a descriptive verb, a verb-noun and noun-verb. Two, the walkout is an outflow of life ―felt 感‖ and breathed 氣 at our heart of being, pressed-out, expressed poetic. Three, ―being-poetic‖ turns into a poem to make sense, to compose musical reason. Four, a poem is formed to versification rule to begin logic-rationality, out of poetic musical reason.759 Five, the above ―dots‖ are lived markings-down, the beats 節奏 in musical reason. All nouns here are verbs, amounting to something quite alive. All things are quite alive, as we living humans look at them. Animals are beings with anima-life as we, living, growing, and reproducing strictly to seasons. Plants live in natural rhythms of day and night, shines and rains, and winds of the seasons. Even stones exist, and then crumble into ―liquid‖ in the grand geo-lithic shifts. Siddhartha760 fittingly ends with such a salutation, though rhythm-less, ending in illusion. Are we sure of all this as factual as described, though? Of course not, these matters are our ―perhaps,‖ our poetic thrust into actuality that makes sense to us. It is musical reason that rejoices while we people thrive in the seasonal plant-milieu, animal-milieu, and the geological shifts of the stone-world, and yet we cannot say all this is just our anthropomorphic projection, totally illusory, either, for no one feeds and lives on illusion. Our tentative thinking of nature as musical sense is real, somehow.

758

On ―dots‖ see ―dot-pragmatics‖ in Kuang-ming Wu, On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 2001, pp. 387-398. On ―markings-down,‖ see ―Bemerkungen‖ in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr. G. E. M. Anscombe, Macmillan, 1953, p. ix. 759 Cf. Wu, ―Chinese Aesthetics,‖ Understanding the Chinese Mind, ed. Robert E. Allinson, Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 236-264. 760 Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha, tr. Hilda Rosner (1951), NY: Bantam Books, 1971, pp. 144-147.

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Now, how and what do we think-in? This is an interesting question. It is ―the search for the self,‖ someone shouts, and three questions arise at once. One, whose self do I search? Two, why search? What is search? How do I search? Three, do we really search for the self?

One, Whose Self do i Search? Do I search for myself? Or do I search for your self? Or do I search for his self? Her self? Ours? Theirs? Nature‘s? ―I searching for myself in your self‖ is teenage, called ―love.‖ ―I searching for myself in his, her, their selves, in nature‘s self,‖ is old age, searching for security, perhaps for ultimate religious security. All these searches intermix, interfere, and confuse each in others, each by the others, to get lost and get strengthened. Such a mess is usually called humanity, human world, or simply the world, the lifeworld. Journalism, reflections, gossips, fictions, poetry, history, biographies, autobiographies, all thrive here.

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Two, Why Search? What is search? How do I search? What do I search? The search is king, called the pursuit of happiness. The world is the search, the self, and the mess and the mesh, the Hun Tun who treats all of these very well, in death, in rebirth, in history, and in the search for the self, whatever it is. Here what cannot be asked is why we search. We all just do it, we cannot ask about it, for we are too busy searching. Why not :why‖? Because asking is searching; searching for the search also searches, and so there is no point questioning the search, for the question is the search. An answer, if any, stops the search; answer is my death. Kids ask unanswerable questions. No wonder they search, they live and grow asking questions, and then forget their questions as they grow up. So do we.

Three, Do We Really Search for the Self? Well, who knows? We just want to know, want to search, and since we do not know what the self is—so we search—we do not know what we search for. The ―self‖ is just a label and a stand-in for the search. We just search for we-know-not-what. We just search, and search is our struggle, our happiness, our misery, our life, and our lifeworld. Search is the bottom-line of all our life-activities, of our world. Poem, poetic, thinking, musical reason, logic-rationality, all end up here—the search. Life is the search, and all our sensible activities, our thinking activities, turn poetic right here in our search. We breathe the search. We search even for the search, hoping to search better— not knowing what search is, what ―better‖ is, much less why search at all. We just feel it as we live on. We see here a surprising spin-off. Poetry and music are always in the plural, one at a time, one in some others, crisscrossing—one in indefinitely many, gathering up in an indefinite one that links to so many. There is no ―one poem,‖ no ―one music,‖ as there is no

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―one existent,‖ no ―one space,‖ no ―one time,‖ no ―one history,‖ no ―one building‖ for all; such idea of ―one‖ is as absurd as ―one platonic universal.‖ Heidegger says that every thinker is a poet who has only one poem, itself uncomposed, out of which and of which all other poems speak.761 His ―one poem‖ is a nostalgic platonic eternity as shadow of time and season, and for him, there is no time-as-shadow-of-eternity. Wittgenstein‘s ―ideas‖ as crisscrossing fibers762 must have come from his love of music. Each fiber is special in the crisscross; each fiber is made special by the crisscross, dyed by this network of music. Fibers turn tacit in the rope networked, as the rope turns tacit in each fiber, giving each fiber this rope-specific feature, this rope-tonality. The rope is a piece of music. The same piano keyboard sounds different in each different musical composition. Absolute pitch is needed to perform a composition; medical doctors are piano-tuners, adjusting each steel-line to sound forth a specific tone, perhaps with many tuning forks. Still, the pitch turns unnoticed—must be forgotten—while the music goes on. The quality and sonority of each tone, and of each performer, makes up the quality and sonority of the performance of the music, but it is impossible to pin down each tone, each performer, in the music with its total tonal impact. Thus the West‘s ―universal‖ is a single plural and plural singles, as the word ―music‖ is, thanks to the specific bunch of fibers crisscrossing. Sonority and tonality are specific and universal, each melting into the other. Such fibers form a melting pot and a rainbow, personal public and public private, all at once as a wonderful kaleidoscope of heavenly nets coarsemeshed with the specific bunches of fibers, leaking nothing, etc. Dots and jerks in the world—whatever the ―world‖ is—randomly com-pose patterns that crisscross to link into jigsaw puzzles to go on, and on into music, and vanish, only to arise again, in turmoil, in patterns, to compose the music of a lifeworld for each of us, again and again. I hear a world of music from a grain of sand, me, and you hear another world-music from another grain of sand, you, and so does she, so does he, and so on, to form a symphony called our common lifeworld. All this has been mirrored in the long history of Chinese writings. Disorder has orderly patterns, order has disorderly turmoil; a big disturbance occurs every ten years, a small one every five,763 China has been in continual disasters—as anywhere in the world—on the brink of demise, and goes on thus for millennia. This is the Yin-Yang inter-involvement that spins out Five cosmic Activities 五行 to expand in 64 hexagrams 六十四卦. They are set yet inscrutable, and no one thought-orsystem discerns its ―system.‖ They are mathematics in poetry and poetry in mathematics. They compose elusive music of the spheres, our lifeworld. So, melody and rhyme and rhythm are elusive dynamics of patterns of ripples that emerge, spread, to vanish, again and again.764 ―Old pond; frog jump-in; water-sound,‖765 says 761

Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, NY: Harper, 1971, p. 160. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr. G. E. M. Anscombe, NY: Macmillan, 1953, Section 67, p. 32e. 763 These are common Chinese sayings, ―亂中有序, 序中有亂‖ and ―十年一大亂, 五年一小亂.‖ China has been a topsy-turvy 亂七八糟 world in its long history; it is not much better elsewhere in the world, either. 764 Tyler Volk, Metapatterns: Across Space, Time, and Mind, NY: Columbia University Press, 1995. Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, ed. N. Katherine Hayles, The University of Chicago Press, 1991. 762

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Basho‘s well-known haiku. The sound, the ripple, the frog, they all happen, to linger in an unsung seer, invisible hearer, that is, ourselves. That is the way it has been since time immemorial, and the ―it‖ is ―old pond‖ that sings this haiku, i.e., the poem and the music that is the sound in silence of a frog of a thing, jumping alive. In all this, ―many‖ is king no one cares for or minds but is just there, quite fragile, for ―many‖ is bracketed in quotations into an elusive ―one.‖ What does the bracketing do? Poem and music do, one in many, many in one. We have been invisible all this while—and have done musical reasoning poetic—to see how music and poem are one, and then find that there is no such thing as ―one.‖ We must be alerted, however. Many essays and volumes on exegetical and expository levels—parading as Confucian scholarship, Shakespeare scholarship, etc.—are filled with tons of interesting asides. We are tempted to ask them, ―What is in them that is not-aside?‖ What distinguishes loose senseless jumbles from plurality-in-unity is this ―in,‖ many in one, one in many, interpenetrating. Such ―in‖ and ―inter-‖ can and should be subtle and implicit, but should be there. This internal mutuality of ―in‖ and ―inter-‖ is what makes an existent, any existent, an existence that is a knot-of-―in‖-and-―inter-,‖ not loose arbitrary bits of we-know-not-what. We are enthralled at this ―in‖ and this ―inter-.‖ Wittgenstein characterizes ―in‖ and ―inter-‖ as ―crisscrossing‖ of meaning-fibers, but he forgets to stress that it is the ―crisscrossing‖ that makes fibers meaningful, sensible, and not arbitrary. Sense is less in fibers than in their crisscrossing. Confucius‘ aspiration to the ―one‖ that skewers both his ideas (4/15) and what he learns (15/3) must also mean this skeweringcrisscrossing of many key terms such as humanness 仁, like-heartedness 恕, authenticity 忠, filiality 孝, ritual 禮, fidelity 信, etc.—or the ―one‖ is nothing. So, ―in,‖ ―inter-,‖ and ―crisscrossing‖ are verbs of lived dynamic, expressed in our pages here as poetic, translation, fit, rhythm, music, reasoning, etc. This crisscrossing ―brackets‖ ―many‖; crisscrossing-bracketing must be natural, not obtrusive ―logical‖ but subtle, wovenunder concrete living-through musical rhythm, life pulsating. Natural dynamics is musical reason inevitable we must conform, on pain of our perdition. This ―must‖ is an exigent existential imperative of music.

765

This is a literal rendering of Basho‘s timeless haiku, ―古池や, 蛙跳びこむ, 水の音.‖

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Chapter 37

MUSIC AS MORALITY Thinking as poetic means life is a poem-music. Now who could resist claiming music as morality? China has been chorusing morality-tune pervasive. In Chinese minds and hearts morality is joyous music; we must survey it. Three points are here heartfelt as music and morality. One, music has many features. Two, music of timely pan-joy depicts morality panself-ing, not Western morality formal, music-less. Three, we shiver wondering why Chinese leaves joy together for self-demise in inter-demise.

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MANY FEATURES OF MUSIC Music (yüeh 樂) is homonymous with joy (loh 樂). Music sounds joys together. This simple characterization has seven features, among others—timely, harmonious, just-right, fitting, enjoyable, human, and accepting. One, music is timely 時, in season. Music is beauty-in-time, timely, or it is no music. Timeliness beautifies music, however ugly its melody, however unseemly its rhyme, and nothing else makes music beautiful, however pretty its melody. Timeliness is the beat of music, to make it beautiful. Cosmic music is then its seasons; in China ―time‖ is expressed as season 時.766 China as any life in seasons lives in music; life is music or it is dead. Two, music is harmonious 和. Harmony in action is music, through all sorts of dissonance harmonizing contraries into organic coherence. Music is a coherence that organizes as it moves on. Music harmonizes. Three, music is just-right 宜, 義. Just-right 宜yi2 in China is a homonym of being right, 義-yi4. Aptness is justice; music embodies this life-truth. Being just right harmonizes all things, tunes up all things, making them-out-of-season in-season. Music thus tunes up listeners ―enwrapped‖ in its air. Going just-right, music heals irresistibly, making us whole, refreshed and composed. Music is therapy. Four, music is fit and fitting 適, 悅. Thus music fits us snug and whole. The fit is comfort, self-forgetting. ―Fit 適‖ in Chinese means ―joy 適‖ of being comfortably fit, finding all snugly fit and fitted in music, self-forgotten. We forget ourselves as we enter music, one 766

See Wu, ―‗Time‘ in China,‖ On the “Logic” of Togetherness, Leiden: Brill, 1998, pp. 342-385.

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with it. The world changes as we enter music; it is Wonderland of moving moments, sliding time out of this world—in this world. Do we have anything we dislike in life? Enter music, and we will be able to breathe again, finding everything in its place. Five, music is enjoyable 好, 樂. ―Knowing it is not [as good] as liking it; liking it is not [as good] as enjoying it.‖ ―Having listened to Shao sacred music, for three months Master knew no taste of meat. ‗I expected no joy to reach so high!‘‖ ―I‘m yet to see one enjoying virtue as enjoying sex!‖ Sacred music, salacious sex, and high virtue heartfelt, we enjoy hill and water.767 Six, music is human 仁. Music is in us as we in nature we enjoy. Music is human virtue and reverent ritual. Religion is one with music, where our whole being as human is at stake. ―Without humanness, where is ritual? Where is music? (3/3)768‖ Music rises or falls intrigued with humanity, its rise or fall. Music is our hearts dancing, in joys, in sorrows—and heals.769 Seven, music is accepting 虛, 容. Variegated vitality of music comes from its power of emptiness that accepts all—as room, water, mother, and valley770—to let everything sing what they are. Chuang Tzu‘s ―hollows‖ in nature pipe out human piping, earthly, and heavenly, as the wind blows, the wind nowhere, a moving breathing 噫氣, and hollows sung to the moving. The world sings as receptacle silent, moving.

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MUSIC AS TIMELY JOY TOGETHER, EVEN WHILE AT WORK ―Ruler [be] ruler, subject, subject, father, father, son, son (12/11)‖ puts things right-aspolitics for Confucius, Chuang Tzu‘s existents fit in joy.771 Feet forgotten is the fit of sandals; waist forgotten is the fit of a belt; knowledge forgotten of Yes and No is the fit of the heart; ―in‖ not changed, ―out‖ not followed, is the fit of events met; to begin at fit and not without fit, is the fit of forgotten fit. All is music crescendo in de-crescendo, rhythmic, rhymed, flowing. The fit checks smiling within the body and the events in history. The checking is bodily-experiential, practical, culminating in joy ultimate to forget it. Body, events in history, and joy that selfforgets, these three intimate checking, verification, music. ―Forgetting‖ tells of fullness of ―fit,‖ in sandals, belt, and all events happening; here ―let go‖ and ―keep nose to the grindstone‖ interfuse. I am born to write, birds born to sing. I enjoy; the workaholic is addicted. I quit writing, go walk, and return with fresh ideas to write on. He is obsessed and cannot leave work. He is trapped; I am free in me self-forget, enjoying myself writing. As I enjoy writing, I let myself go, let my half-baked ideas fly-and-float, and I catch them as I catch fluttering butterflies; I am companion to them elusive. Here letting, writing, and

767

Analects 6/20, 7/13, 9/18=15/13, 6/23. Admittedly, this may be what is meant, not said. 769 Great Preface to the Poetry Classic 詩序, Mencius 4A27. 770 They are all Lao Tzu‘s favorite images. 771 Chuang Tzu 19/62-64. 768

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enjoying interfuse to inter-forget. I smile at Tanizaki; we are idle writers,772 laidback fit, in work. I vanish in work to vanish in nature, forgotten. My work forgets in great ecological joy of no joy, natural; I at work in nature, nature at work in me, and all work together Nature naturing, birthing unceasing. Interfusion fits in cosmic unity of all. Any checking not in such bodily-historical praxis is objective verification, analysis, vivisection. The more such checking, the more assured a disaster worldwide today.773 Ecological disaster is harvested by objectivity, a surgical knife (metal or mental) unchecked. Knife can kill or heal, depending on how we use it. How should we use it? Desmond Tutu said, ―Only wounded doctors heal‖; he must mean that the healing doctors are those in their patients‘ shoes.774 Only those in shoes know where it pinches. Only the doctor in the patients‘ shoes knows their pinch and can fix it. Only such doctors can use the knife—objectivity—rightly to fix the pinch. By the same token, only bodily involved scientists render our globe healthy; they are ―doctors without borders‖ where science, morality and music interfuse into joy of all, natural, self-forget. For Confucius, music-樂 featured this natural joyous-樂 way is awe-struck ritual-禮 backed by humanness-仁; 禮, 樂 and 仁 are an awe-inspiring three in one, one in three, in rhymed rhythmic joy. Our humanness 仁 naturally overflows in dancing music-樂 to ritual reverence-禮, in joy-樂 indeed, to forget the taste of meat for three months.775

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772

Wu, ―Tanizaki‘s ‗Theory of Idleness (Randa no Setsu)‘ and ‗Japanese Philosophy‘,‖ Why Japan Matters!, eds. Joseph F. Kess & Helen Landsdowne, Victoria, BC, Canada: University of Victoria, 2005, pp. 703-716. 773 The West has a checking with its own ―fit‖ mathematical, instrumental, experimental, and theoretical, peeping into actuality with X-ray. ―‗Nuclear magnetic resonance‘ proved a terrifying concept to patients, who thought they were about to undergo a micro-version of Hiroshima. But Mr. Paul Lauterbur, undaunted, continued to work to improve the technique and went around the world promoting it. By the time he died, more than 22,000 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines were in use, and more than 60m scans were being carried out each year. What the machines see now is almost incredible. A tiny ripple of water in the brain, tracked by hydrogen atoms, that shows the passage of a stroke; a patch of inflammation in the spinal cord, indicating multiple sclerosis; the narrowing of a blood vessel, and constriction of the flow, that presage heart disease. Mr. Lauterbur believed MRI could get better and better, until the living body could actually be watched at work. He believed, too, that it might begin to throw up clues about the origins of life; and that in time that fascinating fuzziness, too, would become as clear as day.‖ (The Economist, April 7th 2007, p. 84) Such fascinating Hiroshima horror! All this denies no necessity of seeing-through our bodies, but objective intrusion destructive as Hiroshima-horror. Chinese medical doctor can see through a patient by just watching how he walks in—without intrusion. Too bad such medical insight—seeing-through—is not spread conscientiously to all medical aspirants. Objective scientific checks in the West never return to the raw feel of our body; the check is made with bodily reading, relies on physiology, on theoretical hypothesis. The check is thoroughly objective, surveying, and calculative, in control of data, to be controlled by objective calculation. All this is no real check, but trapped away from ―fuzzy buzzing confusion of actuality,‖ within self-established ivory tower floating in mathematical-theoretical jargon and instruments, called ―scientific objectivity,‖ ferociously clear, exact, accurate, minute, all-covered, cumulative, supremely conscious and assured. This big mechanism comes down on actuality to destroy our bodies and all in ―ecological disaster,‖ ruining our home-earth. Objectivity gone objectivism begins—is!—ecological apocalypse. 774 ―Both authors [renowned doctors] recall professionals they respect telling them that the best doctors are those who can put themselves in their patients‘ shoes.‖ (The Economist, April 7-13, 2007, p. 83) 775 Analects 7/14.

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MUSIC OF TIMELY JOY TOGETHER DESCRIBES MORALITY AS SELF-ING TOGETHER Music of timely joy together strikes us as ―morality self-ing in joy together.‖776 We must explain. One, morality shares what music has, ―living in joy together.‖ Two, moral joy of living musical harmony is no Western ―morality‖ formal, music-less. One, morality shares all music has, ―living in joy together.‖ Music is timely; so is morality, to do the right deed at the right time. Music is harmony; so is morality, to embrace injustice and redress it. Music is just-right; so is morality, to be right and just. Music is fitting to the situation; so is morality, to do deed appropriate. Music is human; so is morality, all acts are to be humane. Ultimate music is joy and generates joy; so should be morality, but we often forget this delightful side of being moral. Music as an integral complex of timely-joy-together, in harmony, is also morality as self-fulfillment together. Morality is joy at our heart of hearts, or it is not moral. How could ―doing right‖ not be joy unspeakable? Moralist Confucius confessed to following what he desired without overstepping rules, and sighed at no one enjoying virtue as enjoying sex (2/4, 9/18=15/13, cf. Mencius 1B5). No wonder in China, morality is called ―Tao and its person-power 道德,‖ ―humanness and its being just-right 仁義,‖ and ―ritual and music 禮樂.‖ All this describes the Confucian sentiment, the moralistic wing of Chinese thinking. Taoism is so intent on natural joy of self-fulfillment that it forgets even the names ―morality,‖ ―humanness and its being just-right 仁義,‖ and just calls it ―Tao and its person-power 道德,‖ natural and human. All these phrases express beautiful musical vitality that erupts 感 from our hearts 心, to dance out in hands and feet, all too natural, all too joyous, as chanted in the Poetry Classic all too inevitable; we ―cannot stop it 不得已‖ (Chuang Tzu keeps stressing), we cannot help but be so and do so; we call it ―imperative.‖ Music is morality that is inevitable joy existential and inter-imperative. Two, such joy of living in musical harmony is no Western ―morality.‖ External objective observation of good/right deeds abstracts theoretical formulae (rules) of the right/good. What is right yields most pleasures among most people, say Mill and Bentham. What is right conforms to the universalizability principle, whatever deeds that can be universalized, says Kant. Feeling-ethics of Hume, Hutchinson, is ―emotivism‖ not felt; no felt joy is here. Plato‘s body-ethics is shaped by body politic derived from a human body, Aristotle‘s virtue ethics derives the right from human nature, Hume‘s feeling-ethics sees what is right is what is felt right. Here is no joy, no music, no movement but formulae, structures, rules and principles formal-schematic, legislatively coercive. Joy and music are China‘s contributions to morality.

776

和辻哲郎‘s 人間の學としての倫理學 (東京岩波書店, 1934) has caught ethics as human togetherness, but not the human joy of togetherness.

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WONDERING WHY CHINA LEAVES SUCH JOY-TOGETHER FOR SELFDEMISE IN MUTUAL DEMISE A Western friend of mine took offence at my description of politics as musical harmony. He said that politics is basically adversarial, proved by the bloody political history in China as in the West. I can also cite almost all Western political thinkers as confrontational, and Lin Yutang‘s Chinese politics as Confucians confronting eunuchs.777 Still, ruler-ruled as adversaries in China originates in both parties agreeing to the ruler as parents; the ruler, even the tyrant, tells people to obey him the ―parent,‖ the people tell the ruler to behave as their ―parent,‖ and any ―ruler‖ not parental is no ruler, to be demoted, by revolution if needed. ―Ruler as parent‖ is politics as family harmony. Ruler-ruled antagonism is not necessarily basic-ingrained in China as taken by Greek mythologies, Hobbes, and others. In the West, adversarial politics is an uneasy détente of cold peace, the original theomachia—fights with/among gods—transferred to Machiavellism. For China, political fights are original harmony gone awry, defense mechanism of communal body attacking itself, cell-growth turned cancerous to destroy mother organism. Political violence is cancerous disease of body politic. China‘s adversarial posture came from parity of reciprocity originally familial and musical. Sadly, one party—usually the ruler—violating this harmonious reciprocity deteriorates this harmony into violence-mutuality. Mencius is quite clear on the original cordial reciprocity turned tragic (4B3), If the ruler regards the subjects as [his] hands-and-feet, then they regard him as visceraand-heart. If he regards them as dogs-and-horses, then they regard him as fellow commoner. If he regards them as dirt-and-weeds, then they regard him as enemy bandit. Thus, ―A thief of humanity is thief; a thief of rightness is crippler. Thief-crippler is a mere fellow. I heard of punishing a fellow Tchou, I am yet to hear of regicide.‖ Tchou‘s tyranny made him mere ―fellow‖ whose assassination was recorded in history (1B8). This explanation makes familial China more awkward than the adversarial West. Why did China lose its original happy harmony in the first place? Mencius (6A8) desperately offers an analogical explanation (6A8), that the originally lush Ox Mount of human nature is now denuded by continual wood-chopping and grass-grazing; but this repeats the problem, leaving unanswered where the chopping-and-grazing comes from. We shiver in horror, wondering why Chinese people, with almost all others worldwide, have to leave such natural joy-together for painful anti-natural self-demise in mutual demise. Confucius‘778 ―It‘s all over! I‘m yet to see one who loves virtue as loving sex!‖ sighs such sad bewilderment. Confucius‘ solemn joy of ritual melody has turned worldwide dirge. The music still goes on, wailing everywhere everyday, over failures of the West and China. China failed more disastrously because China ties morality to heartfelt music, more inevitable than imperative. Why is China‘s failure worse than the West‘s? Let‘s take a long look. Medicine in the West is about physical-chemical adjustment, and so animal health is indistinguishable from human health, and animal doctor is basically the same as human 777

Lin Yutang, A History of the Press and Public Opinion in China, University of Chicago Press, 1936, pp. 1-10, et passim. Lin sadly missed politics in China as familial, taking it instead as antagonistic. 778 Analects 9/18, 15/13, cf. Mencius 1B5. Chinese Wisdom Alive : Vignettes of Life-Thinking, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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doctor. Then, animals and plants are alike in their physics and chemistry, and so everything is everything else, stones, plants, animals, or humans. Thus we might as well take everything as stones, some moving, some not. So the socalled ―environmental disasters‖ are meaningless, for all energies just shift around, not less, not more; science has no disaster. Ubiquitous impersonal objectivity of the West‘s knowledge—―science‖—implicates all this naturally, ―logically,‖ indifferently. In contrast, China has been advocating harmony among distinct entities, Heaven, Earth, and Humanity the agent of harmonization from its heart. To fail to harmonize, to wallow in bloody disharmony, is unnatural, inexplicable, and inexcusable; such failure harvests ―environmental disasters‖ unnatural, inexcusable. In short, environmental failure is worse off in China than in the West. All this begins among people, constantly, in droves, leaving joy-together for the pain of self-hurting—self-violation 自暴, self-desertion 自棄, self-attack 自伐, self-contempt 自侮, etc.—to mutually violate, desert, attack, despise, etc. Mencius constantly wailed over all this (4A8, 4A11), and tirelessly traveled everywhere to persuade people against it, all to no avail. Why? Even the innate ideals passionately embraced often turn to torture and twist into selfinvited disasters. Lu Xun 魯迅779 shrewdly exposed, in his Nahan 吶喊 Calls to Arms, and other sharp exempla, China‘s impossible Root of Evil, feudalism consolidated by means of the ideals of Confucianism. This situation is now a ―man-eating society‖ in which ―Mr. A Q (阿Q)‖ demented (狂人) lived and died. China‘s self-awareness of such a social evil, thanks to Lu Xun, has produced the wellknown violent anti-Confucianism movement under the aegis of Chinese Communism. Now we see a resurgence of sobered ―neo-Confucianism‖ with scholarly researches. We are closely watching how this Chinese cultural renaissance would fare. But then, why do people have to go through all such roundabout route of tragedy? Why do people leave joy for pain, throw out natural mutual assistance for unnatural mutual destruction, twisting beautiful ideals into disaster-tools, and then warn the people about the tragedy? No one answers, for no one has an answer. Countless sages and saints have devoted their whole lives to advocating inevitable and natural joys-together against mutual destruction, all to no avail. Even more basically, we cannot help but ask, ―Why do they have to struggle to advocate such joy of nature? We need no one to tell us to eat when hungry; why do we need sages to tell us to help one another according to our nature? Why persuade us to follow our nature, ourselves? Isn‘t their struggle itself a nature-contradiction, a laughing-stock?‖ Such is the Taoist puzzlement. ―Or else, are we by nature evil and prone to violence, as both Hsün Tzu and Hobbes say‖? Well, how do they, evil as all other people, know we are all evil, and violence is evil, and why do they have to oppose violence and nature-violation? Why persuade us to oppose our nature that is violent? Besides, has their persuasion been effective? Can we teach a pig to fly? The struggles of both sides—human nature as good, and as evil—failed to stop our miseries of immorality. Why did they fail? Taoists say the failure comes from the very trial; it is because we tried that

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we failed. Leave us alone, and we would come back home to our root, being together as trees and squirrels co-exist. Perhaps so, but whatever Utopian dreamland of noble savages of the Taoists and other lyrical naturalists has been matched by its reverse of Hobbes and Kuan Tzu,780 that left alone, the human race would have perished long ago by their own mutual tearing-ups. Besides, those Taoists themselves have not succeeded in world-reforming, either. Perhaps ―success‖ is invisible, while failure is flagrantly for all to see; virtuous people are hidden unnoticed, while damages perpetrated are obtrusively apparent. Still, why have those hidden good deeds not lessened the horrendous damages? Many untold sufferings have originated in human evil; this much must be admitted. Twist and turn as we may, we cannot extricate ourselves out of this pain over world pain. Music sounds all over this, turned world dirge. Well, shall we try another route? Have we noticed something funny going on here about the relation of naturalness with morality? Calling morality by the names of ―Tao and its individual person-power 道德,‖ ―humanness and its being just-right 仁義,‖ ―ritual and music 禮樂,‖ and so on, already deviates from actuality as inevitable (China) or imperative (West). The name ―imperatives‖ shows struggles under coercion against what is forbidden. Such coercive situation bespeaks violations as long as imperatives stay. Imperatives indicate their violations as ―medical doctors‖ indicate ―illness,‖ unable to fulfill the goal for which they are designed. Imperatives defeat themselves. Of course, if people obey what imperatives indicate, imperatives can exist on paper and be forgotten, to turn de trop, useless. Thus imperatives are self-defeating if effective, and otiose if obeyed. We cannot win either way. Imperatives can exist ―just in case,‖ as firemen do, useless yet needed. This would be a third alternative status of imperatives. Either of the three—effective, ineffective, just in case—is awkward, however. Thus we can neither do without imperatives nor do with them. The ―inevitable‖ needs not be touted, either. To tout ―inevitable‖ turns not-inevitable as touting ―I am normal!‖ indicates abnormality. This is why ―success‖ in morality is invisible; ―Tao can tao, not Always-Tao.‖ It is already self-contradictory to tout ―nothing 無‖ and ―nodoing無為,‖ ―natural self-so 自然‖ and ―spontaneity 不得不,‖ Taoism that sings all this must word word-forgotten, no wording, no silence, discarding the rabbit-trap to use it, using nouse. It is ultimate doing, saying, and living, all de trop. Thus the extremes meet. Both inevitables and imperatives are self-defeating, to be forgotten, though for different reasons. Only the music of the heavens stays. The world sings. Music is king, not morality, for music is inevitable, not imperative. We are born to sing as birds. Now, a new familiar shock comes. Come spring, the birds must sing. Suppressing their singing kills them. Their singing is inevitable and imperative because of nature, imperative out of natural inevitability—here both join. Thus perhaps morality is natural imperative.

779

See the magnificent 16 volumes of 魯迅全集, 北京人民文學出版社, 1981, esp. Volume One. I have a 里仁書局 version (3 volumes) published in Taiwan, and a 岩波文庫 translation published in Japan. 780 Thomas Hobbes‘ grim view of primal scenes of humankind is matched by 管子‘s uncomplimentary original scene of primitive people, see his 第三十一君臣下, (臺北三民書局, 民84, p. 558). Both views are alarmingly dire! We wonder how factual such mythical scene is.

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We must do something right—musical togetherness—to inter-thrive, or else we die as birds die suppressed into silence. Do we remember ―the silent spring‖? No wonder we perish in immorality, morality suppressed. The mystery stays, though, on why we suppress ourselves and die against our natural inclination to live on in mutual compassion. We sing dirge. We are born to sing as birds, but we are no birds. Come spring, the birds sing spring. Imbalanced, immoral, we sing pain. We sing strange songs, then, for unlike birds, we sing against us; we sing anti-we; we sing death. Our life-world sings blood of dirge. The world sings violence. China is too gruesome through history to contemplate; it sings (with Han Yü) its bloody imbalance, as Ssu-ma Ch‘ien did his History Records filled with dirges of moral pathos. We are born to sing as birds but, unlike birds, are we born to sing dirge? The mystery stays while we wail music-as-our-immorality. China-we sing anti-we, against spring in spring. My God, we are trapped—in our sinister anti-we. Mystery is beyond us; we are uncannily beyond us, religious by nature. We meet within us the Beyond, in our bloody dirge-of-existence. Hitler here meets Bonhoeffer his assassin, and kills ―Bonhoeffer‖—the ―well-wisher‖—to be killed in turn three days later. No wonder Christianity is centered at the gruesome cross, the criminals‘ death-rack, and Buddhism lives on death beyond death. Oh wretched that we are! Such death-dirge! ―What about the belief in resurrection?‖ Well, it just pushes the headache a step ahead, if not worsens it. If it were false, Christians would be ―the most pitiable of all‖ people, as Paul admitted. So he passionately persuaded us to live in the light of resurrection, and our daily ―labor‖ would not be ―in vain.‖781 We chime in, ―Blessed are those who live on this rainbow!‖ that we hope stays in the dark sky. One thing is certain, though. Countless Christians died in drove in violence by staking their lives on this resurrection-rainbow. Do we die in violence in the hope of reliving in other-worldly blessedness? Doesn‘t it sound like Islamic suicide rebels? The same despair applies, mutatis mutandis, to Buddhism. The self is a bundle of sensations (Hume here), a bundle of desires to cause pain. Buddhism seizes this fact, and ceases desires to cease pain. But without desires, the self ceases to be. Two stories show so, and how both bankrupt. In King Melinda‘s story a sage tells King that there is no cart on which he came, just wooden this and wooden that. But if there are only elements, no wholes, then no words exist, what compose meaning-wholes. Even ―bundle‖ is senseless. Then, Buddhists see nothing big about a brand of resurrection, reincarnation as the chain of dreadful rebirths, and propose death beyond death, called Nirvana. Now, death is one major pain of life. We do not see how death—plain death or death beyond death—could be ―bliss,‖ however much eulogized and dressed up as ―nirvanic bliss,‖ and the Buddhists also died in droves in violence on this deathly bliss. Long detours we have made to return to our pathetic dirge of immorality. Religions could be our hope were we to stake our lives on their incredible claims, and suffer and die for them. Sobriety inclines us to listen to the pathetic music of the world, the Ch’u Tz’u 楚辭 of despaired loyal subject Ch‘ü Yüan 屈原, and ―Ch‘u Songs 楚歌‖ surrounding us as they did 782 Hsiang Yü before his death. 781 782

1 Corinthians 15:19, 58. 司馬遷, 史記, 項羽本紀第七 (台北縣中和市建宏出版社, 1995, I:295).

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The songs encapsulate a sad story of Hsiang Yü 項羽 whose home was Ch‘u. Surrounded by enemies, he was awakened by enemies singing his home ―Ch‘u songs‖ to celebrate their total victory over his home region. Such a sad ironic presage of defeat at hearing one‘s own home-songs sung by the enemies! Oh wretched that we are! Such dirge of our Ch‘u Songs! ―Doesn‘t the believer‘s violent death in joy show the believer‘s vigorous victory of joy over pain and death, though?‖ Perhaps it does. Reckless tenacity to embrace an illusion is incredibly powerful sometimes. ―Credo quia absurdum/impossibile est,‖ declared Tertullian and confessed Augustine783; belief originates in absurdity, based on impossibility. Here is a ray of absurd hope; remember Kierkegaard‘s belief in absurdity, and Camus‘ absurd reasoning? ―Is it still a part of musical reason, though?‖ Well, if music can include any combination of any dissonance, to make sense of them in rhyming rhythm, and if sense is the prime of reason, then Tertullian, Augustine, and all stubborn believers can claim membership in the family of musical reason, and, we hope, of Chinese sort as well. Hopefully, the absurd impossibility here is in the realm of the Beyond; the Beyond is beyond usual reason, and beyond-usual-reason appears as ―absurd‖ to usual reason. Thus the ―absurdity‖ here is the fountain of reason deeper than our usual reason, a new music of the spheres. Thus the ―reckless‖ belief in absurdity bespeaks the pioneering reason, the dawn of new reason appearing in half-baked ideas, then in musical sensibility, and then as musical reason of life beyond life. The recklessness of belief in the absurd Beyond blazes the torch of adventures of ideas. ―Have we resolved the problem of life as dirge?‖ Well, we hope we have hit on the right trail, via this route of music as absurd morality! Now, however, here is another strange turn. If music as morality exposes us as immoral and in pain, then such music thrives precisely because of pain and imbalance! This is a new twist on music, not a cynical turn but an exciting one, a dialectical reverse of despair, and so perhaps a saving turn. ―You‘ve just turned the table, my friend, and made a virtue of necessity of inexplicable tragedies. But, isn‘t your twist of dirge to glory of music a Platonic turn to fly away from this world, if not a Pyrrhonism?‖ Wow, thank you, my friend. I‘d say, your question precisely exhibits the un-Platonic glory of musical reason for turning the world-table around is not turning from lifeworld. Plato‘s is the abstract universality of logic-rationality that must appeal to mysterious reminiscence and inexplicable participation, to connect itself to actual world beyond ―logic.‖ In contrast, musical reason is the rhythm of this world singing, dirge and ode alike. Being rhythmic to make sense, music is reasonable; being this world itself vibrating, the rhythmic reason of music is this-worldly, nothing out of this world. Thus musical reason as a ―universal‖ is of this universe, the heavenly piping in the human with the earthy. Musical universal is an actual ―inter-versal,‖ Confucius‘ ―One that goesthrough all 一以貫之‖ (15/3). Precisely our wailing dirges show how music-reason penetrates deep into unreason, and how musically reasonable the penetration itself is. The more tragic the dirge, the more pervasive reason musical is, and the more hopeful we are in our world of pain for healing-uplifting by music-reason. 783

―I believe because it is absurd/impossible.‖ Tertullian, De Carne Christi 5; Augustine, Confessions, VI. 5.

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Such is the incredible power of the pervasive-ubiquitous music, in its reasonable rhythm in and of this world. The ancient Canticles of Ch’u784 楚辭 poignantly indicate the universal potency of timeless reason in music in the depths of tragedy, coeval with the immemorial birth of humankind who knew how to wail and lament in pain before learning tottery talk. In sum, musical reason is the mundane universal through tragic unreason, the resurrection here now at every occasion of bloody injustice, our own heart-rhythm of vitality feeding on every dissonance into vigorous assonance, dancing through sad days. ―Falling down seven, gets up eight,‖ forever bouncing back up righting itself,785 music is reasonable this way. Such is Chinese wisdom alive. We say dissonance is part of music, yet music thriving in dissonance is harmony, not dissonance.

784

Their commentaries are a legion. See The Indiana Companion to Traditional Chinese Literature, ed., William H. Nienhauser, Jr., Taipei: SNC Publishing, 1986, p. 349. See also 聞一多全集, 步漢: 湖北人民出版社, 1993, Vol. 5. 陳子展撰述, 楚辭直解 (1988), 江蘇古籍出版社, 1995. 楚辭讀本, 臺北市三民書局, 民90. Etc. 785 We quoted to our purpose a Japanese saying, ―七轉び八起き,‖ combined with a Buddhist toy, 不倒翁.

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MUSIC IN DISSONANCE We have been considering music as lifeworld in dissonance more radical than ―music despite dissonance,‖ for the music of things would not sound until disturbance erupts in the environs. The wind shakes trees and grass, agitates water, and hits metal and stones, and they go in commotion to sound music. Likewise, being out of peace produces human wailing words. So says Han Yü. Life is con brio unconquerable in China. Disaster provokes music, the Kitchen Fellow dancing the sacred music with cleaver to loosen an ox; it is mortal disaster that feeds us in dancing sacred music. ―No disasters under heaven, no sage can display talents; [if things] up, down [are] in concord, no wise can achieve exploits,‖ and wise sages vanish.786 Disaster is the sand that grates out the literary pearl of virtuous exploits. The first of the above three critical quotations, the one from Han Yü, is in the well-known Literature of Old: the Vista Stops [here] 古文觀止; the second on sagely wise is in the no less renowned Chao-ming Anthology of Literature 昭明文選. Let us first consider The Best Literature of Old that came more recently, in 1695, than the Anthology that came between 526 and 531. The very title of Literature of Old: the Vista Stops [here] 古文觀止 is significant. ―Literature of old‖ is of course writings since old, since the Ch‘in 秦 era when we inherited the timeless classics of Three Dynasties 三代,787 through Sung 宋, Six Dynasties 六朝, and T‘ang 唐, till the Ch‘ing 清 before the Republic of China. ―Literature of Old‖ is selected writings since time immemorial. This collection of ancient literature makes our ―vista to stop 觀止‖ there, with excellence to stay our gaze. As the buck stops for president to pick, so the vista stops for us to enter. This expression, ―vista stops 觀止,‖ is taken from the ancient Tso Commentary to the Chronicles 春秋左傳 (quoted in this collection)788 to express the attendants‘ exultation at the Chou ritual 786

「大凡物不得共平則鳴. 草木 . . . 水 . . . 金石之無聲, 風撓之 . . . 蕩之 . . . 擊之鳴」 韓愈, ―送孟東野序,‖ in 古文觀止, 高雄市麗文文化, 1994, p. 696. 「天下無害, 雖有聖人, 無所施才; 上下和同, 雖有賢者, 無所立功.」 東方朔, ―答客難,‖ in 昭明文選, 設論, 臺北三民書局, 民90, p. 2116. 庖丁解牛 is in Chuang Tzu 3/2-12; see Wu, Butterfly, op. cit., pp. 281-359. 787 They are the legendary 夏 (2183-1752 BC?), 商 (1751-1112 BC), and 周 (1111-249 BC) dynasties. 788 「德至矣哉! 大矣! . . . 雖甚盛德, 共蔑以加於此矣! 觀止矣! 若有他樂, 吾不敢請已.」 ―季札觀周樂,‖ 左傳, 襄公二十九年, in 古文觀止, op. cit., p. 111.

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music-and-dance. This collection is of writings whose musical excellence stops our gaze in breathless awe. The Literature of Old: the Vista Stops [here] 古文觀止 begins and concludes with two significant selections. The beginning selection is a renowned arresting story in the Tso Commentary, ―Duke Cheng overcame Tuan at Yen (722 BC).‖789 The unusual birth of Duke Cheng disgusted his mother, who then doted on his younger brother, who turned more and more seriously seditious, with mother‘s assistance. Despite advice from ministers to take a firmer stand, the duke the older brother silently stood by, until the ―proper moment‖ to strike and chase his brother away. What did he do to his seditious mother? Hear this. The duke then placed mother in confinement, and sworn never to see mother till at Yellow Spring [after death], but later regretted it. Overhearing it, Ying K‘ao-shu, a border guard of Ying Valley, presented a gift to the duke, who granted a dinner. As he ate, he set aside the meat. Asked why, he said, ―Your servant has mother who tastes all I eat, but not your lordship‘s delicacy. Please allow my bringing it to her.‖ ―You have mother to bring it to. Alas, I alone have none,‖ said the duke. ―May I ask what it means?‖ The duke told him why, and confessed to regretting it. ―Why should your lordship worry? If you dig the earth to reach springs, make a tunnel to mutually meet, who would say you are incorrect?‖ The duke followed him. The duke entered the tunnel and intoned, ―In the big tunnel,/ the joy as water in milk!‖ Mother emerged and intoned, ―Out of the big tunnel,/ the joy at ease!‖ Now they were mother and son as before. Gentleman says, ―Ying K‘ao-shu is pure filial love, loving his mother, reaching the duke.‖ The Poetry Classic says, ―The child‘s love is never limited,/ ever giving to fellow humans,‖ perhaps to say about such. Gladly advised by a filial minor official on how to circumvent his vow without breaking it, the duke consummated a mother-son reunion in joyous inter-bursts of verses, joined with resonance of another joyous praise in the verse of the Poetry Classic. Compression is the soul of poetry that is this story, beautiful as the singing verses that clinch it. No wonder, the story sings itself into our hearts, on how dissonant relations, mother and son, and brother and brother, were handled and dissolved back into their pristine harmony. ―I understand mother-son reunion here, but what about brotherly concord?‖ The duke did not chase his younger brother to the death. He just let him go. We would not be surprised if, later, their mother would serve as go-between to their reconciliation. Their mother-son joy would be expected to overflow into brotherly reunion. This natural human impression exposes later critiques to be rather cynical, off familial focus.790 Still, cynical or no, these sober critiques are themselves musically poetic, made in critical music toward familial music. In any case, maintaining filial-孝 and brotherly-悌 concord is

789

790

「鄭伯克段于鄢」 左傳, 隱公元年, in 古文觀止, op. cit., p. 3. It is so famous that Burton Watson began with this story in The Tso chuan: Selections from China’s Oldest Narrative History, NY: Columbia University Press, 1989, pp. 1-8. Some critiques are cited in 古文觀止, op. cit., pp. 22-23; see 說明 in 左傳, 隱公元年, 臺北三民書局, 2002, pp. 11-12, and 呂祖謙‘s first essay in 東萊博議, 臺北三民書局, 民91, pp. 1-7. All these critiques doubt the genuineness of their mother-son joy and stress the hidden hostility to the younger brother—quite an unjustifiably depressing picture. In contrast, see Wu, History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991, pp. 245-246 admiring the duke, besides the comment above.

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the warp and woof of the Chronicles 春秋 to which Mr. Tso 左 provided commentaries 傳, explaining this ingenious maneuver toward familial musical harmony. The Tso Chuan 左傳 is Mr. Tso‘s commentaries on seasons of events, no straight chronicle, not Tso Chi 左記 or Tso Chih 左志; it is not Ch‘un Ch‘iu 春秋 a chronicle but its chuan 傳 by Mr. Tso 左氏 the historian. The Wen Hsüan 文選 has collected a Preface to this effect appended to the 左傳 by a later writer Tu Yü 杜預.791 Tu Yü said Mr. Tso elucidated events in five ways. One, Tso pointed out the meaning of compact descriptions. Two, Tso explained the compact chronicle of events on what occurred. Three, Tso explained what was too subtle or too august to straightly indicate. Four, Tso expressed unexpressed implications of simple description of events. Five, Tso showed how pursuing fame loses it, trying to hide evil exposes it, etc. Let us come back to Old Literature 古文觀止. If the beginning essay of this Collection that Arrests our Gaze 觀止 is taken from the ancient Tso Commentary 左傳, then its concluding essay is a no less arresting one by a genius literator Chang P‘u 張溥 (1602-1641), titled simply ―Epitaph to the Grave of the Five 五人墓碑記.‖ The essay straightly tells a story of gruesome tortures of these five captives who kept their loyalty to the bitter end, death. Was it a reenactment of Christ on the cross? Their loyalty is virtue 德; their death accomplished it 功; conveying such virtue and accomplishment throughout the ages, is this essay 言 that thereby withstood the corruption of time. Thus words turn incorruptible by establishing incorruptible virtue and accomplishment. Words, virtue, and accomplishment, they are three in one, inter-establishing immortality. This essay, ―Epitaph to the Grave of the Five,‖ is Three Incorruptibles 三不朽 united in one. China has many other instances of clashes among loyalty to the ruler and various loves of family, in other literature outside the two collections of literature considered here.792 To match the moving story of ―Duke Cheng overcame Tuan at Yen,‖ the Tso Commentary has a no less touching story (656 BC), quite tragic, of Prince Shen Sheng‘s 申生 suicide.793 The story goes laconically as follows. Shen Sheng was the heir to Duke Hsien of Chin 晉獻公, whose second wife Li Chi 驪姬 was jealous of Shen Sheng. She urged Shen Sheng to sacrifice to his deceased mother. Having kept some meat and spirits for the Duke, put poison in both, she then proved to the Duke that the meat and spirits were both poisoned. Shen Sheng fled. Some urged him to explain the matter to the Duke; he refused, saying, ―Without her ladyship my father would be miserable.‖ ―Would you go away, then?‖ ―No,‖ he replied. ―With the name of such a crime I go away, who will receive me?‖ He finally hanged himself. We see that both Shen Sheng and Duke of Cheng share three things sad in common. One, both have been much vilified by later critics. The duke‘s ―success‖ was said to be that of dark 791

杜預 (222-284 AD), 「春秋左氏傳序」, 昭明文選, 臺北三民書局, 民9, III:2171. See Wu, ―Tragic Dilemmas in Life‖ in History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991, pp. 235-259. The essay there did not mention that all these tragic descriptions made sad poetry. 793 左傳, 禧公四年, 臺北三民書局, 2002, pp. 297-298; 禮記, 檀弓上 (臺北市三民書局, 2004, p. 78); Watson, Tso chuan, op. cit., pp. 23-34; Wu, History, etc., op. cit., pp. 237, 252, etc. The above offers a new appreciation of Shen Sheng. This story was also considered in Part I under ―Right-in-Situ as Right.‖ 792

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calculation; Shen Sheng‘s ―failure‖ was Hamlet-like indecision. Both criticisms miss the salient fact, described as follows. Two, involved in inferior mothers, father, and brothers as they were, the duke had a happy ending while Shen had a tragic one. We must note that both thereby accomplished filial piety via existential dissonance. Both the duke and Shen Sheng achieved the virtue of filial piety, under impossible circumstances, to their respective mothers so brutally immoral, totally undeserving of such devotion. Three, positioned as ―parent,‖ those mothers received their sons‘ devotions, and yet as cruel and insensitive selfishness incarnate, they deserved filial devotion not at all. Their position and their desert clashed794 disastrously in their sons‘ agonies, in the duke‘s anger and then regret, in Shen Sheng hanging himself. We latecomers applaud-and-admire in tears both sons as accomplished filial sons. Thus it is that both heroes are touchingly immortalized through time, in the words of history of the Tso Chuan, poetic, compact, and straight, reminiscent of the Bible that is also full of tragic stories simply told. Now, filial piety is virtue 德, accomplishment is exploits 功, and both find continuation if not consummation in historical poetry expressed in words 言. By establishing words 立言, then, virtue and exploits were established 立德, 立功, and thus the Three Incorruptibles were established 三不朽 at one stroke, in the form of poetry-in-time, the worded music of historical drama. The phrase, ―Gentleman says,‖ is often attached at the end of each story as coda to the dramatic time-music. History is operas inserted in the ongoing music of time. The Tso Commentary to the Chronicles 春秋左傳 is China‘s first great historical literature. It covers the turbulent 255 years (722-468 BC), the Ch‘un-ch‘iu period 春秋時代, when the grand unity of Chou Dynasty gradually collapsed into brutal intrigues and struggles among regional feudal lords for respective territorial sovereignties. The whole jumbles of events of this period are quite difficult to tame in orderly description, much less with critical interpretation. Tso Ch‘iu Ming 左丘明795 the alleged author of the Commentaries was supposedly a well-known blind historian of the time. Since the date of his completion of the Commentaries was supposedly close to the Ch‘un-ch‘iu period 春秋時代 which the volume was about,796 credibility of the description of events is supposedly quite high. Not only is the factuality of historical details convincing; the narration is vivid, gripping, and to the point. The Tso Commentary ranks very great literary masterpiece797 and justly anthologized later many times, as in the Literature of Old. What these anthologies agreed on is that the volume is poetically compact, rhythmically compelling, hitting at our core with factuality. In addition, this monumental volume interposes critical interpretation and judgment with a twofold criterion, that politics should be people-centered, and that rulers misbehaved would 794

On the clash of position ethics with desert ethics, see Wu, History, etc., ibid., pp. 239-244 et passim, and Part I above under ―Right-in Situ as Right.‖ 795 It could be Tso Ch‘iu-ming, Tso-ch‘iu Ming, or Ch‘iu Ming the Tso historian. 796 On details of critical dispute over authorship, see 左傳, op. cit., pp. 5-6. See also Watson, Tso chuan, op. cit., pp. xi-xxxviii. 797 It is perhaps a masterpiece greater than later literary History Records of Ssu-ma Ch‘ien 司馬遷, 史記..

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surely fall. Thus this volume is a threefold unity of factuality, poetic literary beauty, and ethico-philosophical depth. No wonder, Confucius (5/25) highly regarded its author. Never to be forgotten, finally, is that the Tso Chuan 左傳 is the masterpiece that came out of the turbulent age 亂世之作, literally—in literary way—sounding forth 鳴 the magnificent tunes out of and within bloody imbalance 不平. ―Chuan 傳‖ means ―critical-biographical conveyance‖—in the music of disasters—of provoked heartfelt critiques and of tragic retrospective reflections, full of post-factual wisdom. Chinese thinking is obliged ever since to be solidly factual, poetic, and ethicophilosophical, all at once, being forbidden to fly up in irrelevant speculation ―logical‖ or ―ethical,‖ irresponsible religious imagination, poetic rambling, or bare chronicle of brute facts. In China, facts are meaning-pregnant, meanings are sharply and critically brought out in rhythmic musicality, which is powerfully, pragmatically imperative because it is factual and historical. The Tso Commentary is the first major interpenetration of fact, with musicality and meanings of the events, to initiate such tradition of critical unity for later historiography to follow. Literary essays ever since are pervaded with historical precedents and philosophical depth, historical narratives are literary gems with thoughtful probes, and thoughtful treatises argue in literary gems packed with factual-historical allusions to urge our praxis. The threefold unity features Chinese wisdom as alive. So is the Choice Literature of Old 古文觀止. Between the beginning essay of loving the undeserved mother and the concluding essay of loyalty to death, both factual, literary, and compelling, we see essays of various variations on this twofold theme of life-music through life-dissonance of suffering, often unjustified. Liu Tsung-yüan 柳宗元, banished to rural marginal territory due to his straight character, calmly composed ―Preface to my Poems to ‗Inept Streams‘ 愚溪詩序.‖ Likewise banished to an uncouth unhealthy Miao-minority region for similar reasons, Wang Shou-jen 王守仁, with unbearable pathos, composed ―An Essay on Burial of Aliens 瘞旅文‖ to mourn two or three unknown folks who wailed to death at the corner of an unknown bridge. One calm-stream serenade, another bowel-eviscerating lament, both essays are variations on the same theme of music in life-dissonance, and all other essays of similar sentiments are situated between these two. Fan Chung-yen 范仲淹 in an ―Account of Yüeh-yang Terrace 岳陽樓記‖ grieved before the world grieved, while Tu Mu 杜牧 in ―Prose-Poem to the Op‘ang Palace 阿房宮賦‖ wailed after the world was ruined.798 And the list goes on. This collection thus composes the music of life singing (through) dissonance of lifedisasters. No need to go elsewhere. Nor do we need to go deeply into the Anthology of Literature 文選 that has made the melodies of Literature of Old into symphonies on identical motifs of singing in the rain of pain. ―Does the Confucian sentiment captured above in those literary collections depart from other schools, though?‖ Calm breeze cools the sages out of turbulence; Chuang Tzu blusters, ―So, banish the sages and the wise, and the world would restore its primal peace,‖ for ―Sages not decease, [then] great thieves not cease (10/16).‖

798

These marvelous essays are in 古文觀止, op. cit., pp. 782 (柳), 1128 (王), 819 (范), and 604 (杜).

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Instead, ―the world of ultimate virtue 至德之世 honors no wise, employs no capable, people know no virtues, walk no traces, leave no tradition‖ (12/80-83). Ultimate virtue-power knows no ―virtue,‖ for it is the primal power of primal nature, and to come home to natural spontaneity is the Ultimate Virtue. Thus typical Taoist Chuang Tzu with staunch Confucian Han Yü ride on the wind to sound forth their respective melodies. Han Fei Tzu, extrapolating from Confucianism and Taoism, sounds another tune, the legalist, of the law, craft, and power of governance, his music no less arresting, and quite effective. Name-scholars 名家 want to bring the messed-up world back in line with the names professed in actuality; they are rectifiers of names. The Kung-sun Lung began by declaring, ―Kung-sun Lung is a debater in the Six States. He took names and actuality inter-scatteredconfounded as disease, and tried to make them consistent by arguing to the best of his abilities.‖ The Teng Hsi Tzu 鄧析子 by the allegedly first Name-scholar, declared his identical mission of straightening the world-mess by straightening the name-reality confusion, full of sayings reminiscent of Legalist and Confucian persuasions.799 They aim thus at rectifying the world as Confucians and Legalist-Realists do. And so, far from being pure theorizers of abstract logic as with Western logicians, Namescholars, logical pragmatists, Name-debaters, used shockers in their logical poetry to arouse to straighten our messed-up world. To accuse them of lacking in developed ―logic‖ is worse than accusing French chefs of low aptitude in sushi-making; we should not bark up the wrong tree. Scholars of Names are less of Western ―logicians‖ than of name-poets spewing apothegm-music to tune up the dissonant world. They are clever poets as Hui Shih, whose poems, ten aphoristic lines 十則, remain in the final chapter of the Chuang Tzu today,800 as he was famously entwined with Chuang Tzu to critically shape Chuang Tzu‘s format of thinking. Other name-poets known now are Kung-sun Lung Tzu 公孫龍子, Mo Pien 墨辯, Yin Wen Tzu 尹文子, Teng Hsi Tzu 鄧析子, among others. The point of Hui Shih, Kung-sun Lung, and Mo Pien was to spout poetic non-sequiturs out of ―names,‖ the actual essence of things, to shock the world out of glibly taking things for granted, skimming on the surface of things, sliding, muddled, blind. These logical poets were the Socrates in China, to gadfly-awaken the public, the people, and the rulers. And then these name-poets were ridiculed as irritable prattling sophists and consigned some to oblivion, condemned one (Teng Hsi Tzu 鄧析子) to death, all because of their failures at world-reform, not because of their logical ineptitude.801 China is incorrigibly practical. Finally, as a grand finale that initiated the whole line of literature above, the Change Classic 易經 is a magnificent poem of factuality in a mathematical frame, subtle, elusive, 799

See 公孫龍子, 臺北三民書局, 2004, p. 2 and 鄧析子, 臺北三民書局, 民86, p. 7. The same purpose was shared by another Name-scholar, 尹文子, 臺北三民書局, 民85, pp. 4-6. 800 They significantly remain in Chuang Tzu‘s last chapter ―Under Heaven 天下,‖ to show how greatly Chuang Tzu has benefited from ―debating with them,‖ poet with poet, to develop and hone Chuang Tzu‘s thinking on things. 801 Had A. C. Graham even read Wallace Stevens, much less Socrates, he would have stopped resuscitating the Mo Pien as ―abstract logic‖ in ancient China, as if to tell us that Aristotle was in China.

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existential, and vastly historical-and-cosmic. All these classical literature, cherished all over China through time, are all in commotion, sounding forth the music-of-disaster out of disaster for us to thrive in its music. The world waits for a great musician to emerge to compose a grand symphony of the wind out of these wind-tunes. Let us try our hand. One of China‘s salient features in all this802 is perhaps the notion and practice of ―letting be‖; it is not positive ―accepting,‖ but is often rendered in negative poetic lines, as Chuang Tzu‘s (20/27) ―What comes, never forbid; what goes, never stop.‖ Confucius also said modestly (12/2, 15/24), ―What oneself desires not, never give to people,‖ and was silent on what to do with what one desires, lest one gets in trouble as the Golden Rule, ―Do to others as you would be done by,‖ often does. Or rather, he modestly let his student skewer his Way with two brief characters, 忠 and 恕, self-loyalty and likemindedness, perhaps dual tacit equivalents to the ―one‖ he wanted expressed that may echo the affirmative formulation of the Golden Rule. The whole point of letting here is to refrain from self-imposition extended from positive accepting. Letting is no imposing, however well-meant, good-willed, or for self-protection, for ―what comes‖ in Chuang Tzu‘s ―what comes, never forbid‖ includes something or someone undesirable and hurtful. We also note that those lines quoted on letting are musically rhymed. Letting is the musical rhythm of life, including silent trailing along, unobtrusively yielding to what comes. Chuang Tzu does not mention aggressive tyrant or killer tiger without citing them as cases for our letting-and-trailing. In fact, letting in all cases is patterned after nature, learning from watching how trees, birds, yaks, and the wind go to let be. Letting comes to be trailing and yielding so as to unobtrusively reform. As we allow things to transpire as they do, undesirable or not, we come to be surrounded by them. Being surrounded, we tarry among them, settling and resonating in them.803 Thus entwined, at home in this surrounding, we come to trailing things silently, unobtrusively, thereby to quietly let its reform work itself out. 802

François Jullien is perhaps one Western ―sinologist‖ alive to have noted China as indispensable to paradigm shift in the West (In Praise of Blandness [1991], The Propensity of Things [1999], Vital Nourishment [2007], etc., Zone Books, NY). Sadly, he scatters Chinese exotics as if announcing the major themes of China, while posing Western way; his odd interpretations and mistakes remind us of Pound and Fenollosa with the same zeal—quite correct—to benefit the West with radical novelty of China. Jullien rifles China‘s phrases to his private purpose, nothing sinological. He admits it, and proudly claims to be beyond China and West (2007, pp. 7-10), yet such claim to culture-transcendence is Platonic, distinctly Western and unfeasible, as his phrasing is acerbic and scattered, quite Voltairean French. No one can jump out of his skin, so being French is not wrong; but it is wrong to pretend not to be French. That is hubris warned by the Greek piety and Socrates. See Ezra Pound, Confucius (1951) and The Confucian Odes (1959) both by NY: New Directions, and Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. E. Pound, Washington, DC: Square Dollar Series, 1935, and Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art (1912), Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge, 2007. See James D. Hart, The Oxford Companion to American Literature, 1969, p. 275, on Fenollosa. See Wen I-do‘s note, sensitive and penetrating, on ―characters‖ as painting sense, distinct from ―painting‖ picturing things, in ―字與畫,‖ 聞一多全集, 步漢: 湖北人民出版社, 2004, 2:205-207. We have inevitably to paint the sense of things as Dali, Picasso and many abstract painters do in the West (as do Chinese), but the West adopted none of them as ―Western characters.‖ China did Ts‘ang Chieh‘s 蒼頡 (a collective name of many genius sensepainters) painting-characters and erected them as Chinaese wording system for millennia till today. China‘s simplified characters 簡體字 today continue this tradition. 803 All this summarizes Chuang Tzu‘s sentiment: 安時而處順 (3/18, 6/52), 一宅而寓於不得已 (4/30), 不擇地而安之, 不擇事而安之 (4/41-42), 知共不可奈何而安之若命 (4/43, 5/20), 安化安不化 (22/78), etc.

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Likewise Confucius said, ―To know it is not quite liking it; liking it is not quite enjoying it,‖ and ―the humane enjoy hill; the wise enjoy water‖804 as they are, never intruding. It is living musically, for enjoyment-樂 is joy-in music-樂. This is Confucius all his own, singing in nature (11/25). Here he smiles at Chuang Tzu, self-forgetting in the music of nature. All this is Confucius, Lao Tzu, and Chuang Tzu; neither aggressively attacked the status quo in violent revolution. Their sense sinks into us; their melody in the situations comes in to sing in us. The blue is their blue sky, now is me here. Their sun and its smell is part of me, and I melt into their sun so bright, and things are forgotten as I forget myself in them, under my blue Tennessee sky. Now, saying all this is already one way of letting be, for words do not impose as long as we forget—put no importance on—what we say. This is what Chuang Tzu means by ―wording without words (22/66, 27/6),‖ by ―wording word-forgotten (26/49).‖ Laying down ―letting‖ this way does the Golden Rule and the Golden Mean in our lifeworld. Music in dissonance is the music letting all existence be as it is. The world sings music-in-dissonance. ―Do you mean everything and everyone is-and-must be professional music composer and performer?‖ Well, the thesis of pan-music does not tout pan-professionalism of music. To insist on pan-music of the lifeworld shows all things to be musical, to invite all, professionals or no, to join in dancing it to typify Confucian practice and pre-Confucian Classics, called ―education.‖ ―Music‖ was at the top of the Six Arts of education, apprenticeship to living human. As we need no great chefs to eat and nurture ourselves, so we need no professional musicians to enjoy and join in the cosmic music to inter-thrive. Music in dissonance is one aspect of musical reason, innate and pervasive as people think in daily living without thinking like professional philosophers. The sooner we realize all this fact and join in, the better we inter-thrive with all.805 And so, the question, ―Do you mean everything and everyone is-and-must be professional music composer and performer?,‖ puts the cart before the horse. Not only do we have no need to be chefs to eat, there would have been no chef if we do not eat. Without our childhood lives to music as water flows everywhere, there would not have been professional musicians. We are musical by nature before some of us are talented enough to be professional musicians. Still, your wrong question has this grain of truth. Not all of us become professional musicians, but we do well to respect them and take advantage of their help. Professional musicians are those who egg us on to sensitize us to music, to join in the musical reason that pervades throughout the sky and the fields. We all need not be music-professionals, but we all need them, to live musically. This is how the world sings, especially in disaster-and-dissonance. We had better join in, with Chinese people doing so for millennia. Now, however, we may doubt if all this is poetry or reasoning with solid validity. Is saying, ―Music is the soul of life‘s reason‖ reasonable?

804 805

Analects 6/20, 6/23. The urging is situationally odd, for how could we be urged to return to ―innate self‖? The Taoists circumvent the oddity with circuitous indirection, ironic, absurd, and patently contradictory. Still, urging us back to nature belongs to a mystery of human nature. Education is itself such an oddity of urging.

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“VALIDITY” OF MUSICAL REASON ―The concept of ‗musical reason‘ is fascinating yet unsettling. Is music ‗valid‘? Do ‗valid music‘ and ‗invalid music‘ make sense? Can we grade music?‖ Now this query is itself unsettling. ―Musical reason‖ is proposed to distinguish logic-rationality from reason itself as musical. Reason makes sense, dynamically, rhythmically, but is not (just) ―logical.‖ Trees, squirrels, and stones make musical sense, seasonal, rhythmic, existential, but they are not ―logically valid,‖ for the phrase does not fit here. And to say so is quite natural. ―Logic‖ is our study of the conditions for the validity of what we humans try to say about things, such as musical reason of existents. But validity is part of ―logic,‖ what is part of reason, while reason is not part of ―logic.‖ Requesting the validity of musical reason is as sensible as asking for ―dress of decency‖ for squirrels and trees, for they are all ―naked.‖ Before we go further, however, we had better make sure of what ―logical validity‖ means. A standard view of the intimacy between ―logic and validity‖ is nicely put this way806: Logic may be defined as the theory of the conditions of valid inference or, . . . as the theory of proof. Inference is a process by which we pass from a belief in one or more statements (the premises) to a belief in a further statement (the conclusion) whose truth, if the inference is a good one, is either guaranteed or at least made probable by the truth of the premises. Inference is therefore a mental process . . . [L]ogical study of the conditions of valid inference . . . involve[s] . . . only the formal or structural properties of arguments. . . . To say that a deductive argument is valid means that the conclusion follows rigorously from the premises, or in other words that the conclusion cannot be false if the premises are true. Thus, an inference or argument is valid when the after-statement called ―conclusion‖ follows necessarily or rigorously from the prior-statements called ―premises.‖ This ―follows . . . from‖ is a tight fit, called ―validity.‖ Validity is a tight fit between reason-statements and a conclusion-statement. ―Logic‖ gives conditions for the validity, so we can check on how valid an argument is, but it does not ―repair‖ invalid inference process. Understood this way about ―validity,‖ music cannot be ―logically‖ valid or invalid, for music does not have an after-statement ―rigorously following‖ the prior-statements, for there is no rule for the conditions of tight-following in music, and even if one note ―rigorously 806

This is how D. J. O‘Conner begins his long article, ―Logic,‖ in The Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy, Third Edition, eds. Jonathan Rée and J. O. Urmson, London: Routledge, 2005, pp. 211-212.

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follows‖ another according to a musical theory current at the time, the result may or may not compose a good, persuasive, and moving piece of music. Still, music can perhaps be graded in some way. We have ―good music‖ and ―less good music.‖ Confucius and Plato saw how ubiquitously powerful music is to mold personal character, and graded ―music‖ according to how it corrupts us or builds us, and how much. Something like that can be explored, for insisting on the cosmos being ―pan-music‖ does not mean all music is created alike, as all existents are not; although we must be wary lest we confuse distinction with separation, much less discrimination. The child parents the adult, they say; the child and the adult can inter-parent only because they are different and inseparable. All this can be applied to actuality, by extending logic-rationally ―checking on validity‖ to musical ―grading.‖ As we need tune-up service to adjust cars to be fit-適, highway-worthy, so we need to fit things together to work for our good living. Tuning-up the cars of persons is Confucian management, called politics-政 (Analects 12/11), to ―right‖ names 正名, adjusting fathers to be worthy of the name ―father.‖ Chuang Tzu on his part urges us to fit-適 ourselves in things in any actuality 無可奈何 to be at home-安 any moment. Now ―music‖ can make sense of all this. Music makes—com-poses—sounds to fit into a sensible pattern, one sound ―follows necessarily from‖ another to make melodies, and ―follows rigorously one with‖ another to make harmony. Politics-政 is a community management, a com-position of the ruler-subject community‘s mutual fit to co-sing their lived music of concord. Confucius and Mencius want the ruler to fit into the subjects and the people; Han Fei Tzu wants the subjects and the people to fit into the ruler. Cosmic politics manages cosmic community into the unity of the big three, heaven, earth, humanity; it is a com-position of the mutual fit of nature-human community. Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu want humanity to fit into nature; Western technology adjusts nature to fit into humanity. Now we can go back to musical reason. Musical reason does not examine as logicrationality, does not point out where one note plays-or-links foul to another. Musical reason just reasons; it re-undergoes, re-listens to, and re-performs the musical score left by someone else who has undergone the reasoning process of musical inference. A good musical score is performed variously and listened to repeatedly as we treat a poem, recited and appreciated variously to deepen ourselves. A good poem is recited and intoned, resonated in our heart of being. A bad music or poem is recited to feel out of tune, out of rhyme, out of resonance. Here, ―out of tune‖ raises our eye brows to decipher a foul play, jarring our heart-ofbeing. Wagner and Mahler jar me out of joint, while Haydn and Bruckner tune me into myself. Heifetz bewitches me, I get lost, while Kulenkampff puts me at ease, as Menuhin warms me all over. This is my heart-resonances to music and its performances. How do I tell all this? Only undergoing it can, as I must go out to meet someone before I can tell who is right for me. I have no idea, no criterion, of what is what, until I meet the right person, and even then I am not all sure. Only living through with that person can our life together hammer out for me what the ―right‖ and the ―wrong‖ are. Something like this is, after all, how the baby learns to grow up human in love and devotion. This is the basis, later, of our interview of persons, our literary assessment of an essay, or our ventures in business and politics. This is not Aristotelian practical syllogism, but

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simple pragmatic reasoning beyond words, as a young lady‘s conviction, ―I like him because I like him.‖ Such process is musical reason. In other words, musical reasoning is a resonating-to-reason process of living. Reality, real actuality, comes out in such lived process, perhaps revealed (and verified, perhaps) in reexperiencing what I read about what my heroine did in her autobiography. Reason is reasoning with no prior principle beyond itself. Collingwood‘s ―re-enactment‖ is still too intellectual and preliminary, merely on how to find how to re-experience, not aptness of reexperiencing, much less what it is. No one can tell us that. But the question on grading or evaluation, or appreciation, persists. How do we know some essays are vista-stoppers 觀止 or select pearls 文選? How have Chinese people traditionally judged which essay belongs to ―classic‖ and which to junk? No one tells us, for no one can. Appreciation is the key, but no one knows what it is, or rather, everyone knows it, as everyone knows how to say ―I like it,‖ but no one can tell how to find what one likes, much less what liking, enjoying, and cherishing mean. Perhaps when we are happy in a piece of music, moved by an essay, then that piece is ―good music‖ or ―excellent essay,‖ otherwise not. But then how can we, how do we, describe when we are moved? Now we are caught. We listen, are happy, and evaluate in good music, so we must enjoy good music to know it, and must have good music to enjoy; we are in good music unawares, until jarred by ―bad music,‖ which is another sort of experience. Both how and what are enmeshed in a circle of experience; excellence is in our bones. No wonder, we don‘t know the criterion of excellence in music, poetry, or their ―reasoning.‖ Logic-rationality is out of experiential circle, so can stay beyond to legislate the criteria of validity. This is not to say musical reason has no criterion, but to say that the criterion itself resides in reasoning experience and cannot be extracted to formalize it. Objectivity is within subjectivity in music and poetry. A story in China says a man stole something in broad daylight; he was caught at once. Asked why he stole in broad daylight, he said he only saw the article, not people. It is quite natural to follow one‘s desire, nothing laughable, even Confucius (2/4) admired ―following what is desired, not overstep rules,‖ for desire is oblivious to rules, so ―never mind rule or no rule!‖. As a ruler 君 is beyond rules to legislate them, so a princely person 君子 is beyond rules to be captain of rules. No wonder ―stealing‖ vanished at the moment the man snatched what he took fancy in, for ―stealing‖ is judgment added on from outside later. Baby Mary snatched what she liked; told not to, she snapped, ―Not fair!‖ While we enjoy ―good music,‖ we know not what enjoyment is; while musical reason is reasoning, it does not judge itself how good it is. ―Still, can we not feel, if not tell, something good or boring is going on, while we are undergoing music or reciting a poem?‖ Well, yes and no. Yes, we do sometimes, when the music or poem is quite out of tune, out of line. But usually No, for we are too much involved at the moment to notice the whole bit as ―good‖ or ―bad,‖ as no one can see oneself ―good‖ or ―bad.‖ We just take ourselves for granted, simply living on, and we live in music and poem as we live on. All evaluation is external, post-factual; evaluation of experiential undergoing such as evaluating music, musical reasoning, is impossible because musical reasoning cannot turn

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inside out, for then it is gone. We cannot hear it again unless we re-experience it, and experience is locked in me, impossible to objectify, survey, and check-and-judge. Chinese writings are deeply musical in reasoning, so there is only spontaneous historical evaluation of excellence. China has no objective criteria clearly formulated. Again, all this means, not that China has no excellence or criteria of excellence, but that excellence and its criteria are felt in experiential subjectivity, and handed down without words as interpretive tradition. Abuse and misunderstanding are naturally rampant, as well as freedom (from restriction of external rules) of development of excellence, and assurance of the eventual destiny of excellent works—musical, poetic, essays—as excellent, in history. So China is historyconscious, so show how much alive Chinese thinking is through time. Chinese wisdom is alive precisely in its impossibility of canonizing criteria of excellence, as logic-validity has been canonized and developed in Western philosophy. Still, the question persists. ―Do we not, can we not, have some sense of ‗criteria‘ of excellence in China?‖ Yes, we can, and we must. We can have it as an intuitive sense, by studying carefully, by entering sympathetically, the literary works we love—and there are quite many—plus how later generations of critical literary essayists reacted by taking their time immersing in these works. By taking time to immerse ourselves in appreciation of literary works in China, as we take time to listen to music repeatedly, we will acquire by and by the sensibility we need to appreciate and enjoy China‘s musical reasoning. China has been living thus for millennia as living incarnation of historic musical reason to be cherished by the world. We must do so; it is the only way, the experiential way, to critically appreciate musical reasoning in literary works and its world of our life. This requirement is quite natural. It is a fact that musical reasoning, as music, is all-experiential and re-experiential, so undergoing musical poetry of literature, our appreciation must also be experiential. If musical reason is life-reasoning, we must live through it to appreciate it. ―Criticism‖ on excellence then arises naturally, historically, out of this experiential womb, as has been supremely executed by the Tso Commentary of Tso Ch‘iu Ming the blind historian, and the History Records of Ssu-ma Ch‘ien the grand historian, followed later by many excellent essayists, poets, and historians. All this historical line of performing musical reason constitutes the tradition of excellence in Chinese literary works that embody thinking at its best and most alive. Excellence is alive, and cannot be captured in a logical box of staid validity, as any child‘s brilliance of its elusive face, smiling or crying, forever overflows a geometer‘s compass. Excellence is ever fresh as the child‘s face is alive. This excellence is what Chinese wisdom is—so alive.

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Chapter 40

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“CLARITY” AND “DISTINCTNESS” IN CHINA Our dear critic continues to press his demand for clarification. ―But you proposed ‗musical reason‘ for Chinese thinking. Reason must be clear and distinct, as Descartes said and as all thinkers in the West have been trying to follow. Philosophy emerges because daily routine is neither clear nor distinct, and so thinking puts both to clarify life. Chinese thinking must be clear and distinct, or it is no thinking.‖ We must protest that our critic simply transfers the West‘s criteria of rationality into China. Once we protest so, however, we must produce an alternative Chinese set of criteria of reason. To cite mobility and sensibility and historicity is insufficient. A handy way is to follow along the West‘s way and produce distinctness in China; after all, following-along is one typical mode of Chinese reasoning. All right, then, let us consider how clearly distinct from the West ―clarity and distinctness in China‖ is. We are grateful to such prodding from the West. Our consideration on Chinese clarity and distinctness here and the above thinking on Chinese validity are instances of cultural inter-enrichment.807 We must note. What clarity and distinctness mean in the West differ from what they mean in China, and so we cannot say China has no clarity or distinctness because we cannot find them as meant in the West. In general, Western clarity and distinctness appear entirely objectively in public, while Chinese ones are subjective, intensely convincing and penetrative. An explanation is in order. Clarity in the West is objective, externally judged, mathematically calculative, and technically manipulative. Stop mathematical clarity, and technical operation stops. In contrast, in China, clarity dawns when matters are elucidated and made so convincing as to require no further explanation. We smile and nod as friend to what there is. Distinctness in the West obtains when things are quantified, made digital, seen as made of clearly separable parts, and the integrity of each part seen as exclusive of others. In contrast, distinctness in China appears when each matter is envisaged in its own milieu, and is let respectively be as itself and no other. Some examples come to mind. 807

Another example is translation, as touched on in the section, ―§ Translation,‖ above. See also Wu, ―World Interculturalism: China Written in English,‖ Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, June 2005, pp. 1-42. Jonathan Rée said, Western philosophy is a harvest of intercultural translations (―Translation,‖ The Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy, Third Edition, eds. Jonathan Rée and J. O. Urmson, London: Routledge, 2005, pp. 378-380).

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Confucius (4/18-21) explained filial-piety-孝 differently in different concrete situations, never imposing a general feature of it, if any. On an identical theme of ―practicing at once what is heard,‖ Confucius (11/21) urged one student on, and restrained another. Chuang Tzu said that fish dived scared into water on seeing human beauty, different animals relish different foods and living quarters, birds scared to death by royal treatments,808 and so on. These stories are not examples of relativism (as has often been mistaken) but of appropriate situational distinctness. ―Situation‖ indicates subjectivity. Clear distinct subjectivity is not narcissistic subjectivism but something natal, deep in the heart of being. Something natal bespeaks being natural, following along with what occurs inevitably, so naturally as to be at home 安 in it, however disastrous. This description fits Chuang Tzu as it does Confucius in untoward circumstances who admired sheer enjoyment of virtuous persons ―being there‖ in hills and water (6/23), in fact anywhere, uncouth or no (9/14). Subjective clear distinctness is thus autotelic, determined, legislated, and regulated wholly by the self, un-imposed by others from outside. Poets are like that, and Johannes Brahms, Clara Haskil, and Annie Fischer were known to be harshly self-critical. Confucians always watched over themselves everyday (1/4) and leaned whenever seeing someone better or worse than themselves (4/17). Chuang Tzu said (24/65), ―Alas! I was sad about people self-bereft, and then was sad about those who were sad about such people, and then was sad about those who were sad about such people being sad about people self-bereft. After that, days went distant.‖ Clearly, here is self-reflection to distance from oneself. Not just the Taoists but even Confucius (2/4) exulted, let us repeat, in ―following what is desired at heart, rules not overstepped,‖ i.e., ―I am myself! Never mind rule or no rule!‖ As the ruler-君 is beyond rules to legislate them, so this princely-person-君子 is captain of rules, not vexed at being ignored (1/1), never worrying about people not knowing him (1/16), for hearing Tao at dawn, he can die at dusk (4/8). Of course the birds sing from dawn to dusk the dawn of creation, the Tao of the world.809 Look how that bird sings! So small, so loud, alone! Don‘t care what‘s what, only about how loud and crisp it sings, Oh how it sings! It sings the first dawn of creation above all noises of traffic down there or up in the sky. It perches on just a line, pouching its full body, all shaking to sing all sorts of melodies and tunes, so soft and so full! It blends in with other birds; is it singing or they? Now it turns from one side to the other, so proud. I don‘t want to walk anymore; I go home. All is itself, clearly, distinctly. This is far from saying, ―being oneself clearly and distinctly‖ does not care for others, but rather that, being truly oneself, whatever the world outside happens would come to benefit one‘s self, thereby, far from being selfish, inter-benefit many selves to turn self-ish, clearly and distinctly. Both Confucians and Taoists are thus deeply communal.810 Confucius (7/21) insisted that ―among the three going, there must be my teachers, to choose good ones to follow, not-good

808

Chuang Tzu 2/67-69, 18/33-35, 19/73-76. "Chuang Tzu 2/24 and 49-50 are combined here." 810 Sociality of Confucianism is well-known. On Taoist‘s sociality see ―The Natural as the Social‖ in Wu, Chuang Tzu: World Philosopher at Play, NY: Crossroad & Scholars Presses, 1982, pp. 115-138. 809

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ones to correct‖; often ―debating‖ with the name-poet Hui Shih clarified and developed Chuang Tzu. Hui Shih of poetic-logical sensitivity helped him. It is thus that China does not distinguish but subjective discerns, not with objective distinctness. China clarifies by elucidation, throwing light on matters, to understand them. Some short stories may help show how all this transpires. ―A man wailed over having come too late, for that old man with the immortality-secret is dead!‖ It is clearly silly, yet telling the story with a wink is lucid, and the story is immortalized. ―Monkeys were furious over ‗three at dawn, four at dusk‘ and happy at ‗four at dawn, three at dusk.‘ Get it?‖ And we are softly jolted—if there be a soft jolt. ―A Ch‘i 杞 man lost sleep and appetite fearing sky falling, ground splitting.‖ The dumb fear is yet of ecological disaster earth-shaking, heaven-splitting, nothing laughable. My death is my cosmic cataclysm. The Stoics say when we are alive, death is not, when death comes, we are no more, so death is not. Lieh Tzu says since we do not know if heaven and earth would perish, we have no room for such big matter.811 Live as we do; it is enough for today.812 We follow Lieh Tzu, not knowing when we die. All stories, factual, counterfactual, and imagined, are ―historical,‖ to throw light on concrete matters concerned, to help us discern. This is China ―historically aware,‖ Chinese wisdom alive. ―Where is ‗clarity‘ and ‗distinctness‘ here?‖ Well, it is all over lifeworld. Things get etched out as themselves, subtle, elusive, complex, apparent or simple; ―as‖ is clarity, and ―or‖ is distinctness. Let me explain. Matters of life are subtle or simple, clear or elusive, alive or dead, beyond sense or nonsense; this ―or‖ is distinction. But after things are distinguished, we find things clearly subtle, simple, alive as a newborn baby quiet as dead wood. Low people greatly laugh on hearing Tao; God‘s way is nonsense to ―the wise,‖ and Jesus tells us not to give pearls to dogs.813 Distinction and clarity are now together, convincing. Says China, ―Do we have to distinguish and ex-plain as above? We Chinese people learn from the West about clarity and distinctness, and then continue to elucidate and follow things. Lucid was the story of Hun Tun the Ambiguous, who clearly and distinctly entertained oceanic emperors. It was these emperors who looked at Hun Tun from outside and found him without clear and distinct ‗seven holes‘ and, disturbing Hun Tun‘s inner clarity and distinctness with their external ones, killed him.‖ All this goes to showing that Chinese ―clarity and distinctness‖ is intensely subjective, accumulated from old days into a distinctive tradition of discernment and interpretation. That tradition looks muddled but actually quite definite and subtle. To enter it, we must read every classic carefully repeatedly, as if never read before. To read Chuang Tzu, for example, we must stop ―drawing . . . forced and unnatural distinctions,‖ ―rational and systematic analysis,‖ said Watson. One must instead ―read and reread his words until one has ceased to think of what he is saying and instead has developed an intuitive sense of the mind moving behind the words, and of the world in which it moves.‖ 811

天端第一, 列子, 臺北三民書局, 民82, p. 67. Doesn‘t Jesus tell as much? ―Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.‖ (Matthew 6:34) Jesus has his own different spin on this advice, however. 813 Chuang Tzu 23/41, Tao Te Ching 41, 1Corinthians 1:18-23, Matthew 7:6. Christianity horrifies us with Jesus‘ gory tortures on the cross, the worst and longest death at age 33. Buddhism horrifies us with Emptiness of all, the terrifying chill of our ―premature burial.‖ 812

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Watson‘s advice on how to read Chuang Tzu814 applies to reading all Chinese classics, Confucian and all. Besides, importantly, the way a classic has been read and lived across the centuries is itself an essential authentic part of the classic. This is especially true of the class of all classics, the Change Classic 易經, of which Wilhelm said,815

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[We must] keep in mind all the strata that . . . make up the book. Archaic wisdom from the dawn of time, detached and systematic reflections of the Confucian school in the Chou era, pithy sayings from the heart of the people, subtle thoughts of the leading minds: all these disparate elements . . . create [how] the book lives and is revered in China, and . . . we must not neglect the later strata either. In these, many of the treasures of the very earliest origins are brought to light, treasures that were up to then hidden in the depths of the book. . . [W]e shall follow the lines back from the later to the earlier elements, in the hope that from the study of the living development of the book itself we may also derive insight into its meaning.

Have you noted here the words ―heart,‖ ―lives,‖ and ―living development‖? Chinese classics and their thinking are alive, clearly, distinctly, through the ages. Moreover, what Wilhelm said of the Change Classic applies, mutatis mutandis, to all classics of China and all writings of China. Let us cite a final story to clue us into reading the classics and entering their living tradition.816 Chia Tao 賈島, deep in thought on horseback, bumped into an illustrious literator Han Yü 韓愈. Chia Tao was wavering between two lines, ―monk pushes door below moon,‖ and ―monk knocks.‖ Impressed, Han decided on ―knock‖ for him. This story later compresses into a phrase, ―push, knock 推敲,‖ to mean ―polish what we say,‖ going through weighing to clarity and distinctness. The story describes how clarity and distinctness needs deliberation guided by senior expert to attain, and the story is immortalized in the phrase; it is now a history. Clarity and distinctness is embedded thus in history, the tradition of interpretation and understanding for several millennia, quite alive as Chinese people themselves. It is time to take stock. We began with distinguishing objective meaning of clarity and distinctness from their subjective sensing, and pursued the latter. We see how subjective clarity and heartfelt distinctiveness lead us to China‘s historical ―tradition of understanding.‖ Now, what history means here is intriguing. Historicizing subjective clarity and distinctness must mean that subjective understanding can and must be made publicly personal. Things personal is now made public-in-time, nothing hidden, all open to understanding for anyone anytime to learn. ―Learning‖ undergoes subjective understanding gone on in previous ages, clearly and distinctly for ourselves today. Learning is reenactment re-experiencing the text left to us,817 life-apprenticeship in classical musical reason. It is Chinese ―universal‖ historical. 814 815 816 817

Burton Watson, The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, NY: Columbia University Press, 1968, p. 7. Hellmut and Richard Wilhelm, Understanding the I Ching, Princeton University Press, 1998, p. 51. The story of ―僧推月下門 or 僧敲‖ is recorded in 「賈忤旨」, 鑑誡錄. ―Public,‖ ―education‖ and ―history‖ must be united in Western democracy. ―Making everything public‖ may just produce mob rule if people are reckless, uneducated, irresponsible. A handy way to watch them is to judge them with history, comparing ―today‖ with what has been the case, and one way to deepen people is to teach

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Now let‘s take a deep existential breath for this bombshell. I remember my niece rushed in through the door, shouting, ―Hi, Grand Uncle! I‘m Emma! And I‘m plain old Seven! Not ‗one hundred and seven‘!‖ And then she proudly affirmed, ―This is my table!‖ and ―Five and three make eight!‖ She awed me into long silence, mumbling, ―I didn‘t know you are that ‗old,‘ and of course you are not ‗plain.‘‖ The point here is unmistakable. She asserted, ―I am Emma!‖ and her existential conviction, ―And I‘m plain old seven!‖ led to ―This is my table‖ and ―Five and three make eight!‖ The subjective ―I am I‖ proudly supports ―This is this.‖ Such is what it means to say, ―Clarity and distinctness is subjective.‖ Besides, this subjective conviction is historical, for she has grown up to claim this, and her proud pronouncement has been staying in me till today, reverberating through my life to give me smile and strength. That was a bright sunny afternoon, and my life has been bright and sunny ever since, thanks to her proud shouts. The whole conviction spreads historically, intersubjectively. Going from the deep ―I am I‖ to the assured ―A is A‖ is an a priori process of history. The law of existential identity is our history underlying our living, to exhibit itself—how could it help it?—in this specific interpretive tradition of subjective clarity and distinctness, to guide and typify us as of this culture and no other. Such subjective history is our bones that move as our identity unawares, here now. The history and the tradition are often unspoken, underlying all spoken and written words, and supporting unspoken expressions of events, and judged later as deserving of sagely admiration or horrified warnings—intuitively, communally, existentially, and historically. All this is the undercurrent of China‘s wisdom alive, supporting and shaping China, and it spreads to indirectly shape and support the world for millennia till today. This undercurrent is alive with its own mobile rhythm, rhyme, and reason; it is the throbbing moving music of the world-heart. Mind you, however. A child is too much at home in his Mom, his root, to mention Mom often. Likewise, Chinese literature is so much musical that it mentions music only sporadically. What follows is a sympathetic extrapolation on the mobile nature of musical reason, by watching how music pulses. Sadly, ―music in China‖ in the concrete has for unknown reasons almost vanished today. The consideration below is taken from appreciation of classical music in the West that has fortunately survived. Four features of music come to mind. One, every composition is unrepeatable; so is every performance of it. It has its own ―logic of integrity,‖ one and only, never to be repeated, much less generalized. Two, still, all performances of ―this composition‖ are recognizable as of this one and no other. ―Variations on the theme of Paganini‖ by a specific composer, for example, are by this composer, not by any other. Three, every composer and every performer have their uniquely recognizable styles in all their compositions, in all their unique performances. Four, every composer or every performer has one signature composition or performance. Listening to Vivaldi‘s Four Seasons experiences all typical features of Vivaldi, as Mozart‘s A

them history. At a different front, Rudolf Bultmann in trying to reconstruct Jesus in historical authenticity, says that [a] history is a critical question and answer dialogue between awesome past and understanding today, and [b] the critical dialogue takes place on the basis of what is left to us, the texts of what Jesus said, not how he lived. All this is an uncanny mirror of Chinese historical sentiment, but has sadly been neglected in the West. (Jesus and the Word [1934], NY: Charles Scribner‘s, 1958, pp. 1-10)

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Little Night Music does all his, and Schubert‘s Trout Quintet does all his. ―This one composition‖ shows this composer as he is. We also delightfully remember Yehudi Menuhin performing Beethoven Violin Concerto with Wilhelm Furtwängler, Zino Francescatti doing Paganini Violin Concerto No. 1, and Nathan Milstein doing Goldmark Violin Concerto, all in the early 1950s, as those signature performances that typically represent respective performers. Thus, ―unique, recognizable, style, typifying‖ show how alive and moving the pattern of musical reason is. The ―logic of music‖ is never predetermined but mobile and dynamic, ever developing on its own. At the same time, this moving pattern has its own compelling selfregulation, inevitability, and necessity. This ―its own‖ is clarity and distinctness of musical reason. Such clarity and distinctness is alive, subjective, never rambling, arbitrary; its time-logic is set in its way. Today can never be yesterday or tomorrow; being in a specific situation, we are in a specific sonic time-complex and no other. All sounds surround and situate us in a specific way, no other. And as such, the whole complex ever shifts on its own ―logic.‖ This shift is itself inviolable. Musical reason of actuality is an inviolable dynamics in time and in sound, all-surrounding. The word ―logic‖ was used; ―grammar,‖ ―style,‖ or ―theory‖ might work as well. The socalled ―theory of music‖ and ―logic of thinking‖ are the ―grammar‖ of the language of thinking and of music. Grammar follows language; musical theory as music-grammar follows music; logic as thinking-grammar follows thinking. ―But logic is universal!‖ The grammar of poetry and music is universal as grammar of language; they are all grammar of life-thinking. They are logic of life universal. Music is poetic literature wordless.818 David Oistrakh performs music in orthodox style 楷書 sonorous, vast, and masculine, Fritz Kreisler in sauntering style 行書 free-flowing, tender, and decent, Yehudi Menuhin in grassy style 草書 subtly rich, sinuously shifting heartfelt as each stroke turns819; all are musical calligraphies executed on time.820 The parallel

818

Words in songs and operas are musical wording, i.e., music, no usual words. Besides, Oistrakh, Francescatti, Grumiaux, Milstein, Szeryng, Szigeti display delightful variations within their orthodox style. Besides, Kreisler, Huberman, Kulenkampff, and Prihoda display respective subtle differences in their sauntering style. Menuhin‘s grassy-styled violin, rich, subtle, and sinuous, is suited to Bartok, Elgar, Vieuxtemps, Walton, and is surprisingly steeped in stately Bach and balanced Beethoven, both B‘s being orthodox-styled. Grassy-style embracing orthodoxy-style turns incredibly lush and deep; he claims to have done Beethoven‘s Violin Concerto 25 times a year. He is to my knowledge the only cross-over styled musician (though not as well done on Mozart concerti). Some of his extraordinary recordings are collected in 50 CDs of Yehudi Menuhin: The Great EMI Recordings, 2009 (6 CDs on Bach, 5 CDs on Beethoven, etc.). All these are on violinists alone. The pianists can be classified likewise as well. This point illuminates our standard of appreciation. Standards differ in kind from one style to another. Grassy style cannot be criticized with the standards of orthodox style; Menuhin cannot be accused of ―less accurate‖ than Oistrakh, who cannot be criticized as ―too stiff‖ compared with Menuhin. 820 Musical compositions are classifiable likewise in three calligraphy-styles. For example, Haydn in orthodox style subtly differs from Mozart in sauntering style. Haydn also differs from Bach and Beethoven in their respective 819

orthodox styles, as orthodox 歐陽詢 does from orthodox 文徵明. It would be fascinating to trace the lineage of Schubert‘s symphonies to Haydn‘s, and those of Mozart‘s and Beethoven‘s piano concerti to Haydn‘s, etc. Can we classify German music as orthodox, Spanish music as sauntering, and French music as grassy? Can we say the same with styles of German, Spanish, and French philosophies? Chinese calligraphy is sense-infused and musical as Western music is space-alive, and Chinese music as time-sinuous is an open horizon yet to explore. Now, music is something intensely personal, and there may well be different assignments and

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between music and writing shows how musical calligraphy is, and how calligraphic music is, Western or no. Anyone can get it, knowing Chinese or not. Literature is poetic, worded music, music on paper ever shifting with life-actuality. Lieh Tzu told of a pair of brothers, one with literary insights, another military-astute; both were respectively employed as high-ranking officials in respective states. Another pair of brothers, with identical talents, sought employment in vain. Lieh Tzu made three points on it. One, those in season thrive; those out of season perish. Two, things have inconstant Yes, inconstant No; what is trashed now can be cherished later. Three, so, we must respond to season without fixed rule.821 This entire story and exposition are in musical poetry. Thus all four features mentioned about music appear in poetry and literature. One, as a story is recited, it changes a bit, uniquely unrepeatable. Two, yet a story or a poem or a theme is recognizable as this one and no other. Three, one poetic writer is recognizable by her style as this one and no other. Four, every poet-writer can be typified by one signature poem or theme or production. Now, how did I get all above? I am a music lover; I cannot live without music. I have been pondering on what ―reason‖ is in ―musical reason,‖ and dialogued on this theme with my son John a musicologist. My subjectivity and our intersubjectivity produced the above reflections. ―Our reflections‖ thus practiced reflective-resonating musical reason in situ—at work—to yield its features above. Let me tell you something else. I‘m here now and cannot be there then, though I can imagine being there then while here now. This is the glory and misery of being human, glory because I can put myself elsewhere else-when to plan and empathize, misery because this ―move‖ creates a gap in me to tend me to pretending to be not-I-am. Such gap by pre-tension—tending-forward—emits worries. How can we resolve them? Learn from kids. Kids pretend, too, but don‘t worry because they know822 they are pretending, and call it ―play‖ and do not worry; they even pretend to worry, and laugh about it! They play, live, the music of life that plays-and-pulses them ahead, pre-tending. Music comes thus to heal me of this pretension-plight and puts me fully here and nothere, now and not-now, both at once, for music sings what‘s coming now in what‘s gone now, all in a single melody and coherent rhythm of the now-moment. I ride in the fullness of time and season; every ―time‖ and ―place‖ is apt and at one at once, full, no gap, and on the go. This is the powerful miracle of music, ―leisurely with heaven and earth to make the spring and the autumn‖ of cosmic seasons, in sheer royal joy of a lowliest dry skull casually tossed by the wayside,823 to ―season‖ the sky and the fields, to ―time‖ them to sing the world without bother, never. How could anyone care to bother with useless roadside skull?

821 822

interpretations. What is cited here is just to illustrate that such parallel between music and calligraphy is possible and significant.

列子, 說符第八, 臺北三民書局, 民82, pp. 251-252.

Socrates missed saying that it is OK to pretend to know as long as we know we are pretending; pretension-asknown is now taken as ―intentionality,‖ as part of human nature. 823 Here climaxes Chuang Tzu‘s story where the dry skull, casually by roadside, confessed to the secret of its royal joy vast and inviolable, 從然以天地為春秋 (18/27). Its code is now cracked as cosmic music, thanks to music we love and sing!

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The skull is death-brain; here is cosmic music that the death-reason life-sings to all things up in the sky, around in the fields. Music unites death to life, heaven and earth to seasons, and beautifies to vivify everything with its own reason and season of integrity. That is musical reason whistling life, the magic flute of a dry death-skull by the roadside. Musical reason is thus clear and distinct to the being-heart, at the heart of sky and fields, pulsating everything from past to future, from death to life and beyond. This is clarity and distinctness, subjective and objective, penetrating heaven and earth, pervading death to joyspread to life, in dreams, in plodding walks of waking inter-life. Nothing is more intimate, ultimate, and delightful than musical clarity, distinctness. Now, we must be cautious. Musical reason is historical, and history is blood-stained all over.

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MUSICAL REASON AS HISTORICAL REASON Musical reason in China is historical reason, typified by five points. One, historical reasoning is not philosophy of history, thinking of history-as-object in timeless ―logic.‖ Two, reason musical shows reasoning moving. Three, reasoning historical depicts reasoning existence-involved. Four, existential historicity of reason tells us to be true to our self and spread authenticity in time. Five, it is ―history moralized‖ seriously. ONE, historical reasoning is not philosophy of history in vogue in the West, from Aristotle to Collingwood and beyond, with history as an object reflected on the solid ground of eternal ―logic.‖ ―Historical reason‖ is instead reasoning historical moving, changing as history. Historical reasoning is history moving reasonable, history the primal womb of reason and self-actualization, reasoning in life of life-timing. The dynamics of moving reason ―musical‖ is not random but historical, actual. TWO, the musicality of reasoning depicts reason moving. Music moves on freely, with no restriction but its own way and rule of moving, its own modulation of making sense. In its freedom, musical reason finds its own sense. Violate musical autonomy, and music perishes into noises, to crumble existence into arbitrary noises. Music is thus moving freedom autotelic, free in its law of self-identity; the unity of freedom and its law moves on, in moving freedom self-ruled, in a word, in history. THREE, the historicity of reasoning describes such reasoning to be existence-involved. If the musicality of musical reason is a moving unity of freedom and self-rule, then the reasonof-life historical is a moving unity of freedom and inter-involvement. How so? Strangely, we all want to know straight brute facts without comment, yet as humanly recorded the events take on human significance. Collingwood said that the geological process is not history because no human can reenact it. Well, geological process is history when we humans describe it as ―geological history.‖ Ruskin‘s ―pathetic fallacy‖—nature has no feeling; we cannot attribute feeling to it—is itself a fallacy, for he felt nature as not-feeling, and he is human. Confucius sighed, ―Does Heaven say anything? Hundreds of things are born in it.‖ A mere spring-to-autumn description signifies things‘ births and deaths; a ―bare‖ chronicle sways the hearer. Fact-record is a powerful argument, ―history.‖ China, aware of this power, has for millennia been assiduously ―recording events,‖ and its writings, even its ―logical treatises,‖ are history-drenched. Pull out records of events, and all arguments in actualitypathos vanish, and whole Chinese literature collapses senseless.

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Pan-involvement of history—with other existents, with senses bottomless—describes absolute significance of history. Music can distinguish music from noise, but history cannot distinguish historical from no-history, for no no-history exists. We neglect history, and we are in historical ruins. Ssu-ma Ch‘ien the grand historian lamented that hegemon Hsiang Yü‘s demise was due to Hsiang‘s refusal to learn from history, to his lack of history, and Hsiang‘s ―no-history‖ and Ssu-ma‘s lament of it are parts of history. History never dies; only we live in history and die into history; live or die, we are history. Try as we may to despise history (―Never mind the past; it is gone for good.‖) to break out of it in political maneuvers and/or imagination, all are a part of the actual flow of events, history. Trying to get out of history makes history. As history describes events, the description shows the view and interpretation of that time. China‘s writings tell of understanding, interpretation, and judgment of history; later generation adds their description, understanding, and judgment, people still later add more of their own, and they all thus make history. These layers of understanding and judgment become a series of ―commentaries‖ to the events, to warn and guide us now; these guides thus add on continually to make ―history.‖ So history is contemporary whose part we are, developing from ancient through today toward tomorrow. History is comtemporaneity going unceasing. ―Don‘t they, don‘t we, make ‗mistakes‘?‖ Well, later generations will point them out, and the mistakes themselves become history; mistake as retrospective realization spells history. History is the world-court of judgment, which is itself history, alive and developing. All things all over are all-embracing history, but China‘s history is most pronounced on how pervasive history is, most history-conscious, and so studying Chinese history is most instructive of China and of history. In China, thinking is historical, literature expresses history; thinking and literature compose wisdom as philosophy arguing, and arguing is history-drenched.824 History is the Way, the One, that skewers Confucius‘ life, his knowledge, and the life of everything; the ―skewering 貫‖ is history unceasing. China has no abstract ―time‖; ―time 時‖ is ―seasons‖ shifting. China has been concerned for millennia with meteorology of life‘s seasons, natural and human, historical seasons. The Change Classic and the Tso Chuan are two ways China exploring the patterns of seasonal changes, in which cosmic history is human, human history cosmic.825 Chinese history tells of history as moving musical reason in life, existence-involved. Moving freely, reason makes rules for itself for all involved, and follows those rules. Thus history judges; it is reasonable. History is existence-involved, universal. History is universal reasonableness in time and in space. FOUR, historicity of reason tells us to be true to our self to spread authenticity. Being true to the self and spreading authenticity are an absolute twofold law of history, as gravity and gyration are a twofold law of nature. Violation of the law of history harvests disaster as

824

This is the theme of Wu, History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991. 825 This is the theme of Wu, On the “Logic” of Togetherness: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1998, pp. 342-385.

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violating the law of nature does. Natural laws are natural laws for people, to harmonize nature by harmonizing with nature.826 Let us go slower. First, Confucius keeps stressing, ―Never have glitter to showoff; be solid, slow in words and deeds.‖ Not showy, we must let integrity show itself in few words, following which to act what cannot be helped at our heart. Confucianism calls it fidelity 忠, truthfulness 信, or sincerity 誠 that truthful word 言-accomplishes 成. Secondly, Mencius keeps stressing that we should never scheme for selfishness that stops the spread of integrity. This is particularly apropos of rulers for whom selfish scheming is quite tempting; yielding to it invites self-destruction. This point has been stressed continually in all history books, whose warning has been continually fulfilled, self-destruction in its violations, in all Chinese history. Let us take just one example. Han Fei Tzu is perhaps alone in pointing to the subjects’ mortal risk of touching the ―reverse scales‖ of the ruler-dragon. All others in China, History Classic 書經 and Mencius, warned rulers against touching people‘s reverse scales, and all historical records, Tso Chuan 左傳, Kuo Yü 國語, Han Shu 漢書, etc., report how the rulers perished in droves by touching their peoples‘ reverse scales, though they did not use the phrase, ―reverse scales of dragon.‖ Now, their details are in order. Sincerity 誠, loyalty to oneself, is integrity that goes both ways. If we are self-loyal 忠, our truthfulness cannot help but spread in like-heartedness 恕, from ―filial love to our parents‖ to reach others‘, loving our young‖ to reach others‘,‖ and people turn all brethren within Four Seas. All under Heaven is pervaded by humane milieu the ―people dragon.‖ This dragon has its reverse scales; touching them is death. To touch reverse dragon scales is to stop the reach-out by selfishness. This is because mutuality is human nature. Fidelity to one‘s self 忠 is to be humane 仁, to spread like-hearted 恕. Infidelity to the self is inhumane; it stops the spread of likeheartedness; the stoppage also spreads inhumanity as selfishness cruel, not like-hearted. Cruelty is to touch the reverse scales of the dragon of human nature. Such a foul spread spreads death. The ruler can easily spread self-integrity to harvest great concord among people, or stop its spread, either by his selfishness touched to cause his subject‘s death, or by touching his people‘s reverse scales with his selfish cruelty to perish himself. Han Fei Tzu admonished us on the first danger, saying,827 The dragon is a creature which is docile and can be tamed and ridden. But under its neck are reversed scales which stick out a full foot, and anyone who comes in contact with them loses his life. A ruler of men is much like the dragon; he too has reversed scales, and an adviser who knows how to keep clear of them will not go far wrong.

826

See Chan‘s translation of ―Great Norm‖ in Source Book, op. cit., pp. 8-11; he correctly said that the nine categoies encompass human-cosmos interrelationship central to Chinese history. See ―洪範,‖ 尚書讀本, 臺北市三民書局, 民86, pp. 78-87. 827 司馬遷, 史記, 老子韓非列傳第三 (臺北縣中和市, 建宏出版社, 1995, III:617. This is Arthur Waley‘s translation, Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China (1939), Stanford University Press, 1982, p. 188. See also

韓非子, 說難 (台北市三民書局, 1996, p. 117). Chinese Wisdom Alive : Vignettes of Life-Thinking, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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On the second danger, both Tso Chuan and Kuo Yü tirelessly record historical tragedies of how the rulers perished in droves by continually touching their peoples‘ reverse scales. Tso Chuan recorded,828 Shih K‘uang [renowned musician adviser, blind] was attending the ruler of Chin. The latter said, ―The people of Wei have driven out their ruler—what a terrible thing!‖ Shih K‘uang replied, ―Perhaps it was the ruler himself who did terrible things. . . . The ruler is host to the spirits and the hope of the people. But if he exhausts the people‘s livelihood, . . . and betrays the hope of the populace, then he ceases to be the host of the nation‘s altars . . , and what use is he? What can one do but expel him? . . .‖ Similarly, the Kuo Yü begins with a chapter admonishing tyrannical King Li who silenced popular complaints with death penalty.829 The king was pleased and announced to the duke of Shao, ―I have succeeded in silencing the criticisms. Now no one dares to speak out!‖ The duke of Shao said, ―You have merely dammed them up. But stopping up the mouths of the people is more dangerous than stopping up a river. When a river is blocked and then breaks through, many persons are bound to be injured, and it is the same with the people. Therefore, one who desires to control a river will leave an opening where the water can be drawn off. And one who would control the people should do likewise, encouraging them to speak.‖ Helpless people are actually invincible all through China‘s feudal history, part of Nature‘s unstoppable water-power. Western democracy belatedly acknowledged their power, and that taking ―people-power demo-kratia‖ as a mere slogan, not awesome fact. The Mencius also famously recorded the power of the people,830 King Hsüan of Ch‘i asked, ―Is there [such fact] that T‘ang banished Chieh, King Wu attacked Tchou?‖ Mencius replied, ―It is on record.‖ ―Is regicide all right?‖ ―A thief of humanity is thief; a thief of rightness is crippler. Thief-crippler is a [mere] fellow. I heard of punishing a fellow Tchou, I am yet to hear of regicide.‖ Heavenly timing is less [important than] territorial advantage, which is less [important than] popular concord. If the ruler sees the subjects as [his] hands-and-feet, then they see him as viscera-andheart. If he sees them as dogs-and-horses, then they see him as fellow commoner. If he sees them as dirt-and-weeds, then they see him as enemy bandit. Heaven sees from [the perspective of] my people seeing; heaven hears from [the perspective of] my people hearing. All such Confucian sentiment expresses a subtle Taoist irony in history. People are norulers who yet actually rule over their rulers; they are the almighty no-ruler rulers. People are, to borrow Lao Tzu, the awesome Heavenly Net, coarse meshed yet leaks nothing, quite scary to the rulers. People are the waters that cannot be dammed without damaging the rulers. This is the root of people-power called ―democracy‖ in Chinese version, which has been in actual existence for several millennia in China. 828

左傳, 襄公十四年 (臺北市三民書局, 2002, pp. 991-992). This is Burton Watson‘s translation, Tso chuan, NY:

829

國語, 周語1 (臺北市三民書局, 2006, p. 7), tr. by Watson, op. cit., p. xvii.

830

Columbia University Press, 1989, pp. xv-xvii, abridged.

See Mencius 1B8, 2B1, 4B3, and 5A5 (all Wu‘s translations). The same point as Mencius‘, quite severe, was asserted by 師曠 in response to 晉侯‘s objection to people banishing their ruler (see 左傳, 襄公十四年, 臺北市三民書局, 2002, p. 991).

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FIVE, such idea is ―history moralized‖ with ultimate seriousness. We tend to condescendingly call such admonitions a moralizing of history, to sympathize with John Ruskin who wants us to shy away from the pathetic fallacy of reading our feelings into unfeeling nature, not realizing how bare human description of facts powerfully presents this inexorable law of the moral nature of history, touching intimate subjectivity. This existential law-in-time is the serious inter-existential imperative of cosmos. The Chinese folks tell wisely among themselves, ―Humans unruly, and then Heavens disorderly.‖ Confucianism calls this law ―morality,‖ Taoism calls it anti-moral morality or human nature in primal naturalness. Let us tarry in cosmic inter-existential morality. The situation in Mencius‘ days, as in ours, was dire. One among many causes for the tragic circumstances was rulership struggle. After the collapse of the legendary voluntary throne-abdication to the worthy ruler 禪讓,831 primogeniture took its place, which was soon overruled by royal favoritism. Now naturally occurred succession struggles among the competing royal wives and concubines; those who failed to occupy the throne had to exile themselves (or often be exiled) to far away lands, where they had to dodge secret plots against their lives while planning military takeover of the throne832; every five years people saw small battles, and every decade, big ones. The problem here is how to take this tragic fact. Mencius would deeply disagree with Hobbes taking, as primal and natural, the human ―war of every man against every man‖ to make life ―solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short‖; it is for Mencius not primal, not a given but postnatal artifice. Scheming solely for self-interest worsens the risks to oneself. The entire book of Mencius begins with this ringing declaration (1A1). Mencius‘ was (1A7) a lone, probing, and farreaching insight, based solidly on a spontaneous fact he noticed. The ruthless King Hui of Liang 梁惠王 had a bull released being dragged to sacrificial slaughter! Mencius told the king that his release was out of his unbearable pain watching the bull in mortal jitters. The release showed that this pain of unbearable pity had reached farthest to the least significant living being, and this pain of pity cuts into the King‘s viscera so deeply that he had to, simply had to, have the bull released. This visceral pain in the least kindly of man, at seeing the farthest and least of beings in pain, was the pain Mencius desperately clung on to as the primal beginning of hope; he hit it hard at the King the selfish tyrant, then appealed to King‘s selfish interest. ―Your visceral pain of pity has reaped the benefit of life for the littlest creature. If you just extend it, easily, to your people more precious than a single bull, and your state will thrive, people from afar will flock to you, and you will be matchless, invincible. Otherwise, if you resist your natural extension of your visceral pain-pity to people, to oppose your inmost self, then you cannot keep your head on shoulders. Guaranteed.‖ Either thrive together or perish alone, deciding on these alternatives depends on whether one obeys one‘s deep-seated visceral sense of pity or opposes oneself. To follow one‘s visceral pity or to oppose oneself holds the key to thriving together or perishing alone. No one can avoid this dreadful choice, least of all the ruler. 831

The legendary throne-abdication to the worthy was unflatteringly described by the Teng Hsi Tzu in its opening passage, how lacking in family-feeling the procedure was (鄧析子, 台北三民書局, 民86, pp. 3-7). 832 Cf. Burton Watson‘s bald description in The Tso chuan, NY: Columbia University Press, 1989, p. xxvii. Chinese Wisdom Alive : Vignettes of Life-Thinking, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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This it is that is inter-existential ethical imperative, heartfelt and cosmic, actually resonating musical in the cosmos, apodictic, categorical, and inevitable. This is a powerful argument that eviscerates our recesses of being, the argument that connects facts inevitable to imperative unavoidable, forcing us ―co-thrive or lone-perish,‖ singing heartfelt throughout the heaven and earth. This inmost pain of pity gives cosmic sense and ethical substance to the universal singing, as Schiller‘s communal ―Ode to Joy‖ gives sense and substance to Beethoven‘s cosmopolitan Ninth Symphony. And time has proven Mencius right. History sings the continual dirges of mass destruction by anti-nature rulers. Why there is no mass-thriving sung all over is a deepest of mysteries we worried aloud previously in ―Musical Reason in Unreason,‖ ―Music as Morality,‖ ―Music in Dissonance,‖ etc. On our part, we modestly note that, although Mencius gave us a courageous insight, his proposal was hardly new, a reenactment of China‘s classical sentiment since time immemorial. The Record of Music 樂記 is a piece of heavily stylized dancing music that sings the intimacy between heartfelt rhythm and sociopolitical harmony. After all, music is resonance at the heart of being that pulsates among things, and this heart-resonance had shown in the King‘s pain of pity toward the pain of the bull. Mencius tried to push and enhance this mutual resonance throughout the sociopolitical realm. The Taoists expand it throughout the cosmos. The rhythm is the ritual-禮, the harmony is the music-樂 composing interpersonal morality in socio-politics, to echo the Change Classic 易經, the Lao Tzu, the Chuang Tzu, Mr. Lü’s Chronicles 呂氏春秋,833 and all China‘s writings and its history itself. Any other name than ―morality‖ we call it by, China has serious respect for this inexorable imperative of nature-in-time, called history, as part of the reason-of-life, musical reason; such life-reason has its own laws that can be mocked only to our own perdition. To apply Kant, Chinese thinking has an ―historical a priori imperative‖—books are to read, 7+5=12 is a promise to calculate, musical scores are to sing the world with, and all things are to celebrate life. These ―to‖‘s are seasonal rhythm that pulses ahead the historical a priori and our inescapable imperative to behave accordingly. Moreover, the historical a priori is the musical a priori—with the seasonal heartbeat-ofbeings as the rhythm of life, singing the life of the world, punctuated with lull to hug silence of life‘s heartbeat, and all this is history. Musical reason is thus historical reason; historical a priori is musical a priori. Life sings the world in world history, as the history sings the rhyme and autonomous laws of musical reason, the law of inter-existence life had better practice. That is Chinese wisdom alive throughout the heaven, earth, and humanity, through time unceasing for millennia so far and still continuing.

833

See its elucidation in 蔣義斌 ‗s「 的禮樂合論」, 東方宗教研究, October, 1991, pp. 73-107.

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Chapter 42

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MUSIC, MANAGEMENT, PAN-PRAXIS Few realize that music is the right manner of managing things, and its name is harmony. Music is sound-management into harmony. Sounds surround us as our milieu to seep and penetrate things, even rocks.834 Sounds seep into stones to compose stillness to calm us. Music manages sound to harmonize the milieu, to make us happy. That is what music does, and such harmonizing is what music is. Here is John‘s email (edited). Gidon Kremer has original ideas but can turn eccentric and undisciplined. Igor Oistrakh has reliable consistency but can turn trite. . . . Igor may be higher than Kremer, for Kremer‘s worst is worse than Igor‘s mediocrity. Kremer seems to believe that his new ideas are better than others. Szigeti surpasses Kremer in that Szigeti‘s originality was tempered by humble respect for the score. Kremer lacks this respect. Igor does. The names here are all of famous violinists; his comment shows how difficult musicmaking is. Making of music-of-life is strenuous, requiring sweat, tears, and blood, contra mundi, opposing brutal actuality of ―the world among people 人間世.‖ Musical management is contra-events disastrous, contra-views atrocious, contra policies inhumane, contraoppression unbearable resulting often in revolution. How does musical reason manage world atrocities? Sometime such reason writes treatises 論, argument/explanation 辯, and/or refutation 駁. Sometimes the reason refutes the whole school of thought, as Legalists do Confucianism, and as Taoists do both Legalism and Confucianism. Some other times, musical reason simply describes the whole atrocious events on how they transpire, in chronicles (春秋), tales (史記), stories (三國志), and narrations (漢書).835 Still other times, musical reason even soars up in fables, stories, poetry and prose-poems, and the so-called ―theories‖ to form Confucianism, Taoism, Name-School, Legalist Realism,

834

Basho 芭蕉 (1644-1694) intoned, ―閑かさや, 岩にしみ入る蟬の聲, Shizukasa ya/ iwa ni shimiiru/ semi no koe, What stillness! Sink into rocks, Cicadas‘ voices.‖ (Wu‘s translation) ―しみ入る seep in, sink in‖ is rendered ―sink‖ (Varley), ―stinging‖ (Keene), and ―drills‖ (Hass). ―This verse is about stillness, yet only by sound can we know stillness,‖ says Keene. See Donald Keene, World Within Walls, NY: Grove Press, 1976, p. 89, Paul Varley, Japanese Culture, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 2000, p. 196, and Robert Hass, The Essential Haiku, Hopewell, NJ: The Ecco Press, 1994, p. 40. Basho was pure Chuang Tzu in Japan. 835 In this context, Lin Yutang‘s A History of the Press and Public Opinion in China (University of Chicago, 1936) is quite significant, mixing all these genres of writings.

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and the like. In fact, these ―schools‖ oppose one another as well. Legalist Realism emerged by reacting against Confucianism. All this is struggling management, musical reason at work, music composing harmonyin-pain. Harmony-和 often comes about unawares to those in struggle who are recorded only posthumously, or oppose their ―heresies‖ only to be enriched by them. It is messy dissonancemanagement. Management of dissonance into harmony-和 is music as ―symphoneo‖ in Greek,836 which also means music and fit. But the West does not mention how difficult it is to attain such ―symphony,‖ much less how this symphonic harmony composes life-struggle, itself the profound music in musical reason. Neo-Confucianism did its utmost to refute and reject Taoism and Buddhism, and thereby greatly received their influx, to result in their overall harmony unawares. Chu Hsi was unaware that his Li-principle-理 was provoked by Buddhist system. Wang Yang-ming‘s ―heart-knowledge 良知‖ came from Taoist ―immediate-knowing 直心眼,‖ and Ch‘an-Zen Buddhism came from Taoist side-look at Buddhism. All this is the Ying-Yang ―internecine‖ as ―inter-nascence‖; it is struggling-fighting harmony. All Taoists, Wang, and Zen people say that entering our heart-of-being opens us into the whole Heaven and Earth throughout, our heart as secret passageway means our self enables realizing all things in all things, how all things penetrate from the depth of our heart through to myriad things. Musical harmony is all-interpenetration of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and intersubjective harmony that fits-適 appropriately-宜 everywhere is what is right-義, the ―Tao of personal virtue 道德‖ that is ―humanely right 仁義.‖ Musical management is morality that fits everywhere, a cosmic socio-politics. Moreover, fit-適 means joy-適. Musical management is the joy of fitting harmony that spells cosmic morality. Musical management of harmony shows in money-management to everyone‘s benefit, commercial enterprise. The rhythm of commercial world is the rhythm of interpersonal music, astute management of harmony of mutual benefiting all around. Such management must be tried repeatedly until it achieves harmony of all, until everyone involved is benefited, sellers and buyers alike. Musical management of harmony exhibits also in environment-management, natural science-technology, and the science of time-season, history. Science and historiography deal with our total milieu, nature and time; musical management is their inner principle. Musical management exhibits finally in the Beyond, the inter-personal and the cosmos. Ethics and politics manages the inter-personal; technology manages the cosmos, i.e., Nature in history. To wrap up all above let us consider a significant notion in China, householdmanagement. It is ―economics 經濟‖ in the original sense, oikos-nomos, home-ordering. ―Home economics‖ is actually redundant, a pan-portrayal of house-management of the world and its people, 經世濟民. The economics of society-as-home is socio-politics, as we said. The economics of natureas-home and time-as-home is managed in the Change Classic 易經. At 50 when Confucius came to know of Heavenly Destiny (2/4), he studied and mastered the Change Classic (9/17). 836

On ―symphoneo‖ as music and as fit, etc., see Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Friedrich, tr. G. W. Bromiley, Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1974, IX:304-309.

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In China, natural science and historical science are one to manage and facilitate humanity to harmonize everything in cosmos and in history. The economics of cosmos-as-home is depicted by Chang Tsai 張載 (1020-1077) in ―Western Inscription 西銘‖837 as treating every being as our brothers and sisters in our shared home of the Heaven and earth, a big family-home that homes every home, and demands that everyone be treated as family member. This ―cosmic family‖ is not an arbitrary literary splash; it is a sober faithful description of actuality. No one is an island. Every being is a network of relations, and exists—born into the life-world—as a relation of many relations in inter-birth and inter-support. Here birthing and supporting compose a family. Existence is a family. A person is this family of interrelations of mutuality—parental, sibling, friendly, pedagogical, and sociopolitical. A family-less person is homeless ―mutuality-less 無告.‖ This inter-, this mutuality, is my milieu I live self-forgetful with my others, where my eyes and intentions are always on ―you‖—parents live for children, children for parents, spouses for their better-halves, teachers for students, students for teachers, friends for friends—and things are shared and wealth given. Our family is not rich if three families surrounding us are not. This feeling for the other, felt mutuality, is care felt as what I should do, for we are all a ―big family‖ meaning ―we all,‖ Chinese colloquial ―大家‖ says, for ―shared wombs‖ are ―fellow [country] men,‖ another common phrase ―同胞‖ tells us. The felt inter-―one‖ is an ―ought.‖ Natural ethics, in family-origination of my existence, stresses the other as me. This is the rationale 理 of ethics 倫理.838 As you are stationed in the family-network, as father, as son, etc., so should you behave accordingly 顧名思義 to promote your family appropriate to your family-station; thus emerges the righting of names 正名, the joy of self-fulfillment beyond my actual self, my family greater than myself, to fulfill obligations beyond my natural desire for my rights, even sacrificing myself beyond my natural desire of self-protection. Contributing this way—fulfilling the felt obligations—to enhancing my family, I find composure of being at home. Fulfilling obligations includes expressing gratitude to my roots—heaven, ancestors—and to those who have contributed to my welfare. Such heartfelt gratitude composes ―religion.‖ Thus, mutually stressing caring for the other in China fulfills ―individualism‖ so important in the West. Fulfilling family-duties out of felt oneness with others, in China, fulfills ―rights‖ so crucial in the West. Interrelation-centeredness in China thus takes the place of community-centeredness in the West.839 This approach to life takes the other-centered family-interrelation as an invisible hand that is universalized into communal ―all under Heaven.‖ Sadly, as also mentioned above, ―all 837

Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963, pp. 497-498. Sadly, Chan‘s accurate translation evaporates the original‘s lively rhyme and rhythm. 838 Cf. 和辻哲郎著, 人間の學としての倫理學, 東京岩波書店, 1934. Marcel describes religious obligation to care for a child entrusted by a now deceased friends, the child‘s parents (The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, eds. P. A. Schilpp and L. E. Hahn, La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1983, pp. 95-96.) 839 梁漱溟著, 中國文化要義, 臺北市里仁書局, 民85; its magnificent Chapter 5 is quite imperfectly summed up here.

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under Heaven as one family‖ soon sours into ―all under Heaven as my family‖; familyselfishness thus pits against family-selfishness, and selfishness writ large has no room for public awareness,840 no ―reach out to‖ caring for ―others‘ old and young folks.‖ Meanwhile, the economics of Heaven-as-home continues to show in our awe and reverence, religiosity in our ritual behaviors 禮 both at the temples and in daily social intercourse. In the Rites Classic 禮記, the center of gravity and its spinning-out in life is the Music Classic 樂記. The soul of ritual is music. The core of all these managements is thus music, which exhibits various aspects of human life, to turn everything into music, to sing everything into harmony-on-the-go. The heaven-human harmony as father-son intimacy patterns superior-inferior relation. Thus religion and cosmic politics should be family-ized, that is, music-ized. This ―-izing‖ is the management in China, Chinese pan-praxis in musical reason. All this warns against taking ―words‖ as mere descriptive mirroring of actuality. Even Richard Rorty and deconstructionists feel this negative point, but they have not gone to what this negation positively says. China says that words are vehicles to action. To say is not to mirror but to act. Words are life-acts, managing, performing music-as-life, life-as-music, to poetize life-as-music. Here China realizes John Austin‘s ―doing things with words‖ and P. H. Nowell-Smith‘s Ethics (1954). No wonder, ancient Chuang Tzu‘s lowly wheelwright disparaged the ancient words that performed no more, as Confucius desired no saying, for Heaven does not say but acts. Both Confucius and Chuang Tzu were supreme word-musicians of pan-praxis, as the Name-poets performed logic-music and Han Fei Tzu managed the poetry of Legalist Realism. Description is prescription in China. The natural decency of procreation841 depicts fatherchild intimacy all over,842 the basic pattern to socio-ethics, Five Relations 五倫 father-son, ruler-ruled, among spouses, brothers, and friends. Being unfatherly or unfilial violates nature‘s law written in our nature to destroy social fabric to all-demise. Since then, all later word-musicians keep waving and tapping the sacred music of the Heaven, Earth, and Humanity. They keep dancing the historic rituals of musical reason in reverent pan-praxis. Such is Chinese wisdom alive in brutal pandemonium of unreason today. To make sense of all this, let us look at a poetic line. Biographies of poets and musicians shock us, to remind us of Chou Tun-i who poetized the beauty of the lotus as ―out of mud and not soiled.‖843 Few poets and musicians are themselves as worry-free, pure-simple, lucid-joyous, and beautifully transparent as their poetry and their music. Doesn‘t the lotus-flower need ―mud‖? Doesn‘t ―not soiled‖ need ―out of mud‖? Doesn‘t ―sounding forth 鳴‖ need imbalance 不平? Doesn‘t their poetry and music need the nourishment of the mud so brutally anti-poetry and anti-music, to emerge as poetry and as music not at all muddy? Does the ―anti-‖ nourish authenticity, then? 840

Ibid., p. 23, lists ―selfishness‖ at the top of ten China‘s characteristic features. We admit that Mr. Liang 梁漱溟 tends to gloss over difficult themes, and raise good questions without answering them. 841 Confucius wants to love virtue as loving natural sex (9/18, 15/13) and to follow natural desires without overstepping the line of decency (2/4). 842 So, Chuang Tzu said (14/6), ―Tigers, wolves, they are humane; . . . fathers, sons, inter-intimate, how could they be not-humane?‖ 843

「出淤泥而不染」 is 周敤頤‘s immortal phrase in his , as mentioned before.

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We are now in the haunts, hushed, lovely, of Chou‘s lotus flowers out of mud. The ―out of‖ tells of their mud-origin, yet ―not‖ sullied sullen as Confucius‘ princely man not vexed while socially ignored. Feeding on muddy disasters, the lotus grows high and noble beyond disasters, an amazing natural feat. By nature, nobility grows soiled in dark pain and toils, and keeps growing undaunted, unspoiled tall. Doesn‘t Chuang Tzu, then, need ―stodgy Confucius‖ to soar? Doesn‘t Emperor Hun Tun need the two oceanic Emperors to die and emerge alive as Hun Tun, and that is why Chuang Tzu lustily tells us this story? And does this coming ―out‖ of ―mud‖ amount to ―management‖ of this brutally recalcitrant life-world? If so, the result is nothing short of astounding. We can put it this way, negatively, and then positively. Let‘s begin negatively. ―Out of mud and not soiled‖ says ―out of mud, not of mud.‖ ―In but not of this world,‖ said Jesus,844 but China says, ―Being not of this world owes to being in this world, for being out of this world is enabled by being in this world.‖ It would not be facile to see inner-worldly transcendence here where the world is pain, in Ying-Yang internecine inter-nascent. One trembles to think ―what if,‖ e.g., (what) if Ssu-ma Ch‘ien were not to have been through the unjust punishment, would his History Records 史記 have been written, if not as magnificent? If Confucius were to be happily employed, the cultures in China, Japan, and Korea might have been entirely different, being bereft of the Great One who molded them as they are today! Hasn‘t ―Chinese wisdom‖ come alive because of its failure in the bloody akratic mud? Isn‘t it the mud of tragic Akrasia—knowing, capable, and desiring better, and doing worse— that nourishes the lotus-blossoms of Chinese paragons? But who would have thought of our agonizing paragons being paragons because they are agonized? Isn‘t it what Mencius told us (6B15), though, that Heaven confers the great task by torturing the person—perhaps the greater the task, the severer the torture? All this is the first astounding negative point of ―out of mud, and not muddied,‖ muddied enabling not-muddied. What a surprise it is to see how alive and vibrant Chinese wisdom is through its repeated failures in history! But how alive is Chinese wisdom? The answer is the same point shifted positively, in a new shaded light, slightly shifted. Let us see it this way. John Kennedy said,845 When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man‘s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses, for art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.

Poetry is the soft power that draws the dissipating life-power back straight and pure, softly, Kennedy said; did he notice the quiet lotus-beauty of poetry arising softly out of the mud of power, its ugly excess?

844

Cf. John 15:19, 17:15-18, etc. Actually Jesus would agree with China here, for he also insisted on the necessity of the cross, giving life to the world he created with God the Father (3:16). But China goes on to insist on the very worldly suffering injustice as the mud, the humus, of paragons‘ lotus-blossom. 845 This is John F. Kennedy‘s address at Amherst College, October 26, 1963 (Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, Sixteenth Edition, eds. John Bartlett and Justin Kaplan, Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1992, p. 742 [6]).

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Today‘s paucity of churchgoing spreads simple reverence, saying, ―Be religious in a nonreligious way.‖ No religious jargon that turns us off and awkward. No noun-izing of what is alive. No ―tradition,‖ just hand me down what is precious since yesteryears. No ―morality‖ of thou-shalt-not‘s but be human, be as you are really, as you heartily feel that you are. Now, what does this authenticity unawares look like? I remember seeing a group of kids surrounding an old man who loved kids. They kept pointing at him and laughing, while he looked embarrassed. I asked what the matter was. They said, still pointing and laughing, ―He said he has no headache! Oh, he is so funny, he has no headache! Ha! Ha! Ha!‖ That was my moment of mystery; I was not laughing, nor was he. Kids have no headache, either. Here, no-headache kids mysteriously laugh at a no-headache adult, making him mysteriously embarrassed, and this twofold mystery mysteriously makes me feel so good even now. Mystery over mystery, life is full of things beyond the wildest dreams of our philosophy! The point is clear, though. If you live up to what really satisfies you as kids, you would have no headache. Instead, you will be yourself enough to find yourself in visceral pain as you meet others in pain, and will stretch your hand to pull them out of pain, unawares. That is zealous Mencius (1A7; 7A13); that is Chuang Tzu‘s spontaneous ―World of Ultimate Virtues‖ (12/80-83).846 Legalist Realism tries to plot a blueprint-road to such world concord. The Name-school tries to effectuate the consistency between actuality and the ―names‖ it professes. They all mean well, and their meaning-well is the no-morality morality that follows the visceral categorical imperative of inter-existence, quite conscientiously, consciously. As a result, we can swim in time and space, with logic as compass toward destination, to make destiny out of fate. Destiny is something decisive, logic is what we count on to decide, and so China ―counts destiny 算命‖847 to decide, to decide on what is decisive, destiny. ―How do we do it?‖ Well, it requires sensitive observant knack in life, poetic musical reason. ―How does China do it?‖ Poetic musical reasoning is performed—perfumed—by mathematical music whose score is the Change Classic 易經. Here Yin and Yang the 2 to the power of 3 Geniuses, Heaven, Earth, and Human, mutually entwine ―doubled‖ into 64 hexagrams, each accompanied by a poetic exemplum. The Change Classic is thus a mathematical poetry rhythmically throbbing as time-poetry, season-music. It facilitates personal calculation of situation involving the person calculating. This poetic personal involvement has been dubbed ―synchronicity‖ by Jung, but it should be called ―symspatial-synchronic swimming (SSS).‖ The musical score of SSS is the Change Classic. We do with it the science of what comes (the future) that calculates SSS now, in poetic music. This is a life-science, the living science of partaking of—swimming in—the living flow in life-rhythm, symspatially and synchronically. An important caveat must be entered here. The Change Classic is a tool of SSS, not its guiding principle; China has no eternal principle, as a Nobel Laureate in 2000 Gao Xingjian 846

Mencius‘ ―joining Heaven-Earth flowing 與天地同流‖ (7A13) has an uncanny resemblance to Chuang Tzu‘s

―Village of Ultimate Virtue 至德之鄉‖ (12/80-83), except Chuang Tzu lacks Mencius‘ princely person 君子 joining the cosmic flow. That divides Confucianism from Taoism. 847 It is usually rendered as mysterious ―divination‖ to divine the future. Chinese Wisdom Alive : Vignettes of Life-Thinking, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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said ―I have no ism.‖848 In addition to the Change Classic, change-warp, China has stories of actual change-woofs quite various. China has the riches of ―histories‖ (actual) and ―literature‖ (imagined, as 水滸傳),849 some with ―moral axe to grind‖ (左傳), all enthralling stories telling of astute SSS (戰國策) in the past for us to reenact their history, to re-create our own SSS now. This is China‘s Incorruptibility Three times 三不朽, personal 德 feats 功 written 言 in stories, birthing unceasing 生生不息. China never exhaustively covers every detail in storytelling or ―argument‖; no one can, anyway, as shown in Western philosophy that has been trying for ages in vain. Chinese ―argument‖ dots, instead, patchy ―stepping-stone stories,‖ just enough to facilitate walkingon, stop and go 行 one step, one stop and go, at a time, again and again 行行重行行.850 Heart-logic throbs the musical reason intoning, waving-tapping through millennia in ups and downs, roaming with deer, soaring with eagles, jumping with fishes, lotus-noble out of mud in disasters unceasing. This Chinese Wisdom Alive has been storytelling, story-thinking, on and on breathlessly as a millennia-old baby, piping with Heaven and Earth, daily dawning, dove cooing, inviting us all to join in to family-support, to live on amidst pain as growing pain. Things begin here, now. ―But what is ‗alive‘?‖ Now you‘ve asked for it! Can‘t you feel élan vital cycloneflooding, breathing, gushing, and cannot stop inspiring effort perspiring? Great persons are baby-hearted, says Mencius (4B12) as we saw, and Li Chih851 points to kid-heart to shift our perspective to our primal root, where, as Chuang Tzu‘s Wheelwright insists, even the sages‘ volumes are scum, and reading them is contrary to nature wheeling, making itself. Kids live heartfelt, forever asking ―Why?‖ Questioning is reason at work at the root. Gödel has since babyhood been ―Der Herr Warum, Mr. Why,‖ all his life, insisting, ―But every error is due to extraneous factors (such as emotion and education); reason itself does not err.‖ Kids asking for reasons for everything are also noted by Piaget condescendingly,852 The child, who supposes that there are reasons for everything, asks Why . . . [not only when] a reason exists, but also . . . in cases where the phenomenon is fortuitous but . . . the child sees a hidden cause.

―Fortuitous‖ here ciphers adult‘s proud ignorance. Kids‘ ―reason‖ and quest for it are indomitably ubiquitous, irresistible reasoning alive beyond the adult-mind. Adult ―sages not decease, thieves not cease,‖ Chuang Tzu the kid blusters (10/16). Kid and radical reason are 848

高行進著, 沒有主義, 臺北市聯經, 2001. History and literature intimately entwine into 文史 in China, of course. 850 As a wild pheasant, ―a peck in ten steps, a drink in hundred steps,‖ Chuang Tzu would add (3/14). 849 851

―童心說,‖ 李贄文集, 北京: 社會科學文獻出版社, 2000, 1:91-93. 左傳 (襄公 31年, op. cit., p. 1205) and 史記 (魯周公世家, op. cit., 2:536-540) recorded a 19 year-old royal heir with 童心, judged unfit for the throne, but he became a 昭公; his humdrum tenure ended without outrageous incidents or bloody violence, despite 左傳‘s unkind ―君子是以知不能終也.‖ 852 Gödel‘s saying on 29 November 1972 begins Rebecca Goldstein‘s Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, NY: W. W. Norton, 2005, p. 11. Piaget‘s note begins John W. Dawson, Jr.‘s Logical Dilemmas: The Life and Work of Kurt Gödel, Wellesley, MA: A K Peters, 1997, p. 1.

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one at the root (Li Chih), and this one, this root, is ―alive,‖ tirelessly questing, not aware of age-ing about to come. Confucius was such kid (7/19). We must live ever baby-hearted, dare to propose and care to prove half-baked insights on living, to write unceasing, living unceasing. Such baby-zest hurls853 stories across millennia in rhythms of fresh contagion. This story-thinking is Chinese Wisdom Alive the Baby, with hawk soaring, fish jumping and quivering, wild deer trotting under branches, while we enter them undisturbed.854 Won‘t you join us?

853 854

―Élan‖ is ex-lancer ever hurling forward.

―鳶飛戾天, 魚躍于淵‖ in 詩經, 旱麓. ―上如標枝, 民如野鹿,‖ ―入獸不亂群, 入鳥不亂行‖ (Chuang Tzu 12.81, 20/36). Chinese Wisdom Alive : Vignettes of Life-Thinking, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

Chapter 43

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BEING ALIVE AS HEART-LOGICAL The baby, the hawk, and the fish are so alive they cannot be trapped in a ―logical‖ box, and Chinese wisdom is alive in them. It is time to define again what ―alive‖ means. In our living, ―alive‖ should be defined alive; it would naturally take on telling of a story of our living, saying that being alive has its logic at heart, as our hearts beat and our lungs breathe to show we are alive. Now this brief story-description must be unpacked. ―Being alive‖ shows in our hearts beating, our lungs breathing, in four levels and horizons inter-fusing. To begin, we see the physiology of pounding heart and breathing lungs. Chinese medicine calls it the meridian 脈絡 of body-élan 氣 that composes the inner weather of our health,855 for ―heaven is inside,‖ (Chuang Tzu 17/50).856 This is the first life-textual level. The medical doctors then pattern after physiology to creative bodily adjustments to health that con-forms to natural weather. This is the second exegetical level. Going further, we see how heart beating and lungs breathing perform rhythmic music in our wording and writing. Wording goes as music, rhymed and rhythmic, and writing must go as wording to come alive poetic and musical, in rhythmic rhyming flow, however informal. This is the third expository level. Finally, all this amounts to a living physics857 of persons with nature inter-birthing, both inter-throbbing, naturing unceasing. The heart pulsates for lungs to interact with air around, and the trees are enlivened, whose fresh air breathed out we breathe in afresh, enlivened. The trees stretch and spread, for us to join this cosmic rhythmic flow 與天地同流858 to and fro, breath to breath 息息相關. This is the final fourth hermeneutical level. 855

See Ted. J. Kaptchuk, The Web that Has No Weaver: Understanding Chinese Medicine (1983), Chicago: Contemporary Publishing Group, 2000. 石田秀實著, 氣流れる身體, 東京都平河出版社, 1988. Etc. 856 At this first body-textual, we note, Western physiology tends to see anatomical structure of heart and lungs more than their pounding interactions with outside, which China stresses. 857 ―Physics‖ is physis, nature growing, bringing forth (phyein) all things, as even Confucius (17/19) sensed that Nature (Heaven) silently gives birth to hundreds of things, the Self-So 自然 birthing unceasing 生生不息. Now we have to call it ―metaphysics,‖ a redundancy, because ―physics‖ gets monopolized to level one, as mere physiology of physical nature. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. 858 This is Mencius‘ memorable phrase in 7A13, reminiscent of Chuang Tzu‘s Village of Ultimate Virtue in 12/8083 that embraces tree branches and wild deer.

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These four levels interweave, for the body-text we live (first level) is cosmos-contextual (fourth level). Heavenly timing combined with earthly positioning makes for human harmony 天時地利人和, to compose the musical poetry of the house of space-space 宇宙 of the Three Geniuses, Heaven, Earth, Humans 天地人三才, all alive, one Great Clod belching breath 大塊噫氣, to pipe threefold music, human and earthly in the heavenly 人籟, 地籟, in天籟,859 in the wind and the water 風水, in hills and rivers 山河. This is what being ―alive‖ means, heart-pulsing, lung-breathing, moving-tapping, resonating-reenacting, to make vast ogan-music in time and space. Schopenhauer calls all this will and music, Bergson, élan vital, Whitehead, organism, and Heidegger, poetry. These insights express out of their heart-beating and lung-breathing. Chinese wisdom does wordforth all this heart-lung way, and keeps rolling out music this way for millennia till today. We have just story-defined being ―alive.‖ Let us see how sensible and reasonable all this is, by starting at thinking. To humanly live is to dialogue and inter-reenact, inter-acting, interinvolving, inter-enveloping, and inter-enriching, to and fro, back and forth. Now, reenactment is a dialogue, inter-revolution of assumptions of dialogue partners860; Confucius, Chuang Tzu, and Socrates dramatically demonstrated it. This dia-logic shows how ―logos‖ [a] gathers861 the four levels described above and all dialogue partners, things and events included, to [b] rhythm-pulse forth as reason alive, which counts (reason, ratio, reckoning862) in heart beating, lungs breathing, walking out strata of the Way, movements of the cosmos music, one step at a time. In the West, reason ―counts‖ in logos-ratio, turned later into ―account,‖ keeping its mathematical connotations, while Chinese reason story-thinks, interpersonal and resounding reasonable. Besides, the West turned ―dia-logic‖ into logical dialectic, while China keeps vigorously alive the concrete dialogical feature in storytelling to story-hearing and storyadding, across time. The dominant sense of reason-as-dialogue is distinctly Chinese. Reason as counting is dazzlingly displayed, among others, in Hegel, in whom true rationality is true Spirit in ―abstract distinction.‖ Our reason must make progress in abstracting from concrete shifting details toward eternal principles of the Spirit, the objectified self-consciousness, ever distinguishing external objectivity from subjectivity. To Hegel, China lacks such distinction, so its people subjugate themselves to external forces of the Emperor and his laws. China has no progress toward distinction, ever clogged in such primitive immediacies. Acknowledging China‘s distinctive historiography and family system, Hegel turns his blind eyes to their historic interpersonal vitality.863 859

Chuang Tzu (in 2/1-9, etc.) is rifled here. This point is imperfectly felt in The Interpretation of Dialogue, ed. Tullio Maranhao, The University of Chicago Press, 1990. 861 Logic-logos originally means to gather. See Wu, On Metaphoring, op. cit., pp. 23 (note 23), 54-58, and ―legein‖ as ―to gather‖ in ―analects,‖ The New Oxford American Dictionary, 2005, p. 54. Etc. 862 ―Ratio‖ is ―reckoning, calculation,‖ see Oxford Latin Dictionary (1996), ed. P. G. W. Glare, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 2002, p. 1575. 863 This is our rough theoretical summary of G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (tr. 1899), NY: Dover, 2004, pp. 111-138, esp. 111, 116, 120, etc. Cf. Donald F. Lach‘s description of Hegel‘s low opinion of China in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Philip P. Wiener, NY: Charles Scribner‘s Sons, 1973, 1:366, and Lin Yutang‘s interesting response, albeit unwitting, in ―Three American Vices‖ of efficiency, punctuality, and desire for achievement and success, in The Importance of Living, NY: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1937, pp. 161165. 860

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Hegel was thus unaware that, far from abject subjugation, the family system is a loving respectful mutuality between parents and children to shape China‘s sociopolitical climate, what originates popular bloody overhauls of royalties that violate this entrusted family-ideal. Such persistent allegiance to family-politics through millennia historically demonstrates that Chinese people are far from docile dunces. Much less did Hegel realize that what he thought an infantile stage of substancesubjectivity is actually the primal matrix that enables and envelops his dialectical development from antithetical subjective-objective division to synthetic homecoming, in the original unity of life-reason he called ―Spirit‖ that is China. His synthesis is ever in the mode of antithesis, the aufheben-dialectic antagonistic. China‘s ―synthesis‖-alive is no dialectical synthesis but natural primal inter-resonances in pulsating-breathing rhythm, internecine within inter-nascence, throughout the Heaven and the Earth.864 ―How did China attain this cosmic matrix?‖ China did not attain it; China just naturally matures in it, breathing pulsation alive. China matures through millennia in heart-lung reason, packing in literature and history what life lives through, describing it, alluding and evoking its sense. Reason packs life by literature-chanting what the heart pulses in silence, historydancing what the lungs breathe feelingly. Reason as counting in China is the vital rhythm, heart-beating, lung-breathing. We have been repeating ourselves, for how could we have helped it? Here is the ultimate matrix of living itself that enables, shapes, and establishes all reasoning, and no further elaboration, much less alternative explanation, is possible. Such is Chinese wisdom alive, simple and straight as living, and as subtle and convincing, as Hegel also expresses his manner of living his dialectical way, while naively despising the subtle simplicity of living, original, originative. To make China intelligible in Western way, we now extrapolate from Waismann‘s insights originating in his mathematical sensibility.865 To begin, logic is grammar of wording, which behaves variously as we live, think, and mean variously, so logic differs among mathematics, laws of nature, empirical observation, toothache, aphorism, proverbs, poetry, and mysticism. Each life-situation differs in kind from others, and so the manner—―logic‖— of saying and meaning differs one from the others. So ―logic‖ is a plural. We must be sensitized to the diversity of situations, senses, and ―logics,‖ to live relevant and apt. ―Logic‖ must flex variously to serve protean living, not living serving monolithic ―logic‖ to cease to live while living. But ―logic,‖ however plural, cannot aptly prescribe proper thinking, wording, and acting. Veblen, e.g., is a modern Chuang Tzu866 with scathing indictment of the ―pecuniary culture,‖ consumerism busy inventing-pushing unneeded ―needs.‖ Veblen reenacts Chuang 864

Søren Kierkegaard also objected to Hegel, and went in the direction of concrete subjectivity, similar in sentiment to our objection to Hegel. But [a] Kierkegaard consistently contends with Hegel to the end, while China envelops Hegel, and [b] he just said Hegel is wrong, and that‘s that, while we said China as life-matrix originates Hegel‘s dialectical development that eventually comes home to this life-matrix. Comparing Kierkegaard‘s objection to Hegel with ours further highlights the China-West difference. 865 Friedrich Waismann was Senior Lecturer in Philosophy of Mathematics and of Science, University of Oxford; he was influenced by Wittgenstein. Our extrapolation is from ―Language Strata,‖ How I See Philosophy, London: Macmillan, 1968, pp. 91-121. We appreciate his concrete convincing elucidation of multiple logics, shorn off his irrelevant appendage of ―language strata‖ and ―systematic ambiguity.‖ 866 Confucius and Mencius are fellow fighters with them both against flagrant violation of human nature.

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Tzu‘s ―Webbed Toes‖ being ―corrected,‖ by being maimed to conform to ―decent toes.‖867 They both attack the anti-nature ―decency‖ of civilization. But then, what is really ―proper‖? Where does it come from? The answer is as simple as we are alive. The logic that tells us how to properly live, think, and behave comes from our living itself. We live our heart beating, our lungs breathing, in rhythm; their rhythmic counting regulates living. This is our heart-logic, our lung-sense that we must follow on pain of death. This is China‘s logic alive. It is thus that the connotations of objective reckoning in Western ―ratio‖ is turned into China‘s subjective conceiving 思, heartfelt, supported by the heart 心 throbbing along to ponder, meditate, and dwell in. We study 學 pondering 思, pondering while studying, daily self-examine thrice 吾日三省吾身, pondering thrice or twice before going 三思而後行 (into practice). We raise one thought to evoke three 舉一反三, hearing one to realize two, three, and ten 聞一知十. We gaze at 觀 the father‘s acts and intentions to reenact them, our father being the historic Duke Chou we dream 夢周公. We stew the Poetry Classic to penetrate it with ―one essential‖ 一以貫之, 一言以蔽之. It is to minutely investigate 審, to watch 視, gaze at 觀, and discern 察.868 China‘s deep holistic breathing 息869 from the body-center 丹田 is health in Chinese

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medicine. Deep breathing at the soles 息以踵 to sigh-and-hoot high to the sky 仰天而噓 resonates with the Great Clod belching breath 大塊噫氣 to become the wind that pipes in human, earthly, and heavenly music 人籟, 地籟, 天籟. All this describes the Ultimate Person soil-rooted (至人 is soil-ed 土).870 Deep whole-breathing is vast living in unison with the Music of the Spheres, resounding throughout the Heaven and the Earth. Thus the Confucians dwell heartfelt 思 within the world, while the Taoists body-breathe 息, synchronic with the world within the world. This is China‘s reason that body-throbs heartfelt, in-spires through things, a-spires through time, pondering, soil-ed, to permeate the Heaven and the Earth throughout history toward what keeps coming. All this makes sense; sense feels and perceives, to send us on our way. ―Sense‖ in the West is etymologically akin to ―send,‖ journey.871 Such Western intuition vanished in time, 867

The story of ―Webbed Toes‖ occurs in Chuang Tzu‘s Chapter Eight. Thorsetin Velen‘s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), NY: Dover, 1994, is so verbose, contrasting sharply with punchy Chuang Tzu. The notion of ―noble savage‖ belongs here as well. Cf. Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Index, op. cit., p. 300, on ―Noble Savage.‖ 868 All these are stories culled from the Analects 2/15, 1/4, 5/20, 7/8, 16/13, 5/9, 1/11, 7/5, 15/3, 2/2, 20/1, 2/10. There are of course vastly many more instances of Chinese thinking 思 as pondering long. 869 息 shows nose-holes (自) breathing in and breathing out, born of and controlled by the heart (心). 870

說文解字詁林正補合編, 臺北市鼎文書局, 民72, 8:1103-4.

All these are stories culled from the Chuang Tzu 6/6, 2/1=24/61, 2/4, 2/3-9, 1/21. Again, there are many more instances of deep cosmic breathing. On the Ultimate Person 至人 as soil-ed, see Wu, Butterfly, op. cit., pp. 208-211, 421 (note 76). Lin Yutang aptly said, ―Very much contented am I to lie low, to cling to the soil, to be of kin to the sod. My soul squirms comfortably in the soil and sand and is happy. Sometimes when one is drunk with this earth, one‘s spirit seems so light that he thinks he is in heaven. But actually he seldom rises six feet above the ground.‖ (The Importance of Living, op. cit., p. vii) 871 So says Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (1985, 1993) on both ―sense‖ and ―send,” although Oxford English Dictionary (1998) does not say so on ―sense.‖

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yet it matches an abiding Chinese sense that Tao is what/how things walk out via reasonable living, pulsing-breathing in cosmos. Our sense, perceptive and philosophical, is the passage, Tao, of living-out in worldwide heartbeat and lung-breathing, the cosmic cyclone in us and beyond 浩然之氣.872 The Way walks itself thus and forms. Chuang Tzu said so (2/33) to shake our basic assumption. We would have thought that Tao is the eternal principle up there separate from mundane actuality. He counsels us that, on the contrary, Tao is as alive as we are; in fact, we live on because of Tao that is so alive as to enable us to be alive, allowing us to walk it out. Far from being set in the eternal heaven out of touch with moving shifting actuality, ―reason‖ happens, in cosmos-rhythm, as heart-beating logic and lung-breathing sense of things happening. Reason is a sensible-reasonable modus operandi of being alive, walked out in Chinese wisdom alive for millennia till today to go tomorrow. In the West, reason means reasoning called ―philosophy,‖ with rough three types. Phenomenology tries to go ―back to things themselves‖ with formidable technicalities (e.g., Husserl, Heidegger), analytical philosophy analyzes common terms with bewildering ―logical‖ niceties (Moore, Austin), and literary philosophy observes concrete details to argue for some points (Kierkegaard, Sartre). Socrates‘ casual roaming in the market seems to have vanished among them all. Ancient Chinese thinkers with keen sensitivity also loafed in the people‘s world. Spontaneous itinerary shared among all our paragons is the art of living, elucidating the heart-logic chanting and dancing as kids. Wittgenstein in his acuity of mathematical logic said, that logic is rule of a game, and we sometimes just run around as we shout and throw up balls for nothing, throwing rule to the wind.873 The wind of nature inside us and out has its own logic of life, for Heaven, Earth, and Humanity are breathing in sync; it is the logic 論 of self-arranging of things 齊物, said Chuang Tzu.874 We follow such inner heart‘s desire and the rule obtains by itself, as Confucius realized ultimately in life (2/4). ―How does lived reason deal with universals?‖ Well, ―all‖ is a headache for ―formal logic‖875 for a good reason. ―All‖ flouts ―logic,‖ breaking it into paradoxes, for ―logic‖ divides but ―all‖ defies division; ―all‖ includes everything and nothing, high and low, feeling it as existentially uncanny.876 The Way, Tao, of all this is ineffable. Lao Tzu‘s ―Tao can Tao not always Tao‖ could mean ―Tao can tao, not always Tao,‖ ―Tao can, Tao not, always Tao,‖877 etc. This saying rolls around in paradoxes, for Tao is ―all,‖ nowhere not around. Chuang Tzu (22/43-46) shocked Mr. Easturb, who asked about Tao, with the lowest ants, broken shards, piss and dung, and then pressed the lowest part of a lowly 872

This is Mencius‘ phrase in 2A2, so impressively compact as to be almost untranslatable. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, NY: Macmillan, 1958, section 83 (p. 39e). 874 Chuang Tzu‘s second chapter is titled ―齊物論,‖ with many protean senses. See Wu, Butterfly, op. cit., pp. 154, 172, 178-182, 230, 234-240, etc. What is offered here is another one. 875 E.g., Zeno Vendler, ―Any and all,‖ in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards, NY: Macmillan, 1967, I: 131-133. We go our own way, though. 876 Exclusive Judaism feels it, too, about God the All. Elijah felt he met God as absent in natural disasters, and then met God as no-voice whispering (1 Kings 19:9-18). Natural disasters should display God‘s might, yet Elijah finds God absent; no-voice should show God absent, yet he felt it so eerie as to come out covered. That‘s how uncanny All is. 877 ―道可道非常道‖ could be ―道可道, 非常道‖ or ―道可, 道非, 常道.‖ 873

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pig that feeds us, and Easturb was awed into silence. Tao as All is alive uncanny as we, to feed us; reason feels it, to compose ―Chinese wisdom alive.‖ ―Reason feels it,‖ in ―paradoxes rolling in the all-encompassing All,‖ we say above. Now we are alerted to a man with a sandwich board asserting ―I‘m alive!‖ If advertising that one is normal shows one is abnormal, what sort of odd insanity touting ―I‘m alive‖ would be! Doesn‘t philosophy alive risk this sort of odd life-insanity? ―How could we avoid such life-insanity, then?‖ In the end, we must admit that Chinese wisdom as philosophy alive is self-reflective as a sandwich board man is self-touting. Indirection would be one way, as displayed above by Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu. Being ―alive‖ requires the utmost subtlety of logic woven-under living in pulsating-breathing rhythm, as bones invisible in the movement of body alive. Chinese wisdom weaves logic under awareness, in literature and history. We must attend to how China does it. This ―how‖ is our unobtrusive sandwich board—a contradiction in terms—that, in the end, we cannot avoid. Or rather, perhaps our living situation is like this. China has had no ostentatious ―philosophy,‖ no conspicuous sandwich board, unobtrusive or not, for it would have been an incurable life-insanity. Instead, China has for millennia had literature in history, and history in literature, avidly describing and redescribing living unceasing; such continuous re-descriptions of living-on show how all-important living is. This show-how is Chinese wisdom alive, as part of living. Chinese Wisdom alive thus resonates with living to present living, heart-throbbing as it is lung-breathing.878 A theoretically stipulated triangle can be exhaustively defined, yet any concrete existent is an envelope without wrapper.879 An apple cannot be completely described, nor can we finish investigating an eye, or even a grain of sand, in which we can thus see the whole world entirely open-ended. Such spectacular simplicity of the concrete we call ―alive.‖ Only the child‘s wide-eyed wonder, at the heart of a poet and a scientist, can hop, skip, and dance in this actual world alive. Chinese wisdom is the child alive, chanting and dancing for millennia, in the world alive for ever. Let us put it another way. Pondering as we tarry in great ancients presented repeatedly in the classics, we come to realize; they steadily remained at home in nature inside and out, through thick and thin, to draw us in every period of history. Such is how they come to live in history, historic, immortal, at home in nature inside out. Nature turns history in them, alive. We are attracted to dwell in them, one historical period at a time, at home in them at home in nature. At home in abiding nature is the aesthetic depth of astute composure, the literary 文. At home through storm is classic vitality, serene for ages, aptly called the literaryhistoric 文史, Chinese Wisdom Alive for millennia—today.

878

Chinese wisdom is life‘s conclusive ―unscientific postscript,‖ to parody Kierkegaard‘s of Subjectivity as Truth that also shows how important living is. (See Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript [1941], trs. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie, Princeton University Press, 1968.) Chinese wisdom as postscript serves to remind us of China‘s time-honored tradition of putting introduction as postscript, mentioned in Part I above. 879 Friedrich Waismann called it ―open texture.‖ See his How I See Philosophy, ed. R. Harré, NY: St. Martin‘s Press, 1968, pp. 41-44, 95-97, 101, 102.

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APPENDIX: MR. CHU ON “OUR DAYS NOT RETURNING” AND HISTORY This essay has three sections: Mr. Chu‘s exquisite lament over days not returning, my heartfelt response, and remaining aporia showing our days alive deep.

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Mr. Chu’s朱 Exquisite Lament, “Why Our Days Gone, Come Back Not Again!” Here is what Mr. Chu 朱自清 wrote that I could never get over.880 ―Swallows gone have time to come again.881 Willows withered have time to turn green again. Peach flowers faded have time to blossom again. But, you so smart, you tell me. Our days, why once gone, come not back again? Someone must have stolen them? If so, who is it? Where are they hid? They must have eloped? If so, where have they gone? I don‘t know how many days they have given me, but surely my hands turn slowly emptier. Silently I count; 8,000 days have by now slipped out of my hand. As a drop of water dripped out of the tip of a needle into a big ocean, my days dropped into the flow of time, soundless, shadowless. I cannot help but break out sweating all over, in tears all over. What‘s gone is all gone, what‘s coming is all coming, but how could it be so sudden and silent (匆匆) between going and coming? When I got up this morning, the sun shone sideways in two, three streaks into the small room. Now, the sun must have legs; it has lightly noiselessly slipped away, and I too followed it, completely at a loss. And then, while I washed my hands, my day went from my basin; during my mealtime, my day went from my bowl. While in my silence, it goes away right before my both eyes gazing. As I become aware of its going sudden and silent, and stretch out hand to stop it, it again slips by my hands trying to stop it. The sky darkens and I lie on bed, and it cleverly steps over me, flying away from beside my feet. Wait till I open my eyes to greet the sun again, and then it amounts to a day gone. Face-covered I sigh, and the shadow of the day that just came begins to dodge by through my sighs. In the midst of days flying away, via the world of myriad doors, what else can I do? I can only wander and meander, all too sudden and silent 匆匆. Within those 8,000 sudden-silent days, what is left besides wandering? Days past are as light smokes, blown away by soft breeze, as fading mist melted away by the first sun. What trace do I leave, not even traces as straying threads? I came to this world all naked, I must be going back all naked, but I cannot square this, why do I have to go through this round of coming and going? You so smart, tell me. Our days, why once gone do not come back again?‖

880

朱自清, ―匆匆,‖ in 朱自清全集, 臺南市文國書局, 民83, pp.128-129, among many versions reprinted. ―匆匆‖ here describes how suddenly and imperceptibly time passes. To my knowledge, this touching essay has never been translated, though it has been an abiding assignment in all primary school readings. 881 ―Some swallows, some willows, never come back.‖ Surely, but they come back collectively, and yet ―our days‖ do not even come back collectively, in fact, ―collective return of our days‖ does not even make sense. Besides, some swallows do come back but not a single day of ours does. In short, such hairsplitting has nothing to do with Mr. Chu‘s lament.

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My Heartfelt Response I have read this pithy exquisite essay for God knows how many times by now since I was quite young. I am still deeply moved. My being so moved is part of my response to Chu‘s deep pathos on time slipping by in silence. My being choked in tears is evoked every time his sentences are read. Now, does this fact show perhaps that time does come back again, perhaps differently as swallows come back differently, willows turn green again differently, and peaches blossom again differently? Are days our renewing power, then? Doesn‘t such a thought turn your table around, Mr. Chu? You asked, ―Why our days, once gone, don‘t come back?‖ Can‘t you see how unreasonable it is to ask such a question, as unreasonable as asking a clothing worn threadbare why it does not come back brand new? Amazingly, ―our‖ milieu of ―days‖ worn threadbare turns up brand new every twelve hours at dawn. To change metaphor, all squirrels hop ahead as all birds fly forward. Days are our squirrels and birds going forward to new places, never backward. You said, Mr. Chu, in essence, ―What is gone is gone, what is coming comes, why this round of coming and going?‖ Yes, but don‘t you see? What keeps going keeps coming, afresh. Vanishing ciphers welling up; continuity refreshes. As we cherish the fresh slipped by to look to the fresh springing up, we jump alive as kids, to dance days as music. ―Music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music.‖882 Days are our ―Sound of Music‖ we jointly sing to the mountain, everyday different. More, isn‘t this my response what you hoped for as you wrote this essay? Otherwise, it makes no sense to write at all; you have to write to the reader, ―you so smart,‖ to ask it. But if so, isn‘t your lament already answered by writing it down as it is answered later by later readers? So, hasn‘t your writing come back in your readers‘ responses, heart-to-heart dialogue that answers your query. The answer is packed in the very essay whose question then is selfanswered now. It is an irony, then, to write and ask such an unanswerable question on time, so as to entrust time to answer it by the reader, who fulfills it by your exquisiteness of lament. And it is a further irony that all these mutual establishments are based on the constant passing of time, ―our days ever slipping by.‖ How could establishment be founded on slippage, a mutual acknowledgement of slippage? But that is exactly the impossible trick you, Mr. Chu, pulls off by writing this exquisite lament on ―our days.‖ In other words, Mr. Chu, you wrote a happy essay in a sad tone, and got away with it! This is somewhat like the happy Tommy, whom grandpa gave a candy, told mom that grandpa told him not to tell mom. It is just that here grandpa is ―our days‖ and mom is our dialogue with Mr. Chu. Everyone is happy, Tommy, mom, and grandpa. It is thus that what Mr. Chu says about things not staying stays, each time I read him, I who sigh with him, slipping away into vacuity with him. How do we stay on in vacuity? Perhaps we can stay by abandoning ourselves to the art of time, music. We can dance time in music, can we not? After all, we can use time anyway we want, and music-timing seems the

882

―Music heard so deeply/ That it is not heard at all, but you are the music / While the music lasts.‖ T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (1941).

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best way to spend our time. Can‘t we conduct our lives as we sing our hearty music? Has his essay‘s literary rhythm been such music? Frost sings such music in his ―Away!,‖883 among others and other poets. Now I out walking The world desert, And my shoe and my stocking Do me no hurt. ... Don‘t think I leave For the outer dark Like Adam and Eve Put out of the Park. ... Unless I‘m wrong I but obey The urge of a song: I‘m—bound—away!

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And I may return If dissatisfied With what I learn From having died.

Now, the problem here is what Frost casually tossed out with tongue in cheek, ―And I may return.‖ Would Mr. Chu, now dead, return to respond to our welcome-back? If not, wouldn‘t his lament still hold, then? I am silenced here. How could days and the world return to us? Can science help? Can any cosmos theory help? Sadly, vaunting ―eternal recurrences,‖ in any sense, of cosmos and/or self is otiose, for this reason. The cosmos returning needs be recognized as the same as before, by the same self throughout the cosmic returns. Such a self, in déjà vu or no, needs another self to recognize it as such, and this ―another self‖ needs be recognized so, ad infinitum; infinite receding of recognition amounts to its impossibility. Thus no cosmos can return, and our days cannot return, for no one can recognize the return, if any. The scientists would say, ―Our agreed-upon objective theories warrant cosmic recurrences thus and so.‖ Still, they would be the first to admit that their theories now are subject to future confirmation. Now, ―future‖ is time-later, infinitely receding, and ―confirmation‖ is ―recognizing.‖ So, ―future confirmation‖ amounts to infinite receding of recognition of the recurrence, and we are back to where we started. It is no use protesting that ―no recognition‖ does not prove ―no return,‖ for the return, if any, would be a pie in the sky-unrecognized, which is nowhere. The return, if any, would be the same as no-return. If ―to be is to be perceived‖ (George Berkeley), then to return is to be recognized, and what is not recognized does not return. 883

Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays, NY: The Library of America, 1995, pp. 426-427. Of course, Frost is here playing with ―death‖ and ―return,‖ and perhaps thereby implying that we had better forget missing days not returning. This approach sounds Zen-koan, saying ―day after day, every day is good 日日是好日.‖ This will get us out of Chu‘s problem by dissolving it. I think it an easy way out, if not a copout; there is a place in life for Mr. Chu missing the days that are gone and not return, but is Mr. Frost returning, too, in his poem written to us? And then, our reverie repeats as it did on Mr. Chu.

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China would of course have a commonsense answer to this problem. China would say, posterity does historical dialogue with ancients, who instruct posterity, and posterity enriches ancients. The problem here is that the ancients would not realize their postmortem enrichment, and that may be what Mr. Chu laments. On second thought, however, this must not be what he laments. He could lament how ―our days, once gone, do not return,‖ precisely because he was alive; the dead do not care about such matter. So, he was not worried about the great dead unable to respond to posterity, but about ―our days‖ not returning while we are alive; these are two separate issues (though related). I have resolved the latter issue that is his, though my way of responding sounds like conflating the two; I am sorry about the conflation. But my conflation has its reason. While alive, Mr. Chu can worry about our days not returning, and can be relieved by returning in his readers‘ responses later, while he was alive. After death, Mr. Chu cannot worry or lament; still his ideas in his sentences keep returning in his readers‘ responses, though he can no longer be aware of the return. These two situations differ as life differs from death, yet both share the denial of his worry over our days not returning, whether or not he is alive, and whether or not he can respond to the return. Thus my conflation is not unreasonable, in fact, inevitable if not quite reasonable. To think of it, ―return‖ may have two senses, and Mr. Chu meant one; I meant the other. Return-Chu is brute-fact returning, the fact in the past returning as it is, raw. Return-Wu is the return of the past in fond memory, vividly rehearsed. Mr. Chu lamented over return-Chu‘s impossibility; I celebrate return-Wu‘s retrospective dialogue and enrichment. I do have something further to tell Mr. Chu, though. Frankly, ―fact‖ is always human, for the so-called ―brute fact‖ must have human subject to recognize it as it brute-ly out there; my boy Peter cannot recognize the brute fact of a watch existing until told, to recognize something as ―watch.‖ So, ―fact‖ is human, and ―human fact‖ is correlative; a fact is always I-recognized, with you. No I, no event. So, an event returning or not depends on ―I‖ to decide. A fact returning is always return-Chu in return-Wu. There is no return-Chu without return-Wu, but return-Wu can exist without return-Chu, for an event can linger in my memories (return-Wu) when that event is now long gone (return-Chu). Return-Wu may be what Collingwood calls history as ―re-enactment,‖ as enacting the past idea, for there cannot be a repeat of brute fact, return-Chu; geological happening is no history, says Collingwood.884 We would say, even geological fact is to be recognized as such, human-absent, by the human subject. It is human subject that makes ―non-human fact.‖ Human integrity is made of return-Wu repeated—reenacted—with new return-Chu. Return-Wu makes the continuity of personal identity, where return-Wu changes yet unchanging, as Tom growing out of diapers into an adult, and remains an identical ―Tom.‖ Without return-Wu there would be no continuity of a person, i.e., no person.885 It is fact that makes a person. ―Our days‖ must return-Wu with new return-Chu for me to exist, through shifting time. This is history; history makes me, and I make history, if event 884

R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, Oxford University Press, 1993. The impossibility of ―geological history‖ is in p. 445 (cf. 217). 885 Oliver Sacks describes the loss of personhood in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, NY: Touchstone, 1998.

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returning or not depends on me. History makes me as I make history, and I make history as history makes me.

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“Our Days Return” as History, Yet the Problem Remains Now let me wrap it up by expanding on Mr. Chu. Mr. Chu said, ―Our days, once gone, return no more.‖ We say, they do return again, not as an identical old but as a renewed old remembered, refurbished. Our days are the birds singing the morning of the First Creation, every new dawn. The birds return after the last spring was gone, as Mr. Chu also said, and after they rested last night. They sing the same different First Creation every new dawn. The birds of our days do return—anew. After all, ―return‖ spells ―anew.‖ Thus Mr. Chu, you do return beautifully, in our shared birds of our shared days, precisely in your identical sentences on different paper, now newly read by your beloved readers, again and again. Welcome back, Mr. Chu! We have missed you so much! We love you, Mr. Chu! Now, doesn‘t all this amount to yesterdays returning today? Isn‘t this fact Plato reversed, upside down, that eternity is the moving image of returning time, though not tiresome cyclicrevolving time? This is history, isn‘t it, as ―our days‖ dramatically ―reenacted,‖ lived on, again and again, returned, renewed. History is in essence human. Birds sing the First Creation every dawn, not (only) for them but for us to relive it afresh every dawn, and the reliving is our days returning, our history renewing while we are alive or while our posterity is alive. Human life has thus historical depths, through our very ephemeral days, once gone, come back no more, to come back again afresh. History, history, all that is human is history alive afresh. Awesomely historical is humanity sighing with singing birds every morning. Behind all this is a gaping aporia, though. Let me put it this concrete way. Dark nights are more numerous than moonlit nights. Why? What does this fact mean? Are these questions meaningless, though, for fact is fact, and that‘s that, nothing else can be said further? But is this thought correct, at least correct for humans? Isn‘t it being human to ask questions of ―why‖ after getting ―what‖ straight? But then why do we have more dark nights than moonlit ones? Why do we have more days calm and sunny than stormy or tornado ones? We know we live ―better‖ in dark nights and calm days than stormy (and perhaps uneasy moonlit nights, pace poets celebrating them), but it is the result of these facts of more dark nights and calm days than ones not, not their cause. Still, we could ask whether we live and thrive that way because we are used to such times of more frequency, or because of other causes—and then we are lost. In any case, we now realize that these questions cannot be answered. Is their unanswerability due to our inability (if so, we just try harder), or is it by the nature of the case? What does ―by the nature of the case‖ mean? Isn‘t it identical with ―brute fact‖? If so, we are back to ―base one‖ above, the same question. We are stuck somewhere. Is our losing way similar to Mr. Chu lamenting losing days? Why do we have more dark nights than moonlit ones? We just stare at this question, dazed. Mr. Chu has asked, ―Our days, once gone, never return, but why?‖ Is his question like ours, or not? We have answered his question and worries by denying his antecedent assertion and said that our days do return albeit renewed.

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But can we deny that we have more dark nights than moonlit ones? Similarly, can we deny that the great dead cannot respond to their postmortem enrichment by posterity? We are born to question, I know, but this is too much; I cannot live with it. We have a way out: Timeaporia we must dance on, not ponder on. Now here‘s the dance: Sym-spatial synchronic swimming, SSS, swirls in China. China has been turning and enveloping time and space. China has been returning enriched. That‘s the child parenting the parents; that‘s life. Tao is the movement of reverse, for return is the movement of Tao, says Lao Tzu (40). Tao is movement round and round. That‘s why Mr. Chu lamented over our days not returning, for otherwise who cares? Looking back enables growing up. Retrospection fuels forwarding. It is system alive, things standing together moving on. It is logic, things gathering into a dia-logic. This is what makes sense, how life is made aware, retrospect, returned forwarding, and life made aware is life, isn‘t it? Life turned unaware stops living. Round and round goes life, never harsh, never jagged, roundabout, enriched, round and round, out and out, and then out and in. ―Get it?‖ Baby Andy demands, and Mom must get it! Kids mother mom. SSS swirls in China. Get it, Mr. Chu? Welcome back! Now, we know why this Appendix is put after Chinese Wisdom Alive III. Music, history, and life are at one here, to sum up life, and this Part.

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PART IV: ANCIENT WISDOM ALIVE TODAY IN GLOBAL INTERCULTURE

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Our four-part volume concludes with this Part, watching how Chinese wisdom is alive today, rooted in its tradition millennia fresh. We consider Chinese wisdom alive in general, then in its specific abiding features and its style as valid in the concrete, and finally how intercultural our exposition is, clinched with ―letting Chinese thinking be Chinese‖ as global.886

886

「越是民族的，越就是世界的」begins 中國書法名帖精選, 孫廣來主編, 西安: 陝西旅遊出版社, 2005, ―說明.‖

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Chapter 44

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IN GENERAL The bathtub, as its inscription says, ―New day, day, again, today-new,‖ bathed King Tang afresh daily four millennia ago,887 and since before his reign. China‘s renewals cannot be exhausted by one generation of its concretization today, a tip of the iceberg cool fresh, just one telling instance of how alive China is for millennia. This briefer Part Four itemizes a handful of instances to illustrate how jumping fresh China‘s persistent features are today as have been since millennia; their daily renewals overflow ―now.‖ Such description never impresses Western philosophers who think—―logicize,‖ argue— about everything, including thinking and living, abstracting from the concrete. Chinese wisdom tells stories of the way we think as we live on in lifeworld, probing the concrete for its deep sense. Naturally, to the West, Chinese wisdom is loose, immature, in need of logic-rational tightening and reinterpretation. To China, Western philosophy is an ivory tower separated from the world, irrelevant to living. These impressions show their necessity to gather to intercomplement, inter-enrich; at the end of this Part we consider how to do so. Meanwhile, we must follow the way of Chinese wisdom to describe Chinese wisdom that is ―concrete philosophy,‖ an oxymoron in the West where the concrete is material to philosophize on, not philosophy; ―concrete philosophy‖ is ―no-philosophy philosophy.‖ In contrast, Chinese wisdom is all-concrete or nothing, always telling stories, story-thinking888 things whose ―skin‖ shows their depth-senses. A Chinese biologist trained in the West said, skin has more than physiological, physical, and atomic ingredients the West sees. Skin wraps a person into interpersonal family, then community and socio-politics, to consummate in cosmic concord. The first view sees skindown, the second, skin-up-cosmic. At the cell and below, no skin wraps the integrity of a being. Existence appears only skin-above into cosmic inter-existence. Skin-down misses skin to miss elephant with butterfly889; skin-up expands skin to sociopolitical lifeworld.890 Our Chinese scientist‘s vision is vaster than the scientific West; his 887 888

―湯之盤銘曰, ‗茍日新, 日日新, 又日新.‖ (大學2).

See Wu, ―Distinctive Features of Chinese Hermeneutics,‖ Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, June 2004, pp. 233-247, and ―Chinese Philosophy and Story-Thinking,‖ Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, June 2005, pp. 217-234. 889 Buddhist would of course nod saying, no elephant or butterfly exists. They are puffs of wavicle-wind blown by my desire into empty ideas, empty wind blowing over empty chaos; ―actuality all‖ is vanity. This route

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Chinese heart throbs in his scientific intellect, backed by time-honored Filiality Classic 孝經 proclaiming, filiality is ―reverence to our root, the root of all virtues.‖ The ―beginning of filiality,‖ it continues, is to real-ize our ―bodily hair and skin received from parents,‖ ultimately our Heaven and Earth. ―We dare not injure hair and skin,‖ but do our best to protect and promote it. Skin is a holistic tangible milieu of personality, vulnerable to injury. The Classic astutely mentions ―skin‖ for self-nurture to accomplish cosmic filial piety. This is because skin is my exchange-station with outside world of our being. Skin shows me; ―thick skin‖ is a tough guy. Skin forms my face as ―me‖ not you, yet only you see me, not me.891 We respect the ―faces‖ to do business well to form society; spelling individual, skin spells ―social‖ cosmic. Skin inter-osmoses and the cosmos diversifies by individual integrities of skin breathing in Heaven and Earth. Skin continues to compose the human-cosmic unity interpenetrating, back and forth, to compose the Chinese lifeworld in medicine, martial arts, the arts of cooking, sociopolitical family management, and writing that appreciates this busy historical world. As child‘s skin differs from adult‘s and female‘s from male‘s, so skin varies among cultures. Skin-down X-ray probes, skin-up story-tells; they must join analysis synthesized, to interculture. The West‘s under-skin interfaces China‘s above-skin. Sadly, China‘s skinosmosis has a history of continual bloody crises. ―Aggression‖ is usually attended by replacing the disdained oppressed culture with the aggressor‘s ―glorious culture‖ yet, interestingly, premodern conquests of China sinicized conquerors into Mongolian Yüan (1271-1368) and Manchurian Ch‘ing (1644-1912). Liu Pei 劉備 the new ruler of Han was warned by advisors, that swordsmanship is powerless to govern the post-conquest state of affairs. Culture takes over swords; China conquered uncivilized victors with its high culture in the past. Since nineteenth century, China has been a target of Western colonization. After surviving political-military aggression, it is still too soon to tell how China would survive the economic-cultural West now; matching Western cultural sadism, some Chinese today even masochistically adulate it, though China did not admire Mongols or Manchus before. This is the ―problem of China.‖892 Accepting alien culture is not bad, but we must not be absorbed in it but digest it into our sinews. Today‘s globalization must not destroy regional specificity but effect a kaleidoscopic coalition inter-culturing, inter-enriching. Strengthening China by digesting the West (and the West digesting China) is the sine qua non of globalization; unilateral tribal conquest kills the silences all. All Buddhist discourses so massive are actually so much engine-idling tautology, signifying literally nothing. Nothing signifying is the Buddhist pride and glory. If this is a contradiction, so be it, for nothing can be said, and anything said is contradictory. 890 Thus ―love is skin-deep‖ comes from skin-under stance; we must say ―love is skin-wrapped.‖ ―Skin care‖ comes from skin-repair, as ―care‖ derives from grief, anxiety; we must say ―skin promotion.‖ 891 章學誠 says, ―Each person has ‗me‘ yet does not allow ‗me‘-ing his ‗me.‘ 人各有我而不容我共我也.‖ ―Allow 容‖ can mean ―looks, face‖ (perhaps unlikely here but significant); the second ―me 我‖ is a verb. (文史通義校注, 經解上, 葉瑛校注, 北京市中華書局, 2005, p. 93). I am hid from me; so Chuang Tzu‘s surprising ―losing self 喪我‖ and ―forgetting self 忘己‖ are actually natural designations; they say, ―Be natural,‖ surprisingly though naturally. 892 Bertrand Russell packed his admiration of Chinese life-composure in his The Problem of China (London: Allen & Unwin, 1922) but did not define what the ―problem‖ is. We supply it here.

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In General

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West and China. World survival hangs on this crucial turning point, demonstrated in our final section, ―Letting Chinese Thinking Be Chinese.‖ China alive has been turning problems into opportunities, challenges into nutrition. To this urgent hope for such growth today, this volume is dedicated; our hope is solidly based. China in Chuang Tzu has ―great awakening 大覺‖ to dreaming, to enrich Chuang-dreamingbutterfly with butterfly-dreaming-Chuang, to self-identity, to constantly renew-enrich across time till today.893 This is China‘s resilient power to grow, soon to be illustrated by its ten features, historical, cultural. China is emerging into a world superpower yet fragile,894 absorbing communism, capitalism, science, technology, democracy, etc., while trying not to be absorbed into them, pervaded with exciting future risks since brutal Warring States (480-222 BCE) days that provoked ―hundreds of schools‖ of Taoism, Confucianism, Legalism, Name-School, etc., to stimulate China‘s growth into its renewed enriched self. We can see time-China by comparing it with the space-West. The West today says, ―Time warps‖; even time is space-ed. In China, even space is time-ed. We ―walk, walk, and again walk, walk 行行重行行‖; ―again‖ time-s our walk. ―Thousand-mile walks begin underfoot 千里之行始於足下‖; ―begins‖ is a time-verb. Name-scholar‘s paradox is couched in time, ―Walked today; arrive yesterday.‖ ―Black hole‖ is a cosmic quagmire sucking all things; it is Western cosmologist‘s spacepicture. Seen time-wise, the ―hole‖ is ―now‖ sucking future into past, to turn bright retrospectively; retrospection makes us ―wiser after the fact,‖ i.e., history. ―Now‖ is then time‘s ―brightening hole,‖ the dynamics of history China is keen at. Nothing is thus ―dated‖; all is historic. Each fleeting moment is immortal time-music; its prose-poetry shows a flesh and blood drama, to sensitively contain trivial details to explain into history. Philosophy as radical thinking is of two sorts, analytical and discerning. China has no ―philosophy‖895 analytical, X-ray penetrating, precision flying off into its own stipulated ―exactitude,‖ but discerned insights evoking one another into wisdom of living. The wisdom is soft-focused in stories told, heard, and added. The events story-presented haunt, convince, and instruct to turn us wiser to live better. Attentively perceiving what goes on is written contoured to life, nodded and sighed at in meaning forgotten. It is ―Chinese wisdom‖ at routine best, fresh millennia young, ―Chinese wisdom alive today.‖ Discerning holistic thinking makes concrete wisdom, philosophy concrete and the concrete philosophical. In the West, lethal fighting excludes convivial eating both concrete, so taking both as philosophical takes the contradictory as philosophical. Such understanding misses China. China sees that fighting kills to give birth, Yin internecine as Yang inter-nascent; true victory captures enemy‘s heart, destroying enmity toward conviviality as culinary art does.

893

Buddhism in contrast urges us decisively to awaken, in Nirvana, from dream living-dying transmigrations. Susan L. Shirk‘s China: Fragile Superpower, Oxford University Press, 2007, is off-focused (in socio-politics) and more restricted in scope than our cultural-historical vista here. 895 We can of course claim that ―Chinese philosophy‖ is really in the original sense of ―philosophy‖ as ―love of wisdom,‖ but such a quibble contributes to confusion, now that ―philosophy‖ is widely used in the West as calisthenics of arguments. 894

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So, concrete ―skin‖ is considered above. In all things concrete sparkling depths of sense alive are seen; if this is not wisdom where things come alive anew, what is? Daily renewal has growing pain, history says, to show life inter-involved so complex. Alive-interdisciplinary China‘s activities are; medicine is meteorological; life is mixed in war strategy and martial art of death, culinary art is cultural, sociopolitical that is ritual-reverential to perform human-cosmos harmony; its peculiar characters 文字and calligraphy 書法 typify China‘s concrete thinking; these arts of indomitable health-power advance everyone‘s vigor, digesting obstacles into nutrition.

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Chapter 45

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SOME SPECIFIC ABIDING FEATURES We are ready to go into details of the above general features of China. Here are its ten abiding features displaying how fresh and alive Chinese wisdom has been for ages: medicine, family socio-politics, culinary art, Li-respect 禮, religiosity, mercantilism, martial art, science-technology, ideographic-writing musically lived out in calligraphy. ONE: Medicine has two types of patterns, Western and Chinese.896 Illness is Western doctor‘s concern, who leaves us when tests come out ―negative.‖ ―Checkups‖ fish for specific diseases to repair, trying to be efficient with its analytical invasive techniques. Western medicine cures illness; an apple a day keeps a Western doctor away. Health is what Chinese doctors listen for, to nurture pulsing resonance inside out, mismanaging which dis-eases us, ―ill‖ at ―ease.‖ As we self-forget in health, Chinese doctors are with us silently holistic, less efficient than empathic insightful, varied and vast. An apple a day keeps a Chinese doctor all the way. Thus ingenious Western medicine tries quickly to cure diseases specific; holistic Chinese medicine gently nurtures health vast, growing, taking time. The two types differ to intercomplete health with two features, curing and nurturing; neither can be omitted. Let us now consider Chinese medicine. Chinese Medicine is an intimate art of cosmic wholeness, distilled in timeless Innermost Classic of Yellow Emperor 黃帝內經, followed and enriched across time.897 Everything begins here, inmost personal wholeness spreading to communal wholeness and cosmic interwholeness. An explanation is in order. ―Bodily health‖ is made of no anatomical analytical parts to repair, but is body-dynamics pulsing to resonate with its nature-milieu, unobstructed inner jet-stream (ch‘i 氣) interflowing with cosmic jet-stream to co-grow daily, via osmotic membrane the skin softly wrapping the 896 897

Of course there are many patterns; we consider two major types to classify all patterns under. On the Nei Jing of Yellow Emperor 黃帝內經 (and its several renowned versions), the bible of Chinese medicine, see the whole page of explanation in Ted. J. Kaptchuk, The Web That Has No Weaver: Understanding Chinese Medicine (1983), Chicago: Congdon & Weed, 2000, p. 398 (see Wu‘s review of it in Philosophy East and West, January, 1986), 石田秀實著, 中國醫學思想史, 東京大學出版社, 1992, his modern translation of 黃帝內經素問, and 加納喜光著, 中國醫學の誕生, same press, for microcosmic and macrocosmic inter-harmony in Chinese medicine. Cf. R. G. H. Siu, Ch’i: A Neo-Taoist Approach to Life, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974. Many others are omitted here.

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whole body. Health is bodily breathing in and out, in hot-and-cold harmony of microcosm and macrocosm, fivefold-going in the Yin-Yang internecine, inter-nascent.898 So, Chinese medicine is an art of adjusting bodily weather-flow co-pulsing with vast jetstreams of season 浩然之氣 holistic, with no divisions of genecology, pediatrics, ophthalmology, etc. The bodily jet-stream is felt but invisible, much less localizable, but adjustable by stimulating the bodily key-points with acupuncture and/or moxibustion. TWO: Harmonious health of all things composes families kin-gathered into politics, natal nuclear family writ large, grown natural into community as families interwoven. Far from ruler-ruled antagonism to compromise, Chinese politics manages welfare-for-all; ―all things under heaven are one family.‖ ―Within Four Seas are all brethren‖; ―father, fatherly, son, filial‖ patterns ―ruler, ruler-ly, subject, subject-ly.‖899 Politics is family-economics, the ruler‘s norm to enforce popular obedience, and the ruler‘s mandate, failing which incites bloody overthrow—―raising social-justice 起義‖ by the people. Even today, people assume the governor as their personal parent till proven otherwise; this is not the US legal system impersonal. THREE: Family harmony is captured in Chinese cooking and mercantilism. The arts of feeding and money-making induce happy family-togetherness; ideal politics is envisioned as culinary harmony that family-feeds. Culinary art is a way to enjoy life sustenance; mercantilism is no money-milking trick but camaraderie to inter-benefit in Confucian family warmth and Taoist interflow of nature. Culinary art is part of Chinese wisdom. We are how we cook-eat in culture-distinct ways. Cooking blends various ingredients, each enriched by others, into aromas distinct; the dinner is a zestful conviviality, everyone needed. Relaxed participants are fed-fulfilled in body and spirit—Chinese way.900 Food is nurturing medicine,901 and medicine is literally cookedstewed as soup of 7~8, up to 20 ingredients. Mixing is the essence of food-artistry to go into history and politics in literature replenishing life. If life-nourishment is all-important, and food nourishes life, then China should naturally be intensely interested in foods, acclaiming them as joys of life, lifting them to ―culinary art,‖ and writing on it to live on it.902 China is perhaps the world‘s most omnivorous culture, eating all edibles perhaps except cheese.903 Cooking is harmony musical. Music cooks melodies, cooking choruses flavors, both to feed family-politics. Foods are more important than clothing or habitat, intimately linked to cosmological principles of Yin-Yang and cold-heat, and to health as microcosm904 to structure ritual and

898

五行, 陰陽, 相生相剋. Analects 12/11. 900 Cf. K. C. Chang, ed., Food in Chinese Culture: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977. 901 Food as medicine is also recognized by Western medicine, but not as thoroughly-routinely as in China. 902 Curiously, and unjustifiably, the world‘s literati are above it, as Lin Yutang also noted in My Country and My People (NY: Halcyon House, 1935), pp. 337-340. 903 Food is so crucial in China that Lin climaxes My Country and My People with food-talk (pp. 335-344, before Epilogue). 904 Richard Craze and Roni Jay, The Tao of Food, NY: Sterling Publishing, 1999, links Chinese way of foods to cosmology in China. 899

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politics.905 Chinese culinary art is a natural artistry of socio-politics; the chef is facilitator (loyal astute advisor) of interblending harmony of ruler and ruled to delightfully fulfill every participant, as dinner feeds everyone into China‘s family-artistry of mercantilism. Culinary arts cook Chinese wisdom alive. FOUR: As culinary art spreads to family-ize commerce, so all comportment is Li-respect 禮 more than social etiquette, and Li-loss 失禮 is more serious than a nodding ―Sorry!‖ Chinese people never call teachers, parents, or parents-in-law by their first names, nor would they walk before superiors. Such respectful comportment forms social order. Li-respect has three features, all socially attitudinal: Li as respect with distinction, originating in cosmic reverence, and watchful over empty gesture on pain of perdition. First, Li 禮 respects people I meet as befit their respective positions relative to me. ―Respect a woman‖ is meaningless till concretized as specific respect of my or your or his mother, my or your or his daughter, all different. China thus comes to have varied social ranks. Maternal aunts, elder, younger, or paternal aunts, elder, younger, or male, female siblings, or paternal, maternal cousins, etc., have different ―names,‖ with specific Li‘s 禮; ―no Li 禮‖ dehumanizes-subverts society.906 Secondly, Li 禮-respect originates in the cosmic Li 禮-reverence we owe to the Ultimate All. Human ruler 王 represents humanity to skewer the heaven-earth-human Triad 三 into one,907 seasonally performing the Great Li 禮 to Heaven and Earth, ritually and politically, personally and communally. Thirdly, the ruler 王 can and did refuse the Li-duty, and Heaven destroys him via its people. So, as the Greeks prohibit hubris, China warns against losing felt respect in empty gesture and improper conduct to court disaster. The reason is simple and significant. China is awestruck at Father Heaven and Mother Earth birthing myriad things unceasing, actualizing rosebuds 端 of potentials, only to actualize them into novel potentials, come springtime, to command profound reverence. Even Han Fei 韓非‘s Realpolitik-Legalism builds on Lao Tzu‘s view of Nature.908 China‘s ethics blossoming in cosmic socio-politics (as Great Learning 大學 poetizes) is cosmological quite awesome. All this cosmic-human function parents and regulates interpersonal Li-respect to subtend socio-ethical politics, which then Li-reverently performs the Triune Harmony of Heaven and Earth with Humanity. Li-respect describes China‘s religiosity, to which we now turn. FIVE: All this feeding life social and cosmic extends spontaneously to Chinese religiosity, the primal womb of concrete religions,909 for the concrete is due to the Beyond905

See Food in Chinese Culture, ed. K. C. Chang, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977, Lin Yutang, My Country, op. cit., p. 371, index on ―food,‖ and The Importance of Living (NY: Raynal & Hitchcock, 1937) p. 452, index on ―food.‖ 906 This graded respect and love—opposing 兴愛 universal love—is the basis of 天下為公 (all under heaven shared by all) and 世界大同 (great sharing of the world). 907 春秋繁露 describes it thus: ―古之造文者, 三畫而連共中, 謂之王. 三畫者天地與人也, 而連共中者通共道也 . . . 貫而參通之 . .‖ (in 王道通三, 第四十四, 臺北市三民書局, 2007, p. 908). Then it describes 天地 as 仁, and 王 must practice 仁民 to 參天地. Such activity is described as 禮 in禮記. 908

The two crucial chapters in 韓非子 (解老 and 喻老) build up 韓非‘s policy of automatic rule-by-law as an application of Taoist wu-wei 無為, no-doing that does it all. 909 See K. Wu‘s ―Confucianism as Religion‖ in On Metaphoring, Leiden: Brill, 2001, pp. 504-509. Chinese Wisdom Alive : Vignettes of Life-Thinking, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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concrete. China concretely captures the Beyond-concrete as the Beyond existing out there, beyond capturing-as-concrete. Thus in China the Beyond is beyond personal tangible and impersonal abstract, beyond approachable and unapproachable, only properly to awe and to serve with reverence, in veneration 畏, respect 敬, with ritual-civility 禮 pervading etiquette in interpersonal truthfulness, typified in looking up to my parents, to pervade social intercourse to fulfill every innermost person and personable integrity. My filial piety is socio-cosmic, awestruck before Father Heaven and Mother Earth, to spread socially. The Beyond concrete thus includes the concrete as finger-pointing at the moon beyond here now includes the finger here now; the Beyond concrete manifests within the concrete, which sparkles the Beyond everywhere, the nameless tree, the drink of water. Ch‘an-Zen Buddhism came to China as hollowed Hinduism, as China‘s vital bamboo-hollow, to hollow ―Buddha,‖ ―ritual,‖ and ―doctrines.‖ Here pervades sharp liveliness to what is, alive to what is beyond what is, within what just is beyond life and death. So, reverence toward the cosmic Beyond is nothing beyond this world but deeply thisworldly, shown in ―ritual 禮.‖ It goes this way. Once publicized and made official, any activity is codified as ―sacred.‖ The heinous act of killing people became ―the way of the samurai, bushido 步士道‖; the most dictatorial of governance, Ten-no, Heavenly Emperor 天皇, has been divinized until World War Two. In China, ―ritual 禮‖ of utmost respect has customarily been attached to ―music,‖ ―government,‖ and ―morals-and-etiquettes.‖910 Once made sacred in social rituals, these activities are both made cosmically legitimate and deeply pervasive within individual actors. Rituals make these acts sacred, to manifest the power of religiosity throughout society and individual depths. The sacred is secular pervasive. SIX: Chinese family-reverence cherished in nature and in community extends, surprisingly yet quite naturally, to the art of money-making to inter-benefit customers and merchants worldwide. China‘s bustling merchants turn our selfishness, bemoaned by Hsün Tzu as ―innate evil,‖ into its mutual satisfaction; seller turns anyone into seller‘s family member to naturally care, to delight them into buying, to profit seller. The main concern of Chinese merchants is to make strangers into friends heart-known, ―family members‖ with merchandise to buyers to profit sellers. This principle explains Chinese businessmen taking loss, staying low profile, for steady long-term deals with as diverse a clientele as possible. This is Confucian fruit of family political ethics grown of Taoist naturalism, as nothing is more natural than making family. China‘s cosmopolitan ideal has been a miserable failure in ―politics as beauty tragic,‖ portrayed previously, in the gap between the beautiful sociopolitical family of all and the ruler-ruled bloodshed. Could almighty merchants in China effectuate the political ideal of ―one world, one human family‖? All depends on the Chinese merchants to effectively unify profiting oneself with benefiting customers. This is not the enlightened self-interest preached by Adam Smith, where struggle for oneself alone automatically benefits others. Their appeal is mutual family-profiteering, seller‘s profit made by buyer‘s benefit to entice us all to ―world concord.‖ ―Make gains, not war! Everyone wins!‖ all Chinese 910

禮記, 荀子, and 孔子 have contributed to this trend.

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merchants shout, to break Akrasia—knowing, desiring, capable of doing better and doing worse. To Jesus‘ ―Love your neighbors as yourself,‖ Chinese merchants add, ―for neighborstrangers are now our family members.‖ A cynic says family-relation is a gimmick to oil the deal. Well, if it is, it would be the best gimmick as honesty is the best policy. The cynic insists, ―Isn‘t it a variation on the Western ‗enlightened self-interest‘? ‗Family-mutuality‘ is an icing to sweeten the cake of selfish profiteering, isn‘t it? Nothing is moral here.‖ Mr. Cynic, China separates no profitstrategy from profitless-morality. Chinese merchants‘ family-making policies and techniques naturally grow out of the Gestalt-frame of Confucianism-Taoism; pull it out, and China‘s mercantilism vanishes. Mencius‘ ―rightness 義‖ is royal profit-sharing with the people (1A1-7); natural profit-sharing is the business of business, whose backdrop is Confucianism and Taoism. No wonder, China is the world‘s superpower in international economy today. SEVEN: Martial art in China is the art of soldiery 兰法 to world concord. A knife can serve a scalpel toward surgical health, or a lethal weapon to kill killer and killed. China has survived thanks to its inevitable use of ―knife‖ (military strategy) for the health of everyone in contact, though not without blood stains.911 Martial art ―步‖術 is meant to stop 止 halberds 戈912; the military is the art of stopping war, more than (though often degraded into) war to stop wars. Sun Tzu 孫子, the sage of soldiery-art 兰法, declares what it means to truly ―win‖913: ―The good is to ‗total‘ a state; to break it is next. To ‗total‘ the army is good, to defeat it is next; to ‗total‘ a battalion is good, to ruin it is next, [etc. to the very last soldier]. Thus ‗hundred wars, hundred wins‘ is not the good of good; not fight and subdue their army is the good of good.‖ EIGHT: Science and technology are our sword-hands to promote cosmic health in familyreverence, our hands to achieve the Triune Harmony of Heaven, Earth, and Humanity; here an object is object to subject, and everyone wins. Ecology is home-economics in cosmos, in Chinese spirit medical, familial, political, religious, mercantile, martial, and cosmic, and has been fresh, vast, and alive across millennia. China is thriving today as an emerging world superpower at the cutting edge of science. To know nature naturalizes nature; science is technological. China has its ―slant‖ in scientific technology, i.e., sensitivity to routine regularities of daily living, never abstractive, 911

Accordingly, Japan says the true sword enlivens 活人劍, not kill 殺人劍. See Inazo Nitobe, Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1969), Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1994. The Sword and the Mind: The Classic Japanese Treatise on Swordsmanship and Tactics, tr. Hiroaki Sato (1985), NY: Fall River Press, 2004. Soul of the Samurai: Modern Translations of Three Classic Works of Zen & Bushido, tr. Thomas Cleary, North Clarendon, VT: Tuttle Publishing, 2005. A Book of Five Rings: Miyamoto Musashi, tr. Victor Harris, NY: The Overlook Press, 1974. Etc. 912 See 說文解字詁林, 臺北市鼎文書局, 民72, 10:330. 913

This is Wu‘s rendering of Sun Tzu‘s 孫子 crisp original, 「凡用兰之法, 全國為善, 破國次之. 全軍為善, 破軍次之. 全旅為善, 破旅次之. 全卒為善, 破卒次之. 全伍為善, 破伍次之. 是故百戰百勝, 非善之善者也. 不戰而屈人之兰, 善之善者也.」 ―Break,‖ ―defeat‖ and ―ruin‖ render ―破.‖ Samuel B. Griffith‘s translation, Sun Tzu: The Art of War (1963), Oxford University Press, 1971, p. 77 is least off but still off; his mistranslation with others of ―art of soldiery 兰法‖ into ―art of war‖ is pathetic. Significantly, of the ―Seven Military Classics 步經七書,‖ only the Sun Tzu specifies what ―winning‖ means (in its Chapter Three); all other six classics (吳子, 六韜, 三略, 司馬法, 尉繚子, 李衛公問答) elaborate variously on how to win.

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analytical. Chinese science and technology have been for the sake of concrete cosmic harmony.914 China‘s contribution here is harmony-management, i.e., a holistic interpenetration of infinitesimal and infinite, in co-resonance subjective-objective and physical-sociopolitical. The West still lacks level-interpenetrations, that is, penetrations back and forth between natural physical sciences and humanistic disciplines. Some examples come to mind. Wavicles in physics do not enter sociology. Biology sees sociology in ―sociobiology‖; can sociology and politics penetrate biology? Estrogen-hormone is supposedly responsible for female features; can steady feminine comportment replenish estrogen? Can psychosomatic worsening of illness turn to psychosomatically enhance health?915 These questions are not even raised.

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China‘s ideals of medical cosmology (黃帝內經, 抱朴子) and socio-ethical rulership adjusting cosmic harmony (尚書, 晏子春秋, 春秋繁露, etc.) are an ecological ethics yet to penetrate sociopolitical interculturalism. The subject goes into (in the I Ching 易經, Change Classic) nature-process toward the future, and Western science, objective, subjectless, despises it as superstitious ―divination.‖ All these features show how persistently alive China‘s wisdom is, to contribute fresh perspectives to world sciences. No activity in China is ―for its own sake,‖ but for living well in the cosmos, in the arts of medicine, cooking, fighting, money-making, etc. All statements and arguments, lofty and trifle, persuade living well, e.g., ―theories‖ on cosmos, human nature, names (heart-logic), education, virtues, politics; poetry, histories; dirges, eulogies, fictions frivolous and salacious, legends, even farce. NINE: The unique characters 文字, intoned sketches of things‘ senses, make sense of all above. Every audio-ideograph is sense-complete, to write out things alive as alive (not soundciphers alphabetical), and opens out to resonate with other characters in dialogue in time, as names inter-correcting 正名 into ―history as written 文史.‖ Every world culture began with a painterly writing system; its cumbersome feature was then reduced to sound-signs, to hamper cross-linguistic communication. This world history has one exception, thriving today, ideograms-audiograms 文字 that portray things‘ senses916 in their sounds. The humdrum jumps out singing, hand-clapping. Sense enlivens things when written; writing, sense, and life go in one, in Chinese writing. To begin, I write me out in characters that show me as graphology tells me, but calligraphy does more, shaping me—cures-smokes 薰陶 me-as-it-does-meat—as I appreciate calligraphy 914

Sadly, China has not perfectly fulfilled ecological obligation. 杜牧‘s 阿房宮賦 famously laments, ―蜀山兀, 阿房出.‖ C. A. S. Williams eloquently mourns China‘s extensive deforestation since before Mencius (Outlines of Chinese Symbolism & Art Motives [1941], NY: Dover, 1976, pp. 406-409). China stands condemned by its own imperative of ecological harmony; China may be the world‘s oldest culture with such ideal to be condemned first. 915 Norman Cousins‘ ―laughter therapy‖ (cf. Anatomy of an Illness, NY: W. W. Norton, 1979) is not studied, much less prescribed; can optimistic life-style lessen-heal cancer? 916 See Wen I-do on ―characters‖ painting sense as distinct from ―painting‖ picturing things, ―字與畫,‖ 聞一多全集, 步漢: 湖北人民出版社, 2004, 2:205-207. He sums up 許慎‘s 六書 (指事, 象形, 形聲, 會意, 轉注, 假借) and what 毛詩序 has as 六義 (風, 賦, 比, 興, 雅, 頌). Cf. an elegant briefing of how 文字 originated and how文字 formed文章, in 漢文學史綱要, 第一篇, 自文字至文章, in 魯迅全集 (上海人民出版社, 1981) 9:343-349.

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masters as I write. Meanwhile, my characters917 write out the senses of myriad things to sing and dance them with me. Writing myself on paper, I write myself in life, as name-righting 正名; af-firming words 立言 af-firms my self my virtue 立德, to con-firm this feat 立功 incorruptible 不朽, cosmic and historic, for writing myself out writes out myriad things‘ senses alive. My writing interwrites with Nature beyond life and death. The West thinks alphabetically, i.e., digitally and analytically; China expresses thinking in ideo-audiograms holistically to metaphor in time (literature, history) and space (cosmopolitan socio-politics). The West makes nouns to objectify to clarify; China has verbs in tropes to intone senses of myriad things. The West‘s ―Baby your skin‖ and ―Juice it up‖ are so naturally Chinese. The West is objective; China is intersubjective. The West abstractly ―logicizes‖; China coherently story-thinks. ―History‖ wraps up all above. China has only two volumes on history-writings, Liu‘s 史通 and Chang‘s 文史通義, and both titles share the word ―通,‖ (what) pervades, penetrates, and goes through. Both books describe 史通, what penetrates and pervades through history, not 史性 or 史道, the nature or principle of history. Liu‘s 史通918 is a miscellany of loose ―table of contents‖ on his so-called Six Schools 六家 and Two Styles 二體, plus some others that came to Liu‘s notice, who adds his own critical observations in his survey, on what should have been done. ―History 史‖ is such historical writings surveyed and compiled with such critical observations 通; history 史 has no quale separate from its 通 critical penetration of this historical sort. This practice is extended to treating literature 文 historically 史 in Chang‘s 文史通義919; the name ―history‖ is an adverb, ―historically,‖ and ―historically‖ is history. History moves on920 or it is no history. History moves-and-shows in literature; history is (義) literaturehistory (文史) interpenetrated (通) beyond separate expression. History pulled out of literature dies with literature, as fish pulled out of water dies as the water rots. Literature is belles letters sung in ideo-audiograms calligraphic. History and literature do inter-verb human living, inter-intoning with Heaven and Earth. Philosophy can be analysis or discerning; philosophy of history can be after ―history quale‖ or discerning ―process historical 歷史,‖ i.e., philosophy as historical and history as philosophical—wisdom. The latter expresses poetry humanly cosmic, cosmically human. If poetry makes to shape, then heartfelt life-calligraphy is historic-metaphysical poetry, deep calling deep; my heart calls out things‘ heart-senses in world con-cord, literally in heartfelt togetherness921 of all. Thus every roadside skull of personal integrity makes seasonal

917

―Characters‖ are audio-ideographs writing into myself, to shape my character. [唐]劉知幾撰, [清]浦起龍釋, 史通通釋, 臺北市九思出版有限公司, 民67. 919 章學誠著, 葉瑛校注, 文史通義校注 (1985), 北京市中華書局, 2005. Its commentaries, whose name is legion, are all silent on the point said here. 920 Western noun-culture pursues the ―what‖-quale of history. Chinese verb-culture—and that rarely, only twice— critically describes how history actually goes. The West loves to rise above to sum up in nouns; China undergoes and discerns beyond words. The West has history; China is historical. 921 ―Poetry‖ literally ―makes-creates,‖ and ―concord‖ is literally ―together-heart.‖ 918

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rounds with the brush of Heaven and Earth,922 composing a vast ode of history to the vast cosmic horizons. How does calligraphy do so? Myriad things are music of the spheres, the Great Clod belching breathing in threefold organ facilely called ―winds‖ at the ―heart‖ of all in all. At the level of quantum mechanics— and below and beyond—all such descriptions, stories, turn profoundly aesthetic. Particles twirl wavicles into booming moonlight-sonatas so soft. The fact is, all things inter-blend in their energies into Music of many spheres, and the words here (things, energies, inter-blend in their energies) vanish into ―music,‖ sheer music, where all are reborn (in China for millennia) in cooking, dancing, and singing in sense beyond sense. Here, math and music are identical, incoherence is coherent, virtual is real, while time goes and returns in space. Here the indefinite ―relative‖ is ―shoestrings‖ and many more theories, all turning ―definite.‖ Here the Ying penetrates the Yang, many in one, one in many, moving not moving, all eloquently silent, dancing and smiling an original itself, a Haydn so simple, so innocent, and therefore so penetrating and powerful. Have I spewed nonsense? All this is nonsense mirroring sense, all making themselves by themselves. Things twirl in differentiated universals of wavicles, and China innocently writes out concrete particulars rising family-cosmopolitan. ―I‖ am born with Heaven and Earth, and ―I‖ with myriad things make one923 cosmic music dancing, clapping hands, in Ode to Joy of biblical psalmists and cosmic prophets, joined by Po Yah 伯牙,924 Beethoven,925 and beyond. Singing dancing of ode is no random anything-goes, but a free ―anything-goes‖ with no unruly ―random,‖ for freedom sings music as it invents its rule. Freedom sings its music to its rule it invents. Rule-invention takes genius, who alone enables freedom. Autonomous freedom is loaded with self-responsibility of self-creation, creating self-rule. Nothing is more serious a crime than violating one‘s own self-created rule, random lawlessness. In China‘s customary phrase, 「文無定法」, its 活法 shows as 無法.926 Stories tell beyond stories in music of things piping always. Mr. East-Slum loses selfishness as he blends alive into the Clod belching breathing, windy and no-wind927; writing in China is beautiful ―calligraphy‖ telling such story in time in space, into musicals of all in all, in cosmic silence of moonlight eloquence, as squirrels hop, geese honk, trees sway, and grass waver, for nothing, for everything, in things‘ senses of music. “How does Chinese writing sing things‘ senses?‖ Unlike a single alphabet, one ideogram alone has a meaning (e.g., 體); as such it combines with others into a phrase of several (禮者體也), and then a phrase resounds with others, and sound-tones inter-rhyme to call forth new senses. Ideograms are sense-dots that weave out a tapestry of sentences 文 to sing out

922

Chuang Tzu‘s delightful story in 18/22-29 is rifled here. Chuang Tzu 2/52-53. 924 伯牙 is a legendary musician who moved animals and Heaven and Earth by plucking his zither. See 荀子 923

(勸學), 民76, p. 58, 淮南子 (說山), 民86, p. 831, 列子 (湯問), 民82, p. 178, and 說宛 (尊賢), 民85, p. 266 (all cited volumes published by臺北市三民書局). 925 Beethoven culminated his final Ninth Symphony with Schiller‘s Ode to Joy of all with all. 926 ―文無定法‖ says ―writing-well, no fixed rule.‖ ―活法‖ says ―lived rule.‖ ―無法‖ says ―no rule.‖ 927 Chuang Tzu 2/1-16.

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complex senses of a complex situation, quite alive (e.g., 禮者體也，禮樂之， 以體詠天地之華, etc.). Portrayal in sound is crucial. China intones sense; no tone, no sense.928 Audio-ideograms portray in sound, to shape to sing things‘ senses. Expression explodes singing to dance out sentences, writing to shape expression of things‘ senses. A sentence sings rhymed to call out the next, and both sing to bring about another, and rhyming singing draws forth a series of singing lines. Poetry throbs rhyming and singing through time to story-forth history. Writing crisscrosses into literature 文, into history 史. Things‘ meanings dance out in history‘s singing lines. My Peter said, ―Dad, I have three names, me, myself, and I. Bye, Dad!‖ and out he went to play. I went out with him and sang that song from The Sound of Music, ―Doe, a deer, a female deer; Ray, a drop of golden sun; Me, a name I call myself!‖ Writing dances me out, singing ―me, myself, and I.‖ Writing others me, sings me, dances me out to another. Writing is my first creation, my cosmic act of creation of no one else, for I am no one else. I am me, myself, and I danced out writing, for the first time in the history of the Heaven and Earth, to my other reading me! As I create myself in writing, my writing creates my friends my society, and my cosmos. Now I am social. Li Po 李白 the poverty-stricken poet lifted a wine-cup to the moon, and danced with his shadow in the moon.929 So he wrote a poem singing ―three people‖ drunk dancing! He drunk-wrote a poem of writing-social. Marvelous! Writing creates ―three people,‖ me, myself, and my milieu that includes people and the moon of trees, grass, and all. That‘s also my poetry rhyming social. Things‘ senses are in early dawn, full of thought that things softly feel. ―What thought?‖ They have no answer. ―Full of thought‖ is not clear thought, not no-thought, not creation, not chaos. Children are here, full of thought; music is here breathing thought inchoate. Things chirp silence of meaning with birds, spring-budding in each tree-leaf, morning-creating, waving in grassy calligraphy 草書, in human Leaves of Grass930 that sinuously bend to the winds of vitality blowing over it. Morning gets brighter, ―full of thought‖ in degrees. Poetry comes rhymed to tell of— what? Nothing articulate, just many images full of thought. Poetry is a baby cooing, full of thought, inviting a system of ideographs cum tone-senses, compressed painting, compact music; it is Chinese language in praxis among things silent, and every slightest event quivers early dawn still dark, full of thought, silently singing sense inchoate. The poets intone, ―As the day utter meanings to the night, nights enwrap meaning refreshed toward days, as the sleep sees the baby-meaning growing day and night, as we nurture the baby in our sleep.‖ We overhear our baby the cosmic meaning and we are blessed, breathing in its baby-breaths as poet-novelists do. 928

―Su‖ in tone-1 means administer 司, in tone-2 means secular 俗, in tone-3 means death 死, and in tone-4 means four 四, and many more senses besides. Ong sadly missed this point of tone-as-sense. See Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1970. 929 李白, 「月下獨酌」, 唐詩三百首 (臺北市三民書局, 民62, p. 11). ―Drinking Alone in the Moonlight,‖ tr. Elling Eide (The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature, ed. Victor Mair, 1994, p. 203). ―Drinking Alone by Moonlight,‖ tr. Arthur Waley (Translations from the Chinese [1919], NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941, p. 118); the translation is less good. 930 Did Walt Whitman notice such sentiment in his Leaves of Grass?

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The poet handles words in the world, as the novelist handles the world in words. The poet beautifies words to express the world, as the novelist fills words with the weight of the world. The novelist is thus poetized as the poet is novelized; they inter-enrich. They gather to interdeepen to inter-enliven; our life is enhanced. Poet and novelist tell stories to compose our lifeworld-in-time, to sing our world history; the music is portrayed to compose its calligraphy an ode to the world singing its insignia its ideographs, manifesting the ineffable concreteness. Words such as ―I,‖ ―here,‖ ―now,‖ are used; we all know what they mean, yet they are different in different situations. The West notices and calls them, ―indexicals‖ or ―demonstratives,‖ technical terms; China knows that all words are situation-sensitive,931 not just those picked by Western ―logicians‖ as ―special and technical terms.‖932 Chinese people are aware that words are alive to, in, and as the concrete situations alive. Nouns are verbs moving,933 in fact, all ―nouns must be righted 正名‖ in line with moving actuality, where we must ―no-do to all-do 無為而無不為.‖ Adjectives are nouns moving, adverbs are verbs moving, and so nouns are freely used as adjectives, as adverbs are used as verbs, and vice versa. China is a fluid verb-culture. In China, noun is noun-izing act. To ―father father 父父‖ father-izes father (lets father act father-ly); to ―old my old 老吾老‖ old-izes my oldsters (as befits my old folks); to ―china it 中國之‖ China-izes it (China-―countrifies‖ it). All things are alive, so nouns act, naming things. Chinese wisdom is at work to manifest lifeworld alive. ―But why is noun used to indicate verb?‖ Because noun describes the acts‘ stable pattern, what we usually call ―attitude.‖ ―Give thanks always‖ is an impossible act-sentence, for no one can give anything always. ―Be grateful‖ is an attitude-sentence of a way of living, not thinking of being owed but of how to act to pay back debts of gratitude, ever ready to act out gratefully. ―Be neighborly‖ also is ready to act as neighbor to those near us. ―Being‖ as an abiding attitude shows habitual ―doings‖ in a specific way. Compassion is an attitude to act out in love; ritual-attitude 禮 is readiness to act respectfully. Likewise, honor, dignity, responsibility, filiality, etc., depict conditions in which to act out to show such personal probity. The ―heart unbearable of people‖ is peoplesensitivity acting out in compassion. They are all nouns that are verbs. Here are two more examples. ―Here now‖ is a verb. A girl toddler watched an even tinier tot boy, and grabbed him, kissed him, and both fell to the ground, but they did not cry. That scene so moving grabbed me and stays with me now here. Only that story—as above—gives that moving ―here now‖ to me and to you, but I don‘t know what to call that incident; only a story as above, verbs-filled, captures ―here now‖ unnameable. Life is moving on, full of verbs, and Chinese culture is a verb-culture of life. 931

E.g., my ―cat‖ is not your ―cat,‖ my ―dad‖ is not your ―dad,‖ my ―gift‖ is not your ―gift,‖ etc. The West since Socrates resents such ―irregularities,‖ taking them even as ―contradictions (between same names and different contents)‖ and pursues the ―universal concept,‖ even of ―gift‖ (as in Euthyphro), unaware that ―a same universal gift that pleases diverse people‖ is silly, for ―gift‖ is recipient-specific, and actually, every notion is gift-―given‖ (data) to us and to actuality. The West is a situation-free name-culture that needs to adjust to the actuality of content-specificity of name. 932 This is a great anomaly in the Western context of names as universal concepts, where the same meanings must attach to the same names, always, situation-free. See Palle Yourgrau, ed., Demonstratives, Oxford University Press, 1990. 933 The West is catching up, e.g., ―juicing it up,‖ ―babying my skin,‖ ―no kidding!‖

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Another noun-as-verb example is the moonlight I miss tonight. Why that soft glow is now gone, is beyond me. The glow smiled with my favorite Li Po 李白 whose ―three people‖ joined and danced, the moon, himself, and his moon-shadow, as he lifted his wine cup934; he was so poor. The glow warmly embraced them, silent in it, yet the glow (noun) so embracing, so active (verb), is nowhere tonight. The moon will come back, you say, to glow at my windowsill. I still miss that glow the other night; the glow coming is no longer that glow that night. Why does the moon have to go? Why does it not-stay all night always? Why does Nature change? Isn‘t Nature what it is; why is what-is not what-is? Where did it go? Why does it not stay here now glowing all, saying nothing, saying all? The silent glow, I miss you . . .935 I think of kids tonight, in the dark moonless night. They never miss the moonlight; they are dreaming all night as to have no moonlight. Are they the moonlight as I look at them asleep? Can‘t I join them? I had better! Now I said ―I look at them‖ but I have no kids now; they are all grown up, in the 40s (one in late 30s). I still see them now, asleep. Can I not see the moonlight, with them asleep now? Why can I see them and not the moonlight? Why do I miss the moonlight, but not them? Strange! Now, what have I done so far? Haven‘t I been impressed with the moving moon— moonlight—in stories full of verbs, without name, unnameable? Many things ordinary are moving beyond naming as my ―missing moonlight.‖ These nouns are verbs beyond nouns, called ―here now.‖ Only storytelling describes it in China, a verb-culture of story-thinking. The West loves nouns as nouns, nothing more; it is noun-culture clearly naming things, calling them out of the dark,936 e.g., ―jokes,‖ beyond China that just ―tells laugh-words, good-

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for fun-playing 說笑話, 好玩,‖937 and ―humor‖ that must be transliterated as 幽默, for China humoring has no such word.938 Things and thoughts get clear, articulate, and the ―thought‖ inarticulate is no more in separate concepts with identical meanings always, fixed. Fresh active depths of poetry of dawn are parched dry in name-desert. A noun-culture defines and interprets experience, to turn it into past to deal with it. A verb-culture is aware, plunging into the thicket of shifting experience now to go to the future, moving with changes, joining their dance. Both cultures, both presented in writing 文, must interpenetrate to compose history 史. The reason is not far to seek. Name without action is empty; action without name is risky. China is a culture of acts and verbs; it must look back in history, turn composed (name, noun) to mirror today toward tomorrow. Such culture of moving unity is ―literary-history 文史,‖ to save us from parched name-desert and booming jumbles of acts. Let‘s go slower here. 934

This example was mentioned just a while back; I cannot get over it. Appendix in Part III, on Mr. Chu lamenting our days not returning, considers this theme as well. 936 Noam Chomsky‘s ―deep structure‖ of all languages curiously omits the peculiar verb-fluidity of Chinese language. See his Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965. ―Name 名‖ in China is ―calling 口 in (the dark 冥 of) the dusk 夕‖ of the world, calling forth me and things into existence as such. 935

937 938

See 說文解字詁林, 臺北市鼎文書局, 民72, 2:1154-1157. Cf. 原編佚名, 笑林廣記, or 游戲主人纂集, 香港, 臺北市金楓出版社, 龔鵬程導讀, 1988, 聞一多 calls 隱喻 metaphors, 謎語 puzzles, etc., ―隱語 hidden words,‖ and cites ―魚 fish‖ as an example. Jokes and humor may belong to ―隱語 hidden words.‖ See 「說魚」 in 聞一多全集 (一): 神話與詩, 臺北市里仁書局, 民37, 甲: 117-138.

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Poets of the music of sense alive must come painting thing‘s ―sense‖ in words full of thought, to bring us back to the tender twilight dawn, the silent music of the baby of things, no creation, no chaos. Here things forever breathe dews of shimmering thoughts singing sparkling silence. Here is Chinese language, waving tonal rhyme of thought. Complex English analyzes meanings into explicit system for all. The alphabet captures ephemeral sounds in a sequential, spatial order, to facilitate conceptualizing things, inventing ―formal logic‖ into systems toward one comprehensive meta-system, closing in. English sentences analytically pack complexity. Rhyming Chinese sayings go poetically compact. Compact Chinese goes as ―Li3 禮 is t‘i3 體, ritual is embodied‖; sound alike, senses resonate, where tone is part and parcel of sense, to open out reverberating connotations unlimited, with gaps inexhaustible. Its sound-picture of the sense 文字 of an event is complete in itself as each event is, then resonates with other senses aurally-visually, as each event does with others. These resonances are open as events interrelate contingently, systematic without all-systems.939 Sayings self-complete and autonomous resonate with other sayings. Tillich has autonomous, heteronomous, and theonomous reasons; the last penetrates the two to unify them,940 unaware that Christianity takes theonomy as heteronomy world-transcending. China takes non-theistic theonomy as heteronomy and autonomy joined in nature, as ―inter-nomy‖ internecine inter-nascent, Yin-Yang way. Inter-nomy of Chinese audio-ideograms ciphers dialogue as inter-revolution of dialoguers‘ assumptions, each with its own system, and so dialogue opens systems, radically, painfully. Dialogue inside a system turns it into an ―open system‖ so messy, interactive and inter-transforming. Intra-systematic dialogue petered out since Plato‘s later dialogues, but dialogue is the essence of thinking, and so dialogue came to thrive among systems in the West, where philosophy often achieves internal logic-rational coherence. In contrast, all China‘s writings are dialogue-filled, open-ended, flexuous and coherently systemless. So China is typified as ―literary and historical 文史,‖ as ―concrete and pragmatic,‖ seldom tightly argued. Chinese ideograms of things‘ senses facilitate dialogue-internal writings. Let us put it another way. ―Logic‖ models on language, as language mirrors life.941 Similarly, painting compresses actuality, and Chinese writing compresses painting. Compression comprehends sense; capturing sense makes compression. Calligraphy thus paints comprehension of the sense in writing that paints senses of things. How do Chinese ideograms portray senses? Take ―一, one‖; we cannot go any simpler. One casual stick, say, is named ―one,‖ painted into the sense of ―one‖ to begin all things.942 939

Toyama, Shigehiko says something similar, and then attributes suggestive speech, interpersonal compact, to audial femininity, and informative speech, ―logical‖ systematic, to visual masculinity. I hesitate at his gender attribution, and would rather describe the West with alphabet sound-signs as explicit, theoretical and systematic, and China with sound-sight portrayals as performative, evocative and connotative. See 外山滋比古著, 日本語の個性 (1976), 中公新書, 1996, pp. 124-137. 940 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume 1 (1951), 1959, p. 300, index on ―Theonomy.‖ 941 Friedrich Waismann, How I See Philosophy, ed. R. Harré, London: Macmillan, 168, pp. 68, 89-90. Cf. also Stephen Edelston Toulmin, The Uses of Argument, Cambridge at the University Press, 1958. They call life ―experience.‖ 942

We suspect that 說文解字 read later sense of ―一‖ into its etymology when it says that ―一‖ means the Great Ultimate 太極 of the Grand Beginning 太初 of all things.

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This meaning moves; ―one‖ moves as a verb. to ―one‖ the self—self-focused—and then to one with others, to ―same‖ the benefits with them, to ―one‖ all. The ―one‖ unifies two senses, then, uniting unique individuality focused, wholly devoted to this one only, as if no other exists, with universal totality covering one and all, all as one. Parenting combines both, loving each child as if no other child exists, so as to love all equally. Jesus‘ universal Fatherly love loves each individual.943 Confucius (13/18) and Mencius (7A35) stressed father-son partiality as social justice. Does all this sound strange? Actually, nothing is more natural than individual-―one‖ and universal-―one‖ united. Adam Smith‘s ―wealth of nations‖ is amassed by assiduous selfish individual enterprises. Religious tolerance of alien religions is for the sake of inter-thriving of each state‘s political economy. Chinese mercantilism profits sellers by benefiting buyers in family style.944 American ―justice blind‖ to individuals is meant to benefit individuals.

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―One‖-ing the self is to one my heart-of-being with my self (so say 中庸 and 傳習錄), with my roots my parents (孝經), and with my past. To do so, I cannot just take over what is left there and add on. I must appropriate it—digest it into my proper self—by recapturing it, re-one-ing it into me afresh; every child must learn three R‘s from scratch. This is history reenacted, past one-ed into me, me one-ed into past—into future. World con-cord then comes, the Great One of the World, self-so patterned by self-so.945 Now here is a palindromic bombshell on ―one,‖ with the compliments of Confucius who said, ―with one to thread it 一以貫之‖; here ―one‖ and ―it‖ interpenetrate. The ―it‘ is interestingly two pronged, also interpenetrating. He wanted ―with one to thread my views 吾道‖ (4/15) inside, and ―with one to thread what I learn and know 學而識之‖ (15/3) outside. Thus this ―one‖ is a palindromic interpenetration between me and others, inner and outer, now and then, past and future, learning and teaching, my views and my learning. Their interpenetration happens to me in others, inner in outer, now in then, past in future, learning in teaching, my opinion in my learning, and also goes back as well. Such a ―one‖ is alive, an inter-dynamic unity, and so ―unity‖ is an inter-verb of living, personal-interpersonal and historical-futuristic among Heaven, Earth, and Humanity. The ―one‖ has been the West‘s headache and China‘s fascination. The West takes ―one‖ as the quale of concretes, and has come to consider this quale as the theme beyond concretesas-―cave,‖ yet insoluble in logic-rationality beyond the cave, as one in many, one partaken of by many, etc. This mindset—one is never many, yet one must be fused in many to make sense of reality—persists through the West‘s metaphysics, ontology, analysis, ―logic,‖ analytical positivism, pragmatism, phenomenology, and even postmodernism in a negative form. All manifest how frustrating the West‘s headache on the ―one‖ has been. China takes ―one‖ as all concretes unified 萬物一如; Chan claims ―one word . . . that characterize[s] the entire . . . Chinese philosophy‖ as ―one that professes the unity of man and Heaven.‖946 Anything A indicates the ―one‖ as another not-A, without inter-collapsing or 943

E.g., Luke 10, 15. Mother Teresa hugs this one dying, and her individual devotion spreads worldwide. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, London: Penguin Classics, 1970, 1976. Robert Wright, The Evolution of God, Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 2009. Chinese mercantilism has been mentioned above. 945 禮記, 禮運篇 says all this, to go into music, presented as 樂記. See also 道德經, 25. 946 Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book of Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963, p. 3. 944

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denying A as not not-A. In fact, a thing-A needs ―A as not not-A,‖ so as to refer to not-A to express the ―one‖ of all in all. China does not say it; it thinks thus. Still, the West‘s headache of ―one not many yet in many‖ remains when said. Thus it is that bewildering China‘s wording turns out, simple and concrete yet often unintelligible. China‘s words require an ―Aha!‖ to see-through, a realization ―悟覺,‖ a meeting of the minds ―會意‖; such heartfelt realization is ineffable yet compelling and unmistakable (as pain, compassion). Thus Zen Buddhism proliferates most in words while vehemently denying words. Confucianism was ridiculed as imbecile, humdrum, and all Sinologists unanimously think him in need of reworking. Taoism comes to be accused of life-irrelevance, for it needs to ponder long to reach contradictory phrases, no-do 無為, no-know 無知. But then, why does China (Confucian, Taoist, or Buddhist) call this cosmic ―one‖ in many concretes, ―good‖ beyond all good and evil? No one has even raised this question. The brute fact of cosmic ―one‖ is ―good,‖ and this fact is beyond us to understand. This gutconviction may express our original piety to the cosmos, the all as somehow orderly, order in disorderly many as somehow good. The ―one‖ originates all philosophies, all religions, as the Be-All and the End-All of all, concrete beyond words. All this brings us back to concrete politics. We looked at it previously from the angle of medicine and culinary art; now we can look at it in the light of sense-writing. Politics 政 unitizes various life-praxes with their named meanings; its one-ing is called ―righting into names 正名‖ as commonly used and understood. Even satires, imaginative literatures, and far-out pornographies are sociopolitical, for

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China has no literature for its own sake as in the West. Politics 政 manages ㄆ947 a social righting 正, patterned after—one-ed after—oneness of Heaven and Earth populated by common people. In China, politics is rooted in people 民本, and helpless people‘s power that can overthrow rulership (stressed so much in the West) derives from Heaven, the Way things go; this is the ―natural law‖ of nature and of history. ―People are water in nature, as soft and weak, and as unstoppably powerful. They as river-water cannot be dammed; they can only be led through,‖ says ancient advisor Shao Kung 邵公.948 Two points must be raised. One, ―people as the root‖ of the ruler says that rulership collapses without popular support. This is not quite ―democracy‖ of the West where peoplepower is pitted against the ruling power to bargain-extract contractual compromise.949 Two, the ruler is ―people‘s parent 民之父母‖ expected to be obeyed as such by people, and the

947 948 949

See on政 in 說文解字詁林, 臺北市鼎文書局, 民72, 3:1198ff. See ―邵公諫厲王弭謗,‖ 周語上, 國語, 臺北市三民書書局, 2006, pp. 7-9. This story appeared in Part I. This standard ethos of 民為邦本 is repeatedly stressed since 尚書, 孟子, and 晏子春秋 in China. In contrast, all democratic regimes 民主政治 in the West are based on demos-kratia, people-power, striking legal contract against ruler-power. This is the view of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Mill, Hegel, Marx, Jefferson, Thoreau, etc., as the most enlightened ―Common Sense‖ (1776, T. Paine) of the Renaissance.

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ruler is expected by the people to behave as such. The ruler who misbehaves is to be removed from the title.950 Such is the pragmatic trend of Chinese wisdom never to be mocked, alive through time till today as historical ―law of nature.‖ All things thrown up must fall; all those opposed to ―people as root, ruler as parenting people,‖ must fall. The sentiment of family respect and care infuses Chinese politics, so naturally pervasive that no written depiction of it exists. Selfcomplete and connotative, Chinese sentences tend aphoristic; aphorism arouses thinking, provoking discernment to new praxis. TEN: Music and Calligraphy: The Way to one all is ―music,‖ one-ing co-resonance, beginning at nature to spread to personal hearts of being, to blood-kin, then to the state to the whole life-world. How does music do it? Nature vibrates music, to shake my heart to shape my self, to resonate life interpersonal. Music-movement is respect-movement 禮運 in 禮記,

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政-managed into Heaven and Earth co-resonating; Gardens of Sayings 說苑 begins it at a child, who begins life.951 Chinese audio-ideograms picture not things but their senses, and that is a most natural way of writing out things. Kids ―draw pictures,‖ not make a photo, of a man or a flower. They draw pictures of the essentials of a man or a flower, the specific features, the senses, striking kids as showing a man or a flower. Kids‘ pictures are ideograms of things‘ senses kids see. ―Kids‘ pictures‖ are proto-ideograms of China. Kids sing their pictures all over always; Chinese ideograms sing millennia young today fresh, all over. In fact, many well-known writings in China have chapters and/or long paragraphs on music cosmic and political; a Military Classic 步經, 六韜 Six Strategies, even has a chapter on using music to win battle!952 Such is the cosmic significance of the character ―一, one.‖ In this milieu of musically interactive ―one,‖ where every one ―one‘s‖ with every other, there is no room for usual Western problems of ―one and many‖ and ―participation of one Form in plurality of actuality, or the other way around.‖ Now, as ideograms thus paint the sense of things, so calligraphy書法 is this art of sensepainting,953 uniquely expressing China, yet no single ―Chinese philosopher‖ touches on this distinct aspect.954 As I write ideograms to express my sense of things, they help shape my sense, and thereby my person. Ideograms are dots of sense; we enter spring mist, dripping an ode to germs of sense.

950

951 952 953

Again, 尚書, 孟子, and 晏子春秋 are quite explicit on this point. Arthur Waley says that tyrants had to use the trapping of ―people‘s parent‖ to induce popular obedience. (Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China [1938], CA: Stanford University Press, 1982, p. 192)

說苑, 臺北市三民書局, 民85, pp, 709-723 (in 修文), 728 (in 反質, chapter 3). 六韜, 五音第二十八, 臺北市三民書局, 2006, pp. 114-118.

Cf. Wu, ―World Interculturalism: China Written in English,‖ Taiwan Journal of East asian Studies, June 2005, pp. 1-42. 954 Parts I, II, and III above have all variously referred to calligraphy, explicitly and implicitly (check also on ―writing‖). Alan Watts‘ Tao: The Watercourse Way, NY: Random House, 1975, is perhaps the only exception to the ubiquitous neglect of philosophical imports of calligraphy today. Watts says that it would be a disaster to alphabetize characters, and supports his claim by noticing that English languages tends to graphic ideograms, and characters have fewer strokes than alphabets for the same ideas (pp. 4-10, etc.); these ideas are quite fresh. He tends, sadly, to melt away the integrity of calligraphy into the ocean of Chuang Tzu‘s misty flow of ―watercourse way.‖ More popular than profound, he is nameless in Sinology.

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Soft drops come down, dripping, dripping, to Moisten grass all over alive. Even the dirt roads turn deep with meaning fresh and moist. Things all come alive, really, nothing is casual any more. Drops of spring come as piano notes, one after another, Making a soft broad band of notes, as thuds of tin-tin-ing Softly hitting window-panes, tin rain-conduits, shingled roof; These rain-notes lull me into misty calm Of spring mood faintly brooding, Moistening me and things, fresh chilled, germ-ing life deep. They dot things unceasing into music of spring. This is dot-pragmatics dripping down from spring-nature This is dot-pragmatics in China In daily journals, intimate conversations—dialogues, analects, Cosmic and personal, and interpersonal To form history literary, 文史, cosmic and interpersonal.

The dots are thus the calligraphic characters that spring-rain into dot-ragmatics in China, journals and analects, literature into history, to moisten and enliven us through time, literature as history. Such is calligraphy, character-writing so beautiful, so cosmic, making character so personal. To write presses-me-out, expresses me, to shape me; this vital truth is powerfully executed in character-writing to portray the sense of things. Character-writing shapes characters of things; to write well lives well all over heaven and earth. This is because personality is written in handwriting; we write ourselves.955 Writing style reveals personality; graphology, writing analysis, is based on this principle. Calligraphy—writing well—brings up the human best. How does it do so? Graphology, mistake-prone, can only decipher how we live by how we write; it does not train us to write well. Chinese calligraphy does nurture us as meat is smoked and cured exquisitely 薰陶. Just to watch the masters‘ calligraphies opens me out into their vast horizon, and I am ennobled as they are.956 Character-writing lives out beautifully, inspiring our living-well, our well-being spreading to the well-being of all things. Calligraphy paints such unity of subject and subject-matter in three ways. 955

See Wu, ―World Interculturalism: China Written in English,‖ Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, June 2005, pp. 1-42. 956 Strangely, my soaring ―open horizon‖ is somehow clogged, closed, and stunted when I meet a primer-like introduction to calligraphic master. See the otherwise excellent 王羲之樂毅論, 臺南大眾書局, 民86. I suppose I need to plunge into raw contact with the master, all by myself. Does meeting graphology feel somewhat similar, feeling I meet my fate, not my destiny? Horizon is the vast room poetry gives me to soar. The room unlimited here has my ignorance to explore to grow, in kid‘s wonder. Such room is cut abruptly by primer-introduction with a ―yellow-brick road‖ step by step to walk on. I no longer soar. Isn‘t all this China vast, vague and ambiguous as life, my poetry, my music to go anywhere to make my own sense? It is no methodical logic-rationality ready-made; I make my own rationality. That‘s Chinese wisdom in horizon-calligraphy. Such a poetic soaring pierces conventions toward creativity. Einstein lived piercing creativity unawares; ―he . . . compared his own quixotic parries against the prevailing windmills of science with that of the old knight with a ready lance.‖ ―He had been a difficult husband and father because he did not take well to any constricting bonds, but he could also be intense and passionate, both with family and friends, when he found himself engaged rather than confined.‖ Walter Isaacson, Einstein, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2007, p. 518. His soaring creativity is here, and he did not know it.

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First, calligraphy is beautiful because the writing is alive with ―breathing bone 氣骨,‖ vitality breathing forth its own specific style and structure.957 Its vitality 氣 has a backbone 骨 that cannot be brushed aside. The writing‘s life-breath 氣 is a felt self-expression. A parrot and a computer can emit sounds but cannot make music.958 Only a native speaker can say ―How are you?‖ with proper feeling; a foreigner can only utter sounds to imitate,959 but with no proper feeling. Genuine artwork pervaded with felt life is no copy without such breathing vitality. Zen masters‘ clumsy calligraphy has felt life, not computer-simulated pretty writing. Besides, friendly ―How are you?‖ differs from medical doctor‘s ―How are you?‖ in the way, purpose, intention, and style of saying the same words. Each style has its own ―backbone,‖ bone-structure 骨 of felt 氣 expression. Appreciating calligraphy appreciates different ―breathing bones 氣骨‖ of brush-executions by 王羲之, 歐陽詢, 顏真卿, 趙孟頫,

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文徵明, 董共昌, 蘇軾, 黃庭堅, 米芾, 智永, 祝允明, etc. Secondly, calligraphy brush-portrays many diverse ―hows‖ to present the same ―what.‖ People love parents diversely, story-told in their own many ways; various calligraphers portray diversely the same character, ―filiality 孝.‖ Calligraphy expresses one sense in many actual manifestations; Neo-Confucians‘ often say, ―理一分殊, grain-in-things is one, shared differently‖ among them. Thirdly, as calligraphy portrays the sense, its how dances its what, things‘ senses dancing their music of life on paper, as things‘ senses make sense in human life. It is an art of lifemusic danced out in sense-characters 文字 to express felt personality, neither straightly painting things nor abstractly producing meaning, but dancing the music of sense.960 We hear calligraphy as we listen to music. Let s put it this way. Imitation of a breathing life breathes itself, life-reenacting, lifereproducing a new life all its own, differing from parent life. Many later masters ―copied‖ Wang Hsi-chih‘s ―Orchid Pavilion‖ calligraphy, all different in their own differing ways.961 Art is no mechanical tracing. Chuang Tzu‘s rejection of ancient books as scum (13/69-75), bare footprints (14/74-78), advocates performing re-living.962 In other words, we must try living ourselves our ways just as the ancient tried it themselves, their ways. No one can ―trace trying‖ without trying it oneself. ―Trying‖ performs; mimicked trying does not try. 957

Almost all critical works on English literatures (not Western philosophy) stress the intimacy between style and content, style and structure, but no one probes why and how this is naturally the case. Chinese calligraphy shows it. 958 Animals and machines can of course be used as ―musical instruments‖ but then they are tools used for the felt expression of an artist-musician. 959 Thus Plato-Aristotle‘s view of art as mimesis (imitation, copying) is mistaken. Art may be visible from outside as amounting to copies, but ―copy‖ is an adventitious result of art, not its originative dynamics, the thrust— breathing bone—that creates art. Mimicry of an artwork, natural or crafted, is no art, however skillfully and beautifully traced out. Mimesis is no beauty; it is hollow. 960

―大美學家宗白華說,

‗中國的書法本是一種類似音樂或舞蹈的節奏美術.

它兲有形式之美,

有情感與人格的表現. 它不是摹繪實物, 卻又不完全抽象, 如西洋字母而保有暗示實物和生命的姿勢.‘‖ 961

(on the back cover of 文徵明尺牘, 瀋陽市: 遼寧美術出版社, 2001)

Cf. a convenient collection of these masters‘ various ―copying‖ in 東晉王羲之「蘭亭敘」七種, 東京二玄社刊, 1959, 1988. 962 This is not to reject ―writing‖ as such, for his words were written. Chinese Wisdom Alive : Vignettes of Life-Thinking, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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Trying is breathing. No one can breathe someone else breathing. We learn from our masters how to breathe as they breathe, yet in our own differing ways. I must breathe on my own as my master breathes, and ―on my own‖ is my own bone breathing my own living, and living cannot be traced. I express my breathing life in many ways; one way is calligraphy that writes my living, my breathing. Calligraphy must be breathed live, with its own ―breathing bones 氣骨,‖ breathing with structure of its own; it cannot be traced or reduplicated. No breathing style can be traced by anyone else; I do it alone. Graphologists decipher me by reading my writing, for I write my way of living, my breathing bones, on paper. I perform on paper how my bones breathe, their free life of its own. Different styles and schools exhibit themselves diversely, naturally, for us all to feel and sigh in admiration, in our own differing ways. Chu Hsi‘s 朱熹 calligraphy shows him as a meticulous scholar, as Wang Yang-ming‘s 王陽明 shows him as straightly cutting through things.963 As we watch master calligraphers, they come in to open us out of ourselves, and we soar up with them to fly and dance in the vast skies of vast sense, severally as they severally differ. We cannot help but be enthralled in their several ways. Calligraphy is loud music silently dancing vast sense vastly open.964 王羲之 with Haydn sing music of natural innocence that opens and allows us to sing ourselves with them, and in the meantime forget them to sing ourselves in the field under the sky. Three examples come to mind. Huai Su 懷素 confessed on ―Self Description Pad 自敘帖,‖ also in his grassy style to enter our soul resonating. Having studied Huai Su‘s calligraphy, Sun Guoting 孫過庭 produced a lively and sinuous grassy styled 草書 ―Calligraphy Score 書譜‖ to sound forth his vibrant music of calligraphy, and we cannot help dancing its music. Both are calligraphers of the T‘ang period 唐代. Earlier in Chin晉, awesome paragon Wang Hsi-chih 王羲之 authored ―Preface to Orchid Pavilion 蘭亭序‖ and in sauntering style 行書 presented its pensive meditation on life‘s autumn, and we cannot help but feel it to toast to it.965 Wang is hailed as the Sage in calligraphy to open me up, convince me of my true self hitherto unknown. He never forces me into his peculiar style, as other masters tend to do me, or turns into dull convention. That is why I am drawn to him, as everyone has been through 963 964

See 書道藝術: 中國名品集: 別卷1, pp. 78-81 (朱熹), 114-119 (王守仁), 臺北市藝術圖書公司, 民65. Some hesitations must be confessed here, though. Dictators 步則天 and 張作霖 were great calligraphers, who Confucius and Mencius may not have been; the calligraphy-sage 王羲之 may not have been sagely as

Confucius (as shown in various entries on ―王羲之‖ in 世說新語). Entering such a caveat does not dispute the fact, though, that watching-tracing master-calligraphy releases my heart and soul to soar up high to cosmic exquisite ecstasy otherwise impossible. 965 孫過庭, 書譜, 臺灣故宮博物院, 1997. 唐 懷素 自敘帖 (1960), 東京二玄社, 1988. 東晉 王羲之 蘭亭敘 七種 (1959), 東京二玄社 1988. A convenient reproduction of Wang Xichi‘s ―Preface to Orchid Pavilion‖ appears in China, ed. E. L. Shaughnessy, Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 192-193. Lin Yutang translated it in The Importance of Living, NY: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1937, pp. 156-158. Cf. 王羲之全集, Four Volumes, ed.楊璐, no date. 世說新語 has story-bits of 王羲之‘s life and王獻之‘s life (see p. 7, Index to their lives, in a version published by 臺北市三民書局, 2007). It would be fun to trace famous calligraphers‘ lives. To repeat, 王羲之 opens me, convinces me. He opens me into my true self otherwise unknown. That‘s why I am drawn to him.

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the ages; almost all noted calligrapher has practiced on Wang‘s brush style. Wang must have been a person who enabled anyone in contact to become oneself.966 Thus it is that Chinese calligraphy humanizes actuality musically felt and lived, to incite us to sing and dance it. In Western jargon, we can say, as calligraphy-aesthetics sense-dances music, ontology joins epistemology to evoke ethics into life-ecology. A hundred hearings leap out at us in a single calligraphic dance seen so clear and convincing. Calligraphy is vital music of living in characters that show the sense of things, lived and danced at a stroke in tradition,967 as Chinese wisdom alive. All histories thus are calligraphy, stories of past events inscribed to—yet to, so as to— relive now, reenact now, to sing long at, into future. All writings are invitations, the continuing promises to pre-enact the having-been-enacted. Calligraphy is yesterday‘s promise of today to inscribe-beautifully (calligraphically) our life tomorrow. If this is not Chinese wisdom alive today, we would not know what is. One thing is certain here. Writing system parallels thinking mode. Sticking to characters that paint and sing things‘ senses, China has persisted in thinking concretely, resonating with the pulsing heart-logic of historical calligraphy of life. Chinese wisdom as philosophy has been concrete character-thinking for millennia. The extra-load of simplifying written characters968 is no ―extra‖ but intrinsic to our thinking concrete matters concretely in the concrete, not flying off into abstractive irrelevance as the alphabets tend, for alphabets are signs, themselves meaningless, in need of being combined to point beyond themselves to whatever is stipulated arbitrarily, and therefore, abstractly. Now that the Chinese characters are set up 立 in writing tablets and folders, the ancient sayings 言 stand out familiar today-new. They come to us again, now, afresh each time with fresh sense to nourish our living on at this moment. These sayings are the same different rolling tomorrows, down across millennia. Memorable words and stories are thus repeated without repeating, as we did in our Parts I, II, and III. These words throb into our heart, breathing in life, with new surprising senses singing to hills and brooks. Living appears heart-throbbing, lung-breathing. Human living shows heartminding and lung-singing to intone the Tao of living, in the heart-lung logic of human thinking; living logic dances Chinese wisdom for millennia alive today. 966

Wang‘s vastly frequent appearances in the copious 世說新語 (臺北市三民書局, 2 vols, 2007) testify to his enormous popularity even on his daily trivials; ―王羲之‖ in 人名索引, p. 7, has 14 scattered citations. 967 See detailed expositions in, among others, publications by 故宮博物院 (China, Taiwan); 中國書法全集, general editor, 劉正成, 北京榮寶齋, many volumes, 1991, etc.; 中國書法名帖精選, general editor 孫廣朱, 西安: 陝西旅遊出版社, Ten Volumes, 2005; 書道藝術, Twelve Volumes, 臺北市藝術圖書公司, 民65, etc.; 中國法書選, Sixty Volumes, 東京二玄社; Ch‘en Chih-mai, Chinese Calligraphers and Their Art, London: Melbourne University Press, 1966; 林宏元主編, 中國書法大字关, 光華出版社, 1890. Etc. Etc. 968 ―Characters‖ serve to communicate across distinct dialects and periods (as Bertrand Russell correctly said in The Problem of China, NY: The Century Co., 1922, pp. 31-32), except for being cumbersome to write and check in the dictionary. So, China developed simplified characters 簡体字, though Alan Watts insists that characters have fewer strokes than alphabets (Tao: The Watercourse Way, NY: Random House, 1975, pp. 3-14 et passim). How China would turn out is an open future. Japan has radically simplified Chinese characters into two sets of Japanese alphabets and, since the same sound has so many senses, supplements these alphabets with Chinese characters, adding more of Japan‘s own, as it simplifies them further. It took Japan many centuries to do the trick, and it is now a mess. Cf., 外山滋比古著, 日本語の個性 (1976), 東京中公新書, 1996, and 高島俊男著, 漢字と日本人, 東京文藝春秋, 平成14年, etc.

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Heaven flashes, earth rumbles, and things quaver, all in rhythm. All is music allcontagious. Particles are waves (wavicles) swaying in jet-streams 氣 infinitesimal and infinite. Sages feel them to convey to us as inner cosmic sense969 danced out in musical calligraphy of characters 文字, echoing character-cultivation personal (medical 養身), familial (ethical 五倫), and sociopolitical (sovereign 王道). It is China‘s music resonating millennia, understood as the West does theoretical physics and cosmology. Ancient words are our supports now, incorruptible 不朽 beyond life and death, as the air intoning in and around, subtle tunes all over to lift us unawares with fresh zest to live on, as with a cup of tea refreshing. Such irresistible word-power, unobtrusive, compelling, comes naturally with vivid sense-singing, ―characters 文字‖ composed by China‘s ageless sages today-fresh. Such is China‘s writing ever alive, philosophical, as danced out in calligraphy and literature. In all these discourses, things inside and out, hitherto tacit, jump out alive in all their inherent values, in ageless performance-gems of literary gems, sparkling to guide970 us. ―The importance of living‖971 is a musical theme of China‘s discourses and engagements. Literature-music performs historic philosophy in China. As ―aesthetics‖ in the West originates in perceptual sensing, so ―beauty 美‖ in China is made of ―lambs 羊 so great 大,‖ a delicious 甘 lamb-feast.972 Both the West and China thus regard ―beauty‖ as deliciously sensuous, sense-satisfying. Beauty-―sense‖ has three senses in one: sensory sensing, sensitive sensibility, and sense-making. These three senses unite to compose beauty concrete and sensible, far from pure analytical rationality. ―Sense‖ in China is Chinese aesthetics,973 in perceptual rhythm with things‘ sense. ―What people cherish is life; what life cherishes is Tao. People have Tao as fish have water.‖974 Tao is life-refreshing water, where Chinese wisdom has been swimming for millennia, todayfresh. ―If China has no abstract universal that makes a noun a noun, how does China use nouns?‖ ―Nouns‖ are verbs and adjectives, and ―universals‖ are to universalize with lifestories. Taoism says, ―Name named is no name, while Tao declares not.‖975 The Analects has no ―cosmopolitanism‖ but ―within Four Seas are all brethren,‖ a concrete ideal-milieu that 969

E.g., the sages pre-feel the coming of cosmic seismic disturbance as animals do, and convey the message to us all. See 淮南子, 卷二十 泰族, 臺北市三民書局, 民86, p. 1080. Chinese sages 聖人 (with ears 耳 to hear) are seers as pro-phets of Israel who pre-hear and pre-see. 970 Usually myths and fairy tales are said to come out of deep psyche, as reported by Joseph Campbell in ―The question of meaning,‖ The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales, NY: Random House, 1972, pp. 857-864. China continues this sentiment to reverse it, saying, our concrete depths deepen China‘s myths and legends to enrich concrete thinking. See Appendix: Folklore-Thinking in China, in Part II here. 971 Lin Yutang‘s The Importance of Living, NY: Raynal & Hitchcock, 1937, is composed of legends and stories forever singing. 972 On ―aesthetic,‖ see The Oxford English Dictionary, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1998, 1:206. On ―美,‖ see 973

說文解字詁林, 臺北市鼎文書局, 民72, 4:335-336.

This sense is adhered to in Wu‘s ―Chinese Aesthetics‖ in Understanding Chinese Mind, ed. Robert E. Allinson, Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 236-264, On Metaphoring, Leiden: Brill, 2001, pp. 519-531, and in Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy, ed. Antonio S. Cua, NY: Routledge, 2003, pp. 1-5. 38 This is Ssu-ma Ch‘eng-cheng 司馬承禎 (647-735)‘s Sit-Forget Treatise 坐忘論 at its punchy beginning, ―夫人之所貴者生也, 生之所貴者道也. 人之有道, 如魚之有水.‖ (臺北市三民書局, 2005, p. 1) 975 道德經 1. 莊子 2/59.

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sets the tone, nisus, and direction to our living. Nouns are ―names‖ as imperatives to live up to, ―corrective names 正名‖ of ―old,‖ of ―learning.‖ Thus every ―noun‖ is a story, often many stories, in a nutshell, a life-world filled with verbs and adjectives, and every ―universal‖ is an open vista to enter as an imperative, as a score to per-form to shape our music to live on singing time-ed understanding in six levels: one, geological understanding of nature in, two, evolutionary understanding with, three, biologically understanding things digesting outside, birthing and dying to birth. These three levels typify Western ―logic‖ analytical-synthetic. China, four, historically understands, dialogically re-enacts, five, socio-politically in body, in family,976 and, six, in narrative, metaphorical, intertwining, in five stages (textual, exegetical, expository, hermeneutical, and inter-referential) of story-thinking (storytelling, story-hearing, and story-adding).977 These latter three levels typify Chinese rhetoric, literary and historical 文史, reasonable through time. Rhetoric is no wordy decoration but a verbal art of persuasion that moves persons. Writing patterns after the musical Tao of heaven-earth to move all, to echo ethics-politics.978 Music moves all resonating; statements musical are intoned, rhetorically powerful. Grammar, syntax, and logic are so many versification rules of music-poetry; as musical theory follows music that often breaks it to move people, so ―logic‖ follows rhetorical impact of statements musical, beyond ―logic.‖ Any music that slavishly follows its theory is dead as Salieri‘s, moves no one; any statements that merely follow logic-rational validity are tautologically dead, nothing signifying. Rhetorical effect is king; logic-rational validity serves it. Of course we have foul demagoguery that is effective also. Accusers of Socrates have rhetoric so powerful Socrates himself almost believed in them.979 What‘s the difference?980 Western thinkers have been obsessed with this question since Socrates. We on our part would say, foul rhetoric can only be demolished by a contrary rhetoric, e.g., of Socrates. It is one sort of rhetoric against another (not ―logic‖ against rhetoric), as shown in Socrates‘ Gorgias, Phaedrus, and Apology. Rhetoric is certified ―correct‖ only by correct rhetoric, for logic-rationality can only be valid, and valid logic-rationality can give incorrect conclusion. Let us put this point another way. Explaining laughter need not incite laughter, yet the explanation turns ―wrong‖ if it results in weeping. Such existential involvement belongs to persuasion, to indicate fitness of explanation. Epistemological performance is rhetorically involved. Socrates and Confucius must have been straight as they lived habitually to advocate 976

Socio-politics is understood in terms of time because ―body‖ and ―family‖ grow in time. Plato wants to nurture society as nurturing bodily health; Chinese family grows strong and prosperous in time. 977 ―Story-thinking‖ has been mentioned many times in previous Parts. Cf. Wu, ―Chinese Philosophy and StoryThinking,‖ Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, June 2005, pp. 217-234, and ―Distinctive Features of Chinese Hermeneutics,‖ Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, June 2004, pp. 233-247. A fifth stage, ―interreferential,‖ shows story-thinking self-intertwined. Level One typifies 春秋, Benjamin Spock & Mary Morgan, Spock on Spock, NY: Parthenon, 1989, and Walter Isaacson, Einstein, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2008. Level Two typifies 劉知幾‘s 史通, 史記, 左傳, and Time magazine. Level Three typifies 章學誠‘s 文史通義, Foreign Affairs journal. Level Four typifies perhaps the present volume, Chinese Wisdom Alive. 978 Thus begins Liu Hsieh‘s 劉勰 Literary Heart Dragon Carved 文心雕龍, intoning the unity of heaven-earth, music, writing, and ethic-politics. Rhetoric is cosmic, heartfelt, echoing socio-politics. 979 As powerful rhetorician, Socrates confessed at once to their powerful rhetoric as he began his Apology. 980 This important question will soon be answered. We are here concerned with this question itself.

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no-pretension and humanness. Hitler could not have been gracious, being devoted to racial cleansing. Rhetoric is existentially involved in argument ―objective‖ and ―impersonal,‖ for all arguments aim to convince and persuade,981 and rhetoric is an art of persuasion. After all, music that moves is statement inarticulate—especially in China—and so a statement misfires is no-statement that moves no one. Both music and statements are rhetorical. Sadly, Plato and those after him risked throwing out the dirty water of sophistic rhetoric with the baby of Socratic rhetoric, to embrace something else, e.g., ―true knowledge,‖ ―dialectics‖982; the West then came to take even methodology of thinking as thinking proper, as with Kant‘s critiques of reason, to fly out of this world the womb of human thinking. Abstract meta-level thinking is now here to stay. Some ―radical empiricism‖983 is in order to clean the house of abstraction. How? ―Information is cleansed by more information,‖ tells communication culture today. Publicity of democratic exposure cures mistakes; extended in time, history comes to judge, the more history, the better. Perception can be corrected by more perception and history can, by further history; likewise, rhetoric is corrected by rhetoric discerning, and ―discernment‖ belongs to rhetoric. No wonder, claiming to rise above ―wayward rhetoric serving wayward opinions,‖ the West has never left rhetoric.984 The West‘s pride on its ―logical consistency‖ disdains ―rhetorical waywardness.‖ Let us compare the Western glory of universality with Chinese quiet ubiquity. In the West, ―universality‖ is obtained by leaving actuality to survey from above it, from nowhere nowhen. Each philosophy argues out its specific ―universality,‖ each complete in itself—sounds contradictory—and fights against other ―universalities‖ supposedly ―incomplete and misguided.‖ The fights crisscross into a history as colorful985 as China‘s. Fights inter-criticize, and criticism has no enemy. Both disagreeing and agreeing with criticism criticize criticism to join criticism. Turning as we may, we are ever within criticism, and the turning makes history. A dramatic example is ―mathematics‖ the acme of exact reasoning, the truth of the design of nature, and the basis of Western philosophy. Its ultimate

981 982

劉勰‘s 文心雕龍, 論說第十八, forcefully asserts this point (臺北市三民書局, 民83, pp. 179-190).

This horrid story is innocently told unwittingly in Keith V. Erickson, ed., Plato: True and Sophistic Rhetoric, Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Rodopi, 1979. 983 James B. Freeman argues for ―common sense‖ as the basis of argument in Acceptable Premises, Cambridge University Press, 2005. He repeats Thomas Reid‘s view of common sense as the presumption of all thinking. The book is made more of negative rebuttals of objections than positive elucidation of what ―common sense‖ is and how it supports all arguments, but his point jibes with ours. Our ―radical empiricism‖ (taken from William James) is his ―common sense.‖ 984 Pervasiveness of rhetoric in the West is conveniently shown in The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, eds. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, Boston: St. Martin‘s Press, 1990. 985 Bertrand Russell‘s A History of Western Philosophy, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1945, is said to be ―not a very dependable source of information [yet] readable [, with] many interesting interpretations [and] insights about Russell‘s [own philosophy]‖ (John Perry in Russell‘s The Problems of Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 163); he has his own axe to grind. Few note that Frederick Copleston‘s massive A History of Philosophy, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, and other supposedly neutral histories of Western philosophy, express his commitment to analytical eternal truths, as revealed in his Philosophies and Cultures, Oxford University Press, 1980.

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authority was undermined by criticism of mathematics itself; truth in the West is not static but a dynamic process, exhibited in history as history.986 History as ceaseless criticisms is the Judge final and invincible. ―Unceasing‖ is history; its unceasing criticism unclogs stagnant traditionalism to turn alive. Chinese wisdom historyalive is today-fresh, ever. China‘s ―ubiquity‖ is discerned by tracing Li 理 the grain in specific things, and so the tracing goes in specific perspectives. For example, Mencius‘ debates with many different views of human nature sound ―rhetorical and one-sided.‖ Their various Li-tracings must be complemented by their historical process, how later conscientious generations of thinkers continued the debates (in ―commentaries‖ or no) to swerve in a specific direction. Mencius‘ insistent ―argument,‖ on human nature as originally good, may not hold water, but it initiated an important view—whatever it may imply and connote—that has come to win the day, and China rallies to this view as ―orthodox,‖ i.e., correct, while other views fell silently by the historical wayside. In short, Li-tracing continues in history in time, beyond a particular debater and school, to reveal ―Li-ubiquity‖ in China. Such ubiquity cannot be completed, as there cannot be ―complete history‖ or ―allcomprehensive music.‖ Each day is complete and connects to the next, each epoch is selfcoherent and opens out to the next, as each musical composition is itself and yearns to continue to the next. Such is ubiquity alive in China. In this way, Confucius is alive today shaping China, in historical way. Such historical shaping is dubbed ―rhetorical.‖ The realm of rhetoric is story-thinking and history-telling. Only story and history judge rhetoric, for all three—story, history, rhetoric—belong together, and world history is world judgment. Socrates embodies this awesome trinity as his rhetoric fights accusers‘ rhetoric, by telling the actual story of how he came to be accused, rehearsing the history of the whole cause of accusations. That is his ―apology‖ defending his cause (not himself).987 Such gutsy defense, radical straight rhetoric, is achieved by transparent authenticity honest to the course of events. This is how Socrates‘ rhetoric differs from his accusers‘ false rhetoric, however powerful theirs is. He was thus a supreme rhetorician, joined by Confucius and other historic paragons of China. In fact, the above story of rhetoric in the West has been enabled by looking out at the West from Chinese historical wisdom of story-thinking. China is home to historical rhetoric. How does false rhetoric differ from true one? ―Citing‖ the classics can either [a] blindly ape-follow the citation, or [b] use-digest what is cited to develop myself. The way-[a] insults classical wisdom by going to fanatical fixation, a death trap; the way-[b] re-enacts history to live history today afresh, by devoting myself to the past living to living richer myself. Confucius did so. Socrates obeys the traditional Delphic oracle and tells how he obeys it; it is history, his powerful defense. True rhetoric is truly historical. 986

The history of the calamitous decline of mathematics is told by Morris Kline‘s Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, Oxford University Press, 1980, NY: Barnes & Noble, 2009. Math does not prove a priori, independent of actuality, but packs—organizes (pp. 396-397)—empirical scientific exploration. Thus math tells the West‘s stories, as history (with literature) tells China‘s story-thinking. Kline tells the history of math as Thomas S. Kuhn does of science (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [1962], University of Chicago Press, 1996). History is king of mathematics and science (Kline, p. 5). 987 His self-defense would have dictated appealing to jurors‘ pity by displaying his poor family, to appeasing them with considerable sum of ransom money, etc. Socrates did not use such tactics, and swayed the jurors‘ verdict to death penalty. His defense was of his cause, not of himself.

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It is time to take stock. Let us begin by watching the West‘s recent history; nothing is more irrefutable a lesson than history. First, existentialism came supposedly as exposé and dissolution of Western social fabric, originated in a realization that what people have been taking for granted as reliable was not eternal or necessary; everything (math, science) is temporal and contingent. And then, as if existentialist devastation were not enough, postmodernism came on to deconstruct logocentrism. Kline‘s math and Kuhn‘s science add to Barrett‘s existentialism.988 The Kuhn-KlineBarrett triad tells of the history of the debacle of Western eternity, the logic- rational necessity of predictable science, provable math, and deductive philosophy; the Western society was dissolved on this ―eternity‖ to dissolve this ―eternity.‖ The solid Platonic firmament of logicrational necessity is shattered by thinking, the sky has fallen into ―nothing,‖ and ephemeral temporality, unexpected contingency, takes over. Devastation originates in trusting in an invalid assumption. Reality of heaven and earth is not eternal-necessary but temporal-contingent, resonant with our rhetoric to make sense, to appear as history. So says China.989 Actuality then shows coherence beyond expectation, timely and inevitable in ways not-eternal, not-necessary. The logic-rational West must join cosmic-historical rhetoric that dominates China. To join this actuality-dance is true rhetoric, to persuade us beyond our ―eternal necessity.‖ Let us put it another way. Writing expresses to expose heaven and earth, thereby creates new way of life; all depends on the way we write. Alphabetical abstraction yearns after eternal necessity to bind it in confident logic-rationality, and end up despairing over this ―yearning confidence‖ in devastating existentialism and postmodernism. All this happened in a rigid logic-rational context. Instead of alphabetical logic-rationality, an alternative ideo-audiogram way in China sinuously joins the dance of shifting senses of actual things; this way is immune to devastation of existentialism and deconstructionism. Still, the West‘s ―staid, solid logic‖ since Plato disparages this other way as ―rhetoric,‖ what actually saves us, as Socrates the supreme rhetorician did, from bad rhetoric of demagogical ―logic.‖ Sadly, Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to philosophical Plato, away from rhetorical Socrates. ―Logic‖ is expected rhetoric; unexpected rhetoric cannot enumerate expectedlyexhaustively, but can only show some examples. First, it can go story-way, to include things expected and unexpected, logical, illogical, factual, counterfactual, anything, to weave storyweb in literature 文 into history 史. Unexpected rhetoric jolts us, with preposterous jokes to shock us into sense, to topple dictators political, conventional,990 to set us straight without setting us straight, for laughing at farce brings us to realizing by ourselves. Here, released from the Procrustean rigid ―logic,‖ China‘s supreme rhetorician, Chuang Tzu, freely uses logic to make points to make sense of actual matters. We see his two ways, banter and humor, to ―fool around‖ probing the profundity of actuality. 988

On Kuhn and Kline, see note 982 above. On William Barrett, see his Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy, Anchor, 1962, esp. p. 32. 989 鍾嶸‘s 詩品 Poetry Critiques and 劉勰‘s 文心雕龍 Literary Heart Dragon Carved begin and end with this rhetoric cosmic-musical, i.e., historical. 990 佚名，笑林廣記, 龔鵬程導讀, 臺北金楓出版社, 1988. H. L. Mencken is one noted ―joker‖ of recent days; William Zinsser cites more in On Writing Well (1976), NY: HarperCollins, 2006, p. 212.

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One, banter uses logic to play with argument,991 for thinking and behaving to go serpentine actual way. Chuang Tzu pulls off this stunt to con-form naming to actuality 正名 that Name Scholars and Confucians failed, and Legalists tried seriously to fall in dictatorial disasters. Two, humor says ridiculous not-A to point to A-unsayable. Chuang Tzu constantly humor us with fables, tall tales, and dream-stories; we are unsure if he is serious or just fooling around; he is both. His humor relaxes our guard to get the point. Both banter and humor play ―fooling around‖ for a purpose. ―Chuang Tzu is frivolous when profound, and is profound when frivolous‖992; frivolity and profundity interpenetrate to inter-deepen. Frivolity frees sensibility to dig profoundly, to enter nooks and corners of chameleonic goings-on, in nature in us and out. Deep-going frivolity is the best rhetoric, stabbing us pleasantly to convince heartily. All this ―unexpected rhetoric‖ straightens—in time, in history—wayward warped rhetoric rigidly logic-rational to demagogue. History is the greatest unexpected rhetoric alive, incorruptible, and all-comprehensive. History comes to us by our writing it out, to confront us to enwrap us, thereby to straighten us, if we only dare to heed it. Four points clinch above reflections on rhetoric. One, thinking opens out to open us out served by words, notions, and concepts ranging indefinable; they point thinking to rough directions, which shift as thinking-evoked shifts; all this is rhetoric. ―Technical jargon‖ shows Western philosophers determined to stem conceptual opening; their unceasing quibbles show they failed. Two, open evoking of thinking is what rhetoric does to move people to open out, and opening acts are sharing acts. The more rhetoric inspires sharing the better the rhetoric is, as shown by Mencius. All writings and all activities, political, commercial, succeed as much as they open us to share. Three, the word ―open‖ is verb, adjective, and noun in one. What does not open our vista is poor rhetoric, directions not-open are foul rhetoric Hitler-like; and rhetoric is itself open, as its norm that describes it, opposed to definitions and logic-rational specificity de-fining the range of meaning to definite specifics and no other. Four, ―history-written‖ is irresistible ―open rhetoric‖ showing which rhetoric is less open than which, by showing which rhetoric ended in bloodshed of dictatorial demagoguery, and which has been lasting quietly as Confucius, Lao Tzu. History-written is literature-history 文史, the rhetoric laid out with time-bite of actuality never to be mocked. China is home to rhetoric, historical, literary, and actual. Chinese thinking is persuasive time-logic, a time-gathered history-told legend.993 ―Skin‖ (personal integrity) was thought on in Filiality Classic 孝經 as events were told and thought on in the Tso Chuan 左傳. Thinking is its own history, a panorama of thinking spread in time;

991

On ―playing with arguments‖ see Wu, On the “Logic” of Togetherness: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1998, pp. 150-215. 992 ―One should therefore read him [Chuang Tzu] as one would a humorous writer, knowing that he is frivolous when he is profound and profound when he is frivolous.‖ Lin Yutang, The Wisdom of China and India, NY: Random Hourse, 1942, p. 627. 993 Significantly, ―legein‖ is to gather and ―logos‖ is speech, specified under the entry, ―legend,‖ in Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 2008, p. 710.

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history is a map of thinking. In China, thinking is ―literature-history 文史‖ in dialogues and journals alive in this world.994 In a vital historical perspective, China sees myriad things to begin anew, as life-senses of the world shift, matter-of-fact-ly. All this is a quiet musical revolution amidst cacophony of cognitive analyses that keep failing since heart-less logic emerged as the glory of ancient Greece. Things‘ heart-logic throbs with the primal music where myriad things sing their innate tunes the wholesome organ-piping (籟) of Self-so 自然, natural-concrete, concresced cogrown, as-it-is-originally 所以然, Yin-internecine, Yang-inter-nascent, and as such, it is aswe-should-be always 所當然. To ―re-cognize‖ all this, to ―cognize reenacting‖ naturalness, self-alive today-new, is Chinese Wisdom Alive for millennia.

994

Chinese writing—literature 文—coherently progresses as the coherent progression of events (春秋三傳), rhythmic rhymes (cf. 文心雕龍), counting matters (cf. 抱朴子), waves of inspiration (cf. 楚辭), dialogues (論語, 語錄, 語類), and so on. They are quite alive, diverse, and spontaneous. Such ―natural order‖ is followed by all thinkers, even by the most rigorous of Western thinkers such as Aristotle (see J. L. Ackrill, Aristotle the Philosopher, Oxford University Press, 1981) and Spinoza (see Harry A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934).

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Chapter 46

CHINESE WISDOM ALIVE, IN STYLE Let us wrap it up. We first describe [a] what Chinese wisdom is, and then focus on its distinctness by describing [b] its how as presentation of its what, i.e., the ―style‖ as inherent in ―validity.‖ Chinese wisdom will thus manifest alive today-fresh.

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A. CHINESE WISDOM We begin by asking and answering a simple question: ―What is Chinese wisdom as an alternative to Western philosophy world-dominant today?‖ Our answer is, the task of Chinese wisdom is to express being ―human alive.‖ Now, we have just answered what Chinese wisdom is by how it works, for, in China, nouns are verbs, to be is to do, the what is the how, and so to describe Chinese wisdom is to watch how it works. Let us see how being alive human goes. A grocery store in USA has a sign saying loudly, ―Juice it up!‖; ―it up‖ reinforces the verb-power of noun-―juice.‖ The sign is quite effective because it sounds so natural, as ―Cheez-it,‖ ―Baby your skin,‖ and many others. Nouns work as verbs here, as in Mencius‘ ―‗old‘ our olds to reach people‘s olds‖ (1A7). An existent has the power to stand-out—ekhistemi—to be itself toward itself toward others. Let us go slower. Being be-ings, with power to become—come to be—as it is, to go toward being as it is.995 The tree silently pushes up from below the solid concrete pavement, ruining the sidewalk. Existence is the power that erupts out of nothing, stands erect upward toward the blue sky. All this while, standing out of nothing to fulfill itself, each existent stretches out to embrace another that turns to this existent likewise, to fulfill others that do so to it. Existence is inter-existence. This all-mutuality is yet not smooth, symbiotic inimical, helping choking, one direction within its opposite, palindromic, Ying and Yang. Existents as a family cannot inter-breed without self-demise, but must spread away while nodding at one another, inter-helping, flourishing in inter-fighting. 995

Heidegger also says as much, but sadly he takes this point as an exclusively Greek-German insight. See his insight conveniently summed up in Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.

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420

This inter-situation is more than Adam Smith‘s each-for-itself toward inter-beneficence; existents consolidate internecine inter-nascent. Brethren in Four Seas inter-fight to thrive cosmopolitan; nature red in tooth and claw feeds on senile and sickly for eugenics. Families fighting together—for and against one another—prosper members. Thus we must ―‗father‘ fathers to ‗son‘ sons,‖ to pattern ―‗ruler‘ ruler to ‗ruled‘ ruled‖; this twofold ―to‖-movement—to itself to others—―rights names 正名,‖ ultimately to ―make seasonal order with Heaven and Earth 以天地為春秋‖ as the roadside skull does in joy beyond royal court.996 In fact, the ruler‘s mission is to represent humanity to thread through 貫通 Heaven and Earth997 together into one 合一. All this brings us to cosmic ―human life.‖ For Aristotle, life self-moves locally and selfchanges. In contrast, we say that human living is inner self-moving ex-tending. Our statement has six points: [1] human inner self-moving (of heart, lungs) is [2] logical and autotelic, extending [3] in space via skin and [4] in time as history. It is [5] logic that cosmically gathers, [6] expressed in sense-singing characters, literature, and history. These six points describe Chinese wisdom expressing human living. ONE—heart and lungs: Human living is heart-lungs self-moving, and dies as they stop. Human living is manifested in heart-rhythm throbbing and lung-rhythm breathing-exchanging air around—singing life-music. TWO—logical: Human living as inner rhythm is free, non-coercive and inevitable (natural, sensible), auto-nomic, self-legislating, and so self-reasonable. Life‘s rhythmic singing is dynamically logical. I watched with kids, fascinated, how fish flow in water flowing, and wind-blowing in a flag fluttering. All this with us is so free and yet inevitable, nothing to chart by yet beautifully convincing; it is alive! Calculus can barely chart their general formulas, not actual moving that moves our soul, and no mathematics can capture the fascination. Human living has heartlogic of lung-logic, lived logical autotelic, self-goaled with nature naturing, an alternative to Plato‘s hetero-telic vision. THREE—humanly inner-logical extended spatially in skin: To be humanly alive selfmoves as the heart rhythmically throbs for the lungs to rhythmically breathe, taking in refreshing air and pushing out waste air, in wind fluttering a flag. Thus self-moving rhythm includes exchanges with outside. It is cosmic chorus. To be humanly alive is to move both in/for oneself (autonomous) and in/to/from non-self (inter-being) that includes oneself as another, the other as alter ego, and the milieu as atmosphere, literally vapor (=atmos) penetrating surrounding (=sphere) quite musical. These inter-changes of ―both self and non-self‖ occur as skin-osmosis. Here is the skin-logic breathing lung-logically in life-dialogue with the outside. FOUR—humanly inner-logical extended time-wise in history: Human living‘s threefold logic (heart, lung, skin) composes history that moves retrospectively prospectively, back and forth, in time. This is again human life‘s interaction with outside-in-time, in inter-osmosis,

996 997

Analects 12/11; Chuang Tzu 18/27. 「三畫而連共中，謂之王。三畫者天地與人也，而連共中者通共道也。取天地與人之中以為貫而參通 之，非王者孰能當是？」 董仲舒，春秋繁露，王道通三，第四十四，第一章 (臺北市三民書局, 2007, p. 908).

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inter-reenacting in time, inter-resonating, for we learn from history as we rewrite history ―today‖ to live fuller ahead, thanks to history. FIVE—logic: All this is life‘s logic. Logic gathers998 inter-throbbing, inter-breathing, inter-intoning all life inter-exchanging, an ―inter-ing‖ chorus cosmic-human, past-present, vast-alive beyond life and death, incorruptible. Human living is eco-logical, cosmos homelogical and family eco-nomical, in 家訓. SIX—Chinese Wisdom Alive: So, being alive human is autotelic-logical, to compose history inter-be-ing human-cosmic. Poetry sings music, music poetizes wordless, and calligraphy dances things‘ sense in musical poetry of history. Chinese life expresses humanity alive in sense-singing, characters intoning human-cosmic life—not naïve-mythical, not abstract-analytical, but historical-literary in dancing calligraphy. This is Chinese Wisdom Alive for millennia today-fresh.

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B. STYLE AS VALIDITY Such Chinese wisdom is alive concretely with its peculiar style in its own co-echoing atmosphere. We must consider how philosophically wise such peculiar style of thinking is. Style could be said to be everything but first, one critical point must be made, on how style and validity are related.999 Our view is that style is inherent in validity. Since style as validity that is the soul of thinking, style is everything in thinking. To begin, we note that China does not separate rhetoric from logic, persuasion from logicizing. The West do, where rhetoric is an art of persuasion often looked askance at, if not vilified as trickery, in contrast to ―solid logic-rational validity.‖1000 Nothing is farther from truth than this attitude, illogical partiality for logic-rationality. Logic-rationality1001 is an art of validity in argument—to persuade; logic for validity is an art of persuasion as rhetoric is. Valid argument can persuade falsely when it ―proves‖ falsehood with false premise, whose falsehood logic-rational validity cannot detect. Logicrational validity can persuade illicitly to harm, yet logic-rationality cannot police, detect, and stop. ―Can ‗rhetoric‘ detect and stop harmful persuasion?‖ Well, as art of persuasion, rhetoric is quite sensitive to this issue and so shows at once the toxic rhetoric if any; in fact, this is one cause why logic-rationality despises rhetoric, that it so miserably shows its own failure. Sensitive exposure of failure ensures its eradication. We wish to have validity in rhetoric, but

998

On logic as gathering, see Wu, On the “Logic” of Togetherness, Leiden: Brill, 1998, pp. 162 (and note 41), 334 (and note 181), On Metaphoring, Leiden: Brill, 2001, pp. 10 (n. 23), 54-58, and Calvin O. Schrag, The Resources of Rationality, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992, p. 93. 999 Brand Blanshard‘s On Philosophical Style (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1954), otherwise quite perspicacious, simply bypasses this critical point at issue. 1000 The West took rhetoric as sophism for practical use; sophists were teachers of wisdom to succeed. Nothing is wrong with wisdom for living well, as Socrates also practiced. Sadly, this principle was wrongly applied, to manipulate-twist words to win argument. Winning argument alone is off the principle of wisdom in praxis, for wisdom is not verbal prowess. So Plato reacted against sophistry with the wisdom of eternal Truth, enshrined in universal ―logical‖ validity above worldly opinions. This turn to the other extreme came to be a tacit ethos throughout the West. 1001 ―Logic-rationality‖ is used for traditional ―logic‖; logic includes both logic-rationality and rhetoric.

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we would prefer rhetoric persuading rightly to validity persuading wrongly unawares, ―validly proving‖ falsely with false premise. In short, both validity and rhetoric persuade, neither one is above the other. Logic is grammar of persuasion as rhetoric has persuasive punch. It is rhetoric detected as gone wrong that strengthens rhetoric, as it has proven in history. Detected wrong rhetoric is preferable to undetectable validity of logic-rationality. The point is to watch thus to stick to something correct to persuade (as correct rhetoric does, logic-rational or no), not how validly to persuade (as logic-rationality demands), lest we correctly persuade wrongly. James B. Freeman1002 tries to fix this awkward problem with ―commonsense foundationalism‖ à la Thomas Reid, i.e., putting our common sense as the grand premise to the whole chain of argument. This approach precisely shows how powerless logic-rationality is, for common sense is outside logic-rationality on which logic must rely, as master ―logicians‖ Whitehead and his student Russell told us.1003 This is because common sense is life‘s sense that shifts with history as part of shifting historical reason that is beyond staid logic-rationality to parse. China‘s ―argument‖ is solidly based on such dynamic sense of time—history—toward people in history. China‘s argumentin-history to historical people can be seen to differ from Western logic-rational argument in structure and sentiment. What shape does China‘s argument take? Literary Heart Dragon Carved 文心雕龍 has a chapter, ―arguing treatise 論說,‖ where ―arguing 論, lun4‖ ―rolls 倫, lun2‖ with the cosmic reason 理 Li, thus unmistakably to ―speak

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說‖ to ―please 悅‖ people, with skillfully ―tongued 兌‖ sayings seasonable and sensible, and common sense arrives to shape the sayings that depict the real sense of the matter; these sayings become argument true to oneself,1004 persuasive to people. This is usually called ―rhetoric‖ in the true sense of the word, inclusive of logic-rationality. ―How is such rhetoric judged?‖ Bad rhetoric is recorded as history1005 and judged as ―brilliantly bad‖ by history, together with so many others recorded and admired as stellar ―incorruptible‖ in history by history, as ―classics‖ celebrated as ―literature-history 文史,‖ literature as history, history as literature. History is ―cosmos reason-music‖ resonating all over through time. China‘s argument-in-history is judged by history. ―Why can history judge?‖ It can by the fact that we turn wiser later. This rock-bottom fact cannot itself be probed for its how or proved its why. We are wiser looking back; one era‘s judgment is judged by latecomers1006 so ―awesome‖ (Confucius 9/23). Awesomely 1002 1003

1004

See his Acceptable Premises, Cambridge University Press, 2005. See ―Immortality‖ in The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, ed. Paul a. Schilpp, La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1951, p. 699. ―Induction‖ in The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, eds. Robert E. Egner and Lester E. Denonn, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1961, pp. 155-156. This is my quick synthesis of 說者悅也，兌為口舌 (186), 論者倫也，倫理無爽 . . . 心與理合 (180, 184),

喻巧理至 (186), 時利而義貞 . . . 忠信 (189), and 理形於言 . . . 敘理成論 (190), in 論說第十八, 文心雕龍, 臺北市三民書局, 民83. 1005 The journalists avidly reported Richard Nixon‘s quip, ―I‘m not a crook‖; it was a historic moment. 1006 Comments such as ―不可信 cannot be trusted,‖ ―實係後人偽托 later forgery,‖ etc., cipher the later creative additions as exposed by still later critical evaluations. 偽作 indicates an assiduous collection, for a long time by many people, of variegated wisdom, under the names of famed individuals, e.g., 老子, 莊子, 列子, 管子, etc. These 偽托 are collective wisdom, which is interestingly more conspicuous among Taoist writings than Confucian.

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alive, history develops to better itself, to even decide on what ―better‖ is. So ―history‖ judges, as China rhetoric-throbs, resonating-cosmic for millennia. Such is our negative response to prejudice against rhetoric. Now we go a positive way, via ―style.‖ The Tao is alive, walked to form,1007 and the way it is walked is the Tao, for the Tao is the Way, as noun is verb, the way verb acts out, i.e., the style of the verb. The style is verb of a verb as verb is the verb that makes a noun as noun-ized verb; what distinguishes one noun from another is the way each walks-out itself quavering as itself, to resonate with others quavering as others-themselves, to symphonize. Resonation persuades the point as valid, as quavering is the style of arguing, persuading musical. A stone stays out as ―stone‖ differing from a squirrel hopping out as ―squirrel,‖ and every ―existent‖ thus validates as itself in itself, thanks to its peculiar style of ―standing-out‖ as itself. The validity is Tao of an existent; each existent, each valid as such, is its peculiar style of being itself, and they compose Nature the self-so. To mirror all this is Chinese wisdom alive in Taoist Tao Te Ching and Confucian Analects. Now, convinced of the significance of style as existential validity, let us consider their intimacy, style as validity. Style is the way we argue, usually called ―logic,‖ and since we argue to support a point, a bad style badly supports the point and could ruin it. Style composes validation. To say, ―If the point is valid, it is valid, however badly it is argued for,‖ expresses Platonism, and Platonism is just one style, ―universal logicism,‖ among many. Actually, saying so puts the cart before the horse, for to ―badly argue for‖ a point invalidates the point, to destroy ―if the point is valid.‖ The ―if‖ in this saying hangs on style; good argument can be ruined by a bad way of arguing, bad style, to ruin its validity. Style can thus make or ruin validity. Styles of argument, reasoning styles, differ as regions and periods differ.1008 Chinese wisdom differs from Western philosophy, each with different schools. The West has ancient, medieval, and modern philosophies (in logic-rational analysis, phenomenology, deconstructionism), as French philosophy differs in style from Spanish, German, and British ones, and as China has Taoist, Confucian, Legalist-Realist ―Ways of Thought‖ (Waley), to develop Chinese Buddhism, then Neo-Confucianism, etc. ―What is a good style, then?‖ ―Good style‖ has three features: [a] coherent with its own approach, i.e., in accord with its way of rendering, to [b] do justice to the subject matter, as its methods must correspond with its content. For example, music the time-art cannot be studied with spatial analysis, nor can digital mathematics be used to measure pervasive psyche. Finally, [c] a good style reveals; it must open us out, i.e., arouse and widen our vista for us to notice the hitherto unnoticed. Unfortunately, even if agreed on, these three general features of ―good style‖ are fulfilled only more or less, and that not quantitatively but in varied ways by varied arguers inter1007 1008

Chuang Tzu 2/33. ―Logic‖ can be seen as argument style, and ―many logics‖ offered by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Friedrich Waismann (How I See Philosophy, ed. R. Harré, London: Macmillan, 1968) can be seen as offering various ways or styles of reasoning. Gilbert Ryle (Dilemmas, Cambridge University Press, 1946), Ian T. Ramsey (Christian Empiricism, ed. Jerry H. Gill, Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans, 1974), Stephen E. Toulmin (The Uses of Argument, Cambridge University Press, 1958, Cosmopolis, University of Chicago Press, 1990), and even Basil Mitchell (The Justification of Religious Belief, Oxford University Press, 1981) could be seen as offering a variety of argument-styles. Deconstructionism demolishes one-track ―logocentrism‖ for many logics. They all prefer ―logic‖ to ―style,‖ tacitly holding on to a one-logic mindset, fearing the specter of ―relativism.‖ We adopt ―style,‖ wider than ―logic,‖ away from the West‘s one-logic obsession.

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disagreeing on what ―more or less‖ means. The situation is chaotic, scattered, and bewildering, each party talking past another. None seems to understand the other; each argument seems isolated into its own style, tone and tune. Fortunately, ―good poetry‖ does inflict ―mortal wounds‖ on the reader.1009 If even intensely personal poetry can move and stir many, compelling or repelling, more or less, then it is more so with literature, thinking, and argument less personal, as actually happened in China and the West across time. We can roughly distinguish the ―classics‖ forever evoking insights for readers everywhere across time, from sensational tabloid arousing our passing emotions. Some writers splash without substance.1010 So, Chinese wisdom counsels, ―Live well, sensitively, self-examining, and good style would write itself out well.‖ We must cultivate sensible open-mindedness open-hearted, and a lively-flexuous and perceptive-persuasive style of one‘s own will emerge by itself, and this sincere style will strike some readers as apt and compelling. Creativity originates and operates here. Dialogue can help, in structural co-learning while inter-disagreeing, as dialogue results from one‘s sincere style clashing the other‘s style. Chinese wisdom variously nurtures living-well1011; Western philosophy pursues precision, on which analytical G. E. Moore is far apart from existentialist Paul Tillich, for Moore‘s system (the way thoughts connect) differs from Tillich‘s, and no one probes the system-difference. Change Classic‘s 易經 mathematical poetry takes cosmic pulse, as many essays on ―Original Tao 原道‖1012 purvey its vast vista. Hsün Tzu 荀子 praised music to deepen persons; frugal Mo Tzu 墨子 warns of its waste. Chu Hsi‘s 朱熹 meticulous objectivity clashes Wang Show-jen‘s 王守仁 focused subjectivity. Such numerous approaches blossom in widely varied styles, where truths and validities are variously taken and disagreements flourish. An imposition here of one style among many, the unilateral view of truth and validity, leads only to confusion and ruin. Appreciation of the variety of styles alone contributes to understanding the situation. Shouting ―relativism‖ at this style-appreciation only exposes the shout as itself a unilateral imposition of one view, ―the one validity for all.‖ All this is dot-pragmatics, praxis-beauty in sociopolitical validity—family-chorus— constantly performed in China. Varied dramatic groups perform family-intimacy in persuasive validity in many styles to coups de theatre. Many concertos on brotherhood are performed by many great Chinese violinists, even by Japanese Takako Nishizaki. Various historic literatures sing across time to brotherly concord in cosmos-politics. These artistic crystallizations continue the political poetry of the ―Great Learning‖ chapter 大學 in the ancient Ritual Records 禮記, performed and validated in sweat and blood through history by countless struggles in countless styles for family-democracy, as

1009

Poet Robert Frost said, ―It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound—that he will never get over it.‖ ―The Poetry of Amy Lowell,‖ in Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays, NY: The Library of America, 1995, p. 712. 1010 E.g., Clifford Geertz. 1011 Lin Yutang is keen on it in his The Importance of Living, NY: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1937, still in print. 1012 ―原道‖ (Wing-tsit Chan has it as ―inquiry into Tao‖) appears in 淮南子, 列子 (as 天瑞), 韓愈, 文心雕龍,

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documented by Lin Yutang1013 among bookshelves of others since the ageless Tso Commentaries 左傳. Pragmatic Chinese people are political and historical, for politics is family-praxis for all, history is struggles for it through time, ever with one tone-poem in many styles, i.e., one such ancient poem dedicated to one such body politic of many peoples in many styles of livingthinking. This is the incorruptible dream of China‘s sincere praxis throbbing on today, since time immemorial in myths and legends, validated in many styles of performing it, as Chinese Wisdom Alive. Mind you. Authors of good varied styles can be superb yet themselves odd, decrepit, or depressed poets, philosophers, scientists, and so on.1014 They can even be persuasive yet judged ―mistaken,‖ as Freud and Skinner are. What is required is to be sincere 誠 and serious 敬 in working out the subject-matter. In China, the sagacious 賢 and the odd 怪 often fuse to

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approach sagely 聖, as 漁父, 屈原, 嵇康, and the like.1015 ―Living well‖ does not need to go to the full high Confucius or Socrates. As the way we think, logic is alive as we and our rhetoric changing, growing. Hegel is perhaps the first thinker to explicitly envision moving logic, though taking its move as preset. China has logic as the ―Way walking into itself.‖1016 It is our way of thinking because it is the Way of Heaven and Earth. Cosmos is the Way, Tao alive; we are its part that thinks healthily, and so humanity is the Soul of Myriad Things 萬物之靈. Chinese thinking thus gently variously persuades us to live well, and Chinese wisdom that mirrors such ―sagely‖ style of thinking, lives across time. Now we hear a protest. ―Such a pan-style-persuasion opens a floodgate of arbitrary rhetoric. Reasoning must follow a single regimented universal as the standard of coercive ‗logical necessity‘ toward objective validity. Deconstructionism demolished ‗logocentrism‘ into hopeless chaos of unintelligibility. Few talk about it now.‖ We agree with the dangers you mentioned, pal, and shiver at your ―solution‖ that opens another floodgate of logocentric imperialism bulldozing away rich variety of insights sensitive, actual, and open. We agree that we need sanity and sensitivity, not selfishness, yet sane sensibility needs no Procrustean bed of a single universal1017; even the ―necessity‖ of ―1+1=2‖ must be adjusted by actuality of, say, a spark added to gunpowder, as ―logician‖ Whitehead showed.1018

1013

Lin Yutang, A History of the Press and Public Opinion in China, University of Chicago Press, 1936, reprinted NY: Greenwood Press, 1968. 1014 Robert Frost, Thomas Hobbes, Stephen Hawking, etc., in the West, come to mind. 1015

The renowned ―Eight Sagacious 八賢‖ are 漁父, 屈原, 季主, 賈誼, 楚老, 龔勝, 孫登, and 嵇康, (世說新語, 文學第四, 臺北市三民書局, 2007, p. 237). The renowned ―Eight Oddities of Yang District 揚州八怪‖ are

金農, 羅聘, 鄭燮, 李方膺, 汪士慎, 高翔, 黃慎, and 李嚲 (魚+單), who were all Yang District geniuses in painting, calligraphy, and odd behaviors during the turbulent Ch‘ing period 清代. 1016 ―道行之而成,‖ Chuang Tzu 2/33. 1017 Post-deconstruction chaos is due to continuing obsession with a single universal, resulting in not knowing where else to go. Deconstructionists themselves know no alternative; their writings have to artificially wallow in unintelligible non-sequiturs. 1018 This is his last public observation in The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp, La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1951, pp. 699-700.

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―Rhetorical arbitrariness‖ expresses petty selfishness hermetically sealed, blind to existence as inter-existence inter-chorusing. Our behaving and thinking must flow with the flow to inter-be, not to stem it by coercing it into a one-track universal canon logic-rational. ―Inter-‖ describes a rich variety of styles of thinking and doing, inter-restricting arbitrary irresponsibility of viewing and saying. Individual style is thus permeated with an inter-existential imperative of the one ―must‖ of many actualities, the Tao of many walks, the more the merrier, free and inevitable. ―Day‖ is a plural singular, so is ―life.‖ The actual ways life variously walks out are the ways that we should walk out daily, one day at a time, into others in pan-family-mutuality. Natural actuality in all its free variations, physical science says, is what we should follow as we live out our days, never to regiment and stem it. Is such inter-existence arbitrary? It is sheer insanity to take freedom to inter-be as arbitrary confusion. Mind you, too. Freedom here describes a variety of styles of living, of reasonableness and reasoning. Orderliness obtains in such free variety of styles respecting others, in differences; more variety heals ―relativism,‖ not less. Variety ciphers the variety of standards toward delightful riches of styles. Each style has its own standard of excellence and validity; standards for orthodox style 楷書 cannot be applied to judge calligraphers of sauntering style 行書, much less of grassy style 草書, although all these standards are more or less inexpressible.1019 And the ―cannot be applied‖ and ―inexpressible‖ cipher no chaos, for we have an overarching standard of excellence of all calligraphers to make up the distinguished calligraphic tradition. Still, this ―overarching standard‖ of various standards cannot be formulated explicitly. For all that, the existence of standard does mean variety as delightfully orderly, no chaos. In sum, as it is argued, so it is valid; style typifies validity. As beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so validity is in the mind of the arguer. The variety of validity shows the riches of truth, as beauty. The accusation of ―relativism‖ is valid from one imposing style, universal one-track logic.1020 Style-as-validity argues not for anything goes, but varied selfresponsibilities cum inter-actuality-aptness to reveal-open as the standard; violating it violates validity. All this is too flexuous-situational to be called ―logic.‖ Thus we do have the standard of sensitive inter-existence, openness to differences, aptness to actuality, and respect of many styles of living, reasoning, and persuading, as ―logics‖ the convincing ways of persuasion, flexing with flexing situations. Our commitment opens out to others to melt away fanatic obsession of one sole universal over all; this obsession breeds confusion. True objectivity is sensitive intersubjectivity inter-persuading, alive for millennia.

1019

By the same token, violinist Oistrakh‘s excellence in orthodox style cannot be used as the standard with which to ―judge‖ Menuhin the musical grassy stylist, and vice versa. 1020 Stephen Edelston Toulmin‘s The Uses of Argument (Cambridge University Press, 1958), though made not many ripples, did take logic as the study of the way to justify claims, lamenting today‘s formalization of logic into abstract absolute standard for all propositional truths, but he proposed one model of logic of argument, clear and reasonable, not many. Friedrich Waismann, in How I See Philosophy, ed. R. Harré, London: Macmillan, 1968, did offer many logics for many situations, but he stopped short of taking these logics as so many styles adequate to shifting situations, much less seeing that, for the same situation there can be several apt styles of reasonable persuasion for us to choose one from.

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We all want unity to fall into uniformity oppressive, as in China‘s imperial dynasties under the tacit aegis of Legalist Realpolitik. Rid of Confucian ―morality‖ so ineffective,1021 the social order packed solely by law 法 and statecraft 術, regulated with impersonal power 勢,1022 had worked to widespread bloodshed. We admit that Legalism is China‘s sole school of thought with sure result. Sadly, it proved too effective, lethal as two-edged sword to kill ruler and ruled alike.1023 Let us pursue instead unity in concord of diversity, of various styles of doing-reasoning; so urges Chinese wisdom alive—it is what being ―alive‖ is. This ideal has failed in history, but an ideal is worth continuous trying beyond repeated failures; the past never argues against the future. Now, has anyone ever considered what being ―alive‖ means? It is much more than its physiological or sociocultural manifestations, for ―alive‖ is extra-tautologically richer; no traditional logic has handled it, and could have ever handled it.1024 Every day dawns unexpected, unpredictable, and open-ended. Days are not irrational but reasonable in extralogic-rational way; otherwise ―reason, logic, validity‖ would turn tautological, self-repeating, dull and dead. ―Alive‖ enables ―logic‖ that cannot parse ―alive.‖ After all, the day dawns on me unexpected, and my everyday has my peculiar style of being unexpected. My style makes my days different from yours. These styles, yours and mine, compose our communal culture and communal history quite different from other cultures and histories. Thus ―alive‖ individually historical is an interpersonal process of questions and answers all around, unexpected yet inevitable and reasonable. Such unexpected reasonableness is ―historical reason‖ with which Collingwood was fascinated, linking timed reenactment with question-and-answer through time.1025 This is how history-conscious Chinese wisdom lives. History is ongoing ―alive‖ from yesterdays to today, to push to the unknown tomorrow, ―new, day after day, new today.‖ This is how Chinese wisdom is alive, today. 1021

Ineffective also were Taoist naturalism and Name-scholars‘ name-scrutinies. See 韓非子, 臺北市三民書局, 民86, p. 632 (explanation at 定法), and 導讀 pp. 19, 23, 34. 1023 Legalism is also the only school in China that takes the ruler as antagonistic to the ruled, as did Machiavelli and Hobbes. USA today says that instead of supporting the ruler with laws, the law must guarantee people‘s personal integrity. But is this law itself personal or impersonal? (Is justice blind or does it follow precedents?) That is the wall a Humpty Dumpty of the US law sits on, often to fall into impossible pieces. 1024 ―Alive‖ is not one of usual logical concepts for two reasons. One, ―alive‖ is too primitive a notion assumed by all concepts and arguments to argue about; ―alive‖ is even more primal than the basic law of identity (A is A, not not-A) that can be ―proved‖ only by ad absurdum regression (Aristotle), and regression is impossible without logician alive performing it. By the same token, addition is not throwing 5 and 7 into a slot machine to get 12, but a synthetic a priori (Kant, First Critique, B15-17), synthesizing logical necessity, moving from 5 to 7 to reach 12, as necessitated by embodiment alive, elaborated in Wu, History, Thinking, and literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991, pp. 16-17. Geometry is not preprogrammed space from point A to point B into a line AB, but has a bodily matrix (M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962, pp. 384-386), the lived body moving from A to B to produce a line A-B. Geometry is the lived human body thinking in space through time. Logical calculating machines extend logicians alive designing and checking them to use them. Logic is embodied alive. Cf. Hubert Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason, 1997, MIT Press, among many of his books on computer. All this shows how logic assumes personal operation ―alive.‖ 1025 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, Revised Edition, 1993, pp. 485-487, The Principles of History, 1999, p. 286 (index on question and answer in history), An Autobiography, 1939, pp. 29-43, An Essay on Metaphysics, 1940, pp. 21-57, all published by Oxford University Press. 1022

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Let us put concrete teeth into the above general description of being alive. To be alive is being creative, not fickle but flexible. Creativity is steady fortitude strenuously struggling against all fickle oppositions for sterling friendship with actuality. Creativity is the rock of ages, our dependable friend through days and decades, numerously instanced in YouthLearned Jade-Forest.1026 Solid friendship feeds on solid flexuous creativity through fickle thick and thin. Similarly, creativity inter-flexes with fleeting shifts of time. Let‘s take words. Words express names with implications and applications in praxis. This is China‘s ―corrective names 正名‖ that is a verb. ―Name‖ means a concrete situation meant to become as named, corrected to con-form to its meaning-named. Social positions actually occupied are meant to conform to their respective meanings-named. A father is meant to become what he is named, ―father,‖ a son is to become ―son‖ really, and their relation as so named patterns the ruler to be really so named, to relate to the subjects acting as such. ―Corrective name‖ corrects actuality as meant-named. ―Name‖ is the logic of praxis. China corrects, verifies and validates us with ―names‖ social-proper to praxis, not as the West verifying-correcting subjective ―names‖ with objective actuality. The West wants to know how things go so as to adjust our names; China wants to fulfill our praxis as named by history and convention. ―Righting names 正名‖ is ideal names leading our actual ways of living, as characters 文字 picture things‘ sense intangible. Chinese ―nominalism‖ is our dream biting into our living, as Chuang Tzu dream-talked with a roadside skull (18/22-29). Reality had better follow its dreams, for dreams pull life ahead alive; peoples and cultures without dreams die dried, dreamless. Dreams yarn actual life into actual dream-systems. Dreams are our innate life-power, expressed as ―names.‖ We ask, ―But isn‘t a dream unreal?‖ ―Well, if all is a dream (for how can anyone tell dream from awakening?), awakening toward dreaming is the really real, while we dream,‖ so tells Chuang Tzu‘s butterfly dream (2/94-96), fluttering beyond life and death, and between life and death. All this is real in dream, dream in real, alive and awesome. We say we ―don‘t know how it can happen, so it cannot happen,‖ to deny creativity thriving in dreams. Trite convention has thus denied, for long, metal flying in the air and floating on water. Life-creativity dreaming has made all this to happen, all real-ized. ―How real is all this?‖ Ever alive, creativity is a supreme dream-strategist toward strenuous loyalty to the family, the state, and our lifeworld throughout the cosmos. Their stories overflow Warring States Strategies 戰國策, many classical histories, and countless historic literatures. All these feats are creativity at work, to live out life through millennia till today and beyond. If this is not Chinese wisdom ever alive today, we would not know what else is, what this is, or even what is. To say all this sounds all too self-assured, however. Are we sure of all this? What is such our description, anyway? Is it Chinese or Western? Is it some sort of a monster? Where is our rationale? 1026

―朊友賓主‖ in 幼學瓊林, 臺北市三民書局, 2005, pp. 119-129. We take ―friendship‖ as bosom friends interhelping to befriend shifting situations.

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OUR SELF-REFLECTION AND CHINA-WEST CONTRAST ―You did not touch China much since talking about logic as style of validity. Where is China there?‖ This question raises another, ―What is this ‗Chinese wisdom‘ that has no China?‖ To answer, we must be reminded that existence needs comparison.1027 I am not ―Chinese‖ in China; you are not ―Western‖ while in the West. I stand out Chinese as I meet you, who stand out Western as you meet me. To ―stand out‖ (ek-histemi) is to exist; to ―meet‖ is to compare, to gather (com-) as equals (-par), 比. Comparison thus describes existence. Chinese wisdom is described as it is compared with Western philosophy. The description nods to understand China and the West, and is not itself China or the West yet familiar to both. Our description is like both Chinese wisdom and Western philosophy, yet is not quite either one. Description of ―logic‖ as ―style of thinking,‖ e.g., is relevant to the West that takes logic as abstract unilateral universal, and our thesis is so naturally practiced in China as in need of no explicit explanation. Apropos of logic as a style of reasoning, our delivery is persuasive as China, logical as the West, and so we hope it is palatable to both, although no Chinese would have put things quite in this logical way, and no Westerner has ever heard of such an odd bodily logic, so non-analytical, heart-throbbing, lung-breathing, and skin-osmotic throughout the whole family-world within Four Seas and throughout Heaven and Earth. The fact is, all our descriptions in this volume are meant to be an amicable catalyst to both China and the West, to let them join in dialogues of mutual learning to inter-deepen. Dialogue that inter-enriches collapses, however, when one side overrides the other to deny the other as genuinely other than the one side. ―Fine air at hill dusk, birds co-fly around‖; nothing here is noteworthy, yet thus poetized, things as-they-are hit us, turning us distant as nature of the world, untouched by worldly din. It takes the sensitive T‘ao Ch‘ien 陶潛 to take note of the as-is, sing it out to hit us with the sense of things. Winds blow to bend grass; nothing is the matter until Confucius came to

1027

Thus incomparable existence vanishes, such as Western ―culture,‖ ―logic,‖ and ―science.‖ Cf. Wu, On the “Logic” of Togetherness, op. cit., pp. 27-87. The converse also holds, that comparison needs existence, and that China must be Chinese for global interculture to obtain, as our last Section elucidates.

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intone it (12/19), ―The wind of princely virtue bends the grass of commoners into true government.‖ He is common uncommon, sutble; Hegel missed it. Poetry is worded music; music undergoes experience. China‘s audio-pictograms crisscross thus to musicalize the as-is, to net the sense of things to reenact, re-undergo the sense of actuality. We must persist through its protean music intangible, powerful undergoing, until it vanishes to yield actuality full of sense. We today tend to be the Greek West looking at Proteus the inscrutable China. China the Proteus is Chinese wisdom alive. We now word with China, forgetting its wording, on actual sense alive. Let us pair up Chinese genius with Western. Chinese genius is literature-history 文史, persistent reenacting, re-undergoing in worded music through storytelling. Literature is things-interwoven with sensitive storytelling, thinking as thinking on, as history, collection of audio-pictographs painting-singing things‘ sense, to spread a historic symphony of milieus one after another. Its think-on needs a think-of, its recognition needs cognition to stabilize it. History is a live-through, an ―and‖ of here and not here, now and not-now, again interweaving but this time as a process back and forth, back to past and forth to now and future, thereby gaining after-the-fact insights to live on better. The danger in history-thinking is that we may stay only there in the past, engulfed in the dead-and-already. The West is another palm of humanity, China‘s asymmetrical counterpart of humanity. The West is adept at a think-of, survey, cut-and-gather of division and collection (Plato), analysis and synthesis (Kant). ―Philosophies of music,‖ say, considers music in a spatial perspective, never move as music, with music. A dictionary of music either has no ―music‖ or an ad hoc lifeless article on music.1028 The West‘s danger is to go not-there, to see from nowhere, to forget the past, to turn rootless. The China-West difference is milieu-difference, in terms of which we can see the peculiarity of China against the background—milieu—of the West. To begin, ―milieu‖ must be described, for no philosopher or poet in the West cares to pay attention to it as such; they all see milieu at work, not milieu itself.1029 Milieu is where it is at, where we are at, the air and tone we live in, our motherly home we dwell in, the life-world that constitutes us and gives birth to all our systems, closed and open. Milieu is what surrounds us, that in which we are, the background against which and

1028

The World as Will and Idea (A. Schopenhauer, 1844, reprint, NY: Dover), Philosophy in A New Key (S. K. Langer, Harvard University Press, 1942), The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (Mikel Dufrenne, 1953, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), all explicitly claiming to center on music, treat music schematically-spatially; so do articles on music in The Continental Aesthetics Reader (ed. C. Cazeaux, London: Routledge, 2000), The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics (eds. B. Gaut & D. M.Lopes, 2001), and The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (ed. J. Levinson, 2003). The Norton/Grove Encyclopedia of Music (ed. Stanley Sadie, NY: W. W. Norton, 1988), Music in the Western World: A History in Documents (eds., P. Weiss and R. Taruskin, NY: Macmillan, 1984), and The International Cyclopedia of Music and Musicians (eds. O. Thompson et al., Eleventh Edition, NY: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1985) have no ―music.‖ Harvard Dictionary of Music (Willi Apel, 1985) has a casual brief article on ―music.‖ Now, Composers on Music, ed. Sam Morgenstern (NY: Random House, 1956) and The Conductor’s Art, ed. Carl Bamberger (NY: McGrawHill, 1965) are insiders‘ confessions on music, with more ―meat‖ on what music is. These essays risk dissipating in details of genres and techniques; the forest of music vanishes in the trees. But these essays are music in vivo, music alive; when alive, one cannot describe oneself alive. These books are thus music incarnate in words. Reading them forgets oneself in pleasure, as listening to music does. These books are a musical fun. 1029 Wu, ―The I-Milieu: Its Implications for Culture and Thinking (I)‖ (December, 2007, pp. 1-59), ―The I-Milieu: Its Implications for Culture and Thinking (II)‖ (June 2008, pp. 1-68), Journal of World Religions.

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out of which we move and sing, of which we are unaware but can feel if it is fresh or foul, enabling or stunting, opening us out or closing us in. What deserves noting is that in the West, the ―life-world‖ is a blanket term at the finale of thinking, beyond moving or not-moving, today‘s stand-in for the traditional ―universal.‖ In China, ―life-world‖ is in flux, time-ly world 時世, time-ly thrust 時勢, or time-ly tide 時潮, constantly changing the Yin-Yang Five-Goings 五行 way, seeping-shaping my living way and life-direction. This must be what the hegemon Hsiang Yü 項羽 meant by ―heaven‖1030 in his hour of demise, saying, ―Heaven perishes me 天亡我!‖ With such understanding of ―milieu‖ in mind, we now gaze at China in the milieu of the West. We have four points. One, the West has three milieus in which to relate to China, analytical, overlooking, and pointing. Two, Buber points to China, is willing to receive China, but in his way of centripetal concentration. Three, in this Western milieu China emerges expressing vast relaxed actuality. Four, in this intercultural manner, ―milieu‖ is etched forth, as China also appears as singing vast relaxed actuality-milieu. ONE: Western three milieus on China: The West can understand China in the West‘s three milieus, analytical, overlooking, and pointing. The analytical milieu is most natural to the West since Hegel, to whom China is quite infantile and illogical. Recently we see three prominent representatives, A. C. Graham, Chad Hansen, and Christoph Harbsmeier, all trying to make some logic-rational sense out of innocently simplistic China. ―China can think logically,‖ Harbsmeier proudly says. Meeting China radically different, the West naturally rally to its native genius, logicrational analysis, to tackle it, while non-analytical thinker (e.g., existentialist, phenomenologist) shies away. Max Weber‘s1031 is a sensitive anthropological study of cultural exotics called ―China.‖ The West has another philosopher solidly in this group but not rigidly in logic-rationality. Still, curiously, he is taken as congenial to China1032; he is Martin Heidegger. To comment on him takes too much space here, and so an Appendix I is devoted to him at the end of this Part. The overlooking milieu is not yet applied to studying China, but can be fruitful when applied. Russell sees induction, logic applied to actuality, in need of common sense lest a growing boy‘s head hit the stars. Whitehead says 1+1=2 applies to no gunpowder and a spark, and must be guided by common sense beyond 1+1=2. Wittgenstein sees ―that the world is‖ as beyond propositions, which we must climb to kick away.1033 They are at logical hill‘s peak overlooking the land, China, unawares.1034

56

司馬遷, 史記, 項羽本紀, 中和市建宏出版社, 1995, 1:196, 197, 300. Max Weber, The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (1951), NY: The Free Press, 1964, takes both Confucianism and Taoism as ―religion,‖ not ―thinking.‖ 1032 Chang even puts Heidegger‘s words as commentary to the Tao Te Ching. Chang Chung-yuan, Tao: A New Way of Thinking: A Translation of the Tao Tê Ching with an Introduction and Commentaries, NY: Harper & Row, 1975. Chang makes us think that Heidegger has said all that Tao Te Ching means! Who needs Tao Te Ching if a Western philosopher has exhausted it? But we would give Lao Tzu credit for enabling even such thing to happen! 1033 The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, 1903-1959, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1961, pp. 154-155. The Philosophy of Alfred North White4head, La Salle: Open Court, 1951, pp. 699-70. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922, 6.44, 6.54, 7. 1034 Bertrand Russell, The Problem of China, London: Allen & Unwin, 1922, admires Chinese composure as ethos, not as distinct wisdom. Still, his overlooking posture conduces him to admiring China. 1031

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The pointing milieu is shown in Polanyi‘s tacit dimension of knowledge, the finger moon-pointing, Fenollosa‘s beauty in China and Japan, and Buber‘s reasoning persuasively poetic, congenially Chinese. Polanyi is innocent of China. Fenollosa was an historian of Asian art, and his foray into Chinese characters was admirable though off. Only Buber probed China‘s wisdom, the Confucian sentiment of history admiring historic paragons, translated Chuang Tzu and wrote a long introduction to it.1035 Thus, Buber interests us most. TWO: Buber pointing to China: Buber reasons with poetic passion of Chinese ―prosepoet 詩賦家‖ persuading the whole us,1036 not just intellect. Of all Western thinkers, he is most willing to probe China as China, even willing to ―receive‖ China to benefit the West. Two caveats must be entered here, though. One, Buber is unaware of ―milieu‖ while dwelling in ―relation,‖ ―between-ness,‖ which indicate milieu. He casually uses ―surrounding‖ and ―background,‖ missing milieus of air, stones, trees, animals, and even God ―in which we live, move, and have our being.‖ He misses I-Milieu the dwelling for I-It and I-Thou, and so reduces milieu-things, trees, animals, God, etc., to rambling mysticism.1037 Two, he delves into a part of China to round it into his own ―poetic system,‖ to mirror systematic Germanism mixed with Jewish poeticism. His explanation of Tao tightens into ―unity‖ in human self and in cosmos,1038 to miss self-forgetting, no-self, self-loss, self-fit, self-interchange, casual indwelling, meandering with laughter, playing with story-bits and arguments, and Tao centrifugal as centripetal, and so on. He is too narrow and tight for Tao. THREE: China shows up expressing vast relaxed actuality: Buber‘s Western centripetal consistency in his sympathetic probes of China culture-shocked China to manifest itself as expressing vast relaxed actuality, vaster than the West‘s three milieus—analytical, overlooking, pointing—in which it looks at China. In China, all things dance out into

1035

Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (1966), The Study of Man (1959), etc., University of Chicago Ernest F. Fenollosa, Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art (1911), Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2007, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, Washington 20, D. C.: Square Dollar Series, 1935. Martin Buber‘s ―The Teaching of the Tao‖ (pp. 31-58) and ―China and Us‖ (pp. 121-125) in Pointing the Way (NJ: Humanities Press, 1957) sympathetically probe China, and both essays say that the West can ―receive China‖ (pp. 58, 134-135). Sadly, he took China as only receptive of teaching from past paragons, unaware that the ―student‖-posterity in commentaries actively enriches paragon-teachers, begun already in Confucius‘ delightful dialogues with students (2/15, 3/8, etc.). Still, Buber‘s way of saying and arguing is in line with Hebraic dialogism of ―you speak, I hear,‖ reminiscent of Chinese dialogical persuation, in contrast to the Greek Medusa-analytical gaze that turns things stone-static. The West has others who take China seriously, but not as systematically as Buber. Mathematician R. M. Smullyan‘s The Tao is Silent (Harper & Row, 1977) has no rhythm. G. Johanson and R. Kurtz‘s Grace Unfolding: Psychotherapy in the Spirit of the Tao-te ching (NY: Bell Tower, 1991) is psychotherapy. H. Fingarette‘s Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (1972) (IL: Waveland, 1998) is philosophical, analytical, and psychological. T. Merton‘s The Way of Chuang Tzu (NY: New Directions, 1965) is Christian. F. Jullien explicitly takes off from the sinological front of his many volumes into his own peculiar comparative culture (Vital Nourishment, NY: Zone Books, 2007, pp. 7-10). None takes China as China. Buber stands out alone on this score. 1036 Although not originated in China, the coercive techniques to transform a whole mindset into another are captured as ―to brainwash,‖ directly translated from Chinese phrase, to ―wash brain 洗腦‖ (The American Heritage College Dictionary, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000, p. 169), out of China‘s holism. 1037 In Buber‘s I and Thou (tr. R. G. Smith, NY: Charles Scribner, 2000), ―round about‖ (29, 40) and ―background‖ (41) are used casually, and ―trees‖ and ―God‖ are mystified (22, 115-126). He wavered on ―habitat‖ when pressed (Philosophical Interrogations, NY: Holt, Reinhardt, and Winston, 1964, p. 19ff). 1038 He greatly flexes his logico-rhetorical muscle to tell us how the two blend.

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existence. All nouns are being-verbs, casually self-homed, self-forgotten, coming-in as they dance out. FOUR: ―Milieu‖ appears with China: Thus China is culture-shocked to appear in contrast to the West; we now know China deeper.1039 We hope that the West would also be jolted by how different it is from China, to realize itself deeper than before. ―But the West is dominant now, even while catalyzing the appearance of China as China.‖ Perhaps the West is. What this cultural fact means for China and the world is crucial. China can take advantage of it to dwell in this Western culture as its tacit milieu and background, against which to appear as China distinct. China can thereby make two contributions to world interculture.1040 One, by taking advantage of the dominant West as its milieu, China can etch forth ―milieu‖ for serious reflection. Two, China can present itself as a distinct milieu, an alternative lifeworld to the West. China reflects on things in literature, history, and calligraphy. ―Literature‖ is composed of characters as sense-singing, not alphabetical soundsigns. This sense of things is ―history‖ telling the stories of past to be reborn in the now anew. No literature, no history; no history, no ―now.‖1041 Analytical clarity can turn irrelevant pseudo-exactitude clean and manipulable. A softfocused story-way, vignette-dotting as analects, epistles, journals, essays,1042 can lose the map in the thicket of details, losing the forest for the trees. Each must go to the other to complement; the West and China must inter-learn to inter-enrich. ―Wait, not so fast. You pointed out Buber‘s failure to blend the cosmic and the human, and you failed to relate vast relaxed actuality to myriad things moving. You must blend and relate before you go on.‖ Wow! Thanks for your observant comment to egg me on! My answer is fourfold, to reveal the actual relaxed oneness, Heavenly Balance 天鈞, of all with all. One, blending and relating are left open, lest we fall in Buber‘s trap of tightening in selflocalizing.1043 The ―relaxed‖ situation cannot ―tighten.‖ Two, ―walk‖ must go ―doublelegged‖; one-legged walk is silly. It is also as silly to ask why ―=‖ of ―3+4=4+3‖ that is a how, not a why.1044 Three, ―relaxed‖ has room for ―things to move and dance.‖ Four, these 1039

Here is a telling example. In the 1800s when Japan, just out of feudalism, caught foreignism infection to throw out its own treasures, ―It is a strange thing that at such a crisis it should have been the keen eye and prophetic mind of a young American [Ernest Fenollosa] who first realized the threatened tragedy, and that to his energy and effort, more than to any other cause, was due a swift reaction.‖ This is Mrs. Fenollosa‘s keen observation (Ernest Fenollosa, Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art [1912], Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2007, p. xx). The ―strange thing‖ came out of two jolts, Fenollosa the Westerner jolted in Japan to feel Japan‘s genius, and Japanese people jolted by Fenollosa the Westerner to move back to Japan itself. What a delightful intercultural miracle! 1040 This is because we have no ―world culture,‖ only world interculture. 1041 We remember the two stories on the human skin as we began this Part. One skin-story goes down to its analytical components, the other goes up to the wide cosmos. The going-down is a descent-path of X-ray into bones and schemes; the going-up is an ascent to the milieu of life-world ever shifting and expanding. The issue of skin-color as base of racism is omitted here. 1042 1043 1044

E.g., 語錄, 文集, and collections of short stories in 左傳, 晏子春秋, 戰國策, 史記, etc. Buber is mistaken in trying to cognitively blend cosmos and self, not in being unable to blend them. Mathematics shows how ―=‖ obtains between ―3+4‖ and ―4+3,‖ not why it does. Science (knowledge), including math, studies how, not why. Aristotle‘s ―four causes‖ are four hows of—responsible for—comingto-be of things. Later thinkers followed the trail (vide ―aítion‖ and ―próödos‖ in F. E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon, NY: New York University Press, 1967, pp. 16, 165).

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three points open out ―vast and relaxed‖ for things to ―move free‖ in into one Heavenly Balance of double walk of all with all, no tight blending-relating. Even stories on matters nonfactual overflow facts in the fabric of arguments; ―Factual History Records 史記 drive events with literature, fictive Water Margins 水滸 breeds events with literature.‖1045 These stories are crystallized in gnomic phrases to lug around in daily discourses, oral and written.1046 Chuang Tzu‘s notion of ―morning three‖ hinted at above is a story-bit (2/38-40) portraying the concrete sense: ―Uncle Monkey said, ‗Morning three, evening four‘; monkeys were all angry. ‗OK, then, morning four, evening three‘; monkeys were all pleased. Heavenly Balance [is] to ‗double walk.‘‖ ―Morning three, evening four‖ is here, not theoretical ―3+4‖; ―ok, then‖ and ―double walk‖ are here, not abstract ―=.‖ Besides, pull out concrete monkeys, anger, pleasure, Uncle Monkey, and ―ok, then,‖ the whole story vanishes. ―Isn‘t the story about 3+4=4+3, though?‖ O, no, it is not in the story, though intimated. Mathematics tells the mechanics of how things go; the notion of ―morning three‖ shows what it actually means in our living. What does it mean? The story-notion of ―morning three‖ is on the monkey-mindset unable to double-walk, and kindly walked out for them by Uncle Monkey. Every ―morning‖ tells of fresh ―three‖ to double-walk our living. Such seems to be the point, the meaning, of the concrete notion of ―morning three‖ told by this story-bit, seemingly concocted but surprisingly relevant and actual. Similarly, China has no abstract ―coincidence of opposites‖ proposed by the speculation of Nicholas of Cusa, but vibrant Yin and Yang agelessly internecine, inter-nascent, ever double-walking to five-walk 五行, one into the next, and back. Chinese argument is concrete,1047 to move concretely, as Chinese language intones things‘ sense, with no droning monotony. Speaking sings to persuade us on the point. So, in order to ―read‖ the characters portraying-singing actuality-senses, i.e., to read China‘s literature, history, and stories, I must go into a holistic ―disposition 姿勢.‖ My whole bodily life recognizes characters 認字1048; my whole body-world moves to recognize, not cognize.1049 ―Calligraphy‖ dances forth literature historic that performs how as what, noun as verb, logic as rhetoric, where historic Poetry Classic 詩經 directs political performance.

Phenomenology studies the structure (logos) of appearance (phenomena), again no why here. Music alone hums out how in why beyond knowledge. China‘s discourses go musical way, two-legged 兩行. 1045 金聖嘆 (1608-1661) said well, 「史記是以文運事, 水滸是因文生事」 (讀第五才子書法, as quoted in 中國美學史資料選編, 光美書局 or 輔新書局, no address, no date, no editor, p. 539). 1046 See K. Wu, ―World Interculturalism: China Written in English,‖ Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, June 2005, pp. 1-42. Arthur H. Smith, Proverbs and Common Sayings from the Chinese (1914), NY: Paragon Book Reprint Corp. and Dover Publications, 1965. 中國古代寓言選, 長沙:湖南教育出版社, 1982. 馮作民, 宋秀玲編著, 中國成語名言关源, 上集, 下集, 香港: 新時代出版社, no date. 陳永楨, 陳善慈編著, 漢英對照成語詞关 Chinese Idioms and their English Equivalents, 臺北書林出版有限公司, 民81. 陳日朊, 金士杰編, 成語故事三百篇, 長春: 吉林人民出版社, 1982. And the list goes on. 1047 In contrast, thanks to alphabet-sign thinking, even seemingly concrete ―Socrates is a man and mortal, so all men are mortal‖ is really about any blank-S, any blank-M, and any blank-attribute; the rest is added decoration. Western argument is abstract and universally valid. 1048 ―如何認字‖ in 聞一多全集, 步漢湖北人民出版社, 2004, 10: 846-849. Significantly, this note clinches the whole ten volumes of his collected works. 1049 See Wu, On Chinese Body Thinking: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1997.

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Here, nature is our ethics, cosmology is to achieve cosmically sociopolitical. The ―is‖ repeated in this statement is the human ought; the cosmic ―is‖ supports the human ought. Nature is the fact of prime order, and so we humans must achieve it accordingly among us, to become an appropriate part of nature. The Triune harmony of Cosmic Geniuses, Heaven, Earth, and Humanity, is our human mission. To say is to reason to persuade. Bad sayings go through the ears; good sayings fill the belly. So, poetry is rehearsed to sing what is meant, and ―argument‖ moves the whole life, not to entertain the brain. Such gut-saying moves the world to achieve cosmic order, the root of Chinese politics. Tung Chung-shu 董仲舒 is passionate at our human mission of cosmospolitics.1050 History tells stories to argue for living well. Why/how1051 does telling stories argue? ―Proofs‖ in the vast milieus, e.g., religion, science, politics, and metaphysics, ―must rely on the cumulative weight of converging arguments that cannot be entirely formulated,‖ says Mitchell1052; he has proposed something novel in the West, but actually such argumentative praxis has been China‘s daily routines for millennia till today. Doesn‘t the weightiest of cumulatively converging arguments lie in the stories of facts, each with a set of varied converging implications? Nothing is more powerfully convincing than these stories as ―converging arguments.‖ I would not know what ―father‖ is until I become—come to being—father myself, and only telling its stories conveys the existential sense of ―being father.‖ Stories bring you closest to my undergoing ―father.‖ Stories convey what it means to experience a milieu, suffer the pain, perform deals, and assume an attitude, in short, how we exist through our days. Story-conveyance powerfully manifests what is conveyed to move the hearer to conform to it, and ―moving to conform‖ performs an argument as performing a musical composition. Volumes in China are all overtly or covertly historical, all telling-performing stories. These stories converge to cumulatively argue for the ancient best to persuade us. Confucius traces-out what‘s there in history 述 (7/1); he conveys—tells stories—to continue the ancient best in the present performance. To tell stories performs, to argue for what we must practice now. All this is unheard of in the West. This description of China amounts to urging both the West and China to juxtapose and inter-shape cultural milieus into a cultural kaleidoscope, to inter-deepen to enrich our many mobile life-worlds alive, shifting historically, inter-culturally. Cultural chauvinism kills all cultures, domineering and dominated. We thrive together or perish in isolation, and we have no third alternative. ―How can interculture happen to benefit the West and China?‖ The West‘s milieu is objective; China‘s is inter-subjective. To be objective and comprehensive, the West must look impersonally at things, separate from human subject, who is to be observed as object, to clarify and arrange things, to control them. China must learn how to let objects be objects, no human subject intruding at all.

1050

The long 導讀 explains all this in 春秋繁露讀本, 臺北市三民書局, 2007, pp.1-159. In China, why is how, to describe is to (give) reason, and 故 as ―therefore‖ is ―thus.‖ 1052 Basil Mitchell, The Justification of Religious Belief, Oxford University Press, 1981. The volume is short and scattered, as if to portray Mitchell tottering delirious in his ―novel‖ ideas. 1051

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China‘s ―objectivity‖ is dismal. Objects are objects only to human subjects, as threatening or promoting; we must pattern our life after ―nature‖ and ―Heaven and Earth‖ in our morality, socio-politics, and computed as divination and mystical correlation in Yi p‘u 易卜 and Great Ultimate Diagram 太極圖 of 邵雍, 周敤頤, and 董仲舒, admired even by Chu Hsi 朱熹 the meticulously ―objective, comprehensive.‖.1053 The West must smash China‘s comprehensive subjectivity. None can toy with objectivity. Computational magic, divination, and mystical cosmology show subjectivity tampering with objectivity. In contrast, Einstein‘s sober computation into relativity, resulted in the real magic of nuclear power, is the result of objective reverence of things as things. But then the West‘s objectivity has its trap. To ―develop‖ nuclear power into bombs and to hoard its use in USA alone, is an awesome crime against humanity, committed by Oppenheimer under the aegis of US selfishness, political subjectivity. His speech justifying it goes like this1054:

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―And there was finally, and I think rightly, the feeling that there was . . . no place . . . where the development of atomic weapons would have a better chance of leading to a reasonable solution, and a smaller chance of leading to disaster, than within the United States. . . . [A]tomic weapons are a peril which affect everyone in the world . . . a common problem . . . to handle [for which] there must be a complete . . . community responsibility [, which] has decisive advantages. . . .‖

Oppenheimer‘s speech tragically defeats itself. On one hand, he says that this worlddestructive power must be handled by the whole world community, as if he its manufacturer were not responsible. On the other hand, he says that [a] US exclusive custody of this awesome power is most secure, for [b] USA the irrational manufacturer of atomic weapon is the most reasonable nation, as if both these points were self-evident. His double shams make up a most antidemocratic crime against humanity. Perhaps the charming genius of the ideal of democracy (and of China‘s people-as-root ethos 民本思想) lies in its avid advocacy of objectivity in cosmopolitan publicity of governance, against all political secrecies for subjective gains. Oppenheimer fell unawares into the trap of anti-democracy. His self-ignorance is all the more tragic for his being a conscientiously objective scientist. China has its own objectivity in recording history for publicity among contemporaries and posterities. Stringent objectivity to history record, even at the cost of life, is reverently memorialized in an ancient story of extraordinary courage. Three brother grand historians 太史官 braved executions to keep on record the five characters, ―Ts‘ui-chu assassinated his lord 崔杼弒其君.‖ Two were serially executed by Ts‘ui-chu their lord; the third one came forth and calmly wrote the same five characters! That made Ts‘ui-chu to relent and let the record stand. Another historian was about to take off to 1053

Chu‘s 朱熹 comprehensive anthology 近思錄 begins by touching on the mumbo jumbo of ―道體‖ as human embodiment of Heaven, Earth and beyond, and then at once plunges into various human affairs, and stays

there till the end. 王陽明‘s 傳習錄 objects to even this humanistic approach to the cosmos. The most ―objective‖ in China are historical studies that are still for our living well now. Such subjective milieu remains China‘s today, understandable only by noticing this historical background and milieu. 1054 Speeches that Changed the World, London: Quercus, 2005, pp. 124-125.

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take their place in case the third one was also executed. Such extraordinary loyalty to historical objectivity deserves historic commemoration!1055 Sadly, this self-sacrificial loyalty to historical objectivity has often been sacrificed for facile subjectivity of contemporary convenience, royal or otherwise, though some falsified records were corrected subsequently, in the name of ―textual criticism,‖ even under tight censorship of the Ch‘ing period 清代, until even today. The history of loyalty to objectivity in the West and China tells how critical and difficult it is to preserve objectivity, even today, even in the West that upholds it explicitly and practices it strenuously. China must learn objectivity from its past and also from the West its partner today. What can the West learn from China? Take Heraclitus‘ subjective ―You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are continually flowing in,‖1056 watched over by cosmic Logos. Such view is incoherent. You are not the river; how do you know all this? Who are you? Are you separate from the river, or not? Does this statement flow, or not? If Logos says so, another similar set of questions would appear. All are separation, ―step into,‖ ―logos‖; all above questions want joining, in vain. In contrast, Chuang Tzu‘s comparable ―Way walks it and forms 道行之而成‖ (2/33) is coherent. ―Walking‖ goes by two legs of Yin and Yang walking fivefold 五行. All things routinely walk, and their Way forms. The Way is thus active, moving, and set for all; it is subjectivity at its best, and it is pragmatic objectivity for all. Here praxis of pragmatics is metaphysics of cosmology, and socio-ethics is based on the cosmic Way. What goes naturally is what ought to go humanly. Such pan-pragmatic milieu has no separation, only aspects inter-involving-developing, mutually implicating-explicating, to walk on, a holistic co-happening of Yin and Yang internecine, inter-nascent, the personaland-public milieu. ―River‖ is here in walking, ―logos‖ is here on the Way; river and logos unite in the Way walking to form themselves, naturally, routinely, in seasonal flow walked out everywhere. After all, the flow is one, called ―time‖ in the West, called ―the Way, Tao‖ or ―shih 時‖ as seasons1057 in China. China shows to the West how time-ly all things must be lived, not viewed objectively space-wise. In some such way, China and the West need to gather in dialogue, inter-smashing to inter-critique and inter-shape, to reach milieus-together, the holistic vista, the Sense Penetrating through all 通義, the Primal Way of things 原道, and what all this means. ―Milieus-together in holistic vista‖ is the West‘s jargon, ―the Sense Penetrating through all 通義 in Primal Way of things 原道‖ is China‘s, and ―what all this means‖ must be reached by both through dialogue beneficial, laborious. For the West, life as walk needs a whereto; without whereto, walk aimlessly wanders. For China, the road of life is walked out; purely thinking of whereto ends up being unable to walk. Besides, pondering on whereto is itself a walk; it is walking (thinking) without walking (unable to walk), a contradiction. 1055

左傳讀本, 臺北市三民書局, 2002, 襄公25年, II: 1096. This story has been cited several times. How could I

help it? I am still shaking with feelings of admiration and adoration. Philip Wheelwright, Heraclitus (Princeton University Press, 1959), Atheneum, 1971, p. 29. 1057 See Wu, ―‗Time‘ in China,‖ On the “Logic” of Togetherness, Leiden: Brill, 1998, pp. 342-385. 1056

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The West insists, ―My warning stays. Without the whereto, we are just lost in the ‗mist‘ of actuality.‖ China replies, ―Ko Hung 葛洪 of the fourth century touted the ‗truth‘ that ladies out of the house invite disasters, and ‗proved‘ so by many well-known historical tragedies cited in the classics.1058 The West now in the twenty-first century accepts ladies outdoors active in social enterprises, as ‗that‘s the way it is,‘ and witnesses sexual revolutions in the Middle East. Where is the ‗truth,‘ then? This example shows how actual walking forms Tao, and we would not even know what it means to preset the goal. How could Ko have foreseen the women‘s situation today? How could we today foresee what will be tomorrow? We humanity just walk on, and the Tao forms.‖ The West says, ―All this shows that our goal itself has changed. Ko‘s ideal was to avoid disasters to keep society safe. Ours is equality of women and their contributions to the society. Kuo‘s walk is not ours; we walk our respective walks.‖ China says, ―Well then, ‗ideal‘ itself walks; the whereto of ideal cannot be preset. In fact, all whereto, whereat, and wherefrom are determined by how we walk, not the other way around, don‘t you think?‖ Thus what-priority and how-priority inter-smashes to inter-deepen. In fact, destination (D) and walk (W) inter-involve. We walk out D as D makes our saunter into W. D changes as we W to change us, while D shapes W. D and W inter-define, and W-intent China must dialogue with D-centered West to inter-complete. The Western bent to ideal transcendence to survey must dialogue with China‘s praxis in historical ongoing; existential dialogue would not happen unless both parties actually engage as equals. I walked as I thought of the above dialogue. Walking may not always feels good—it gives pain sometimes—while I walk, but I hear crickets chirping, season seeping in, roadside cracks and grass smiling at me, and I am grounded as I walk on. Besides, walking makes me feel better later, for my overall health. Walking literally walks me into my better future, wherever the destination, irrelevant to the destination. I told myself such a story as I walked; my walk walked out my own story of walking life. All this story-thinks in hermeneutical level-4 via interpretive level-3 on life‘s familiar ―walking.‖ Our saying so now displays the self-reflective level-5. This is the Way we have walked, the story way walked in China-West dialogue, and my own monologue. Their interwording and mine to myself enlighten both China and the West to deepen both and me. Let us tarry at this inter-wording for a while. Inter-wording 與言 in China is education 傳習 transmitting the tradition. Tradition 傳統 transmits 傳; it is a verb. Tradition transmits the past best, which is creativity; tradition transmits creativity. But transmission of creativity is no conveyance of goods. Creativity lights up the inner flame; only flame lights up fame. Tradition of excellence transmits past creativity by evoking—calling forth, lighting up—new creativity with a skillful display of past excellence. Tradition transmits evocation. This explains Confucius‘ exposition 述 (Analects 7/1) and his student Tseng Tzu‘s transmission 傳 (1/4). Exposition does not create 作, but let create, expounding past excellence to educe new excellence; transmission does not receive, but receive to practice in our respective ways 習. To ―receive teaching 受教‖ is to ―transmit practices 傳習‖ to turn apart 相遠 in diverse creativities; ―born alike, [we] practice apart‖ (17/2). 1058

葛洪, 抱朴子, 疾謬, 臺北市三民書局, 民91, 下: 311. In less than a page, he packs so much.

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Confucius raises one for us to return three (7/8), for us to hear one to know ten (5/9), tells the gone to let us know the coming 告往知來 (1/15), to succeed the gone that opened what came, to open what comes 繼往開來. Learning happens via such inter-wording 與言 to evoke, raising points by expounding the past to transmit creativity. Among friends as teachers (7/22) and between past and now (1/15), inter-wording creates new vistas, as Plato-Socrates reached new plateaus-conclusions via dialogues. Chuang Tzu‘s inter-wording radicalizes Confucius‘. A kitchen-fellow shows the lord his lowly profession of dancing butchery to feed the lord; it is inter-wording existential. Underling wheelwright tells his lord point blank that ancient words the lord is reading are scum; he elucidates it by illustrating it with his lowly profession of chiseling wheels,1059 got in heart, hit at hand. All their inter-wordings are written—as scum?—to inter-word with us latecomers. They all tell us not to tell; they forget words to word with us. They vanish to let us appear; their ―teaching‖ is ―shadow‖ to ―follow‖ us to etch us out. This wording-with us evokes (to teach) to transmit creativity, as flame lighting up flame to continue without end.1060 This is Chinese wisdom alive through history till today. Let us put this point negatively. ―China fresh today for millennia‖ vanishes as soon as I visit this territory just to collect whatever interests me. Soon boredom and disdain dawn, and I must leave China the primitive, or else give my kind hand to update and deck up China the museum relic shamefully lingering in today‘s civilized world. For me, China has nothing that has been inexhaustibly nourishing its myriad people for millennia, till today. China is no ―China‖ raw, genuine, and refreshing but one more item collected in my glorious all-comprehensive system; proudly imprisoned in my splendid West, I have no China as China, much less China ever richly alive today to enliven the West. Obviously my self-imprisonment chokes me to death as I kill China.1061 This volume on Chinese wisdom alive is dedicated to shaking ―me‖ awake, from my dogmatic slumber all-lethal, into global inter-enrichment, which requires that China must be let distinctly Chinese, and thereby let the West be really Western, not ―universal‖ beyond Western. 1059

Does ―wheel‖ intimate wheeling inter-wording? Chuang Tzu 3/2-12, 13/68-74, 26/48-49, 11/63-65, 3/19. 1061 A worse case that need not detain us here is someone who does not even take a second look at China, so proud as he is of his (not her) distinguished philosophical achievements in the West. Wu‘s essay inviting Rorty to inter-learn with Confucius, citing vibrant intercultural relativism, was brushed aside forthwith. Rorty said rhetorically praising relativism the pejorative term is a mistake. He said that the West (he) has been telling stories (so no need to learn from China). See Rorty, Pragmatism, and Confucianism, ed. Yong Huang, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009, pp. 279-280. I have three responses. One, Rorty just dismisses relativism as pejorative term and my rationale as rhetoric. That is not fair, not conscientiously philosophical. Two, Western math-logic is one sort of storytelling, but this fact does not argue against dialoguing with Chinese historical storytelling. He has not read how Confucius and Chinese thinkers think their story-way. Rorty uses stories as dispensable illustration for his argument; it is not story-thinking, thinking led by story wherever it goes, thinking story-way, ―arguing‖ story-way, arguing without ―logic‖-arguing. Thus, three, he is full of himself, for he thinks he has story as China has, so he refused to inter-learn in world conversation he himself proposed; he does not practice what he preaches. He came to China for conference in his name to teach China, not to learn from China. It is so sad. How concretely China-West interculture can go is shown in Wu‘s ―World Interculturalism: China Written in English,‖ Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, June 2005, pp. 1-42, where under ―relativism‖ (12-18) Wu cited six distinctive features of Chinese story-thinking, no definitive views, no conclusion, methods un-canonize-able, no-arguing, thereby arguing, and climbing up sayings to kick them away (Lao Tzu, Wittgenstein). 1060

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To think of ―thinking‖ is to ―meta-act.‖ Meta-A as with-A1062 can be above A or amid A, or both in some amid-A acts. The musician is above music as composer, and amid music as performer; ―thinking of life‖ also lives on, so life-thinking is meta-thinking amid life.1063 Thinking can be taken as a meta-think, above-think metaphysics 形而上學, and amidthink meso-physics 形而中學.1064 The West picks above-think philosophy; China embraces amid-thinking wisdom. In the West, meta-think may still be thinking but is no longer a common one; it is abstracted from daily thinking, theoretically ―out of the Cave,‖ surveying this world from ―above‖ as above-think, above life-thinking. Western ―metaphysics‖ is above-physics, above studies of things of the world. In contrast, in China, meta-thinking thinks-amid the worldly skin-exchaning, heartthrobbing, lung-breathing, character-writing (character-building and as calligraphy), cooking, family-ing, fighting, and money-making. China meta-thinks thinking-amid things, ―mesophysics‖ in, with, and as daily life-thinking, to sense life as reasonable, deep wisdom alive. A telling example of meta-above vs. meta-amid is ―philosophy of history,‖ a meta-think on history. Western philosophy of history typically argues about history as if history were an object separate from an ahistorical thinker. Western philosophy of history is above-history looking over it, not realizing that thinking-about-history is itself part of history. In contrast, China has only two volumes on history, 史通 and 文史通義.1065 The former cites ―six schools with two styles 六家二體‖ as authentic histories, and then gives various examples of how best to write history. The latter says ―historical events, historical literature, and historical meaning 史事, 史文,1066 史義‖ make history, the last being the essence of history, without saying what it is; then it goes into Tao, etc., and how best to write history. So many recent essays1067 on the latter repeat all this.1068 In other words, both books execute, however imperfectly,1069 a mid-history sort of metahistory. Our volume has pondered on the meaning of the events so far, just as the ancient independently pondered on the meaning of the events then. Such historical reenactment 1062

On ―meta‖ see H. G. Liddell and R. Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996, pp. 11081109. 1063 God is above the world as creator-Father and amid the world as sustainer, continual creator-Spirit. 1064 「形而上學」is from 易經, 繫辭上傳, 第十二章 (臺北市三民書局, 民85, p. 526). 「形而中學」is 徐復觀‘s coinage. 1065 (唐)劉知幾撰, (畫)浦起龍釋, 史通通釋, 臺北市九思出版有限公司, 民67, and (清)章學誠著, 葉瑛校注, 文史通義校注, 北京市中華書局, , 2005. Both volumes have been mentioned in a different context. 1066 章學誠is quite eloquent on how literature 文 originates in history 史 that is the inevitable reasonable process of nature; as 文以載道 (載史), so 文以史裁(統文), interpenetrating in sense 通義, breath to breath 息息相關. He elaborates on Mencius‘ (4B21) ―共文則史, writing in history style.‖ (王義良著, 章實齋以史統文的文論研究, 高雄市復文圖書出版社, 1995, esp. from 第三章 on). But he did not say 文史‘s unity is cosmic music. History shaping literature Tao-deep is quite original in China. Some Western writers impressively weave history into their literature, some extensively, but none is shaped by history. See e.g., Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1864-69), Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ (1951), Constantine P. Cavafy, Collected Poems (2009), etc. 1067 My student Dr. T‘ang, Rui-hong 湯瑞弘博士 generously collected for me a vast amount of writings on 文史通義. 1068 Or else, they try poorly and in vain to execute Western philosophizing about the volume. 1069 The greatest of our many complaints is that they failed to specify clearly what history is, what history means, the 史義. They harp on which actual histories are ―better‖ than which, how appropriately to write history, etc., engulfed in history itself. But being engulfed in history is precisely Chinese meta-history. Both books exhibit this crucial point, and their exhibition is history.

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personal through time is meta-history that is history, the history of history as history, historyamid history. It is not the West‘s ―philosophy of history‖ above history. This is how China is history-conscious. In the meantime, we overhear this dialogue between the West and China. The West (W) says: Facts can be fairly evaluated only by lifting them out of their immediate factual context. Philosophy must be objective, above board factual. Philosophy must be above the worldCave. China (C) says: Doing so is also part of history. Philosophy of history is also history.

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W: Hegel also said, ―World judgment is world history.‖ C: Hegel‘s world judgment is done by world-Spirit that is Reason above history. W: Where is objectivity in China if reason needs objectivity to judge the facts? C: We humans judge the now by going ―above‖ it into the past-―now.‖ ―Going to the past‖ is a historical move, history itself—history is a verb, you see. W: What if the past-―now‖ gone into is itself wrong? C: The future-―now‖ judges our-now by going above our-now, after all dust-now is settled. So, going beyond history is history-after history, and all this is history; history above history is history amid history. Reason moving above all facts, even past history, this move describes human time; the move is the dynamics of history itself. W: This is pan-historicism, one brand of philosophy of history. C: Pan-historicism is part of history. Philosophy of history is history. Philosophy above all things is part of history. Being human, we cannot jump above all things in space to comprehend them. We can only continue to comprehend things as they come in as life goes on. To ―continue,‖ ―as they come,‖ ―as life goes on‖— all this move is human time, human history. This dialogue goes on this way, but isn‘t this dialogue itself a part of history? This is what being history-conscious means. China is said to be history-conscious for good reason, which is part of history. History is reason, as reason is history. History, history, we are all too history.

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Chapter 48

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CHINESE WISDOM ALIVE TODAY—A WRAP UP Now, let us go slower. Three features characterize China; China is story-filled, a palindrome, and humor-filled. To ex-press this way of thinking and living is Chinese wisdom alive, millennia old, fresh today. ONE: China is story-filled. The West wants theoretical ―universals,‖ abstracted above the concrete, so as to last forever. But China just tells stories of concrete ―here now‖ since ancient millennia, and these here-now‘s are forever fresh, alive, and deep with meaning always, every ―today‖! Stories, actual, likely, and unlikely are ―concrete universals,‖ or rather, ―story interversal.‖ Story-thinking is storytelling, story-hearing, and story-adding, and all this storyprocess is a historical process. TWO: China is a palindrome, literally ―back-running [ahead] again,‖ same word(s) read forward and back, such as ―1881.‖ In China, things actually run one into another, back and forth; logic-rationally, ―P implies Q‖ is ―Q implies P,‖ where ―imply‖ is plied-in, P and Q being reciprocally plied-in. Confucianism, Taoism, Legalism, and Buddhism inter-involve and interweave, actually and logically, the Yin-Yang way. How do these four thought-trends inter-involve, inter-run-into? Confucianism is lively as Taoism; Taoism is profound when frivolous, profound as Confucian. Legalism came from Hsün Tzu a modified Confucian, and legalism derives from a modified Lao Tzu. Confucianism and Taoism have historically fared quite brutally, i.e., both isms fared legalistically in history. China Taoistically deconstructed Buddhism into Ch‘an (Zen) of radical realism, which in turn deconstructed Confucianism into Neo-Confucianism of Chu 朱 and Wang 王 and others. This palindrome, actual and logical, is a story of history-thinking in China, back and forth, in this sense. Ancient sages aspired to cosmic-human ideals and strove after them. We today do so likewise as they did, yearning after them, learning from their lives. In so doing, we today add on to their lives—unawares or not. History in China continues in this palindromic way. THREE: China is humor-filled. Confucius is known in China as an ironist and humorist; he ―knows nothing‖ about death, destiny, and spirits, and was constantly rubbing himself with them, always aware of death, destiny, awestruck at the divine while enjoying rivers and hills, living as his heart desires, and sighed at those who claim to be A and are not A. Chuang Tzu

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toys with death as he dream-talked with a roadside skull, butterfly-dreamed fluttering between life and death, and drum-sang at his wife‘s death.1070 All this is to live on in and out of death, to live no-death. How could all this be possible? Amazingly, yet as a matter of fact, China actually practices living-now in and out of death. This process is called ―history 史,‖ story-woven and recorded as ―literature 文.‖ This is to set up words 立言 incorruptible 不巧, living on, deathless. China is alive for millennia today fresh. What does all this mean? Well, what are humor and irony? ―Humor‖ induces laughter when we are triumphant. Research says that laughter and joy boost immune functions, produce more natural killer cells against diseases, and release endorphins for a sense of wellbeing in the brain. Thus those who joyfully laugh live healthier and longer1071; China‘s humor is opposed to Epicurean-Stoic ―ataraxia,‖ solemn ―do not disturb‖ humorless, laughter-less. ―Irony‖ is tool to humor as humor is tool to laughter. Irony is a tool of humor, saying A to mean not-A.1072 Irony thus pretends. Socrates pretended not to know to expose experts pretending to know, but Socrates honestly did not know, so he pretended to pretend. Chuang Tzu (29) lets Brigand Chih 盜跖 pretend a good guy to expose Confucius pretending a good guy. Irony thus cleanses history. Metaphor says A to point to like-A; irony says A to point to not-A. Both use just a part of A; ―Jesus is a door‖ omits ―Jesus is wood.‖ This limitation in literal meaning leads to— produces—humorous wit. Now, this point, limit producing wit, has a surprising pragmatic bite that is China, the distinctively Chinese way of life. Sorrow is somber-humorless, and only one-with-humor can be truly sad; only those who laugh heartily can wail heartily.1073 Humor deepens high seriousness in sorrow. Lin said that Chuang Tzu is profound when frivolous1074; they are one in him. We say this is true of all Chinese sage-thinkers. This is because both high seriousness and laughable humor originate in sharp sensitivity biting into life and things. Only those sensitive can laugh and wail. ―Sensitive‖ is sensitized to things‘ sense, deep and clear. Joy and sorrow are contraries, not contradictories. Contradictories such as ―The universe is 4000 years old‖ and ―The universe is older than 4000 years‖ cannot both be true at once, while contraries must coexist to inter-manifest, such as light and darkness, black and white. China is steeped so deeply in the concrete time and space that it thinks to thread all conflicting contradictories into complementary contraries, as it keeps conflicts as conflicts, confirming complements on strength of conflicts. This is the basic ubiquitous (not universal) 1070

On how natural though unusual this story is, see its contrast with Kierkegaard‘s story in ―§ Kierkegaard and Chuang Tzu, in the Comic‖ in Part II. 1071 ―Laughter yoga‖ was practiced in Tokyo, they say (May 2009); seeing a part of it in the news makes us feel as if laughter were an eternal giggle, silly and impossible. Rationales for laugh in life are tried here. 1072 Similarly, ―metaphor‖ says A to mean like-A. Metaphor contrasts with ―hiding words 隱語,‖ riddles, to obscure what is otherwise clear. Humor and irony belong to this family of expressions that take a roundabout way of saying A by saying no-A. See on 隱語, ―說魚‖ in 聞一多全集(一)，上海開朊書局，民37，pp. 117138 甲. 1073 So, only saints sinless truly repent, and only those in Nirvana enter Nirvana. 1074 ―One should therefore read him as one would a humorist writer, know that he is frivolous when he is profound, and profound when he is frivolous.‖ Lin Yutang, The Wisdom of China and India, NY: Random House, 1942, p. 627. Lin did not probe into the structure, much less rationale, of such amazing unity. Wu quoted him in The Butterfly as Companion, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990, pp. 26, 403, On Metaphoring, Leiden: Brill, 2001, p. 566, and others. The rationale of the unity is finally said here.

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Grain in and through things (not principle) of Ying and Yang. The ubiquitous Grain 理 of myriad thing is everywhere every-when, the one Way-Tao walked out thing-inherent and myriad. Universal principle is the princely abstract Beyond turned (-verse) one (uni-), lording over insignificant concrete details to comprehend them, thereby conferring meaning to them. This universal perspective sees and survey spatially; the onlooker stands apart to observe. ―To hear and listen‖ resounds in contagion of waves-of-being in rhythm. To hear obeys 聽從, dancing as the paragons dance life admirably, as they banter and wail. Only those who shout out heartily can shed tears of joy and of sorrow at the heart-of-being, echoing throughout Heaven and Earth in deep rhythmic pulsation; read Psalm 126. You are changed by things changing, to change me in their irresistible rumbles we hear. China‘s music is cosmic in ethics sociopolitical. Haydn is my Chuang Tzu; neither contrives but let sounds arise, melodious. He is precious in that anyone can play his simple music, reasonably well; the more simplesensitive, the more refreshing-profound. Clever shaping spoils Haydn; the more shaped, the less Haydn heard.1075 He sings silence1076 as birds do; silence cannot be shaped as no one shapes birdsongs. Once shaped (if possible), silence vanishes. We had better follow Haydn and birds to sing silence living it, lest all vanishes noisily. Chuang Tzu is as simple, straightly sensitive, sensitively straight, yet strangely such straight simplicity offends our clever contrivance and convention. He turns ―odd‘ and ―paradoxical‖ to us, as Socrates was condemned to death. Luckily Haydn has not offended the West, nor was Chuang Tzu condemned to death. Still, Haydn and Chuang Tzu are all too concrete to be toyed with theoretical universals. Chuang Tzu is China. ―But Chuang Tzu is just a part of China.‖ Birds are also a tiny part of nature, and whatever they twitter utters nature just right, and so they ―sing silence‖ of nature, not noisy; birds sing to echo valleys deep and calm.1077 Machines in tune whirl silent, effective; the healthy are calm and casual while the sick writhe and groan. Chinese sentences build on audio-ideographs portraying things‘ sonorous sense, so whatever they express hits the bull‘s eye; they sing sense of silent things. Music in nature should be allowed to overflow as it moistens everywhere, enriching everything. Our preoccupations, trivial, extraneous, and unnatural, should never be allowed to stem music in nature flooding-in; stemming music dries us up to wilt us away. Taoism says, the Confucian fuss over ―doing good‖ closes us off to choke us dead. Saying so, Taoists forgets saying so, while soaking in bird-twittering silence echoing valleys and skies. ―Nothing‖ is here, fulfilling everything, no-do, all-do, alive, making seasons with vast Heaven and Earth. We then come by and by to sing our own music of life, to write our own calligraphy breathing the music of our life in the bone 氣骨. We turn into seasons of vast flood-in of cosmic music 浩然之氣 as Mencius used to breathe soaring-soaking all over nature. History forms itself, personal, communal, cosmic. Still, as human expressions Chinese sentences tend to migrate into saying too much to turn noisy and shallow, if not choose wrong words to swerve out of focus. Chinese writers 1075 1076 1077

So, Heifetz the supreme shaper confessed that easy Mozart is hardest; he hardly touched Haydn. Just listen to any of his piano sonatas; silence is there bird-singing. A line from 林征明‘s poem, 「蟬噪林愈靜，鳥鳴山谷幽」is rifled to our purpose.

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forever need the music of poetic sensitivity to keep them in tune, in line, to sing silence of things expressed. All Confucians are thus Taoists at heart, hid and powerful. This is why Chuang Tzu the Taoist appears above—with simple Haydn—to typify Chinese wisdom alive—concrete, all too ubiquitously concrete. In the universal perspective, all things complementary tend to turn into conflicts, all contraries are threatened to turn contradictories; joy is joy, sorrow is sorrow, and the twain never meet. In contrast, in China, contradictories are shockers of Name School 名家,1078 fulfilled by Chuang Tzu to conform life to actuality. Joy, banter, humor, and laughter join sad serious wailing; these contraries inter-intensify to enrich living. Chuang Tzu fulfilled Name scholars this way. ―In the beginning is the Word‖ (the Bible) and ―In the beginning is relation‖ (Buber).1079 China has both, saying, ―In the beginning is naming relating‖ us to actuality, as actuality. Naming relating us to actuality is Confucian ethics; naming relating as actuality is naming as creation of Hsün Tzu, expounded in NeoConfucianism as ―investigation of things 格物.‖ All this is ―righting names 正名,‖ righting thinking (Name School) to right behavior (Confucianism). Name scholars‘ ―para-doxes‖ are literally contra-opinions to jolt us to turn us pliant and adaptable to actuality, in actual ethics, in deliberating mind, in the heart-of-being of our inner core 心 and of thing‘s grain 理, and this twofold ―thing-investigation 格物‖ is taken by Chu Hsii 朱熹 as actual probe for thing-grain, by Wang Yang-ming 王陽明 as heart-cultivation. This primal purpose is soon twisted out of shape. Name Scholars turned obsessed with righting-thinking alone, and leaves actuality; Confucians touted ―good‖ to corrupt good as a fanatic touting his being normal to turn abnormal. Chuang Tzu came along to learn from Name Scholars (Hui Tzu) by arguing with him to ground him onto actuality. Chuang Tzu also told Confucius to quit ostentatious showoff of ―good‖-ideal, to return to the self-so 自然 to turn naturally good 自然, as Confucius did finally (2/4). So Chuang Tzu himself forgets trying, forgets words. He leans on criminals to learn from the un-learnable (23/76-79), and lets Brigand Chih 盜跖 teach the teacher Confucius. Chuang Tzu forgets talk to talk, argues against argument (2/84-92), banters with Name scholar Hui Tzu in Hui‘s own way (17/87-91, etc.), and plays with tyrants their silly games (4/58-59). This is to ―yin shih 因是‖ (2/55), following along, originating in the as-is, what things selfaffirm as all right. As a result, wry humorous composure comes into everyday living, come what may. ―O woe where weal leans! O weal where woe lies!‖ intoned Lao Tzu (58). In weal as in woe, in laughing heartily and crying heartily, we are truly alive heartily, always deeply humorous.

1078

Kung-sun Lung has eight meanings of ―White horse, no horse.‖ (公孫龍子, 臺北市三民書局, 2004, pp. 2741) One is this. ―White horse, black one, brown one, grey one, etc.‖ can relate to ―horse,‖ but they cannot to ―white horse.‖ So, ―White horse is no horse‖; they differ in category. Baby Mary insists, ―Mom, I want a breakfast and a toast‖; she says, ―I want a horse and a white horse.‖ ―Breakfast‖ is no ―toast‖; ―white horse‖ is no ―horse.‖ Another conundrum, ―I go to Yüeh today and arrive yesterday,‖ could be understood this way. I start my journey to Yüeh today, and will arrive there some tomorrow, I say. But ―tomorrow‖ never arrives, for tomorrow-arrived is no tomorrow; tomorrow is forever nowhere. Yesterday is no longer here, i.e., nowhere, either. So, tomorrow not-yet and yesterday no-longer are both nowhere; I start going today, and arrive yesterday that is nowhere as tomorrow nowhere. We might as well say, ―take off today, arrive today,‖ for only ―today‖ exists. ―Arrive yesterday‖ is just a shocker. 1079 John 1: 1. Martin Buber, I and Thou, tr. Ronald Gregor Smith, NY: Scribner Classics, 2000, p. 31.

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This is what Russell caught when he saw composure among coolies when they met insults, composure in city-dwellers stayed when brigand-disaster was supposed to be imminent.1080 Thus humor and irony conquer suffering, and jolt us delighted into realizing deep sense in things, as Name Scholar‘s 名家 paradoxes (contra-opinion) meant to do.1081 So it is that humor and irony make light of human pain, to turn us forever alive through thick and thin. This life-attitude has a repercussion on ―death,‖ the end of life. We see that death ―exists‖ to scare us only in life, where life is seen pitted against death. So there is no death in death, for no death resides in no-life. What if we live in no-life? We then would live no-death. This ―living no-death‖ can be of two ways. One is to live in no-life, living blowing out the flame of our desire-to-life, and the ―blowing-out‖ the flame is literally ―Nirvana.‖ Living blowing out living is an irony Zen laughingly humors on. Rock-bottom mortal agonies widely publicized was followed by utmost stunning Resurrection totally hushed, barely divulged just to his least of lovers and his innermost circle, never to the public. This central series of events in Christianity is ridiculously contrary to what we expect, so ironic, so farcical. Still, as ―sting‖ of sin and devil, death remains no joke, the ultimate Enemy to conquer, yet Jesus‘ followers were engulfed in deadly agonies in life. Again, life-death contrast is ironic humor,1082 not death. Another way is to live now not then, a bit twisty. Woody Allen ruefully joked, ―I wish I knew where I will die, so I don‘t go there,‖ and we laugh. Why? Our laugh shows we chime in to wish with him, but are aware that he is wrong, for death happens not somewhere ―there‖ but ―then‖ anywhere, ―a time to bear, and a time to die.‖1083 So his saying can be changed to ―I wish I knew when I will die, so I don‘t go then.‖ Now, not-go-then is literally ―now‖; I must live now so I don‘t die. Woody-humor spins out all this. Such ―living now‖ is of three sorts. The first is Buddhist living blowing-out, living ―in‖ emptiness 空, including Zen. The second is Stoic-Epicurean ―a-taraxia,‖ literally ―no disturbing life‖ as a hotel sign says, for our living hotel-hops.1084 The third sort is Chuang Tzu going ―in and out‖ of death and life, told in a story of dreaming to be a butterfly to awaken from and to it; it is quite simple, quite slippery, and quite fascinating-humorous. Chuang Tzu jokes on death itself by mixing it with sex in his wry ironic Lady Beautiful kidnapped by a barbarian chief, and repented of her initial tears after sharing the chief‘s 1080

Bertrand Russell, The Problem of China, NY: The Century Co., 1922, pp. 211-225. Sadly, he did not probe into why Chinese people had such strange composure. 1081 Thus these paradoxes 辯 of Name Scholars (Chuang Tzu‘s ―supreme swindle 弔詭‖) belong also to China‘s family of evocation, i.e., metaphor, hiding words, irony, and humor. And so, it barks up the wrong tree to ―logically parse‖ to unravel these paradoxes, as many ―logicians‖ do. Chuang Tzu cavils not at their being ―illogical‖ but at them ―unable to convince people‘s hearts (不能朋人之心 33/79),‖ i.e., failing to evoke people, as rhetoric failed. 1082 The Gospels‘ major portions are on Christ‘s death events. Mark‘s short ending even omits Resurrection. Even Athenians the worldly informed were impressed with Resurrection (Acts 17:21,32). Paul its passionate preacher was taken as insane (Acts 26:24); he suffered mortal hardships for Resurrection (John T. Fitzgerald, Cracks in an Earthen Vessel: An Examination of the Catalogues of Hardships in the Corinthian Correspondence, Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1988), while taking death as ―sting‖ of devil (1 Corinthians 15). Elton Trueblood, The Humor of Christ (NY: Harper & Row, 1964) has no ―death.‖ 1083 Ecclesiastes 3:2. Cf. ―the time came for her to bear a child‖ (Luke 2:6). 1084 Both ways can be taken as two ways of confronting Nothingness. Its confrontation in the West resulted in apocalyptic irrationalism of modern existentialism quite gloomy, as succinctly described by William Barrett‘s Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (NY: Doubleday, 1962). In contrast, China thrives on Nothingness as 無, 虛, and 空.

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square bed and sumptuous meals. How do we know our fear of death is not as silly as Lady Beautiful‘s tears? Chuang Tzu also pillowed over a casual roadside skull to dream-talk with it about its exquisite joy making seasons with the cosmos. Such vivacious curiosity over death enables friends feelingly to chant as they gather around the deathbed of their friend to see him off, and enables Chuang Tzu to squat and put upside down an empty barrel to tom-tom chant over his wife‘s death. These stories humor over death to deepen life.1085 Let me repeat his dream story to culminate all above. Chuang Tzu ―last night 昔‖1086 dreamed to be a butterfly. He was sure he was a butterfly; and then, on awakening, he was sure he was no butterfly but a man. But then, he was not sure, for he could be a man having dreamed to be a butterfly or a butterfly currently dreaming to be a man. Both situations are equally plausible. So he was sure unsure, awakened to dreaming, quite distinct from Buddha awakening from dreaming. Now, ―dreaming‖ is possible when ―Chuang and butterfly differ 有分,‖ and this is called ―things changing 物化‖ (2/94-96); distinction as such—man vs. butterfly, death vs. life— means things inter-transforming, in ourselves and with butterfly the other. This in-and-out dynamics is the ―not go then,‖ ―living now‖ that is ―living in and out of death,‖ a dream. Is butterfly itself a dream? Is dreaming itself a butterfly? Does it matter as long as we see that ―butterfly‖ flutters between life and death? This simple subtle road to deathlessness is made by a simple story. This is story-thinking distinct from logic-rationality,1087 calculating what has happened, not what goes on now open to what is to come. Future is contingent (touch and go), accidental (chances falling on us), and random (running haphazard). All this is impossible to calculate and ―logicize‖ analytically, definitively. The West quests ―pure facts‖ with no meaning, no ―opinions,‖ yet fact is always factwith-meaning, as it is always in China. ―Meaning‖ is given by historians and posterity always changing, so ―fact‖ always change; history changes. Meaning is given free, ever open to interpretations and to all possibilities that come, precisely by being based on factual data. The heavier the fact-wings, the higher soars the meaning-airplane. Meaning-weighed fact-thinking is no irresponsible flight of fancy but weighted with facts, yet the factual weight of wings is invisible during the flight. This free open soaring is in the milieu of time, its trail is itself a storytelling, and the story it tells is ―history,‖ and history is factual information that feeds with meaning to soar higher. The process is an open dynamics of living, ever fresh ―here now‖ for millennia. It is the lived tradition in literature of storytelling, story-hearing, and story-adding, crisscrossing 文 into history 史 unceasing. China—Chinese wisdom—is history-stories 文史 alive, ever today-fresh. The free airplane soaring in meaning is not irresponsible fancy but accomplished with heavy wings of factual rationale, invisible while in flight, except from outside seen as inevitable retrospectively, not ―at the moment.‖

1085

Chuang Tzu 2/73-81, 94-96; 6/54-60; 18/15-19, 22-29. Making fun of death deepens Chuang Tzu‘s humor. In comparison, Kierkegaard‘s cynical joke on a failed applicant for prostitute-license is not funny. See our previous section comparing their comicality. 1086 Thus the story is put in a time-context. This is a timed story. 1087 ―Logic‖-thinking differs from logical thinking that includes story-thinking, also logical in its own way.

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Chinese Wisdom Alive Today—A Wrap Up

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This is why the West is fascinated with ―fate‖—fatum, what has been spoken—that is retrospectively judged, not ―destiny‖ destined by unexpected courses of events going into the future. ―Logic‖ wants impossibly to ―start today and arrive yesterday.‖1088 In contrast, storytelling makes sense—by story-hearing—of any new data while they come in, ―yarning‖ them into a sensible tale, i.e., history 史 in story-literature 文. Story-thinking palindromic, humorous, and historical, describe how alive Chinese wisdom is. How about our description of all this in all above pages? Is this description itself Chinese or Western? Our description talks about both ―above meta-think‖ and ―amid meta-thinking,‖ not abstracted from life, not lived-and-engaged, and both, in an engaging way, alive. We go freely in and out of both the abstract and the concrete, focusing on China‘s ―amid-meta thinking‖ against the Western backdrop of ―above-meta think,‖ to etch forth the West as well. We have four groups of people related to ―story.‖ Group One are storytellers, Haruki Murakami, Barry Magid, Amy Tan, Iris Chang, Maxine Hong Kingston. Group Two are story-hearers who enjoy stories, dig into meanings, and change their lives. Group Three are story-thinkers as this volume and some writings. Group Four are story critics as Socrates (Apology, Phaedrus) and narratologists. They all require talents; how are they related? I must stop here before sucking into meta-level maelstroms. China has no Western ―mistake,‖1089 ―humor,‖ etc.; the West has no Chinese ―通,‖ ―氣,‖ ―勢,‖ ―妙,‖ etc. Words show ways of viewing the world. So China and the West differ in gestalt, in manner of intending, style of synthesizing, and way of capturing the lifeworld. A culture is a gestalt; no single culture embraces all, for a perspective is a specific angle of vision, a specific pattern of attitude, and specificity depends on other specificities to solidify; global interculture consolidates regionalism. Western philosophy has since Socrates pursued what it is—the universal—that makes things what they are; for this ―it,‖ thinking leaves sense-caves to climb up to the Form-Sun. The leaving heads to abstract analytical objectivity. Chinese wisdom asks what common things mean by entering the concrete world here now, and expresses their senses in audioideographs 文字, compressed paintings of things‘ senses, no analytical signs or X-rays or pictures. We have contrasted the West‘s concrete-leaving analytical objectivity with China‘s concrete-entering pondering on senses of things, because such a contrast has a pragmatic bite. The description opposes siding with one side alone, Eurocentrism or Sino-centrism, and opposes going beyond both into ―the brave new world philosophy,‖ a tacit Western pie in the Platonic sky. Instead, our description of the contrast extends the actuality of subjectivity as intersubjectivity, existence as inter-existence, and insists that globalization needs both the 1088 1089

The phrase is what the Name-scholars 名家辯士 touted. Strangely, China lives in time and is keenly aware of time, but has no word ―mistake‖ that is a time-sensitive notion of error. The West has the word ―mistake‖ but is quite ill at ease on thinking time-wise retrospectively. For example, ―how error is possible‖ tackled by Plato (in Theatetus) and Royce (in ―The Possibility of Error‖ in Religious Aspect of Philosophy) got lost somewhere unknown, because both forget that error happens-intime, in me, realized only after the fact as ―mistake.‖ Royce‘s logical assumption of Being-as-Truth in error is unintelligible and unneeded, for such ―assumption‖ lacks who made error when. ―Without who-when‖ makes this assumption unintelligible; ―with who-when‖ renders this assumption dispensable. How do I know I have made a mistake? Commonsense knows; it is a mystery of ―wiser after the fact,‖ history as all-knowing. We all know this; none knows why or how it is so.

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West and China, that the ―world philosophy‖ is composed of both China and the West interenriching. ―World culture‖ is intercultural. This point has been made before, but it is so crucial and so often neglected that it cannot be repeated too often. Actually, a point has been haunting this whole Part, the individual-ubiquity intimacy. Individual independence needs interdependence; group inter-existence needs individual selfstanding. Self-esteem is basic to personal dignity, the condition of inter-existence that is existence. My self must be supreme in cosmos, and myriad things exist with me as I depend on them to exist. The one grain of things 理一 runs through things shared variously 分殊. Individuals and togetherness interdepend to inter-birth.1090 No one is an island; we all have at heart unbearable sensitivity to others. I am I-Thou; existence is inter-existence. Conversely, togetherness is based on independence. The Middle Kingdom 中國 is at the center of the cosmos, and center-kingdom is essential to interdependent cosmopolitanism. Individuality covers totality, as covering begins and ends at individuality. An individual creates itself in the Ubiquitous Creating Itself; Ubiquity-Creation manifests variously as individuals creating. Ubiquity and individuality inter-depend to inter-birth; Ubiquity Creating one grain of things to share variously as individual creating. So, this Chinese thinking begins world interculture. This point answers the question, ―Why do we do all this?‖; it is elaborated in a section below, urging us to let Chinese thinking be Chinese, not Western, so as to globalize. Globalization is required for and requires integrities of each culture. Our skin is our exchange-station with outside to living growth; our regional culture is our skin our intercultural station toward global inter-thriving. All starts at ―what Chinese wisdom is‖ presented in this volume as a sine qua non to world globalization. To substantiate the urgent necessity global and intercultural, we must demonstrate the integrity of each culture to benefit interculture on an equal footing; the following section meta-binds our whole volume.

1090

David Hackett Fischer (Liberty and Freedom, Oxford University Press, 2005) describes liberty as independence and freedom as communal dependence entwine to compose American history, but is silent on why, i.e., they need each other to exist as respectively themselves. This is the soul of Chinese wisdom..

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“LET CHINESE THINKING BE CHINESE”: SINE QUA NON TO GLOBALIZATION

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1091

Globalization that inter-cultures to inter-deepen requires Chinese thinking1092 to be Chinese, not Western, and thereby let Western philosophy be Western, not Chinese. Chinese thinking must be Chinese, as any cultural thinking has been that culture for millennia, Chinese or Western. This straight task is urged here, for such identity-tautology is being violated; Eurocentrism imposes itself on others to wipe out the West as it does us all, to collapse globalization. Globalization is a globe-wide interculture that needs each individual culture to be itself to inter-enrich, never dominated by any culture, Chinese or Western; global inter-culture requires that Chinese thinking be Chinese, not Western, and thereby the West be Western, not Chinese or worldwide. This is an ontological tautology not empty1093 but the integrity of individuals, to interact among them to all-enrich. Tautology is the bone-structure of thinking, to restore China and then the West, to interculture in globalization. Interculture and individuality inter-depend in two ways. One, individuality enables interculture to operate; two, interculture consolidates individuality. Way One is basic to Way Two (subsections A to E below), and is completed by Way Two (subsection F). Here are six subsections: A. why letting Chinese thinking be Chinese is required of globalization, B. what it means to let Chinese thinking be Chinese, C. how necessary it is today, D. how to attain it, E. what it contains, and F. how it inter-deepens with the West. Thus this section stresses that China as China is needed for globalization, explicating why global interaction requires China-individuality as other-confirmed. The tautological law of cultural identity—A is A, and not not-A, so Chinese thinking must be Chinese, not Western— is sine qua non to interculture spreading global, inter-deepening. 1091

This is refurbished from Wu‘s essay to appear in Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy. China is listed first because its integrity is most damaged, and restoring it restores the West. Final section F shows how Chinese integrity leads to interculture with the West. We focus mainly on classical China, for today cannot exist without its root the past, which is needed even to oppose the past, as did Mao (Note 26). See Susanne K. Langer in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp, La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1949, pp. 381-383. 1093 Tautology as ontologically significant appears in Parmenides, Confucius (righting names), Chuang Tzu (selfso), Leibniz (self-sufficiency), Schopenhaur (the principle of sufficient reason), Descartes (cogito), Zen Buddhism (as is), Nishida Kitaro (double negatives), Sartre (negatively), Marcel (positively), etc. In fact, all thinking, East or West, can be said to be based on ―A is A, and not not-A.‖ 1092

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A. WHY Three points are here: globalization is a miscegenation that shapes uniqueness, interversal globalization depends on individual cultures as inter-existence in existence, and so, uniqueness of each individual culture is indispensable to globalization. These three points are clarified and explicated by responses to three interrelated objections. First, someone objects, ―Each culture is a mixture, so it is senseless to let Chinese thinking be Chinese.‖ Individuality may be mixed away but mixing often strengthens uniqueness, as Mom assures Tommy in susection F. Here we support Mom by saying that, pace the objection, each existent articulates its unique mixing1094 as its gathering logos.1095 Mixing makes uniqueness, as a strong rope depends on its twines‘ variety, number, and how they are twisted into the rope. As such ―miscegenation‖ makes an individual rope, so a specific set of mixed genealogies of each culture makes that specific culture unique. Individuality shows a distinctive mode of mixing, not ―purity‖ of no-mixing.1096 Secondly, someone says, ―Today‘s world is global, melting away individualities; insisting on individuality is an anachronism.‖ This is the first objection on miscegenation applied to globalization as a melting pot, saying that globalization decimates individuality. This objection forgets that globalization is no melting pot but rainbows of cultures. Otherwise, globalization turns characterless beyond this world, to reflect the world-transcending West, nothing ―global.‖ So we reply, on the contrary, individuality is a unique synthesis of miscegenation, as the first response above explained, and so globalization as interculture depends on each culture being unique as itself and no other. Globalization is participation of distinct1097 particular localities, without which globalization vanishes. After saying so, let us join hands. Your ―anachronistic‖ is really a ―diachronic‖ passthrough of two crucial stages to reach the novel life-world reminiscent of China and the West, yet not quite either, as described in subsection D. It is the New World of verdant Global poetry envisioned in subsection F. The present subsection specifies how to arrive there. Thirdly, a final objection says, ―The law of identity, ‗A is A, not not-A,‘ says an existent is just as it is, and so, no interaction is possible.‖ This objection goes to another extreme and forgets that ―A is A‖ is af-firmed by ―not not-A,‖ i.e., not other-than-A. Existence is confirmed by coexistence with its other, existence obtains by interacting with the other. ―A as A‖ exists as ―not not-A‖; I exist as not-you, con-firmed by you. I am my face I do not know; I depend on you to tell of me, to stand-out (ex-ist) different from you.1098 I am my other‘s other. A unique individual was born of two parental others; even identical twins 1094

Mixing-in-general is nowhere; mixing is always specific. Logos articulates a gathering. Calvin O. Schrag, The Resources of Rationality, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992, pp. 77, 93. Wu, On the “Logic” of Togetherness (1998, Leiden: Brill), pp. 162 (note 41), 334 and note 181, and Wu, On Metaphoring (2001, Leiden: Brill), pp. 10 (note 23), 54-58. 1096 Uproars over Black Athena: The Afroasiaacitc Roots of Classical Civilization: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece: 1785-1985 (by Martin Bernal, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987) on mixed genealogies of Greek culture were due to missing the fact that mixing consolidates uniqueness. 1097 Many essays in Early China/Ancient Greece: Thinking Through Comparisons (eds., Steven Shankman, Stephen W. Durrant, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002) oppose dichotomizing ―China vs. West,‖ but it is illicit only if ―vs.‖ means reification, and distinction is no reification. 1098 Wu, On the “Logic” of Togetherness: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1998, pp. 88-149. 1095

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mutually differ. The law of identity, ―A is A,‖ is other-logical ―not not-A‖; being-logic is a dia-logical dialectic.1099 Otherness confirms individuality in interaction, and individuality as otherness enables intercultural globalization. ―Global‖ is inter-versal. After postmodernism deconstructed the West‘s universal rationality sovereign over things, Schrag proposed ―transversal rationality‖ across matters, still a going-over as the ―transoceanic‖ over across the ocean. Reason was seen ―over‖ (Plato) matters, and now ―across‖ (Schrag) matters, another ―over.‖ We say, reason is inter-reason as the human is intersubjective, not trans-subjective; the transversal must yield to the inter-versal. The subjective pride of individuality alone solidifies intersubjectivity that depends on each solid subject. Inter-existence solidifies each existent; stamping out China stamps out the West, and globalization turns a mushy lump of nobody.1100 This is Bradley‘s blanket universal Royce stoutly opposed. Dallmayr says,1101

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[W]e may perhaps survive [as individuals] if—instead of simply exploiting our arsenals of power and control—we would stop and respect the Other as other, [i.e., many] cultures of peoples and nations, and if we thus could learn to experience otherness and the others as the ―other‖ of ourselves in order to partake in one another.

Transversal is cross-cultural; inter-versal is intercultural. Cross-culture assumes separated distance to go across; interculture interpenetrates to inter-enrich. We are by nature ―interhuman,‖ for ―cross-human‖ makes no sense. We must recognize reason as an inter-versal through things, to and fro, toward intercultural globalization. Thus globalization is not cross-cultural but inter-cultural, in and for which each culture is to be itself, each to learn from the other to inter-deepen. ―Global,‖ ―inter-,‖ and ―each‖ coimplicate1102 to make globalization intercultural, where ―each‖ culture is pivotal. Unique intermix makes an individual to deepen another inter-versally into globalization. Globalization is thus local unique cultures each trans-versing1103 itself to inter-verse with others to inter-enrich. This pivotal point will be reinforced in ―C. Necessity‖ to blossom in the final ―F. Wrap-Up.‖ This subsection on difference and otherness, congenial to diremptive 1099

With fluid intelligibility, dialogue does not operate on fixed principles, theories, or systems, but lets perspectives inter-influence and inter-change the dialogue partners, who thus grow into themselves. Dialogue continues a quiet revolution, not a top-down Plato or a bottom-up Aristotle, but parallel transformations by inter-storytelling, coherent and open. China is a storytelling culture in dialogue across space and time. The Interpretation of Dialogue (ed. Tullio Maranhao, University of Chicago Press, 1990) faintly intimates all this. 1100 Equality or inequality of existents, and what ―equality‖ means may be relevant here, but it is beyond the current concern. Still, Hwa Yol Jung‘s anthology, Comparative Political Culture in the Age of Globalization (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002) shows that we now (should) oppose Eurocentrism, the Orient is emerging, and globalization dawns. We say, saying so in general risks melting all away, unless globalization inter-cultures to inter-deepen each culture. Robin R. Wang‘s intercultural ideals in Introduction sound hollow as the essays wobble on the West-axis, in her edited Chinese Philosophy in an Era of Globalization, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 1101 Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual, Two volumes (1899), NY: Dover, 1959. Fred Dallmayr, Dialogue among Civilizations: Some Exemplary Voices, London: Palgrave, 2002, p. 65. 1102 Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (2008) has ―interindividual‖ (p. 651). Martin Buber has Between Man and Man (NY: Macmillan, 1965). ―Inter‖ and ―each‖ thus co-implicate. 1103 Calvin O. Schrag replaced universality with ―transversality‖ that ―recognizes‖ the other (Resources, op. cit., pp. 148-179) to timidly stretch to interculturalism, not quite reaching it (―A Thought Experiment on CrossCultural Dialogue and Peacemaking,‖ Letting Be: Fred Dallmayr’s Cosmopolitical Vision, ed. Stephen F. Schneck, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006, pp. 310-319).

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Western thinking (J. N. Findley), positively stresses how essential distinctive Chinese thinking is to interculture. What is China‘s individuality?

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B. MEANING Chinese thinking has distinctive features (in subsection E), not to be westernized. ―Thinking‖ means ―thinking mode,‖ the way words are used in/for thinking. Wording is culture, a life-style in daily thinking. We see what culture someone lives by listening to her speaking pattern—how she expresses, how she uses words—not a specific language she uses. A person is a flesh-and-blood culture speaking. Now, what is Chinese thinking? ―Chinese thinking‖ appears in its double-edged example, my friend Mrs. Tu. She shows here a sad fact about Chinese thinking, and shows a positive dream in subsection F later. She is a Taiwanese, saying ―makarano‖ for MacDonald, asking, ―You go? I no go,‖ and saying, ―I hear no‖ to mean ―I don‘t understand.‖ So, she talks Taiwanese in English accent, and cannot claim to be speaking in English, though she can be exotically parsed by English-speakers. Today‘s Sinologists1104 are Western Mrs. Tu. Richards‘ Mencius on the Mind Westanalyzed in Mencius-tone1105; Fingarette‘s Confucius West-philosophized in Confuciuscadence; Hansen‘s A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought ―logicized‖ with Chinese jargon; Harbsmeier parsed an anthropological specimen, ―China,‖ in an Aristotelian (and Tarski) frame.1106 They speak Chinese with Western syntax, as Mrs. Tu does English with Taiwanese syntax. What is China‘s thinking-syntax? China discerns and persuades, not argue abstractly; it ―rights names,‖ i.e., rights wordusage to how it should be practiced on; here is no logic-rational (language) analysis. China is ―wise,‖ not in ―love of wisdom‖ at meta-level. Thus to the logic-rational West,1107 KongMeng-Lao-Zhuang 孔孟老莊 have loose miscellanies of rhetorical talks. Hsün Tzu, Mo Ru, Han Fei, Wang Ch‘ung, Chu-Wang, Tonglai, 荀子, 墨子, 韓非子, 王充, 朱王, 東萊, etc. talk and dispute, not logic-rationally argue. They are all poor Emersons, not a Kant. China thinks by assembling idea-bits, historical asides, and biographical afterthoughts. Long ―introductions‖1108 must come in to lecture Confucius on his 1104

―Sinologist‖ refers broadly to a student of China so well-informed as to explain China, often confidently. I. A. Richards knew that Western analytical precision suits no Chinese poeticity, which he tried to accommodate with ―multiple definitions‖ of all possible senses of some terms in the Mencius. He thus ironically analyzed the unanalyzable he acknowledged, to impose his Western analysis, for no Chinese scholar does so. 1106 I. A. Richards, Mencius on the Mind: Experiment in Multiple Definition, Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1932. Herbert Fingarette, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (1972), Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1998. Chad Hansen, A Daoist Theory of Chinese Thought: A Philosophical Interpretation, Oxford University Press, 1992. Christoph Harbsmeier, ―Marginalia Sino-logica‖ (Understanding the Chinese Mind, ed. Robert E. Allinson, Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 125-166) and Language and Logic in Traditional China (as Joseph Needham‘s Science and Civilization in China, 7.1., Cambridge University Press, 1998). Are they aware that postmodernism has deconstructed their logocentric frame? 1107 W. V. Quine (From a Logical Point of View [1953], Harvard University Press, 1999) has the West‘s viewpoint, of course, with all his rhetorical persuasiveness. 1108 Cf., Bryan W. Van Norden, ed., Confucius and the Analects: New Essays, Oxford University Press, 2002, ―世紀末讀論語‖: 哲學雜誌, 臺北市聯合出版中心, 1993. All Analects translations carry ―introductions‖ longer than translations themselves. Tao Te Ching suffers from the same fate. 1105

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life and words, and lecture the reader on how to read him; he is a babbling baby his Western Mom must ―interpret.‖ Wouldn‘t it be nice though to relish Confucius as he is? The Sinologists are China‘s strange Mom, for they are Western Mrs. Tu who selects and stuffs China‘s ―random bits‖ into Western syntax-frame, logic-rational, epistemological, and cosmological, extrapolating from those bits to answer Western questions of truth, ethics, politics, metaphysics, etc. Is this ―Mom‖ China‘s real mother? Now, the I Ching 易經 has a mathematical system, Chu-Wang 朱王 have socio-ethical systems, Lao-Chuang 老莊 are metaphysicians, Name-School 名家 engages in logic-rational analysis, and Hsün Tzu 荀子, Mo Pien 墨辯, and Wang Ch‘ung 王充engage in linguistic logic, etc. All is familiar to the West, all unheard of in China. Thus, the Sinologists are busy doing Western philosophy with Chinese data. No China is here. It is all right to do Western philosophy this strange way, but it is not, much less claimable as, ―Chinese philosophy,‖ yet all this sadly passes as ―Chinese philosophy‖ today. We hesitate. Is this Mom a tacit culture-colonial paternalism, unawares or not? These scholars‘ ―Chinese‖ reveals the English-Chinese differences (as Mrs. Tu‘s ―English‖ does), but they cannot claim to show China (as her ―English‖ cannot claim to be English), though their works can be exotically parsed as ―Western‖ by Chinese scholars in China (as her ―English‖ can be parsed by English-speakers as ―Chinese‖). Never should those who consider China in Western mode think they are thinking on China, while speaking English in Chinese jargon. The amount of Chinese data is irrelevant to thinking-pattern; in fact, ―the more, the worse.‖ As Japan says, ―The Analects read, the Analects dumb.‖1109 To Legge, China is barbarous; for Hansen, Tao is analytical logic; Harbsmeier says China can think ―logically.‖ These Sinologists are all engaged in Western philosophy with the Western mindset, alien to China.1110 Of course, Western philosophers welcome Chinese scholars defending China on Confucius, Tao, human nature, socio-politics, language, etc., in Western mode. We are now all arguing on a theme, ―China,‖ among ―toothache,‖ ―perception,‖ ―life-world,‖ etc., in Western philosophy; and the West is no longer invited to Chinese thinking as Chinese. Arthur Wright said, ―China has no philosophy.‖1111 He was right in seeing Chinese as not English, and wrong in saying English alone, not Chinese, is language. This silly mistake is easily correctable by adding an obvious adjective, as ―China has no Western philosophy.‖ It follows that a unique culture, China, has its own ―philosophy‖ distinct from Western philosophy.1112

1109

「論語讀みの論語知らず.」 The august Ch‘eng Brothers said, ―程氏曰, 今人不會讀書, 如讀論語未讀時是, 此等人讀了後又只是, 此等人便是不曾讀.‖ (quoted in 鄭板橋四書手讀, 四川成都: 巴蜀書社, 1993, p. 93). Cf. Wu‘s review of a book on Sino-Japanese studies of Confucius, in Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, March 2007, pp. 90-93. 1110 They would come quite helpful toward the end of this section. 1111 H. G. Creel, ed., Chinese Civilization in Liberal Education, University of Chicago Press, 1959, p. 141; David Nivison (p. 144) agreed (135, 154, 159). Henry Rosemont, Jr., said in Honolulu, summer 1983, that China has no ethics as Aristotle‘s, to draw fire from Wing-tsit Chan. Would Chan disagree with Wright? 1112 ―It follows‖ obviously assumes that all humans speak, speaking implies thinking, and thinking implies philosophizing, to jibe with the ubiquitous human character of ―philosophy.‖ Such a series of assumptions

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C. NECESSITY ―Can‘t we just do what we have been richly doing? Why make an extra fuss?‖ Assuredly, all above talks critically alerts us to world problems; they arise not out of no ―good‖ policies but out of ―clash of civilizations,‖1113 which in turn arises out of insensitivity to different cultures and thinking-modes. Twenty odd graduate schools of international studies in USA are now busy devising policies in the single US frame to speak many languages in one, American English; this monocultural mindset and policies worsen multicultural problems. Two examples— government and justice—tell of the world disaster. In the West, ―government‖ is adversarial. Ruler and ruled clash and must strike a Social Contract. This enmity-assumption—people-power (democracy) opposing the state—is shared by Hobbes, Locke, Jefferson, and politicians, to make sense of Thoreau‘s oxymorondeclaration, ―That government is best that governs not at all,‖ for government ceases to be Public Enemy No. 1 if it ceases to govern, though a ―government that governs not‖ selfcontradicts to self-vanish.1114 In contrast, all Chinese people take ruler as parent in the family of a state people-centered 民為邦本. Ruler tells people to obey him their parent, and people tell ruler to behave as their parent. The authority both to rule and to be ruled arises from taking governance as parenting. Not parenting the people but brutalizing them is ―crime against humanity‖ to reduce ruler to just another fellow 一夫 (Mencius 1B8), to be removed by revolution if needed. Both tyranny and revolution assume ―ruler as parent.‖1115 Thus, when such basic notion as ―government‖ in China (parenting) even means opposed to the West (enmity), policies made in the West‘s frame alone1116 would ill fit China to worsen problems. No wonder, ―democratization‖ in China has been slow and painful.1117 Sensitivity to cultural differences, letting Chinese thinking be Chinese, is thus essential to international policy-making. Again, in the West, ―justice‖ is fairness. Everyone is equal under the law; no other consideration counts. It is the principle of Western law, though at times tarnished in practice. In China, a straight fellow hides his father a sheep-thief (Confucius, 13/18); if Shun the great hardly require separate demonstration. Every ―philosophy,‖ Chinese or Western, begins here, and missing Chinese wisdom different from Western philosophy also begins here. 1113 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1996, whom Edward W. Said castigated (―The Clash of Definitions,‖ Hwa Yol Jung, op. cit., pp. 363-380). Still, Huntington‘s dated tribalism rightly calls our attention to the world problem. 1114 Al Gore‘s Assault on Reason (Penguin, 2007) is a political counter-assault. 1115 The Documents Classic 尚書 says of heavenly awesome mandate to rulers to care for people, on pain of royal perdition (民86, pp. 25, 62, 80, 101, 138, 150f, 175, and 186, out of 187 pages); 「民主」 (pp. 150, 151) means 民本. The Tso Chuan 左傳 tells of ―bad‖ rulers brutalizing people (p. 8 of its 導讀, 2002); the Warring States Strategies 戰國策 is strewn with people-centricity (p. 5 of its 導讀, 民87). (All three books are published by 臺北三民書局.) Arthur Waley said, in royal ―inscriptions the spectre of Realism [Realpolitik] is assiduously muffled in the trappings of traditional morality,‖ i.e., family-politics (Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China [1939], CA: Stanford University Press, 1982, p. 192). 1116 We can even ill afford to smile at F. S. C. Northrop‘s naïve ―solution‖ of world cultural conflict with the West‘s scientific verification of theories with facts (The Meeting of East and West, NY: Macmillan, 1946), for ―fact,‖ ―theory,‖ and their mutuality mean differently in different cultures. Sadly, his naïveté in 1946 lingers on today all over the world. 1117 One possible cause for the Iraq mess today may well be the West‘s imposition of its ―democracy.‖

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ruler‘s father killed a man, Shun would order his officer to investigate, and secretly shoulder his father away (Mencius, 7A35). All this is not odd since the root of justice is parent-child relation, filiality; its violation crumbles the justice-system. In later days, a man assumed that personal virtue is critical to justice, his father lacked virtue, so he accused his father, who was then prosecuted. Yet doing so violated filial piety the basis of justice, so the son was executed for this fundamental violation.1118 These examples show that ―justice‖ works on the legitimate sense of interpersonal relations, and ―legitimacy‖ is culture-dependent. Thus the so-called ―international court‖ dispensing world justice and human rights is a senseless mockery unless basic differences in the very meanings of justice and individual rights1119 are appreciated. Unless intercultural adjustment is sensitively-painstakingly undergone, accusing people of other cultures of injustice, violation of individual dignity, crime against humanity, etc., invites only disbelief and disaster. We must listen even to Hitler to avoid perpetrating his cultural tyranny over other peoples. Thus, thinking is on meaning-differences culture-based. Doing Western philosophy with Chinese data to parade as ―Chinese philosophy‖ razes away basic cultural differences. As if to push Mrs. Tu‘s ―I hear no‖ as English everywhere, exploitative colonialism, military, economic, and cultural, will mean ―globalization.‖ Meaning depends on culture, so appreciation of individual cultures is absolute sine qua non to meaningful globalization. Now, appreciation is poet-sensitive. With perceptive discernment, poets feel and see the core in/behind various actuals, and express it aptly. Eliot was more correct than he realized when he claimed to qualify to observe European culture, because he was a poet.1120 Poets our clear-sensitive friends would feel/see China-West differences and show distinct Chinese feeling-seeing, in West-like clarity. We must poetically-clearly as Eliot discern how China‘s history perfumes literature and thinking into one, and how its felt expression penetrates life to awaken life.1121 We cannot stay in the West, though, for we then risk perceiving China in the West‘s frame, and would be seeing-feeling the West, not China. As perceiving the ―hidden Christ‖ in other religions sees Christ, not religions, so staying in the West sees the hidden West in China, not China, and Confucius is a faded Cicero, Mencius a failed Dewey, and Hegel denigrates China.1122 West-frame sifts and shifts scenes to suit the West, by proposing ―universal comparative categories,‖ e.g., its humanity, experience, meeting, pragmatism, creation, God. A philosopher says, apples cannot be compared with oranges, but they can be compared under their common category of ―fruit.‖1123 Beware. ―Fruit‖ is separate from us but ―culture‖ 1118

We discern now how a revolution of a basic cultural sort Mao‘s Cultural Revolution was, as he incited people to accuse their parents. Classical tradition is essential to understanding-today. 1119 Our pages on family show individual rights are individual ones in the West, and familial ones in China. 1120 T. S. Eliot, Notes towards the Definition of Culture, London: Faber and Faber, 1948, pp. 110-114. He simply asserted that he was a poet without specifying reasons why being a poet qualifies him to think about culture. 1121 Susanne K. Langer put her ―new key (1942)‖ in ―feeling and form (1953)‖ and in ―an essay on human feeling (1967, 1972, 1982).‖ China has the key as feeling-perfumed forms intoning history. 1122 Hegel‘s History of Philosophy is summed up by M. Merleau-Ponty, ―Everywhere and Nowhere,‖ Signs, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964, pp. 135-137. Hegel‘s self-determination of the Spirit is German, i.e., regional-cultural, not ―universal.‖ 1123 Robert C. Neville said so in comparative religion (246), unaware that religion, as culture, is not fruit; ―religion‖ is different to different religionists, but ―fruit‖ is fruit indifferently to all persons. So, he sticks to ―God,‖

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as part of us humans is not, so equating fruit and humans makes a category mistake. Most Sinologists appeal to ―humanity‖ as a handy, omnibus, and unproblematic concept, but this concept is far from un-problematically universal. How is it so? Poet sees cultural differences in the same ―humanity‖-phenomena. The West‘s sad ―Vanity of vanity, all is vanity‖ is Buddhists-Taoists‘ treasure trove to rejoice in. Death as Greek shadow, as Christian judgment, contrasts with Chuang Tzu‘s joyous regard of death as ―change 化,‖ surprising Western Waley. The West‘s sober ―We come from dust; we return to dust‖ augurs well for Taoists who ―see a world in a grain of sand.‖1124 Varied as various cultures, ―humanity‖ has nothing common to be a universal. Another of the Sinologists‘ favorite overarching concepts is ―experience‖ we all undergo, but as John E. Smith said this concept itself has undergone many meaning-changes in the West alone. He offers ―meeting,‖1125 unaware that we cannot meet without communally knowing what to meet, and this ―know-what‖ is cultural, Hsün Tzu says.1126 ―Meeting‖ is culture-sensitive, nothing universal over all cultures. This point is brought home by my Peter of four, whom I asked to go in the house to pick up my watch. He came back at once, saying, ―I can‘t find it, Dad.‖ ―That‘s funny. I just put it on the desk. Go look again.‖ ―OK, Dad.‖ He came right back. ―I can‘t find it, Dad.‖ So we went in together. ―Here it is, Peter! Can‘t you see?‖ ―O, I didn‘t know that is a watch,‖ Peter said, to jolt me. The watch was nowhere till we co-named a thing as ―watch.‖ Not knowing what ―watch‖ is, Peter was unable to meet a watch, and ―what ‗watch‘ is‖ is cultural. Here is an interpretive circle; we must know the name ―watch‖ before we can meet it (―I can‘t find it, Dad‖), yet we must meet the watch (―It‘s here, Peter! Can‘t you see?‖) to know it (―O, I didn‘t know that is a watch‖). This meet-know circle is I-Peter cultural interaction, a circle of cultural hermeneutics. Socrates in Cratylus can dismiss both views of word-origins,1127 convention and things‘ nature, because he assumes1128 a direct privileged access to ―truth‖ beyond (439a) things and convention. Such an assumption must be ―proved‖ by going through words as this dialogue (428) shows (425d)—to show how engulfed we are in a hermeneutic circle. ―Is this circle a

admitting that God is ―ultimacy‖ that is ―vague‖ (249), to cipher the risk of cultural differences noted here. (―The Role of Concepts of God in Cross Cultural Comparative Theology,‖ Philosophy of Religion for a New Century, eds., Jeremiah Hackett, Jerald Wallulis, Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer, 2004, pp. 243-259); his ―creation‖ is in the same predicament (―The Chinese Case in a Philosophy of World Religions,‖ Allinson, op. cit., pp. 48-74). 1124 The Bible (Revelation), W. K. C. Guthrie, The Greeks and Their Gods, Boston: Beacon Press, 1954, p. 377, index on ―Dead, cult of,‖ and G. S. Kirk, Myth: Its Meaning, etc., Cambridge University Press, 1970, p. 289, index on ―death.‖ Chuang Tzu 2/79-91, 6/45-97, 18/15-19, 22-29, and Arthur Waley, Three Ways, op. cit., pp. 30-32. ―Auguries of Innocence,‖ The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, NY: Doubleday, 1988, pp. 490-496; it is Blake‘s instance of unpleasant retribution, not at all Taoist-enjoyable. 1125 Allinson, op. cit., p. 27. 1126 He said so in ―On Righting Names 正名篇.‖ 1127 His etymological probes into names and concepts we use daily enliven our language; the probes themselves are just irresistibly alive, irrespective of whether they hold water in scholarship today. 1128 He assumes it because he needs something stable over things flowing, and he fails to see stability in all the flux of things. He never watches closely the flux itself as the concrete, and close observation here amounts to sensitively living in and through the concrete as China continues to do to make history.

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cultural one?‖ Looking at the dialogue as happened in ancient Greece tells that it is a cultural circle; Socratic privilege of Reason beyond culture is cultural.1129 So, without culturally known names, nothing is orderly. Confucius, Hsün Tzu, and Name-School insist on ―righting names 正名,‖ i.e., to live apropos of ―names‖ as actualcultural notables (notions, not stipulated concepts), so as to right social chaos.1130 Besides, not logic but a Peter-story has ―argued‖ for ―righting names.‖ This is China‘s concrete storythinking, understandable to the West in Socrates‘ magnificent Apology. Smith then says pragmatic Wang Yangming parallels the American pragmatists,1131 alluding to ―pragmatism‖ as another ―universal‖ concept, yet for which Smith must stretch American pragmatism toward Wang, for the American spirit of pragmatism, logic-rational and formal, is not Chinese pragmatic spirit, tacit, undergoing. China practices pragmatics; the West considers pragmatism.1132 China strives to perform, to con-form what we practice to what we profess, so as to live in line with our ―names‖—if a father, one must live up to ―father‖-hood. This living-up-to-name brings our actuality to our professed names. Confucians strive to correct [living toward] names 正名; Name-scholars scrutinize names to do so; Taoists do so. China is socio-ethical. In contrast, the West logicizes to relate the practical to the timelessly rational, to join concrete particulars to rational universals, so as to control actuality with instrumental reason of technology. Western pragmatism objectifies, speculates, and controls; they call such operation ―instrumental inquiry in pragmatism.‖1133 Chinese pragmatics so different must thus be wobbled to pull toward Western pragmatism. Smith‘s American interpretation wobbles Wang, as most essays in Allinson‘s edited book wobble similarly, stretched.1134 This stretch, such cultural interpretation, practices a Mrs. Tu speaking Chinese with English jargon, for the Sinologists forget that meanings of the ―same word‖ differ, and we must be sensitized to the differences. Smith and Allinson stress how feasible interculture is, so much as to bury its subtle difficulties that require patient sensitivity to perceive as among friends. ―You also advocated a communal knowing of ‗names‘ that sounds like overarching concepts, ‗humanity,‘ ‗experience,‘ ‗meeting,‘ ‗pragmatism,‘ ‗truth,‘ ‗creation‘ and

1129

Cf. Wu, ―Cultural Togetherness‖ in On the “Logic” of Togetherness: A Cultural Hermeneutic, 1998, pp. 2787, and Appendix III (passages in Phaedrus are discussed) in On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic, 2001, pp. 615-640, both published by Brill in Leiden, the Netherlands. 1130 Analects 13/3, 荀子, 正名篇. All extant works of Name-School 名家 began by declaring their purpose as ―righting names 正名.‖ 「疾名實之散亂; . . . 為―守白‖之論」 (公孫龍子, 2004, p. 2), 「循名責實 . . . 則以安國」 (鄧析子, 民86, p. 7), 「名也者, 正形者也, 則名不可差. 故仲尼云, ―必也正名乎!,‖ ―名不正, 則言不順‖也.」 (尹文子, 民85, p. 2). They are quotations from respective volumes published by 臺北市三民書局. 1131 Allinson, op. cit., pp. 30-33. 1132 See ―The Spirit of Pragmatism and the Pragmatic Spirit‖ in Wu, Togetherness, op. cit., pp. 313-342. 1133 These phrases of Dewey‘s typify the attitude of American pragmatists, who aggressively tackle practical problems with ―logic‖ and science. (John E. Smith, The Spirit of American Philosophy: Revised Edition, Albany: State University of New York, 1983, America’s Philosophical Vision, University of Chicago, 1992) History and non-being are out of their concerns. 1134 Wu‘s chapter on ―Chinese Aesthetics‖ (in Allinson, op. cit., pp. 236-264) did not wobble because it was written in friendship-sensitivity, from inside China.

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‗God.‘1135‖ This query points to a critical point. Abstract concepts proposed above are the West‘s stretched to overarch/cover all cultures, tacitly aspiring to monolithic universals, so the effort at covering other cultures wobbles as Western Mrs. Tu. In contrast, Chinese ―names‖ are inter-versal agreement struck among actuals. ―Name‖ is no ―universal‖ that means ―[all] turning-toward one,‖ but a ―general,‖ an intergenesis of common sense, ―as A, so B,‖ meta-phoring 比, ferrying from one sense to another1136 into a family of senses. ―Universals‖ corrected as ―trans-versals‖ must be ―interversal‖ of con-versation, i.e., inter-turning, toward the agreed-upon generality of globalization. So, our Peter-me conversation generated the general name, ―watch.‖ Little Peter leads Hsün Tzu, Name scholars 名家, Confucians and Taoists to push Berkeley to the pragmatic limit. Peter confirms Hsün Tzu to actualize ―to be is to be perceived‖ (Berkeley) by naming. So, Name scholars make-right our names for Confucians to name-right actuality socio-politically, for Taoists to name-right naturally. Such is the fascinating ―righting names 正名‖ at work in life. Actual agreement means, we do not meet till we inter-know, and we do not know till we meet. We inter-tell to know, inter-show to meet, happily or not, ever sensitive. Life is a showand-tell kindergarten to learn and grow, an educative cultivation into communal culture. This is sensitive interculture in time (history) in space (globalization). Such life-education is a two-way evocative inter-narration, i.e., storytelling, storyhearing, and story-adding from both ends; tellers are hearers of hearers-as-adders, coherent and open to the future ever adding, by tellers and hearers inter-changing. All this traffic makes local culture to compose global history. History, story-activities, cultural meeting-andtelling—all converse into inter-versal globalization, cosmically. All this makes us think. We humans have been living on storytelling as we have on water, for stories express, no, effects, experience, looking long into the future. Story is humanity‘s power to live beyond itself, quite imaginative, unpredictable, and so quite alive. Storytelling is our power that drives our living as it shapes life, sharpening our cosmic potentials to justify all existents. We by nature tell stories to create the world, and tell new stories to change it to recreate it. Concretely, our communal stories form ―names‖; with names, things define themselves in sonorous heartbeat of the world to shape our respective life-worlds called ―China,‖ ―the West,‖ etc. Thus as born storytellers, -hearers, and -adders, we are creators of our worlds our cultures, to actively harmonize Heaven and Earth. Our actuality worldwide is story-shaped, name-created. Such is what ―globalization‖ amounts to. Globalization consists in bosom-friendly sensitivity each to the other, mutually different. ―Otherness‖ and ―difference‖ are to mobilize as a dynamo to individuality-in-mutuality to push cultural togetherness forward. Only sensitized friendship is equal to this difficult task intercultural and intersubjective. Let us go slower. Sufficiently clear otherness makes distinctness toward interaction. Each day is sufficient as a whole story to make for a life-history. Each culture is self-sufficient toward its own communal story to make for world-interculture. Globalization is many distinct integrities of 1135

Neville proposed ―creation‖ (Allinson, ibid., pp. 48-74) and ―God‖ (Philosophy of Religion for a New Century, op. cit., pp. 243-260) as categories for ―cross cultural comparative theology.‖ 1136 See Wu, On Metaphoring: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 2001. Chinese Wisdom Alive : Vignettes of Life-Thinking, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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―each day,‖ ―each culture,‖ one into the other, to interweave Lao Tzu‘s (73) ―Heaven-Net inter-meshing, sparse and nothing-leaking.‖ The ―inter-meshing‖ Net is made by many twines each strong as the ―sparseness‖ of Heaven-Net enables each twine to be itself, in its free inviolable integrity, and so cherishing individuality enables the Net to ―leak nothing.‖ Inter-versal globalization makes it necessary for individual particularity to be inter-sensitized to cultural intercourse.

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D. METHODOLOGY We said that miscegenation alloys into a tough-flexuous individuality. Likewise, comparison brings out uniqueness so powerful, and wide varied readings make for a great unique writing. Unique existents need to turn melting pot into rainbow coalition.1137 How? By going through the others‘ differences, not staying in them to get lost in the crowd. Here, ―difference‖ is pivotal. To concretize the matter, we look at Wu‘s responses to condemnation by positivistic literalists.1138 They say Wu is wrong in taking his private opinions as objectively describing China. Their argument says: Wu differs from their accustomed way of citing as describing, Wu gives very few citations, lacks China‘s traditional jargon, so they do not understand Wu‘s mumbo jumbo, therefore Wu is expressing his private opinions, not objectively elucidating China. Their argument is valid only when they assume that they are China and correct on China. Wu says this assumption is wrong and self-contradictory in three ways. One, difference argues for no ―wrong‖; they also differ among themselves, inter-criticizing. ―You differ from me, so you are wrong‖ is wrong. Two, thinking itself can differ, to make thinkers dizzy, but being dizzy argues for no ―wrong‖; ―You make me dizzy, so you are wrong‖ is wrong. They assume thinking as same, logic-rational, and Western.1139 Three, they take citations as ―objective,‖ the more citations, the better proof; but citation cites mere data, making no point. On their showing, they must ―cite‖ the entire corpus of data to be ultimately clinching, and no one can cite the whole corpus; per impossibile, the whole corpus cited would be no ―citation‖ but copying the corpus. Besides, ―citation‖ requires citing some data and cutting others, and such decision is made with one‘s ―private opinion.‖ Any citation is a private matter, never objective. Conversely, ―fewer citations‖ do not prove ―more baseless.‖ E.g., Wu‘s compact description of ―Chinese concrete thinking‖1140 cites less than they may desire (he does cite), but it is more coherent and eye-opening, and perhaps more accurate a description of Chinese thinking, more to the point, than mere citations of data without explanation. All this does not say Wu is correct, but warns of smug positivistic literalism, against ―holier than thou‖ attitude pretending to be correct when unsure. It is unscholarly; it is academic chauvinism, entirely wrong. Its key culprit is xenophobic opposition to difference

1137 1138 1139

Cf. David H. Fischer, Liberty and Freedom, Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 691. Their name is legion, e.g., 余英時, 黃俊傑, Christoph Harbsmeier, and the lists go on.

All positivists tacitly assume ―thinking‖ as identically logical-Western; Harbsmeier, A. C. Graham, and Arthur Wright explicitly assume so in all their writings. 1140 Wu, On Chinese Body Thinking: A Cultural Hermeneutic, Leiden: Brill, 1997, pp. 22-79. Chinese Wisdom Alive : Vignettes of Life-Thinking, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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of any sort from one‘s accustomed way of thinking-writing. This attitude is no actual scholarship that thrives on critical inter-learning among differences. Let me appeal to Confucius, who said (7/1), ―述而不作, I read out of ancient words, not into them; I do exegesis, not eisegesis‖; the saying is endorses no repetition without private opinion, for he said [3/20] of Poetry Classic, ―樂而不淫, 哀而不傷, joy and sorrow without extreme,‖ and the phrase is nowhere in the Classic. Thus exegesis walks on a tight rope between eisegesis and repetition. You accuse me of eisegesis, I warn you of repetition. You claim straight reportage while sneaking in your opinions (do eisegesis), all the worse for doing covert eisegesis unawares. So your accusing me shows your repetition as eisegesis, falling in both ills at one. Why? Beware. All explanations of the original are interpretations, as ―exegesis‖ is a read-out, a reading, an interpretation. My wording different from the original clearly shows my explanation as my interpretation, open to critiques. You assume your interpretation as ―not interpretation but truth,‖ just because you repeat the original words. You do not realize; repetition in different context and different order is interpretation. You are blind to your own interpretation. And then you accuse me that I am wrong, wallowing in private opinions, just because I do not repeat the original words, and not in your contest, not in your order. That is not only unfair; that is plain dogmatic and wrong. In short, ―difference‖ is the eye of the storm. Let us tarry here for a while. We insist that difference does not mean ―wrong,‖ but difference does not guarantee ―right,‖ either. Instead, difference exposes each as each, to provoke scrutiny. Difference is a dynamo to critiques, critiquing which endorses it. Critique is thus a royal road to correction, to becoming more and more correct. Difference guarantees not ―correct‖ but a sure way toward ―being correct.‖ The ―way toward‖ is history; Chinese wisdom is alive historical. Now we apply this discovery to this query. ―How do we let Chinese thinking be Chinese, and speak Chinese in Chinese, not in English?‖ We answer, we must discern China‘s thinking-pattern as different from the West‘s, and the perceptive discernment can be cultivated by going through the fire of the West‘s logic-rational clarity differing from China but, mind you, by going through it, not staying in it. We must sensitively empathize with cultural differences, and use Western clarity to discern and express them. We can then discern how Chuang Tzu playfully ―debates‖ with logician Hui Tzu, playing with arguments1141 and with contradictions, and our seeing so will be clear as a Western Hui Tzu. The seeing needs Western clarity. We can all become sensitive-poetic, as mother to her baby, as bosom friends mutually ―heart-know 知心,‖ but we need to use Western clarity to clearly see and express our discernment. Western logicism, a sharp tool, is yet seductive master that enslaves. We must be wary of how we use ―logic,‖ lest bewitched into staying in it. Staying in Western logicism traps us in the West‘s cultural universalism; going through logicism enables us clearly to discern distinct China and perceive the West. Perceptive dicernment matures in three stages; each stage has Chinese part and Western part, 1/1 and 1/2, 2/1 and 2/2, and 3/1 and 3/2. 1141

On how crucially ―arguing‖ differs from ―playing with arguments‖ see Wu, Togetherness, op. cit., pp. 150-215. Going through Western ―logical‖ perceptivity enabled Chinese-Wu to see and express China-West differences, to make a Chinese contribution to world inter-philosophy.

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Stage One is when we do as the tradition has been doing, e.g., 1/1, textual scrutinyexegeses in traditional China of Ho Yen 何晏, etc., and 1/2, Sinologists‘ monologue in Western universalism, misconstruing enlightened cosmopolitanism of Greek sophists and Kant. 1/1 died but not 1/2, sadly perpetrated today. Conspicuous absence of intercultural learning mars Mumford‘s ―World Culture,‖ Eurocentric, unawares, accusing China of being imprisoned in the dead past.1142 In 1/2, Gestalt-sentiment is absent. Jumping fresh I Ching 易經, Confucius 孔子, Hsün Tzu 荀子, Lao Tzu 老子, Chuang Tzu 莊子, Mo Tzu 墨子, and Kong-sun Lung 公孫龍 are anthropological specimens in Western ―logic‖-box. Aristotle says ―logic‖ is ―organon,‖ mere tool not to be obsessed with, but no Sinologist cares; they just logic-rationally scrutinizing China, unaware of their imprisonment in logic-rationality. Thus, Stage Two arrives, 2/1, with China-mode to naively interpret the West, as did Chang Chi-tung 張之洞, Liang Sou-ming 梁漱溟,1143 etc., and 2/2, with Western mode to interpret China and not know it1144; 2/1 died but not 2/2, as China stays in West-logicism. Overwhelmed since the May Fourth, just liberated from Marxism, and eager to jump on the West-bandwagon, China sees no Whitehead‘s warning,1145 ―The precision is a fake‖ because ―1+1=2‖ applies not to ―gunpowder and spark‖; ―logic‖ works only in suitable situations yet cannot specify ―suitable.‖ Are ―numbers‖ abstract, universal, and unmoving?1146 Chinese numbers are sagas historic, situated: ―1‖ is cosmic unity, ―2‖ is Yin and Yang, ―3‖ is heaven, earth, and humanity, ―4‖ numbers seasons and directions, ―5‖ is Five cosmic thing-Goings crisscrossing between Yin and Yang, and ―myriad‖ is all things countless as insects all over1147 interweaving into ―1‖—and their stories go on. All this1148 vexes ―digital logicians‖; Westspellbound, Chinese thinkers are blind to such dynamic genius of China. Finally, we hope Stage Three dawns beyond Stages One and Two. Here we first, 3/1, pass through the fire of the West‘s logicism, to use it to clearly understand and express China‘s sense-milieu, and then, 3/2, pass through China to perceptively understand and express the West‘s sense-Gestalt and genius. 1142

Lewis Mumford, Interpretations and Forecasts: 1922-1972, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973, pp. 441460. This pioneering essay on ―World Culture‖ is otherwise insightful though wordy. 1143 張之洞 had 「體中用西」, 梁漱溟 had 東西文化及共哲學 (1920) and 中國文化要義 (1949). 1144 We see it even in Chinese ―plain straight exegeses‖ of Chinese terms, e.g., Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy, ed. Antonio S. Cua, NY: Routledge, 2003 (except Wu‘s ―Aesthetics‖ [pp. 1-5]), and 楊儒賓著, 儒家身體觀, 臺北中央研究院, 民85. 1145 Nor do Western Sinologists, either. Do they see numbers as situated in China, not fixated in abstraction? 1146 Almost all Sinologists think so, Christoph Harbsmeier says so in all his writings—as taken in the West. 1147

On their fascinating etymologies, see 說文解字詁林, 臺北市鼎文書局, 民72, 2:2ff (一), 10:1070ff (二), 2:205ff (三), 11:552ff (四), 11:565ff (五), 11:588ff (萬). They cite many more and more complex implications than the ones cited above. E.g., 萬 as 蟲 reminds us of Chuang Tzu‘s (12/82) 「蠢動而相使不以為賜」! All these colorful stories of ―numbers‖ tell of their concrete romances; I stopped at 5, but the numbers continue to continue their historic sagas, not at all abstract. Parallel excitement is exhibited at the drama of the West‘s history revealed by vivid etymological exploration in Owen Barfield‘s lively (though verbose and perfunctory) History in English Words (1926, 1967), NY: Barnes and Noble, 2009. It would be exciting indeed to compare this etymological history of the West‘s youngest commonest language with that of a unique oldest in the East, Chinese language. 1148 Harbsmeier brushes ―all this‖ aside as not ―numbers as such‖ (Language, op. cit., p. 4); he is a Western ―logician‖ pure and simple, blind to China.

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On 3/1, two Western pivotal ―logicians‖ urge similarly. Whitehead warned, ―The precision is a fake‖; Wittgenstein wanted us to ―kick away‖ his proposition-ladder we climbed.1149 Passing through ―logic‖-fire (taking ―logic‖-precision as ―a fake,‖ ―kicking‖ the ―logic‖-ladder climbed) sensitizes us to Chinese thinking as Chinese. Heartfelt knowledge facilitates bosom-friendly inter-versal translations; sensitive Sinologists ―enters China to ‗China‘ it,‖1150 to ―West‖ the West. Inter-versing China with not-China, the West, dawns (3/2) to inter-deepen, as subsection F dreams. Now we focus on 3/1 so as later to enter 3/2, for 3/2 follows 3/1. Again, beware. ―Through West‖ to vivify China (3/1) is not ―staying in the West‖ to westernize China, fitting China into West-frame (2/2). ―Through West‖ uses West-clarity as tool as Aristotle, Whitehead and Wittgenstein urged. Neglecting their urging risks turning 3/2 (vivifying the West) into 2/2 (pan-West).1151 We must do 3/1 first. So, going through the ―logic‖-fire yields focused perception, now sensitively discerning China-features different from the West. This perceptive discernment is not China or the West and akin to both; it is discerning as China, perceptive as the West, but, combined, it is neither. Being not the West, China is not an added item in the Western pond of discussion, yet as akin to the West, China is not a stone thrown into the pond, but a friend deepening the West (3/2) as the West does China (3/1). This sensitivity is not of the West taking all thinking as Western philosophy, nor is it China‘s, for China has no such meta-logic-rational apprehension. The sensitivity is yet like the West‘s, for it is as sharp-clear, having been through the fire of Western ―logic,‖ and is like China‘s, for it is congenial to life-discerning as China. This sensitivity is a China-West intercultural inter-versal.1152 Sensitive perception thus understands China. As understanding politics does not govern and is no politics, so understanding China is not China, for understanding Chinese thinking handles no ways of life as Chinese thinking does. Understanding China is at meta-level to Chinese thinking, to let Chinese thinking be Chinese. The line, ―Birds sing, mount faint, valleys far,‖ has words, not birds, mount, or valley far. Likewise, understanding the West is not the West.

1149

Whitehead‘s ―Immortality‖ concluded with ―The precision is a fake‖ (The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp, La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1951, p. 700). Ludwig Wittgenstein‘s kicking his proposition-ladder is in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.54 (tr. C. K. Ogden, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1922, p. 189). Beware, all logicism-Sinologists, Graham, Harbsmeier, Hansen, et al.! 1150 This is to quote to our purpose Han Yü‘s 韓愈 「入中國則中國之」. Space limitation disallows elaborating on translation as friendship previously explicated, relevant here. Cf. Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, eds. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, University of Chicago Press, 1992. 1151 David L. Hall (China/Greece, op. cit., pp. 15-34) accuses Sinologists of missing Western niceties (23-34) while he misses Chinese sense-milieu. Western are his ―speculation vs. imagination (or scholarship),‖ his ―philosophy‖ that picks ―philosophical literature in China,‖ his ―pragmatic testing,‖ etc. He ―translates‖ (2526) China into an item in his Western process-pluralism (26-32); here is no China. Pace Hall, translation caters to no familiarity of the ―target language,‖ but faithfully conveys the original in its unexpected sense-milieu. Every Chinese word has senses A, B, C. D, E, F, configuring a sense-milieu surprising to the West. Hall misses such sense-plurality and such sense-milieu; he picks only B, and puts it in the West-Gestalt. E.g., ―ch‘eng 誠‖ rendered ―creativity‖ is no ―ch‘eng 誠‖ but Western, ―process‖-tilted; it is a monster. Hall did not go through 3/1 before 3/2. (Waley and W. A. C. H. Dobson are literary monsters, but less than ―logical‖ monsters such as Hansen and Harbsmeier.) 1152 Wu takes cultural inter-versal as ―metaphor‖ in Body Thinking (1997, p. 488, index), Togetherness (1998, p. 466, index), and On Metaphoring (2001). Metaphor as interversal tool to interculture is explained here.

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Such cultural sensitivity is how cultural inter-versal goes through various cultures to facilitate interculture inter-deepening. How does inter-deepening go? Analytical clarity helps understand China deeper1153 (3/1); the West‘s digital clarity yields efficient technics, to yet ruin individuality and nature, and so should go through China‘s interpersonal warmth (3/2), but not stay in it to confuse itself with China, to risk mortal danger.1154 ―But clarity knifes to death China‘s poetic Hun-tun-like ambiguity.‖1155 Indeed, using a clarity-knife risks staying in Western logic-rationality, to kill the Tao into logic-rional analyticity. China must instead pass through clarity-fire, becoming perceptive knife-like to be Hun Tun-like.

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E. CONTENT Inter-versal sensitivity reveals China-West differences. The West picks out from actuality some concepts—as forceps pick out—to build a system, to explicate thinking; China trails actuality to notice notions—nota bene, notables—in actuality as stories, to implicate thinking. Inter-versal sensitivity clearly discerns China, system-less.1156 Seven stories below show China a-chanting, platitude-provocative, contradictory, denying to affirm, elusively traditional, and storytelling. Against the common impression of a humdrum traditionalist, mostly Confucius, alive beyond ―logic,‖ is cited; not many sages are needed.1157 ONE, august Confucius‘ sayings are aphoristic, more chanting-instructive than didactive, far from disputing. No wonder, Confucius so offended logic-rational Hegel as to incite Sinologists to westernize Confucius. They do not understand. In China, tone is part of wordsense, and intonation means in discourse; chanting recites ―argument,‖ and poetry is its logic, as speech began at singing with which it is in natural affinity1158 in fusion of form, tone, and sense. Naturally, music and dance are autotelic reason to exist things. Music makes meaning in sonic poiesis, dancing forth sense in bodily moves alive and fitting, performing away

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Wu understood the Change Classic 易經 better by reading Helmut Wilhelm and Richard Wilhelm, Understanding the I Ching: The Wilhelm Lectures on the Book of Changes, Princeton University Press, 1995, and Honda Wataru, 本田濟著, 易學—成立と展開— (1960), 京都市平樂寺書店, 1987, among others. 1154 C. G. Jung mortally warned Wilhelm not to confuse China with Germany, warned against staying in China (Memories, Dreams, Reflections [1961], NY: Random House, 1989, pp. 373-377). Wilhelm did confuse and did die of it. This is an obverse of China confusing the West as China, just as fatal. 1155 On Chuang Tzu‘s story (7/33-35) of Emperor Hun Tun, see Wu, ―‗Emperor Hundun渾沌‘ A Cultural Hermeneutic,‖ Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, 2007, pp. 263-279. 1156 All Wu‘s Butterfly as Companion (1990), cultural hermeneutic trilogy (Brill, 1997, 1998, 2001), and this volume, Chinese Wisdom Alive, show Chinese thinking as Chinese. 1157 Wu‘s Body Thinking (op. cit., pp. 22-95) unfolds Chinese thinking-patterns that these stories instantiate. 1158 On dancing musicality reflected on in the West, see Judith Lynne Hanna, To Dance Is Human, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979, and Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, abridged by David Berman, London: J. M. Dent, 1995, pp. xxx, 79, 162-172, among others. On lived musicality in China, see ―歌與詩‖ (聞一多全集, 湖北人民出版社, 2004, 10:5-15); ―詩的語言,‖ ―詩言志辨‖ (朱自清古关文學專集(上), 臺北市宏業書局, 民72, pp. 79-88, 183-355); 徐復觀, 中國藝術精神, 臺灣學生書局, 1966, pp. 1-44, 57-60; Wu, History, Thinking, and Literatrue in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991, pp. 125-173, and the list goes on.

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unlivable irrationals into milieus orderly and fit.1159 Rhetoric flows forth reason in chantingdancing poiesis,1160 mnemonic and practical, to make our cosmos. Thus China‘s rhetorical thinking is bitingly life-logical. TWO: China abounds in trite common sense, threadbare stereotypes. Chinese thinking often stresses platitudes, to jolt us into living the wonders of common life. Confucius asks (6/15), ―Who can exit, not by door?‖ What else would we go out by? He exclaimed at riverside, ―Water! O, Water!‖ (Mencius 4B18, Analects 9/17) Who does not know river is water? Chuang Tzu‘s story, ―Morning, Three,‖ says 3+4 is 4+3 (2/37-40); don‘t we know it? We keep pondering on what all these platitudes mean. THREE, Chinese thinking is provocative. Awesome Confucius says (2/4), he has attained the final ideal when ―I-follow what my-heart desires [and] not overstep rules‖; does he now just follow desires? He laments—recorded twice 9/18, 15/12—that he is ―yet to see one who loves virtue as loving sex.‖ How amazing! Confucius, of all persons, should lump sacred love of virtue with salacious desire for sex! He seems more extreme than the Taoists! FOUR, China often thinks in contradictions. Confucius claims to teach anyone who comes (15/39), yet if he raises one corner (point) and is not returned with three more, no more is taught (7/8). Is his pedagogy discriminatory or not? He says, ―Three people walking must have my teachers in them‖ (7/22) and yet ―No friend not up-to me!‖ (1/8) What do you want us to do, Confucius?1161 He says (6/23), ―The humane enjoy hills.‖ Don‘t humane people love humans, not hills? The word, ―wu 無, nothing,‖ exists to mean a nothing, so saying ―wu‖ is a contradiction of joining existence with no-existence. Such contradictions describe Confucius alive, living since millennia. That Confucius is alive is shown in the fact that these contradictions are natural and common, not contrived as Russell‘s paradox.1162 As Whitehead said,1163 abstract ―1+1=2‖ works only in a suitable situation, and suitability is beyond ―logic‖ but easily decided by common sense. China is at home refining (not defining) common sense, to discern what commonsense contradictions in culture mean. FIVE, Confucius‘ denials affirm. He denied knowing divinities (7/21) or death (11/12), yet he urged reverence at ceremony as divine-present (3/12), and bewailed at beloved Yen Hui‘s death (11/9), ―Heaven ruins me! Heaven ruins me!‖ He must have known Heaven to 1159

Hermann Hesse‘s impressive description of the magic-power of music in China, to mold the person and the state, was sadly placed in a half tongue-in-cheek context (The Glass Bead Game [Magister Ludi], trs. Richard and Clara Winston, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969, pp. 28-30). This is because in the West, OrpheusPythagoras-Plato-Aristotle‘s idea of music tuning up the person went out of fashion (except Schopenhauer); see Music in the Western World: A History in Documents, eds. Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin, NY: Macmillan, 1984, pp.1-12. In contrast, Chinese classics are filled with music as inherent in rituals tuning up cosmos, society, and persons. 1160 ―Poiesis‖ is ―creative production‖ (Oxford English Dictionary [2001], XI: 1123). Languages poetize (―Prose Poem,‖ ―Prose Rhythm,‖ ―Prosemetrum‖ The New Princeton Enmcyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 1993, pp. 977-982). Shih 詩 magically sings felt-intention (Wen-lin, ed. Chow Tse-tsung, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968, pp.151-209 [by Chow who even speculates on Greek poiesis vs. Chinese shih-making 作.]). 1161 A way out could be to see ―teacher‖ as different from ―friend,‖ but both are so intertwined in Confucius that we would be lost tangled in this route. 1162 Roy Sorensen (A Brief History of Paradox, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. xi-xii) says Western philosophy is made of paradoxes (questions with too many good answers) as mathematics is made of numbers-as-such. 1163 Therefore, ―The precision is a fake.‖ Whitehead, ―Immorality,‖ Schilpp, op. cit., pp. 699-700.

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know that Heaven ruins him. So, his denials imply acquaintance,1164 as his ―no-do 無為‖ stresses ―do.‖1165 He climaxed with 3 not‘s (1/1), ―Not people-known and not vexed, not rather princely of a man!‖ to begin the Analects. SIX, Chinese thinking tradition is elusively alive. Mencius supposedly inherited Confucius, yet quoted Confucius sparingly (less than Chuang Tzu). His inner ―cyclonic jetstream 浩然之氣‖ (2A2) and ―human good as an originally lush Ox Mount‖ (6A8) sound Taoist.1166 Chuang Tzu supposedly inherited Lao Tzu, yet criticized Lao Tzu at his funeral, of all occasions (3/15-18)! All this makes an inscrutable inheriting of tradition! SEVEN, stories have ―argued‖ for all features above to interweave literature, history, and thinking. Story-thinking ponders on concrete themes,1167 beneath thinking about by the postSocratic West.1168 The West wants theoretical ―universals‖ lasting for ever, abstracted above the concrete. In contrast, China just tells stories of concrete ―here now‖ since millennia, and these here-now‘s are amazingly fresh, alive, and deep with significance always, every ―today‖! Stories are ―concrete universals.‖ Chinese words are story-fragrant of life-flowers perfuming objectivity, form, and logic.1169 Expressive denials and contradictions freely affirm, to story-tell of life, and to right names to right social chaos; words are subtly woven as subtext under various life-contexts, history-persuasive, story-alive. Such China is unheard of to Western logicism.

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Chuang Tzu says (2/28) breeding kills, killing breeds (方生方死, 方死方生), and ironizes (Wu, Chinese Body Thinking, op. cit., pp. 58-79). Confused, people say he is a ―relativist‖; isn‘t it a silly non sequitur? 1165 Confucius and Taoists often say ―no-do 無為.‖ ―Friends heart-know 知心‖ are ―never opposed at heart 莫逆於心‖ (Chuang Tzu 6/47, 62). People-love is the ―heart unbearable at people‖ in pain (Mencius 1A7). Harbsmeier cannot take ―not‖ as affirmation-stressed (Language, op. cit., pp. 1-7, 107-114), nor can Graham (Studies in Chinese Philosophy, etc., Albany: SUNY Press, 1990, pp. 331-359); Graham (Chuang Tzu, London, 1981, pp. 9-14) has reasoning as distinguishing, not as alluding or ironizing. 1166 Mencius may be a Confucian in this sense. Chan typifies China (Source Book, op. cit., p. 3) as ―the unity of man and Heaven,‖ not knowing ―unity‖ here means ―interpenetration,‖ as Chinese nouns are also verbs. Taoist ―man‖ is Heaven-penetrated; Confucian ―man‖ penetrates Heaven. Mencius expands ―man‖ to Heaven sociopolitically (rightness as profit-sharing, not-right as profiteering), and profit-sharing originates in ―unbearable heart at people‖ in pain, and cosmically expands ―man‖ as nourishing human breathing to cosmic cyclone flooding the cosmos. In ―man‖ penetrating nature, Mencius is a Confucian. 1167 Roger T. Ames also noted that Chinese thinking is not analytical (he was silent on Western reification now deconstructed) but narrative, historical, and analogical (but silent on Graham, and on how narration can be helped by analyticity-tool). (―Thinking Through Comparisons: Analytical and Narrative Methods for Cultural Understanding,‖ China/Greece, op. cit., pp. 93-110; books co-authored with David Hall cited.) We further note that Chinese story-thinking trails and echoes actuality, initiated by historic paragons who refined common sense. 1168 Wu, ―Chinese Philosophy and Story-Thinking‖ (Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Summer 2005, pp217-234), ―Distinctive Features of Chinese Hermeneutics‖ (Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, June 2004, pp233-247). Besides, ―Alive and Together in China (44pp),‖ Storytelling: A Cultural Meditation (615pp), Story-ing: Dynamic Moving Logic of Things (640pp), are all yet to publish. 1169 China has no ―fuzzy logic‖ of today that is not ―fuzzy‖ but many-valued (degrees of truth), still digitally diremptive; 0.2 is not 0.21. (cf. L. Zadeh, ―Fuzzy Sets,‖ Information and Control, 8 [1965], pp. 338-353) What would a fetus as ―0.2 human‖ mean? How would fuzzy logic parse the plump baby‘s ―round square‖ face? Such questions are beyond digital-diremptive logic to answer, however ―fuzzy‖ and multi-valued.

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F. A WRAP-UP We have considered two points, A. Chinese thinking as uniquely itself, B. among other cultures to interculture toward globalization. Methodological tie-together opens us to the global prospect of Wonderland in interculture inter-enriching. We now tie them up in, A, Chinese thinking as not Western or a random heap of genealogies, and slightly expand on, B, intercultural deepening in globalization, which unique China effects with unique West.

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A. Chinese Thinking as Unique All discerning Chinese scholars in China and beyond have every rationale and responsibility to properly lead the world‘s Sinologists into Sinology proper, not as Western philosophy. Fulfilling this name-correcting 正名 task has negative and positive aspects. Negatively, two cautions cannot be overstressed: 1. Sinology is not Western philosophy, and 2. Chinese thinking is not a heap of mixed genealogies, cultural or historical. China is as it is. And then, positively, a delightful inter-deepening happens. First we go a negative way. First, we again stress Sinology as no Western philosophy. Defending Confucius with the West‘s dialectic is doing Western philosophy, not Chinese thinking. Elucidation of Chinese thinking in the West‘s mind-frame is Western elucidation is Western, Western-philosophizing on a topic, ―China‖; here is no Chinese thinking.1170 It is proper to repay the West with its own coin, which yet should not be labeled ―Chinese coin,‖ for the coin is Western. To explain Chinese thinking in Western thinking-mode is to do Western thinking, Western philosophy, on these themes; Chinese apologetics is metaSinology, not Sinology. Secondly, we consider Chinese thinking as not a random heap of mixed genealogies, to answer again an objection, ―Every sort of thinking is a mix of many strands, so it is senseless to let Chinese thinking be Chinese.‖ That every person is a mix of many others in the past does not mean that there exists no ―me.‖ Farrer said,1171 [Y]our aunts play over you the tiresome game of family faces: I mean of sharing out your eyes, nose and chin among your direct and collateral family elders, who are supposed . . . to be responsible for these several features: you begin to feel that your face is nothing but a heap of mixed genealogy. . . When . . . the aunts are gone, your mother says: ‗Never mind, dear: they have to talk like that. But it‘s a lot of nonsense. You are just yourself, and very nice too.‘

We add that this Tommy is a unique bearer of his unique culture, as his mother (his parent culture) proudly assures him, without fear of mixing away individuality; the parental culture, responsible for Tommy‘s existence, certifies Tommy‘s uniqueness. Tom shows his culture that proudly says, ―Tom is our boy,‖ unique. Taking Tommy as mixed genealogies could help the geneticists understand Tommy, and ―help‖ and ―understand‖ focus on Tommy. What is clear is what Mom told Tommy, ―You are 1170 1171

Graham, Harbsmeier, Cua, 李明輝, 劉述先, etc. are all doing so and claiming to be doing Chinese philosophy. Austin Farrer, Reflective Faith, ed. Charles C. Conti, London: SPCK, 1972, p. 32.

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just yourself, and very nice too.‖ Chinese thinking is Chinese, ―and very nice too,‖ not a random heap of mixed genealogies, historical or cultural. Similarity ruins no individuality, either. ―You are a doggie, right, Tommy?‖ ―No, I‘m a boy, not a doggie,‖ Tommy snaps back. ―But you look like a doggie, you crawl and bark like your doggie.‖ ―But I‘m NOT doggie!‖1172 Then Mom says, ―Don‘t tease Tommy, Uncle Wu.‖ Mother China is gently telling me not to tease China into Western philosophy. I had better obey her. Everyone is made of her specific synthesis that differs from every other‘s, and even identical twins mutually differ. Difference ciphers uniqueness; otherwise there would be nothing that exists as it is. It is all right to be mixed, in fact, it is necessary to mix to consolidate uniqueness, but we should never take Western philosophy China admires as ―Chinese wisdom,‖ as we should never call Tommy ―doggie,‖ however much he loves his doggie. And then things happen, positively. As Tommy the Chinese culture is more than the traditional five ethnic components—Han, Manchu, Mongol, Islamic, and Tibetan—so our shared Global Wonderland tomorrow may well consist in each culture deepening and enriching the others, in mutual enjoyment as we enjoy music. Beethoven lets one mood ―argue‖ with another, to persuade the hearer. Hearing Beethoven reminds a China-man of Chinese classics envisioning sociopolitical economy as musical harmony, nourishing us as delicious cuisine.1173 This exquisite harmony is naturally realized in intimate family to spread to the nations and the cosmic world. This China-man then yearns after ―appealing‖ to Western people to enter their unheard-of Chinese vision, to inter-learn. ―Chinese despotic nepotism would then, I hope, be cleansed by Western impersonal laws and adversarial politics, which in turn would imbibe China‘s interpersonal warmth, so that big and powerful politics gently protects individuals, as Hobbes hoped.‖ ―But, first,‖ he would mumble, ―China should delightfully persuade the West, as Beethoven ‗argues‘ to draw us as we enjoy his melodies. China must musically ‗argue‘ to persuade the West, as deliciously as Chinese cuisine has been gently nourishing the world. Chinese ‗argument‘ must deliciously nurture.‖

B. Localities Globalized ―But how can China and the West inter-learn?‖ Subsection D has three stages of maturing into Chinese wisdom as philosophy. In Stage Three we can learn profitably from Mrs. Tu. Speaking Chinese in English manifests distinct Chinese; ―I hear no‖ is OK in Taiwanese till said in English, and then Chinese (unnoticed so far) and English (showing how peculiar it is) 1172 1173

Science cannot study humans as animal or machine (Wu, On Metaphoring, op. cit., pp. 265-275). On ―government by music,‖ see 禮記 (樂記), 荀子 (樂論篇), 呂氏春秋 (大樂, 古樂, 音律, 樂成), and 蔣義斌‘s ―的禮樂合論,‖ 東方宗教研究, 1991, October, pp. 73-107, etc. On ―government by cuisine,‖ see 左傳 (昭公20年), 國語 (鄭語, ―史伯為桓公論興衰‖), 呂氏春秋 (本味), 說苑 (雜言, chapter 17), etc. China‘s lived harmony is expressed in music and cooking to extend to social praxis and political management as elucidated in previous pages of this Part; on thinking as cooking, see Wu, Body Thinking, op. cit., p. 33. Cf. Ezekiel 3:1-3.

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appear. Sinologists speak English in Chinese, and West (to China) and China (to the West), not noted in Chinese or English alone, appear. Going through ―A is not not-A‖ helps realize ―A is A‖; befriending others gives selfknowledge. To study Western philosophy, we at Stage Three can now study wobbling Sinologists expressing China; to know China, we can study Sinologists‘ strange un-Chinese works. Being jolted by them, world interculture reveals each distinct culture. Since World War II, Northrop, then Eliade, and later Huntington,1174 each has alerted the West to the ―world crisis‖ of culture-confrontation; none noted its positive potentials, i.e., differences-meeting leads to differences-mixing, to manifest the integrity of each mixer. Thus mixing reveals uniqueness as miscegenation breeds every culture to be a ―mixed-up kid,‖ a stout Tommy. To stop cultural interaction saps unique strength of individuality; intermixing globalization strengthens provincialism. Globalization in turn depends on locality that is ―distinct‖ to go toward mutuality beyond locality; locality-awareness invites others‘ critiques to enrich, to benefit the whole. This self-transcending élan of locality is the inter-versal dynamo to globalization; globalization thus depends on locality as transversal universality does on provincial particularity. Far from being a ―scandal‖ (Kittel1175), ―particularity‖ is salvation of so-called universality, a dynamo to globalization. Postmodernism is keen on transversality that, for Deleuze, communicates across different dimensions. Schrag loosely packs transversality, dialogues, otherness, enrichment, the self, mutuality, adjustment, accommodation, and responsibility, to oppose unilateral hegemony and war. He goes in a right direction, saying,1176 [T]ransversality . . . depends upon . . . dialogue across the various groups . . . , fostering a recognition of the otherness of each of the groups . . . to a ―dialectical enrichment.‖ Transversality . . . heightens the self-understanding among the several involved groups through a mutual acknowledgement [to require] adjustments and accommodations . . . of the contributions by . . . groups. [D]eveloping self-understanding . . . and encouraging shared responsibility, transversality avoids both the hegemony of a decision-making process . . . from top down and . . . horizontally dispersed . . . warring . . .

The West‘s postmodernism is currently busy deconstructing traditional subject-centered logocentrism separate from actuality; reason is now transversal praxis, intersubjective, sociopolitical, and communicative. Richards, Graham, Fingarette, Harbsmeier, and Hansen still apply the West‘s dated logocentric rationality to China, and the postmodern West‘s

1174

F. S. C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West, NY: Macmillan, 1946. Mircea Eliade, The Two and the One, University of Chicago Press, 1965. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1996. 1175 Gerhard Kittel coined that notorious phrase, ―the scandal of particularity‖ (in Mysterium Christi, 1930), tacitly assuming Lessing‘s unbridgeable ―ugly broad ditch‖ between eternal logical necessity and ephemeral historical contingency (Lessing’s Theological Writings (1886-1924), tr. Henry Chadwick, London: Adam & Charles Black, 1956, p. 55). This difficulty is concocted out of radically separating the logical from the actual, with a Western penchant of logic-rationality. 1176 Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, NY: George Braziller, 1972, p. 149. Schrag quotes it in Resources, op. cit., p. 152.

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transversal rationality is yet to deconstruct them, so as properly to reach China toward interculture.1177 The West today on its part must extend one more step toward intercultural globalization, to apply transveral1178 rationality1179 toward cultural interversality of Western rationality with Chinese reason, to let East be East, and West, West, before the twain can—must—meet in friendship of global inter-friendly enrichment.1180 How? We must return to the historic crossroads when China got the West‘s impacts, to revive deliberations on how to respond. As at the US dawn of debates over its Constitution,1181 we must initiate discussions on ―the Constitution of World Interculture‖ at every locale, cultural and sociopolitical, where we must constantly stress uniqueness—let Chinese thinking be Chinese, so Western becomes Western1182—in the global intermixing of cultures.

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I know of only one application of deconstructionism to comparative religion, however tentative, in Robert Magliola, On Deconstructing Life-Worlds: Buddhism, Christianity, Culture, Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1997. 1178 Besides transversality, two more of the West‘s candidates for globalization are Jacques Derrida‘s ―différance‖ that defers to different meanings oncoming, and Gregory L. Ulmer‘s ―puncept‖ that puns in word-play to decenter meanings (―The Puncept in Grammatology,‖ The Foundation of Letters, ed. J. Culler, Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 164-189). ―Différance‖ can bring the West to China‘s wording as open-ended in implications; ―puncept‖ smiles at China‘s argument-by-puns, ideo-audiographic (Wu, History, Thinking, op. cit., pp. 125-173). 1179 Is Jean-Paul Sartre‘s Nausea (1938) (NY: New Directions, 1964) a devastating precursor, confronted with sheer existence, to deconstructing the logocentric ―essence‖? His iconoclasm lingers on in later deconstruction to draw closer to China, yet it is not quite China‘s gentle approach to actuality. Did the contrast come from Nausea‘s Western sentiment? Still, Nausea is a journal (as his philosophical works are story-strung) to end in hope in music, echoing China thinking in journals and music. Can China and West meet here, besides ―transversal,‖ ―différance‖ and ―puncept‖? (Gabriel Marcel‘s Metaphysical Journals [1927], 1952, also unify stories, music, and thinking.) 1180 We adjusted the beginning of ―The Ballad of East and West‖ (1889), ―Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,/ Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God‘s great Judgment Seat;/ But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,/ When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!‖ in Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Definitive Edition, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1940, p. 233. Kipling was born in India and went back there many times, so he knew what he was poetizing about. But it is odd saying ―never the twain shall meet‖ until they meet ―face to face.‖ So we adjusted it to stress the necessity of meeting. 1181 蘇輿編, 翼教叢編 (1898-1899), 臺北中央研究院, 民94 (2005). (The rationale for the title is not explained.) The Debate on the Constitution, Two Volumes, NY: The Library of America, 1993. 1182 François Jullien is perhaps the one Western ―sinologist‖ to have noted China as indispensable to paradigm shift in the West (In Praise of Blandness [1991], The Propensity of Things [1999], Vital Nourishment [2007], etc., Zone Books, NY). Sadly, he scatters Chinese exotics as if announcing the major themes of China, while posing Western way; his odd interpretations and mistakes remind us of Pound and Fenollosa with the same zeal—quite correct—to benefit the West with radical novelty of China. Jullien rifles China‘s phrases to his private purpose, nothing sinological. He admits it, and proudly claims to be beyond China and West (2007, pp. 7-10), yet such claim to culture-transcendence is Platonic, distinctly Western and unfeasible, as his phrasing is acerbic and scattered, quite Voltairean French. No one can jump out of his skin, so being French is not wrong; it is wrong to pretend not to be French. That is hubris warned by the Greek piety and Socrates. See Ezra Pound, Confucius (1951), The Confucian Odes (1959), NY: New Directions; Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. E. Pound, Washington, DC: Square Dollar Series, 1935, and Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art (1912), Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge, 2007; James D. Hart, The Oxford Companion to American Literature, 1969, p. 275, on Fenollosa. See Wen I-do on ―characters‖ painting sense as distinct from ―painting‖ picturing things, ―字與畫,‖ 聞一多全集, 步漢: 湖北人民出版社, 2004, 2:205-207. He sums up 許慎‘s 六書 (指事, 象形, 形聲, 會意, 轉注, 假借) and what 毛詩序 has as 六義 (風, 賦, 比, 興, 雅, 頌).

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A final query asks, ―Why do you write all this in English?‖ I play ―Mrs. Tu‖ for two significant goals. One, I ―write Chinese in English‖1183 to balance off today‘s fashion of writing English with Chinese data. Two, the balance serves as a catalyzing contrast to bring out distinct Chinese thinking to all Sinologists, ourselves included, to let Chinese thinking be Chinese, not Western, so as to advance globalization of world interculture. Interculture inter-deepens, China going through the West to self-clarify and self-know better, while the West going through China to self-know better and more humanized. To borrow Chuang Tzu (2/96), the West has the genius of distinguishing 有分, for China to interexchange inter-changing 物化, to complete world interculture. ―But the contents in subsection E are so childish, not philosophical. How can the West go through China to be enriched? No wonder, Sinologists are Westernizing China; interculture is one-way.‖ Such sentiment has no China; it is in Stage Two. For Merleau-Ponty in Stage Three, infantile is not puerile1184; in fact, pre-philosophy reveals much beyond afterphilosophy1185 to yield cultural inter-deepening. How can we do so? To begin, a pressing issue must be addressed now. Worldwide interenrichment includes shared responsibility to protect and promote humane concerns, however diverse, with shared though varied human parameters. Respect of individual dignity of all persons, however diverse, remains ―respect‖ entirely inviolable. Any government trampling human respect cannot be defended, by insisting that such criticism violates the state sovereignty; it is a standard ploy of every dictatorial state, and holds no water at all. Inhuman treatment in all forms deserves condemnation worldwide. All nation-states must share the task of protecting-promoting the respect of human integrity of individuals, taking into careful account cultural varieties of what ―human dignity‖ and its ―respect‖ mean, so as to bring all communities into global brotherhood. This task must be undertaken by a global federation such as the United Nations; the task must never be borne, much less dictated, by any single nation, however dominant it is, however ―legitimate‖ its claim is. Such self-arrogation to judge others amounts to arrogating a single nation, an individual, as the whole of humanity; it would violate the duty to respect individuality in the name of administering the duty of respecting individuality, a terrible crime against humanity in the name of humanity. Now, we should never forget. Respecting individualities all around is not a long-faced execution of unpleasant obligation. On the contrary, respecting others is the joy of world togetherness, the natural joy of individual cultures that inter-learn to inter-thrive in cosmopolitanism I dream of hearing an Oxonian Professor Baxter, a renowned Confucius scholar, chanting aloud with British gusto his Analects translation. Intoxicated, I exclaimed, ―Wow! Confucius came through alive in your English, leaping out vivid and articulate, different from droning him in traditional Chinese!‖ Now, could you imagine a Chinese scholar of Hamlet reciting it in Chinese? Wouldn‘t Shakespeare leap out alive as he would not have when read in traditional English?‖ Dr. 1183

Wu, ―World Interculturalism: China Written in English,‖ Taiwan Journal of Asian Studies, June 2005, pp. 142. 1184 Merleau-Ponty, Signs, op. cit., pp. 138-140; he dialogues with China in Wu‘s Body Thinking, op. cit. 1185 After Philosophy (eds. Kenneth Baynes, et al., MIT Press,1987) has an uncanny resonance with Before Philosophy ([1946], Henri Frankfort, et al., Penguin, 1954), to learn much from the latter.

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Baxter sparkled, ―O, that would be the day, would it not? I would wish so much to attend the recital!‖ My dream throbs here now, in the chanting chorus of odes to globalization among all unique cultures, one deepening the other. An Indian Babylonia-scholar is heard singing Gilgamesh in Sanskrit, deepening India and Babylon. I join in to write Chinese in English, and talk English in Chinese,1186 to deepen China and the West. This is the dream of cosmopolitan brotherhood shared heartfelt by Greek sophists, Chinese literati, German and French humanists, and American revolutionaries. ―What do you say on Legge, Graham, etc., whom you criticized? Don‘t they also mix?‖ They in Stage Two take ―reasoning‖ as monolithically Western, stretching it to China1187; I in Stage Three cherish the unique integrity of China and the distinctive West, and celebrate their inter-versal co-deepening. Our crucial differences I now yearn to see turned into China learning from Legge and Graham, to see new depths in China, and thereby see new depths in the West. Subjectivity now goes intersubjective. I strive for myself, and others come to strive for themselves by and by. How? I used to write on a desk in a corner of our family room, where kids screamed, tumbled, fought, and crawled all over me. Their nasty mess made even their Mom to ask me why I don‘t go to my office; I said it‘d be too quiet to write. I kept on writing, and never told my kids to do homework. They all did it themselves as I kept on writing, and two of them turned professors at medical schools, one medical professional cum violinist and musical historian, another, teacher of English in Japan. Thus did I stood myself, and, so did they 自立立人, quite naturally, mutually forgetting, doing with one another without doing with one another 相忘而相與於無相與. That is Confucian Taoism of innate intersubjectivity naturally inter-existing. All this describes things‘ own inner grain 理 of inter-versal, of interculture interenriching toward globalization. I study and strive for my culture‘s excellence as I learn from your culture, as you strive for your culture‘s excellence, and world concord dawns all by itself on us all. We need not shout for special ―globalization‖ or ―world culture‖ above particular regional cultures. Natural diversity in natural concord—heartfelt togetherness—has been dreamed after by Greek sophists, Chinese literati,1188 Mandela, and civil rights fighters.1189 With this 1186

Wu, ―World Interculturalism: China Written in English,‖ Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies, June 2005, pp. 1-42. I often go home to Taiwan to urge world interculturalism by propagating Western culture. 1187 The cover of China/Greece, op. cit., has Miss Greece, aground, gazing up at an exotic Chinese character; its ―comparisons‖ stretch Greece upward—is it a Greek élan?—to China, to typify the book‘s essays. A. C. Graham‘s study of Mohist Logic is a brilliant cultural monologue, more Western than study of Mo Tzu (Later Mohist Logic, Ethics and Science [1978], Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2003). China can/must learn from both. 1188 The Greek sophists‘ cosmopolitan ―unity of mankind‖ (W. K. C. Guthrie, The Sophists, Cambridge University Press, 1971, pp. 24, 44, 11 n. 2, 153, 160-163) echoes ―All are brothers within Four Seas‖ of Analects 12/5, politically practiced as ―不臣異俗 no subjugation of different customs‖ for 7,000 years (till oppression of Tibet and Sinkiang 新疆 in 2009, as historian of ideas Dr. Wu Rui 吳銳 lamented in his email of April 2008). Sadly, Voltaire‘s flashes of cosmopolitan insights, e.g., ―Catéchisme chinois‖ (pp. 78-95) and ―Chine‖ (112115) in Philosophical Dictionary (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1972), were not developed. 1189 See Mandela: The Authorized Portrait, Kansas City, MO: Andrew McMeel, 2006, and Reporting Civil Rights, Two Volumes, NY: The American Library, 2003. Noble concord arises from thinkers and the unjustly oppressed. The news has it that people all over Africa celebrated Mandela‘s birthday in 2009 by distributing foods to the poor, painting orphanage, etc., doing good works as Mandela has been doing.

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cosmopolitan dream all over the world all through time, this subsection calls all Sinologists to turn cultural universals into inter-versal deepening.1190 Letting Chinese thinking be Chinese, not Western, shall let Western thinking be Western, not Chinese or universal, toward intercultural globalization. It must be done now. Now, let us balance off this tone of urgency, a bit out of tune with the vast, quiet, and historic ―eternity‖ of Chinese wisdom alive, by considering history; it is so strange, for facts are stranger than fiction, and so their history is often feigned in fiction and by historians. History is unreal real, not-present present. History is concerned with particular events yet it is not, seemingly concerned with general patterns yet without universal laws. History is present now yet not present, quite personally with us yet quite distant, subjective and intersubjective yet not directly so, retrospective yet prospective; it is no longer yet ever now, already ended yet endless. History is concrete inter-versal ubiquitous, experiential object lessons inexhaustible. We all learn from history yet no one has written a comprehensive lesson of history. History is dead past ever alive fresh now, forever quiet alive, and forever settled exciting unsettled. Nothing is without history yet it is nowhere until we write it out. Whatever written, and written about history, even opposition to history, are parts of history. History is a living already lived still living, a completion so incomplete, a gone ongoing, in short, alive. No wonder, Chinese wisdom is alive because it is historical. Is all this so spooky and complex, so distant from us? On the contrary, all this is as intimate with/in us, and sweepingly seeping in all, as insects so fragile, zoo-ing at night, any night. Hear this little scribble on life in life. Insects, not seen, no instrument So calm, so cool, They mix calm and cool into Steady zoo, zoo, zoo . . . all over So calm-cool zooing all over. Even moon in soft blue is In them steady cool, soft. .... Now moon hides into their soft silence Cool calm, no more moonlight I crawl into bed Zoo-ed in calm cool Hugged in moon in them silent Three in soft night not seen, no instrument All over, cool, calm . . .

So the insects come, ―zoo,‖ and vanish in not many days. They yet last with the moon lasting so long, to hug all poets in China for millennia, till last night at three1191 so fresh and 1190

Some hopeful signs are budding in China. After publishing several books in comparative philosophy, Professor 張再林 has put out 作為身體哲學的中國古代哲學 (Traditional Chinese Philosophy as the Philosophy of the Body), 北京中國社會科學出版社, 2008. 1191 I hope you, my dear reader, have caught ―three.‖ Li Po lifted his wine cup to the moon, and the moon, his shadow, and himself, the three, danced right there. See 李白, 「月下獨酌」, 唐詩三百首 (臺北市三民書局, 民62, p. 11). ―Drinking Alone in the Moonlight,‖ tr. Elling Eide (The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature, ed. Victor Mair, 1994, p. 203). ―Drinking Alone by Moonlight,‖ tr. Arthur Waley

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calm, and cool. Poets are those who write poems to create the specific logic of the sense felt at the time, as hearing insects, as reading a face. The poems must be judged in the light of themselves1192 so fresh, always. The poem unites creation with mirroring of actuality. Nature is wise in China alive today, all over, cool and calm. ―Now and again/ I am here now/ And now is when/ I‘m here again.‖1193 ―Again‖ tells how Emperor T‘ang‘s bathtub cleanses us into history, tomorrow fresh. The poem is of the West‘s young poet in smiles, joining hand with ancient Chinese bathtub where we are cleansed daily. All this depicts Chinese wisdom alive today.

(Translations from the Chinese [1919], NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941, p. 118); his translation is less good. I on my part had my dear insects, my moon, and my insect-zoo-ing accompanying me—we three at three at night. I was so happy and contented as I crawled into bed there then. 1192 This is China‘s poets this volume has been insisting on. I am glad Auden agrees. See W. H. Auden: Prose, Volume III, 1949-1955, Princeton University Press, 2008, pp. 656-659. 1193 ―Here Now‖ by Samuel Menashe in Poetry, September 2009, p. 405. I wish I wrote it!

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APPENDIX I: ON MARTIN HEIDEGGER Here we focus on Martin Heidegger‘s (H) Introduction to Metaphysics he recommended as ―elucidation‖ of his masterwork, Being and Time.1194 Later-H expands on this major theme. We have five subsections below, more or less interconnected. Subsections I and II are on H and China, subsection III is on H‘s network, subsection IV is on H‘s mythmaking, and subsection V is on H and Plato. These subsections have a conclusion but it is not expressed— for the reader to expand.

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I: H and China Heidegger‘s (H) similarities with China are uncanny, e.g., H‘s ―Being‖ (ibid., 63-64) parallels ―China as verb-culture,‖ H‘s ―logos as gathering‖ is reminiscent of ―li 理 as grain in 1195 the jade of things,‖ and H‘s physis matches China‘s seed-power 種 in spring-power 機. The subtle H-China differences are enormous, however. We can mention just six for now. Later subsections cite more. One, for H the West has forgotten Being; Chinese wisdom is Being-nonbeing infused, not forgotten but lived. Two, H thinks with logic-rationality; China story-thinks sinuously in time. Three, H uncritically stays in the West‘s logic-rationality, to turn complex with forbidding neologism, about actuality simple and natural. H‘s introduction to the concrete-familiar turns the intimate alien-unapproachable. Nor does H consider philosophical significance of ancient ―fragments‖ and ―poetry‖ he quotes often. Poetry for him is an object of discussion; later H did see poetry as thinking proper but then it is mysticism, not Western philosophy. In contrast, China thrives on dot-pragmatics (fragments as ―philosophical‖) and on poetry as music pregnant, sense-full, and logical, inclusive of logic-rationality. Four, H rejects ―ambiguity‖ and ―nothing‖; China thrives on them. Five, H rejects ―violence‖ in all senses yet follows it unawares; China embraces violence as part of YingYang logos-singing internecine-inter-nascent. Six, H rejects ―forgetting‖; for China it is positively nuanced, connected with ―fit 適,‖ matching H‘s ―Fug‖ in a totally different context. There are many more differences, all stemming from H‘s logic-rationality vs. China‘s storythinking.

II: H and China (Continued) H is like China in that both see time process as real, poetry as thinking in motion (H 168, 176, though never practiced), H interpreting Parmenides in terms of Heraclitus as China sees Confucius as alive as Chuang Tzu, probing to the fourth level by questions (H 7, 40), etc. China yet differs from H. China sees process as history, H as appearance. China is history1194

See Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trs. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000, p. vii. 1195 In fact, Chang Chung-yuan uses H to elucidate Lao Tzu, in Tao: A New Way of Thinking: A Translation of the Tao Tê Ching with an Introduction and Commentaries, NY: Harper & Row, 1975.

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praxis; H sees time as violent-aggressive-confronting (H xii, xvii, xxiii, 65, 252, etc.), to go beyond beings. H hates empty, vague, vapor, nothing; China thrives on them. As a result, China tends to blends into the ambiguities (not vagueness) of daily ongoing. H turns clear, distinct, and can afford to be complex-involved, and obscure. Both turn subtle, China oftener than H. H is somehow not China, as voluptuous opera is no droning chant. In H, verb, by turning infinitive, turns noun as manifestation of beings (H 59-61, 71). In China, ―name‖ is a shorthand for verb as in righting name, as all nouns can turn verbs, verbs can turn nouns. Thus all words are active and interactive in China.

H’s Network

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Proudly, H bases himself on German and Greek the most powerful and spiritual (60) languages to weave out the networks of verb-noun, being-seeming, being-thinking, beingnature, etc. His weave-out from these two languages has two difficulties. He seems to take such weave-out from two specific languages as valid for all actualities. Two, H seems to overlook the fact that his weaving is his own private weaving, blind to other different interpretations of the materials he cited. As a result, H hates no-being, empty, fragment, ambiguity, poetry as thinking1196; these are modes of thinking non-Greek, non-German, where China thrives. H‘s private interpretations of Greek texts have been objected to by conventional Greek scholars. H gives no rationales for his own interpretations. Thus H is highly idiosyncratic; H cannot cite his idiosyncratic interpretations of languages to support his idiosyncrasy. In contrast, our pages here always contrast Chinese thinking-mode with Western, to bring out the peculiarities of Chinese wisdom. Besides, we never leave traditional commentaries; we always extrapolate from traditional interpretations. Moreover, importantly, our pages always support historical elucidations with actual daily praxes.

IV: H and Myths H has invented his peculiar etymological needle (out of ancient German and Greek) to stitch out a mythological network called ―Being‖ (in ancient sense), and then turns around to accuse the West today (there is no other world for H) of forgetting this ancient Being-network he concocted. H is worse than Freud (F) who ―interpreted‖ dreams of ―abnormal‖ people with ―complexes‖1197 F concocted out of Greek myths. Neither gave rationale for such concoctions. Myth for myth, F at least applied his myths to ―dream‖-actuality; H does not even interpret actuality with his myths, but just imposes them onto it, and accuses it of not conforming to his clever concoction. For H, asking question delves into the ground, and this ―ground‖ is ancient Greek-German (60). He is ethnocentric.

1196

―Only poetry is of the same order as philosophical thinking, although thinking and poetry are not identical.‖ (Introduction to Metaphysics, op. cit., p. 28). 1197 The Interpretation of Dreams (1913) is Sigmund Freud‘s first major masterwork. Chinese Wisdom Alive : Vignettes of Life-Thinking, Nova Science Publishers, Incorporated, 2010. ProQuest Ebook Central,

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All this is not just unfair; it is cultural chauvinistic and downright insane, as if to accuse today‘s airplanes of not made of wax as Greek Icarus‘ mythical flying wings were. Wax aside (H would surely have his own spin on ―wax‖), H‘s accusation of today‘s world is oddly thought-provoking, but this fact cannot deny that his concoction is woven out of his idiosyncratic etymologies (of ancient Greek and German) without rationale. Ironically, Bultmann (a) used H‘s myths to ―demythologize‖ the New Testament (b) into the world today accused by H‘s myths. Theirs is indeed a ―mad, mad world.‖ Besides, Zen and Japanese scholars flock to H, and Chang even used H as commentaries on Tao Te Ching. H may instantiate the truth that being racial, cultural, and local is to be cosmopolitan.1198

V: H and Plato

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The secret code of H is Plato.1199 H is Plato today; their structural procedures are identical.1200 H‘s Being is Plato‘s Idea. H descends to the Ground, to gather the gathered beings, to appear in the gathered beings and Dasein. Plato ascends to the Sun of the Real, in which all things participate to turn real. With his myth of the cave and divided line, Plato calls us all to convert and partake of Idea (The Republic vi. 509d-511e, vii. 514a-521b). H does not even call his concoction out of etymological origins a myth but calls on us all to convert and return to Being. Platonic H is convincing because all Western philosophers engage in footnoting Plato as Whitehead claims. Both Heidegger and Whitehead are ―Plato today‖ reenacting the myth of the cave; H‘s Being and Time echoes Whitehead‘s Process and Reality. In the mode of Platonic divided line, H goes beyond here-now with his principles-that-govern. All this is typical of the West. China calls for entering deep into here-now to follow along with the Ligrain in things, pervading Heaven and Earth.

1198

Cf. 「越是民族的，越就是世界的。」 (Thus begins ―說明‖ that begins 孫廣來編, 中國歷代名帖精選, 陝西旅遊出版社, 2005.) 1199 Paul Tillich is similarly an interesting Platonism today, Plato upside down (God as Ground), in an ultimate context of Christian religion. 1200 Sadly, H merely cited Plato; see H‘s Introduction, op. cit., p. 252, index on ―Plato.‖

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APPENDIX II: COUNSELOR AS POETIC PEDIATRICIAN-MOTHER ―I don‘t wanna sleep!‖ Tommy shouts. ―Ok, Tommy. Don‘t sleep. Just sit here beside your pillow. Mom reads you a story you love, ok? Don‘t sleep.‖ Tommy nods. ―Once upon a time . . . ,‖ and Tommy hits his pillow. Mom follows Tommy, not forcing him, not letting go of him, but lets him be. ―Let be‖ is not let-go, no-do is not not-do.1201 Mom does not oppose Tommy‘s revolt; she reads what his revolt expresses, i.e., Tommy wants fun, e.g., hearing stories told. Counselor must listen for what suicide-behavior expresses. Mental people express their want, their desires, with their language of suicide, of violence, of food-rejection, of anti-life, of antisociality. Counselor must listen for their bottom-desires by listening perceptively, patiently, to their odd hurtful language. Counselor must listen, not muffle, must hear their heart-message— never suppress their language. Counselor must let them talk in their language, never stop it. How to do it is the counselor‘s task; the art of listening remains the fundament, nonnegotiable. Now the basis worked-out is the system-in-general, or rather, rules of thumb quite impossible to formulate explicitly to lug around as a manual. Counselor must undergo apprenticeship in the art of listening, to flex with each mental person in each unique language of living, its wording so idiosyncratic and ephemeral, as each baby babbles differently from the other, one moment differing from the other, and Mom must listen with tact, to compile this baby‘s own provisional ―dictionary‖ constantly changing. Pediatrician must follow each baby to hammer out this baby‘s rules of thumb, and then that baby‘s; physiological rules of thumb must be tailored to each living unique baby. Pediatrics is an art under the command of love of babies, listening for each set of ―baby babbles‖ in each living style. Physiology is invisible bones in life-flesh moving. Bones exposed must be put back into flesh; in flesh-moving bones manifest alive, indirectly. Pediatrician must watch each baby‘s movement to perceive—not see—baby-bones. Counselor is mother, is pediatrician, in love with special mental people often not at all lovable. Counselor needs motherly tact, pediatric perception, to move and change with each mental person. To do so, counselor must listen intently, to hear the heart-message in the person‘s hurtful words and peculiar wording. This is the rule of thumb in general, never a set system. ―Listen with care‖ is the key to counselor the pediatrician and the mother rolled into one. ―But why do we have to care for those weirdos? Who cares?‖ Well, ―insanity‖ is our confession to ignorance, an exposé of our fear of unknowns, our condescending dislike of difference. We are proud we are ―normal‖ thanks to their ―abject abnormality.‖ Besides being an offense to our ethical obligation to compassion, this complacent attitude proudly shuts us off from the fact that those ―insane‖ geniuses blaze the trails of astounding novelty. They see things we never dream of, the many brave new worlds. No wonder, ancient people revered the insane, as Ruth Benedict reported. Both Confucius and Chuang Tzu were eager to learn from insane people as sages. Ancient prophets of Israel are psychotics seeing-hearing things no one did. Zaehner, Spalding Professor of 1201

莊子‘s 天放is not 孟子‘s 放心; 無為 is not 不為.

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Eastern Religions and Ethics, Oxford, wrote An Inquiry into some Varieties of Praeternatural Experience,1202 a polite name for ―insanity.‖ It takes a mathematical genius who teaches at Oxford. Lewis Carroll as his pseudonym,1203 to write Alice in Wonderland so ―crazy‖; we are now all Alice in today‘s wonderful Quantum Land, thanks to those mental people of physicists.1204 Wonderland is crazy land, and crazy land is wonderland. Many ―insane people‖ today have achieved so much—Ezra Pound the world-renowned poet, John Nash the Nobel Prize winning mathematician, Gödel another great mathematician, genius Josef Hassid the violinist died at age 26.1205 Many ―autistic‖ people are famed painters, mathematicians, etc. And the list goes on.1206 ―It is the privilege of true genius, and especially of the genius who opens up a new path, to make great mistakes with impunity.‖ ―Everyone appears mad who recognizes the eternal Ideas in fleeting things.‖1207 Schopenhauer said,1208 genius looks far to agonize over here. Mental persons suffer from ―crazy ideas,‖ we say. Desire to grasp the moon had been laughed off until the astronauts got to the moon in 1969. Socrates dissatisfied met pigs satisfied, and pigs killed him disturbing their peace. ―We must separate high agonies from low.‖ Can we tell two unknowns apart, though? We had better respect all agonies as geniuses‘. God alone knows how many ―insane‖ talents have perished on life‘s wayside; these people cannot survive without our ―normal‖ protection. We must protect them as protecting our treasure so perishable, so breakable. We owe it to them and to ourselves to do so, on pain of throwing talents and novel future to the wind. It is not too much to say that our future depends on them, and so we owe it to them and to us all to protect and nurture them to blossom. Counselor is crucial agent to protect our treasures for tomorrow. An important caveat must be entered here. Upon asked why fish has no umbrella, Tessie, aged two and a half, proudly answered, ―‗Cause fish has no hand!‖ Mom was ecstatic, ―See how logical Tessie is!‖ That set me thinking. What ―logic‖ is that? Answer, cute logic, and I challenge any logician to define what ―cute logic‖ is; it is indefinable. Counselor‘s rule of thumb of listening is as indefinable as Tessie‘s logic. 1202

See Analects 18/5 and Chuang Tzu 4/86-89. R. C. Zaehner, Mysticism Sacred and Profane (1957), Oxford University Press, 1971. 1203 That ―Lewis Carroll‖ is a pseudo-name shows how ―insane‖ this mathematical genius, Charles L. Dodgson, has to be to write this great ―insane‖ unreal stuff. 1204 See Robert Gilmore, Alice in Quantumland, NY: Springer, 1995, among many books he wrote to report on today‘s crazy mental world of physics. 1205 Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (1934), Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989, the last chapter. Analects 18/5 and Chuang Tzu 4/86 record how both want to learn from insane people. M. O‘C. Drury (―Madness and Religion,‖ The Danger of Words, NY: Humanities Press, 1973, pp. 115-137) lists prophets and Jesus as psychotics. John W. Dawson, Jr., Logical Dilemmas: The Life and Work of Kurt Gödel, Wellesley, MA: A. K. Peters, 1997, Rebecca Goldstein, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel, NY: W. W. Norton, 2005. R. C. Zaehner, Mysticism Sacred and Profane: An Inquiry into some Varieties of Praeternatural Experience (1957), Oxford University Press, 1971. ―Psychiatrist‘s Chair: Anthony Feinstein examines the case notes of violinist Josef Hassid, whose life of potential musical greatness was cut short by tragedy,‖ highly admired by Fritz Kreisler and Carl Flesch. The Strad, December 1997, pp. 1343-1349 (taken from History of Psychiatry, Vol. 8, Part One, 1997, published by Alpha Academic). 1206 Arthur Schopenhauer lists many quotations on genius-mad identity and many mad people of genius in The World as Will and Representation, tr. E.F.J. Payne (1958), NY: Dover Publications, 1969, I: 189-94. 1207 Both are quoted in ibid., pp. 191 (Plato) and 413 (Voltaire). The first saying is by Voltaire (Siècle de Louis XIV, ch. 32); the second is by Plato (Phaedrus 249D). 1208 Schopenhauer, op. cit., I: 186.

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1209

Psychiatry has for counselors a thick official ―helpful guide to clinical practice . . . 1210 across cultures‖ called Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR), imprimatur by American Psychiatric Association, 2005. Its two sections chill my spine, ―Definition of Mental Disorder‖ and ―Issues in the Use of DSM-VI‖ (pp. xxx-xxxii). Counselors are trained to consult it to categorize and treat mental ―disorders‖ as medical doctors treat diseases. ―DSM helps clinicians determine disorders and gives clinicians common language.‖ These words make sense only if mental pain is taken as same as medical disorders, requiring common technical terms. Mental pain is yet no physiological disorder but heart-language to word forth thwarted desires, and counselors are no clinicians but hearers of heart-message expressed in mental pain. Common language—common corridor (William James)—is enough to convey the heartmessage and communicate among counselors. No technical ―common language‖ is needed. Mental pain is common words expressing thwarted desire, Tommy‘s revolt for Mom to hear his desire. You see, the whole insistence—determining disorder, technical common language—comes from taking mental pain as the same as medical disorder. They are not. Mental ―disorder‖ is actually desperate language of seers frustrated. Of course, when mental pain gets so severe as to risk damaging the person and surrounding, to destroy the message, counselor must use all means available—physical, physiological, psychopharmacological, DSM is useful here—to moderate the severity so as to render the language clear and lucid enough to go through. Such are emergency measures counselor must use, but they remain auxiliary means to facilitating listening, never the major focus of counseling. So, counseling is charged with two responsibilities, first, to protect, which is a means to the primary second, listening. First, counselor must protect mental persons from hurting themselves and others. Second, counselor must listen while protecting mental persons. Counselor must never lose sight of the main mission to listen to them, while busy protecting them. DSM is a useful means (not ―guide‖) only for protection, not for listening; protection is a means, clinical, urgent and preliminary, to listening, no substitute for counselor‘s main mission, listening. Counselor is a listener, never a clinician. Even ―counselor as therapist‖ is under suspicion, counselor listens, not heal. There is a great temptation to counselor, however, to do clinical protection alone, for protection is often urgent, abiding, immediate, necessary, clear-cut, visible, effective, easily proving that counselor is doing something, while motherly listening is an art quite laborious, nebulous, uncontrollable, going nowhere, time-consuming, not sure whereto, in a word, ―unscientific.‖ Counselor must never yield to this temptation—to switch to being a clinician and lose sight of listening. Consider Jesus. When people looked for him to cure them, he left to preach elsewhere; when he heard that John was beheaded, he went to other villages to preach; what sealed his

1209 1210

Be it noted that ―psychiatry‖ is almost a branch of medical science, medicine applied to psychic area. Why do they call the Manual ―statistical‖ is another chilling mystery; how could psyche be rendered in statistical terms? The word is not explained in the Manual.

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death verdict was his admission of being the Messiah, the Son of Man.1211 These are strange words and behaviors until we realize the following point. Jesus refused to yield to these temptations—just to heal and feed people, to overthrow Roman injustices, to clean up orthodox corruption, even to teach people and disciples—to lose sight of his main mission, preaching the arrival of the Kingdom of God. These other jobs are means, urgent, preliminary, to preaching, never its substitutes. These other jobs at most prepare people to enter the Kingdom of God, not the Kingdom itself. When the means and preparation clog up his main mission, Jesus loses himself. Jesus is no social worker, no political revolutionary, no physician, no teacher, but the preacher. By the same token, counselor is motherly listener, no medical clinician. Medical clinical work prepares for the listening; being engrossed in clinical work—being a therapist—loses the counselor as counselor. Now we must remind ourselves. ―Listening‖ never blindly follows, but actively perceives-listens, via ―words‖ of pain and revolt, for the bottom desires heartfelt, to hammer out how best to fulfill them with mental people; they are much smarter than we think, in fact, they are geniuses seeing-hearing what we never dream of seeing-hearing. Mom reads a ―once upon a time‖ story because Mom feelingly perceives that that is one form of fun Tommy desires at heart. Tommy nods to approve of Mom‘s reading. Listening is thus an active perceptive art of interactively fulfilling mental people‘s bottom desires, nothing more powerful. It is powerful praxis of ―wu wei 無為, no-do‖ that is quite contagious. It is Chinese wisdom alive at work. Holistic Chinese medicine does ―listening prognosis 聽診,‖ listening pre-knowing, as counselor also does ―listening ahead‖ as above described, listening to the pain telling of the person‘s future, thereby advocates fulfilling the person, and counselor‘s key is listening, motherly perceptive. Wrongly, ―listening‖ connotes blind laid-back following, ―take-time, let-go, and donothing.‖ Listening sees through (perceives) in a split second. Mom‘s reaction to Tommy is ―at once.‖ Zen Master strikes a lightening; Chuang Tzu devastates with a riposte. They listen, taking no time. A client needs a tiny push to ―realize it‖! Counselor must listen, to strike with that sharp quip. It takes two sessions or less; longer sessions waste time. Counselor is Zen Mom. And the counselees can tell at once as well. Frost said, ―It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. [One] can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound— that he will never get over it. . . . [P]ermanence in poetry as in love is perceived instantly. The proof of a poem is not that we have never forgotten it, but that we knew at sight that we never could forget it.‖1212 Counselor just listens, to create that lasting poem for that mental person, who ―can tell the moment it strikes him,‖ perceiving ―instantly‖ that he ―never could forget it‖; it gives him new life. ―Is counselor a poet?‖ Well, Mom and motherly pediatrician, who compose counselor, are both poets of perceptive insight, thanks to their heartfelt listening for the depth 1211

Mark 1:37-38 (Luke 4:42-43), Matthew 14:13, Mark 14:61-63 (shrewd Jesus could have dodged directly answering this fateful question, as other two versions attempted for him, Matthew 26:63-64, Luke 22:67-73; he strangely did not dodge). Matthew 23:39 (Luke 13:35) is significant, also proclaiming himself the Almighty King of unbearable compassion while condemning the unspeakable crimes of pharisaism. 1212 ―The Poetry of Amy Lowell,‖ Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays, NY: The Library of America, 1995, p. 712.

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message expressed in the mental pain so obnoxious, irritating, and even dangerous to observers and to mental person, the genius so precious. ―How could we be slow and quick at once?‖ Zen master or a poet‘s sharp quip, or Mom‘s, is both quick and slow, letting not let-go; people thus go their way, thanks to counselor. That‘s Zen, Mom, and poet. It takes time to turn out a quick Mom, who is intuitive, penetrative, and sharply listening, yet all are so natural of Mom loving Tommy. This view of counselor differs from the standard one today, but if we take Taoism, Zen, and Confucianism (―Mom‖ is Confucian) seriously, this view follows—follows strictly. Family love Confucian lives in irresistible naturalness so Taoist. Everyone is perfect, and everyone must improve. That‘s Zen, Mom, kids, love, poet, and life. And that‘s counselor helping, smiling. No one is ―sick‖ or ―disturbed.‖ We are all frustrated; our root-desires are stunted. Who isn‘t? Kids stamp feet yelling all day, because they are frustrated. They have every right to! We are so dishonest as to muddle along; some of us are so sensitive, so kid-genius, that they so ―insanely‖ react to frustration, that they turn hurtful to themselves and us. Counselor is here to cherish, listen, and tacitly, tactfully,1213 push them into themselves, with a quip. That‘s Zen, Mom, poet, and Taoism in one. O, no, I keep repeating myself, but how could I help it? I do hope you see this point, so simple, natural, and loving. ―Isn‘t all this Chinese?‖ So glad you‘ve caught it! It is Chinese wisdom of life, isn‘t it? Let‘s return to Mom we began with, to learn from Mom. What can be learned from Mom is limitless, to be sure, but we confine ourselves to just one lesson. Mom knows Tommy‘s desire he likes, to hear a story, and also knows Tommy‘s other root-desire he dislikes, to nap. Mom tactfully satisfies Tommy‘s desire he likes, and tells a story, and thereby satisfies Tommy‘s other deep-desire he dislikes, to nap. Thus Mom hits two birds with one delightful stone, because Mom sees through Tommy, because Mom listens and watches Tommy, because Mom loves Tommy. Such a long series of connections are fulfilled at once at a stroke, by telling-story that Tommy enjoys. It is Mom‘s stroke of genius of love, Mom‘s poetic Zen, in an instant. This is ―the long and the short‖ of Mom the counselor, so long and so short in one Another important warning is here. ―Root-desire‖ is not Superego or Id, not fantasy of ―my ideal self,‖ not changing, not unchanging.1214 Mental pain warns us never to tinker with the root-desire, but listen for it, listen to it; pain is the word just there, in pain. Motherly counselor intently watch for the root-message coming from the root-desire, to construct with mental people their own fulfillment in line with their root-desire, while medically protecting them from excess of pain, from damaging themselves and others. Nor is ―genius‖ high IQ but folly focused. A well-known ―slow poke,‖ Mr. Sun Tzu-ch‘u 孫子楚, won the hand of the most beautiful lady, the highest accolade in state examination, and the highest honor in the administration. What is his secret? His was such ―folly 癡‖ as to ―focus 凝‖ in pursuits; he was folly focused in studies and skills, to accomplish the highest, 1213 1214

―Tact‖ includes psychopharmacological assistance, of course. I part with Zen-inspired therapists somewhere here. They have no-self therapist with no-self client; I say, therapy vanishes where there is no-self. They may claim no-self as self-changing (Magid, 22); I say, no-self is not changing self. They deny all desires as fantasy-self; I claim root-desire as precious, beyond change and nochange. See Barry Magid, Ending the Pursuit of Happiness: A Zen Guide, Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2008. Mark Epstein, Thoughts without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective, NY: Basic Books, 1995.

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while those ―no fools‖ fail, giving up halfway.1215 Folly is the genius of mental people, our treasure ineffable and breakable. Perfection resides in folly. Perhaps I should have said, ―genius‖ means not just high IQ but also folly focused; genius is made of 1% inspiration infusing 99% silly perspiration, i.e., folly focused, as genius Edison confessed. High IQ inspires folly-focused. Now all this begins to portray mental persons, the fragile geniuses we commoners treasure and protect, and follow. The revolutionary blessings and judgment of mental persons can be put this way. The poor and needy people turn central in the compassion-world of Buddhism, Christianity, Lao Tzu, and Mencius. The needy are at the center of our ethical obligation, to judge us to expose who we are, to determine our final destiny. How many dictators have lost their heads to the helpless commoners in need? Now, mental persons have this aspect; they are in need of our protection. But they are much more; this need-aspect is subordinate to their major feature. They are the seemingly erratic yet genuine genius beacon to the novel horizons of humanity. We condescend and despise, even abuse them, at our own peril, exactly as dictators perish at the hand of the powerless needy. Have we heard of ―Animal Farm‖? Orwellian lunacy offended even the sensibility of T. S. Eliot and others.1216 Mental persons are, by being patients-in-need, to lead us from low-level ―normality‖ up forward. Who would have thought that we must let metal fly up in space and float over water for thousands and thousands of miles? That is sheer insanity, and such insanity pushes us forward and upward. We must satisfy the needs of mental people, serve and protect them, as we listen, learn, and cooperate to fulfill their ―insane‖ visions for themselve, thereby for all humanity, on pain of perishing ourselves with them.1217 Such inclusiveness of interpersonalism, extended to social ethics, is the genius of Chinese wisdom alive.

1215

蒲松齡‘s story, ―阿寶,‖ concludes by saying, 「性癡則共志凝, 故書癡者文必工, 藝癡者技必良. 世上落拓而無成者, 皆自謂不癡者也.」 ([清]蒲松齡著, 聊齊誌異, 臺北文化圖書公司, 民85, pp. 70-72) 1216 ―After a thoughtful review of the manuscript of George Orwell‘s Animal Farm, an editor at the British publishing house Jonathan Cape responded, ‗I think the choice of pigs as the ruling caste will no doubt give offense to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as undoubtedly the Russians are.‘ As an editor at Faber & Faber, T. S. Eliot concurred, stating, ‗We doubt . . . whether this is the right point of view from which to criticize the political situation at the present time.‘‖ Anne Skillion, ed., The New York Public Library Literature Companion, NY: The Free Press, 2001, p. 311. 1217 (Freud and) Jung‘s careers that initiated ―counseling‖ support my view of counselor. See Jung‘s Memories, Dreams, Reflections reviewed by Lewis Mumford as ―Revolt of the Demons‖ in Interpretations and Forecasts, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973, pp. 388-406, esp. 392, 395, 397, 399, etc.

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INDEX

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A academic, 46, 163, 184, 459 accidental, 446 accommodation, 175, 468 accuracy, 55, 324 achievement, 125, 126, 374 acupuncture, 392 adaptation, 93 adjustment, xxv, 5, 52, 58, 89, 93, 196, 333, 455, 468 administration, 87, 184, 203, 481 adult, xx, 1, 9, 26, 76, 79, 85, 144, 165, 167, 202, 293, 308, 309, 348, 370, 371, 382, 388 adulthood, 107 advertisements, 16, 42 154, 312, 378 advocacy, 30, 434 aesthetics, 146, 409, 410 age, xx, 21, 39, 42, 102, 108, 135, 155, 244, 326, 343, 353, 372, 478 agent, 46, 175, 334, 478 aggression, 246, 388 aging, 102, 135, 209, 318 agricultural, 246 aid, 5, 7, 10, 11, 72, 99, 151, 166, 171, 182, 190, 346, 377 air, xiv, 7, 66, 76, 81, 86, 114, 193, 195, 202, 214, 233, 248, 253, 258, 260, 272, 273, 285, 301, 302, 321, 329, 373, 410, 418, 426, 427, 428, 430 allies, 413 alphabets, 16, 235, 261, 312, 405, 409 alternative, xiii, 2, 80, 87, 114, 154, 191, 232, 278, 335, 351, 363, 375, 414, 417, 418, 423, 431, 433 ambiguity, 80, 128, 138, 201, 215, 230, 246, 279, 316, 375, 463, 474, 475 ambivalence, 246

American Indians, 29, 106, 256 American Psychiatric Association, 46, 479 American Revolution, 251, 252 amnesia, 176 analytical thinking, 183 anatomy, 205 anger, 148, 282, 296, 323, 342, 432 animal health, 333 animals, xxiv, 33, 39, 45, 58, 88, 90, 91, 100, 125, 126, 128, 144, 160, 161, 169, 192, 205, 325, 334, 352, 398, 407, 410, 430 annihilation, 289 antagonism, 71, 114, 284, 333, 392 antagonistic, 333, 375, 425 anthropological, 238, 253, 429, 452, 461 anti-Confucianism, 334 anti-Semitism, 253 antithesis, 227, 375 anxiety, 277, 388 apartheid, 177 appetite, 31, 249, 353 application, 53, 54, 223, 263, 266, 393, 468 aptitude, 207, 344 archeology, 220, 251 arrest, 44 articulation, 141, 150 artificial intelligence, 230 artistic, 41, 110, 422 asia, 106, 200 asian, 4, 20, 77, 81, 93, 229, 246, 351, 387, 406, 411, 430, 432, 437, 465, 469, 471 aspiration, 328 assassination, 333

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Index

486 assault, 86, 454 assessment, 348 assignment, 379 assumptions, 41, 42, 146, 171, 374, 402, 453 astronomy, 100 atmosphere, 16, 159, 172, 254, 418, 419 atomic weapon, 434 atoms, 120, 161, 165, 331 atrocities, 223, 275, 365 attacks, 188, 237, 239, 302 attitudes, 12, 88, 246 attribution, 402 aura, 306 authenticity, xviii, 19, 48, 131, 134, 135, 201, 224, 290, 291, 328, 355, 359, 360, 368, 370, 413 authoritarianism, 159 authority, 52, 148, 157, 159, 185, 306, 413, 454 autism, 176 autonomy, 193, 359, 402 aversion, 224 awareness, 75, 79, 122, 133, 334, 368, 378, 468

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B babbling, 452 babies, 107, 123, 144, 155, 274, 307, 308, 477 banking, 40, 48 bankruptcy, 191 beating, xxiii, 139, 373, 374, 375, 376, 377 behavior, 5, 18, 73, 88, 157, 190, 265, 444, 477 beliefs, 184, 250 bending, 58, 59 benefits, 58, 146, 220, 394, 403 bible, 39, 46, 95, 143, 144, 155, 234, 292, 307, 308, 342, 391, 444, 456 birth, xvii, xx, 91, 114, 124, 228, 245, 252, 287, 292, 338, 340, 359, 367, 373, 389, 411, 428, 448 birth control, 124 black hole, 175 blame, 21, 222 blends, 85, 92, 168, 247, 248, 307, 314, 352, 392, 398, 475 blindness, 124 blood, 16, 26, 54, 68, 128, 156, 166, 187, 282, 283, 331, 336, 358, 365, 389, 395, 405, 422, 452 bloodshed, 87, 260, 313, 394, 415, 425 bloodstream, 257, 265, 296 bonds, 93, 406 bone marrow, 103 borderline, 261

boredom, 437 borrowing, 187 bottom-up, 451 bounds, 464 bowel, 343 boys, 9, 148 brain, 100, 331, 358, 430, 433, 442 branching, 141, 143 breathing, xi, xiv, xv, 15, 58, 137, 197, 205, 228, 272, 330, 371, 373, 374, 375, 376, 377, 378, 388, 392, 398, 399, 407, 408, 409, 418, 419, 427, 438, 443, 465 breeder, 265, 464 brothers, 56, 71, 296, 306, 342, 357, 367, 368, 471 Buddha, xxiv, 22, 29, 324, 394, 446 Buddhism, 36, 44, 45, 159, 175, 176, 237, 238, 240, 243, 262, 336, 353, 366, 389, 394, 404, 421, 441, 449, 468, 482 Buddhist, xvi, 28, 29, 96, 139, 159, 175, 177, 194, 215, 238, 241, 312, 338, 366, 387, 404, 445, 481 budding, 399, 471 buildings, 44 burn, 14, 96, 173, 220, 222, 239, 303 business management, 312 buyer, 14, 394 bypass, 16, 146, 179, 219, 262

C campaigns, 57 cancer, 234, 396 candidates, 469 capitalism, 241, 389 casting, 117 castration, 251 catalyst, 197, 238, 427 cataract, 174, 248 catharsis, 296 catholic, 11 causality, 143, 191 cave, 202, 403, 476 cell, 67, 333, 387 censorship, 213, 435 chaos, 68, 86, 175, 194, 201, 202, 260, 273, 313, 314, 387, 399, 402, 423, 424, 457, 465 childbirth, 293 childhood, 21, 169, 346 children, 1, 57, 86, 101, 108, 120, 123, 126, 138, 165, 167, 169, 174, 277, 278, 285, 304, 367, 374 chinese medicine, 272, 312, 373, 376, 391, 392, 480

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Index christianity, xxiv, 9, 169, 176, 237, 238, 240, 316, 336, 353, 402, 445, 468, 482 christians, 73, 243, 336 chrysanthemum, 114 ciphers, xiii, 68, 89, 232, 371, 380, 396, 402, 420, 424, 455, 467 citizens, 85 civil rights, 471 classes, xiii, 187 classical, xvii, 2, 7, 20, 37, 39, 56, 66, 127, 153, 154, 156, 157, 160, 161, 163, 164, 206, 208, 227, 228, 312, 317, 345, 354, 355, 364, 413, 426, 449 clinician, 479, 480 clusters, xxiv, 17, 291 coercion, 40, 292, 335 cognition, 132, 139, 428 cognitive level, 174 coherence, xi, xv, xxiii, xxiv, 3, 46, 100, 119, 126, 163, 166, 207, 212, 234, 261, 271, 276, 278, 319, 321, 329, 402, 414 collateral, 466 colonial rule, 254 colonialism, 233, 312, 313, 388, 455 colors, 15, 262 comfort zone, xix commerce, xx, 14, 167, 241, 393 commercials, 16 commodity, 48 communication, 84, 245, 396, 412 communism, 44, 334, 389 community, xxv, 10, 45, 183, 203, 217, 238, 250, 257, 266, 318, 348, 367, 387, 392, 394, 434, 470 compassion, 6, 84, 86, 87, 319, 336, 400, 404, 477, 480, 482 competition, 245, 247 compiler, 226 complement, 11, 122, 223, 387, 431 complexity, 2, 3, 113, 121, 123, 129, 152, 169, 194, 201, 324, 402 components, xviii, 262, 431, 467 composition, 51, 219, 227, 273, 278, 289, 297, 327, 355, 413, 433 comprehension, 127, 142, 146, 259, 269, 402 compulsion, 53 computation, 434 computer technology, 96 concentrates, 22, 238, 258, 278, 429 conceptualization, 187 concreteness, 400 conditioning, 258

487

confession, 21, 49, 139, 204, 295, 324, 428, 477 confidence, 134, 308, 414 confinement, 340 conflict, 32, 37, 84, 85, 207, 454 conformity, 302 confrontation, 445, 468 Confucianism, v, xiv, 2, 36, 43, 55, 59, 68, 76, 77, 78, 89, 92, 112, 114, 126, 135, 159, 160, 244, 246, 312, 334, 344, 352, 361, 363, 365, 366, 370, 389, 393, 395, 404, 421, 429, 437, 441, 444, 481 confusion, 59, 60, 78, 87, 94, 115, 199, 202, 238, 239, 331, 344, 389, 422, 424 congress, iv, 37 conscious activity, 132 consciousness, xviii, 15, 100, 128, 133, 146, 175, 176, 374 consent, 209 consequentialism, 124 conservation, 67 constitution, 469 consulting, 42, 239 consumerism, 375 context-dependent, 262 contingency, 414, 468 continuity, xxi, xxiii, xxiv, 87, 114, 115, 282, 380, 382 control, 86, 124, 203, 248, 253, 282, 331, 362, 433, 451, 457 convergence, 289 conversion, 73 conviction, 57, 72, 265, 282, 349, 355, 404 cooking, 388, 392, 396, 398, 438, 467 corporations, 43 correlation, 434 corruption, 184, 185, 215, 341, 480 counseling, 18, 37, 55, 80, 190, 238, 272, 312, 479, 482 couples, 9, 253 covering, 9, 45, 131, 403, 448, 458 crack, 67, 237, 239 creationism, 325 creativity, xxi, 131, 132, 156, 157, 237, 406, 426, 436, 437, 462 credit, 3, 49, 429, 342 crime, 12, 73, 85, 124, 341, 398, 434, 454, 455, 470, 480 criminals, 246, 307, 336, 444 criticism, xvi, 65, 110, 187, 213, 265, 290, 412, 413, 435, 470 crops, 57 cross-cultural, 312, 451

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Index

488

crying, 350, 444 cultivation, xviii, 30, 38, 53, 58, 60, 68, 93, 241, 242, 248, 306, 410, 444, 458 cultural differences, 126, 454, 455, 456, 460 Cultural Revolution, 48, 251, 455 curing, 391 curiosity, xv, 17, 446 customers, 394 cycles, 62, 121, 216, 304 cyclone, ix, xxii, 101, 117, 371, 377, 465 cynicism, 172

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D daily care, 241 daily living, 3, 127, 266, 285, 346, 395 dances, 196, 212, 250, 296, 304, 305, 399, 407, 409, 419, 432 danger, 47, 54, 248, 299, 303, 361, 362, 428, 463 death penalty, xviii, 12, 244, 362, 413 deaths, 2, 5, 27, 85, 177, 201, 359 debts, 400 decision-making process, 468 decomposition, 304 deconstruction, 164, 165, 423, 469 deduction, 53 defects, 139 defense, 18, 333, 413 definition, 54, 77, 190, 195, 306, 316 deforestation, 396 delivery, 215, 427 delusion, 206, 224, 263 democracy, 32, 42, 85, 86, 183, 254, 255, 259, 312, 354, 362, 389, 404, 422, 434, 454 democratization, 454 denial, 78, 83, 111, 135, 137, 164, 175, 382 depressed, 117, 139, 423 desert, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 334, 342, 381, 401 desertion, 222, 334 destruction, 31, 58, 334, 361, 364 deviation, 207 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 46 dichotomy, 2, 99 dictatorship, 42, 69, 101, 159, 255 dignity, 4, 35, 56, 75, 400, 448, 455, 470 diminishing returns, 31 disappointment, 275, 307

disaster, 5, 7, 42, 46, 57, 58, 86, 192, 193, 331, 334, 339, 345, 346, 353, 360, 393, 405, 434, 445, 454, 455 discontinuity, xxiii, 114, 115 discourse, 12, 463 discrimination, 275, 348, 464 diseases, 391 disorder, 199, 201, 479 disposition, 432 disputes, 114 dissatisfaction, 260, 308 distortions, 94 distribution, 125 diversity, 36, 234, 254, 369, 375, 425, 471 division, xv, 191, 375, 377, 428 divorce, 253 doctors, 13, 177, 238, 274, 327, 331, 335, 373, 391, 479 doors, 379 dream, xvii, xx, 11, 40, 42, 43, 68, 71, 72, 73, 92, 138, 142, 148, 172, 188, 191, 196, 200, 206, 235, 251, 263, 266, 279, 291, 292, 304, 311, 321, 376, 389, 401, 415, 423, 426, 442, 445, 446, 452, 470, 471, 475, 477, 480 drinking, 66 drowning, 194 drugs, 274 DSM, 46, 479 DSM-IV, 46, 479 dumping, 21 dung, 140, 377 dust, 206, 225, 439, 456 duties, 367

E ears, xxii, 101, 108, 284, 305, 365, 410, 433 earth, 5, 23, 33, 49, 89, 127, 145, 168, 169, 186, 188, 195, 205, 207, 208, 217, 245, 246, 292, 297, 331, 340, 348, 353, 357, 358, 364, 367, 376, 393, 406, 410, 411, 414, 461, 469 East Asia, 4, 20, 77, 81, 93, 229, 246, 351, 387, 406, 411, 432, 437, 465, 471 Eastern Religions, 478 eating, 30, 33, 44, 305, 334, 389, 392 echoing, 41, 54, 119, 272, 274, 292, 301, 410, 411, 419, 443, 469 ecological, xxiii, 5, 23, 33, 48, 93, 239, 253, 275, 304, 315, 319, 331, 353, 396, 409 ecologists, 30

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Index economics, 7, 42, 137, 366, 367, 368, 392, 395 ecstasy, 408 education, xv, 11, 131, 132, 208, 252, 346, 453 ego, 32, 42, 145, 149, 288, 418 elaboration, 42, 123, 205, 220, 325, 375 elders, 106, 466 electricity, 243 email, 20, 365, 471 emotion, 128, 164, 168, 174, 195, 205, 266, 277, 371, 422 empiricism, xx, 28, 202, 421 employees, 168 employment, 134, 184, 357 endorphins, 442 energy, 54, 67, 243, 264, 305, 306, 431 engagement, 131, 132, 133, 134, 231, 232, 233, 303 english language, 165, 266 enterprise, 366 enthusiasm, 155, 166 environment, 9, 315, 366 epistemology, xvi, 49, 138, 409, 452 equality, 436, 451 equating, 456 eros, 183 estrogen, 396 ethics, xvi, 5, 30, 31, 32, 33, 53, 73, 76, 78, 80, 100, 124, 126, 134, 138, 223, 242, 332, 342, 367, 368, 393, 394, 396, 409, 411, 433, 435, 443, 444, 453, 482 ethnocentrism, 123 etiquette, 135, 393, 394 eugenics, 33, 124, 275, 418 eurocentric, 461 europeans, 35, 47 evil, 12, 30, 57, 58, 69, 71, 72, 85, 87, 128, 137, 239, 287, 292, 334, 335, 341, 394, 404 evolution, 114, 145, 216, 292, 325, 346 exaggeration, xv, 193 exclusion, 31, 78, 199 execution, 124, 238, 470 exercise, 131, 220, 228, 255, 277 existentialism, 65, 414, 445 expertise, 42 exploitation, 233, 237 explosives, 120, 252 exposure, 76, 83, 412, 419 extinction, 319 extraction, 195, 220 extrapolation, 61, 122, 233, 355, 375 extremism, 253

489

eyes, xxii, 21, 23, 106, 173, 176, 226, 287, 367, 374, 379, 466

F fabric, 54, 192, 368, 414, 432 fabrication, 290, 291 failure, 55, 66, 223, 333, 334, 335, 342, 369, 394, 419, 431 fairness, 324, 454 fairy tale, 410 faith, 172, 238, 248 familial, 32, 333, 340, 395, 410, 455 family members, 201, 394, 395 family system, 35, 374 fasting, 176 fat, 168 fatalism, 72 fatalistic, 89 fatherhood, 255 faults, 65 fear, 58, 75, 134, 197, 209, 246, 251, 252, 353, 446, 466, 477 feeding, 31, 77, 124, 125, 338, 392, 393 feelings, xiv, xvi, 28, 60, 126, 363, 435 feet, 7, 17, 43, 85, 87, 105, 192, 240, 283, 304, 314, 332, 333, 362, 376, 379, 481 females, 251 femininity, 402 fetus, 465 feudalism, 334, 431 fibers, 147, 327, 328 fidelity, 7, 15, 39, 78, 241, 288, 289, 291, 328, 361 fighters, 375, 471 filial piety, 163, 342, 388, 394, 455 fire, 14, 58, 127, 145, 151, 169, 173, 233, 239, 263, 283, 453, 460, 461, 462, 463 firms, 2, 142, 397 fish, xv, xvi, xix, xx, 4, 19, 25, 36, 39, 56, 66, 83, 90, 91, 107, 149, 200, 214, 225, 275, 276, 288, 307, 352, 372, 373, 391, 397, 401, 410, 418, 478 fission, 161 fitness, 411 fixation, 85, 413 flame, 436, 437, 445 flavors, 95, 392 flex, 36, 40, 88, 271, 375, 477 flexibility, 53, 55, 61, 87, 88 flight, 104, 446

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Index

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490

float, 32, 138, 189, 196, 263, 287, 315, 330, 331, 426, 482 flood, 15, 57, 69, 148, 159, 216, 217, 300, 371, 443, 465 flow, xv, 14, 26, 57, 62, 92, 113, 119, 129, 149, 190, 203, 204, 217, 227, 229, 233, 331, 360, 370, 373, 379, 392, 405, 418, 424, 435 fluid, 2, 224, 225, 226, 227, 230, 263, 400, 451 focusing, 197, 447 folklore, 243, 249, 250, 251, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267 food, 31, 33, 66, 77, 92, 114, 124, 125, 136, 147, 192, 222, 258, 312, 392, 393, 477 forceps, 4, 463 forecasting, 13 foreign language, 229 foreigner, 407 forests, 160 forgery, 420 forgetfulness, 113, 129 forgetting, 9, 19, 23, 45, 61, 76, 153, 189, 217, 266, 303, 304, 305, 318, 323, 329, 346, 388, 428, 430, 471, 474, 475 forgiveness, 164 fortitude, 426 fragility, xxi, 100 freedom, 30, 45, 207, 217, 274, 350, 359, 398, 424, 448 friendship, 166, 221, 288, 295, 317, 426, 457, 458, 462, 469 frustration, 108, 167, 221, 225, 253, 481 fulfillment, 73, 332, 367, 481 funds, 16, 36 furniture, 250 fusion, 161, 463 fuzzy logic, 465

gift, 56, 95, 296, 308, 340, 400 glass, 105 global village, 235 globalization, vii, 69, 117, 122, 388, 447, 448, 449, 450, 451, 455, 458, 459, 465, 468, 469, 470, 471, 472 goals, 469 goat milk, 16 god, xxii, 48, 52, 95, 107, 136, 137, 143, 144, 176, 225, 237, 238, 241, 243, 244, 292, 336, 353, 369, 377, 380, 403, 430, 438, 455, 457, 458, 469, 476, 478, 480 governance, 4, 11, 25, 93, 204, 223, 263, 283, 344, 394, 434, 454 government, iv, xx, 25, 39, 42, 43, 68, 87, 183, 203, 251, 252, 253, 394, 428, 454, 467, 470 grading, 348, 349 grain, xvii, xix, xxiii, xxv, 20, 22, 28, 60, 95, 115, 146, 147, 172, 191, 209, 229, 237, 327, 346, 378, 407, 413, 444, 448, 456, 471, 474, 476 grandparents, 107, 108 grass, xiv, xx, xxii, xxiv, 38, 39, 41, 44, 58, 138, 149, 150, 285, 306, 333, 339, 398, 399, 406, 427, 436 grassland, 102 gravity, 167, 360, 368 grazing, 102, 149, 333 greed, 25, 58 green revolution, 125 greenhouse, 252 grief, 17, 388 groups, xxiv, 126, 144, 324, 422, 447, 468 growth, xviii, 9, 15, 18, 19, 21, 37, 39, 54, 73, 148, 149, 151, 159, 216, 234, 244, 285, 304, 305, 307, 309, 317, 333, 389, 448 guilt, 139 gut, 283, 404, 433

G

H

gait, 53, 76, 140 games, 148, 176, 256, 278, 444 gender, 316, 402 genealogy, 245, 466 generation, 45, 48, 49, 108, 234, 360, 387 genes, 245 genre, xx geography, 45, 89 geological history, 359, 382 gestalt, 114, 212, 266, 395, 447, 461, 462 gestures, 2, 228

habitat, 392, 430 handling, 13, 39, 48 hands, xix, 7, 9, 17, 39, 43, 85, 87, 88, 176, 192, 214, 226, 232, 248, 283, 287, 304, 308, 314, 332, 333, 362, 379, 395, 398, 450 handwriting, 406 hanging, 61, 342, 423 happiness, xxv, 13, 14, 32, 58, 63, 65, 67, 72, 85, 175, 176, 296, 326 hardships, 445 harmonization, 334

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Index harvest, 126, 129, 134, 136, 222, 232, 253, 313, 351, 361 hate, 57, 202, 275, 322 haze, 9 headache, 142, 180, 253, 336, 370, 377, 403, 404 healing, 139, 173, 255, 331, 337 health, 13, 32, 42, 62, 65, 68, 76, 241, 255, 272, 333, 373, 376, 390, 391, 392, 395, 396, 411, 436 hearing, 3, 7, 21, 22, 44, 99, 101, 157, 168, 185, 201, 206, 227, 250, 259, 264, 284, 285, 297, 305, 306, 337, 352, 353, 362, 374, 376, 411, 441, 446, 447, 458, 470, 473, 477, 480 heart disease, 331 heartbeat, ix, xi, xiv, 174, 287, 364, 377, 458 heartburn, 76 heat, 208, 392 hegemon, 59, 69, 241, 242, 283, 360, 429, 468 height, 83, 221, 226 heme, 194 heredity, 9 higher education, 252 hip, 45 holism, 114, 430 holistic, 23, 78, 89, 111, 156, 376, 388, 389, 391, 392, 396, 432, 435 homeless, 367 homeostasis, 275 homework, 471 homogeneity, 227 honesty, 26, 103, 134, 139, 164, 255, 395 honey, 232 horizon, xix, 81, 90, 150, 356, 406 hormone, 396 hospitality, 40, 121, 199, 201, 229, 232, 235, 278, 279, 305, 316 host, 16, 73, 362 hostility, 340 house, 6, 19, 32, 48, 108, 127, 128, 142, 172, 182, 190, 193, 392, 405, 409, 410, 428, 442, 463 household, 136, 366 human dignity, 470 human nature, 29, 30, 44, 56, 58, 73, 77, 78, 111, 168, 182, 184, 216, 332, 333, 334, 346, 357, 361, 363, 375, 396, 413, 453 human rights, 455 human subjects, 434 human values, 56 human virtue, 330

491

humane, 9, 15, 23, 25, 26, 29, 30, 31, 38, 47, 58, 88, 126, 134, 148, 168, 174, 195, 222, 223, 296, 305, 332, 346, 361, 368, 464, 470 humanism, xiv, 31, 32, 78, 84, 111, 245 humility, 247 humorous, 172, 415, 442, 444, 445, 447 humus, 79, 369 husband, 406 hybrid, 272 hydrogen, 331 hydrogen atoms, 331 hypocrisy, 71 hypothesis, 331

I ibuprofen, 274 ice, 105, 220, 232 identical twins, 450, 467 identification, 115, 199 identity, 4, 68, 114, 142, 143, 192, 194, 201, 291, 292, 355, 359, 382, 389, 425, 449, 450, 478 ideology, 223, 253, 254 idiosyncratic, xiii, 475, 476, 477 illusion, 53, 185, 202, 237, 255, 325, 337 images, xx, 145, 176, 193, 330, 331, 399 imagination, 67, 199, 343, 360, 462 imitation, 40, 407 immediate situation, 16 immortal, xxi, 1, 273, 368, 378, 389, 422, 480 immortality, 29, 67, 265, 282, 341, 353 immune function, 442 immunization, 147 imperialism, 423 imports, 405 imprisonment, 437, 461 in situ, 28, 29, 35, 40, 45, 52, 55, 83, 89, 209, 304, 324, 357 in vivo, 428 inbreeding, 313 incest, 313 incidence, 201 inclusion, xx, 212, 259, 269, 319 incompatibility, 264 incurable, 378 independence, 156, 295, 448 Indians, 29, 104, 106, 256, 470 indigenous, 121 individual character, 16 individual rights, 455

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492

Index

individuality, 32, 38, 39, 367, 403, 448, 449, 450, 451, 458, 459, 463, 466, 468, 470 induction, 6, 54, 80, 429 industry, 45, 46 ineffectiveness, 239 inefficiency, 125 inequality, 451 infants, 22, 307, 312 infection, 211, 431 infinite, 31, 81, 96, 104, 121, 132, 164, 207, 210, 305, 381, 396, 410 inflammation, 331 inherited, 146, 186, 192, 258, 339, 465 inhuman, 56, 133, 275 injunction, 323 injury, iv, 296, 388 injustice, 71, 117, 167, 177, 253, 332, 338, 369, 455 innocence, 21, 141, 226, 408 insane, 4, 120, 168, 169, 238, 259, 284, 285, 307, 445, 476, 477, 478, 482 insects, 39, 461, 472 insight, xxiv, 156, 195, 251, 331, 354, 363, 364, 417, 480 inspection, xx, 132, 233, 315 inspiration, 205, 266, 416, 482 instability, 48, 68, 224 institutions, 239 instruction, 159 instruments, xx, 331, 407 insults, 77, 413, 445 intangible, 255, 256, 426, 428 integrity, xiv, xxiv, 4, 7, 8, 20, 51, 55, 59, 68, 77, 90, 134, 138, 142, 192, 194, 201, 221, 240, 315, 351, 355, 358, 361, 382, 387, 394, 397, 405, 415, 425, 448, 449, 459, 468, 470, 471 intellect, 173, 388, 430 intelligence, 9, 40, 207, 230 intentionality, 135, 151, 357, 367, 376 interaction, xv, 42, 84, 100, 114, 125, 149, 202, 242, 264, 303, 373, 418, 449, 450, 451, 456, 458, 468 interdependence, 114, 121, 448 interdisciplinary, 390 interference, 9, 15 internalizing, 40, 146 internet, 42, 143 interpersonal interactions, 242 interpersonal relations, 12, 146, 189, 367, 455 interstitial, 141 interview, 348

intimacy, xiii, xxiv, 5, 57, 167, 168, 205, 243, 252, 261, 347, 364, 368, 407, 421, 422, 448 intonation, 463 intrinsic, 274, 277, 409 intuition, 46, 128, 197, 376 invasive, 391 Investigations, 119, 325, 327, 377 investment, 120 invisible hand, 367 Islamic, 336, 467 island, 254, 367, 448 isolation, 32, 433 ivory, 138, 331, 387

J Japanese, 15, 43, 69, 112, 143, 146, 155, 185, 234, 235, 288, 305, 311, 312, 313, 331, 338, 345, 365, 395, 409, 422, 430, 431, 453, 469, 476 Jews, 313 jobless, 224 jobs, 173, 480 joints, 58 journalism, xx, 113, 129, 182 journalists, 45, 92, 182, 192, 420 Judaism, 377 judge, 11, 37, 43, 101, 157, 182, 197, 230, 285, 349, 350, 354, 360, 412, 413, 420, 421, 424, 439, 470, 482 judgment, xx, 12, 56, 128, 135, 164, 254, 260, 342, 349, 360, 369, 413, 420, 439, 456, 482 jurors, 413 justice, 12, 13, 45, 76, 77, 244, 254, 259, 329, 392, 403, 421, 425, 454, 455

K kidney, 274 killer cells, 442 killing, 31, 124, 125, 137, 159, 273, 275, 279, 394, 464 kindergarten, 458 knees, 266 Korean, 301

L labeling, 313 labor, 58, 124, 169, 174, 206, 242, 336

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Index lakes, 19 land, 7, 18, 23, 57, 87, 138, 153, 195, 199, 203, 208, 222, 234, 429, 478 landscapes, 193 language, xxiii, 10, 16, 17, 35, 53, 93, 94, 139, 165, 200, 206, 219, 227, 228, 229, 230, 258, 262, 272, 273, 274, 288, 289, 292, 299, 312, 356, 375, 399, 401, 402, 432, 452, 453, 456, 461, 462, 477, 479 language acquisition, 165 laughing, 31, 171, 172, 173, 193, 284, 285, 334, 370, 396, 411, 414, 430, 442, 444 law, 13, 19, 48, 57, 58, 68, 84, 128, 142, 182, 184, 189, 190, 192, 193, 224, 253, 259, 265, 266, 312, 344, 355, 359, 360, 361, 363, 364, 368, 374, 375, 393, 404, 405, 425, 449, 450, 454, 467, 472 lawsuits, 187 leaks, 362 learners, 243 legislation, 31 leisure, 83, 235 liberty, 448 life-after-death, 263 lifetime, 35, 148, 283, 295 limitation, 369, 442, 462 linear, 141, 144, 145, 146, 150 linear reasoning, 141, 144, 145, 146, 150 linguistic, xx, 17, 121, 232, 253, 289, 396, 453 linkage, 233 links, xxv, 12, 326, 348, 392 listening, 40, 46, 85, 86, 212, 238, 274, 285, 428, 452, 477, 478, 479, 480, 481 liver, 28 locomotion, 212 logical atomism, 165 logical implications, 189 logical reasoning, 191, 233 lover, 88, 230, 357 low-level, 482 loyalty, 32, 85, 87, 88, 265, 341, 343, 345, 361, 426, 435 lung, xi, xiv, xv, 28, 36, 146, 205, 325, 373, 374, 375, 376, 377, 378, 409, 418, 427, 438 lying, xix, 51, 206, 250

M machines, 47, 230, 306, 331, 407, 425 magnetic resonance imaging, 331 management, 5, 6, 32, 37, 43, 45, 55, 60, 68, 71, 125, 312, 348, 365, 366, 368, 369, 388, 396, 467

493

manipulation, 71 manners, 35, 214 manufacturer, 434 marches, 212 market, 92, 136, 377 marketplace, 16, 281 marriage, 173, 253 marrow, 95, 205, 213, 217 Marx, 32, 237, 252, 404, 461 masculinity, 402 mastery, xvii maternal, 393 mathematical logic, 6, 10, 53, 54, 119, 120, 214, 377 mathematicians, 478 mathematics, 4, 96, 120, 166, 208, 234, 263, 272, 306, 327, 375, 412, 413, 418, 421, 464 matrix, 11, 145, 147, 375, 425 meals, 66, 305, 318, 446 meanings, 12, 16, 53, 89, 123, 136, 146, 147, 155, 165, 181, 196, 199, 208, 235, 262, 273, 303, 343, 399, 400, 401, 402, 404, 426, 444, 447, 455, 457, 469 measures, 58, 61, 168, 204, 479 meat, 7, 58, 85, 217, 228, 330, 331, 340, 341, 396, 406, 428 medical school, 471 medical student, 205 medicine, 23, 67, 238, 255, 266, 272, 312, 373, 376, 388, 390, 391, 392, 396, 404, 479, 480 meditation, 132, 408 melody, 219, 327, 329, 333, 346, 357 melt, xxii, 38, 39, 45, 96, 115, 161, 204, 318, 327, 346, 405, 424, 450, 451, 459 membership, 337 memory, xx, 29, 85, 128, 382 men, 28, 35, 45, 47, 134, 144, 171, 184, 200, 206, 244, 306, 319, 361, 367, 432, 469 mental disorder, 46 mercantilism, 391, 392, 393, 394, 395, 403 meridian, 54, 138, 208, 296, 373 meritocracy, 42 metamorphosis, 291, 292, 304, 311 metaphor, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 53, 79, 93, 114, 146, 167, 187, 194, 207, 215, 232, 263, 267, 277, 380, 397, 401, 442, 445, 462 meteorological, 390 microcosm, 392 Middle East, 436 Middle Kingdom, 448 middle-aged, 35

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Index

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494

migraine, 253 military, 40, 41, 44, 55, 57, 87, 92, 189, 357, 363, 388, 395, 455 mimesis, 407 mimicking, 290, 296 minority, 343 mirror, xiv, 14, 16, 17, 80, 104, 114, 127, 158, 163, 214, 228, 229, 252, 261, 271, 283, 293, 299, 355, 368, 401, 421, 430 misunderstanding, 89, 115, 232, 288, 301, 350 mixing, 76, 171, 239, 365, 445, 450, 466, 468 mobility, 351 models, 402 modernism, 121 modulation, 359 modus operandi, 128, 195, 261, 266, 377 moisture, 95 mold, 57, 161, 195, 348, 463 money, xv, 13, 15, 30, 31, 37, 168, 253, 366, 392, 394, 396, 413, 438 monks, 56 mood, 277, 321, 406, 467 moral training, 60 morality, xvii, 43, 47, 52, 55, 56, 58, 72, 77, 125, 217, 222, 269, 297, 329, 331, 332, 333, 335, 336, 337, 363, 364, 366, 370, 394, 395, 425, 434, 454 mother tongue, 139, 228 mothers, 342 motion, 128, 211, 212, 214, 216, 217, 248, 259, 474 mountains, xvi, 125, 204, 269 mouth, 131, 132, 225, 227, 284, 307 movement, 35, 53, 68, 76, 80, 169, 212, 214, 299, 300, 332, 334, 378, 384, 405, 418, 477 multicultural, 312, 454 multiple sclerosis, 331 murder, 246, 275 muscles, 242, 246, 430 musicians, 288, 346, 368 mutation, 292 mutual respect, 291 mutuality, 5, 41, 134, 143, 147, 328, 333, 361, 367, 374, 395, 417, 424, 454, 458, 468

N naming, 6, 26, 128, 187, 296, 400, 401, 415, 444, 458 narcissism, 242, 352 narratives, 343 nation, 35, 38, 41, 47, 227, 254, 362, 434, 470

nationalism, 39, 87 natural disasters, 56, 57, 84, 192, 377 natural killer, 442 natural killer cell, 442 natural laws, 224, 361 natural science, 23, 33, 76, 366, 367 neck, 11, 361 negativity, 177, 202 neglect, 156, 354, 360, 405 negligence, 86, 221 negotiation, xxiii, xxiv, 68, 92 nepotism, 42, 43, 45, 86, 467 nerve, 77 network, xx, 128, 142, 143, 145, 147, 150, 151, 327, 367, 474, 475 New World, 450 no voice, 266 Nobel Prize, 478 noise, 35, 360 non-human, 90, 281, 382 normal, xviii, 1, 19, 76, 113, 129, 295, 335, 378, 444, 477, 478 novelty, 93, 154, 157, 163, 165, 169, 292, 308, 345, 469, 477 nuclear, 20, 92, 161, 234, 245, 392, 434 nuclear family, 392 nuclear power, 20, 434 nutrition, 192, 255, 389, 390 nuts, 13, 106

O obedience, 183, 254, 392, 405 objective criteria, 350 objectivity, 40, 100, 265, 292, 315, 316, 317, 318, 321, 324, 331, 334, 374, 422, 424, 434, 435, 439, 447, 465 obligation, 23, 51, 288, 367, 396, 470, 477, 482 observations, 122, 397 oceans, 138, 199, 203, 229, 234 odyssey, 21, 32 Oedipus, 251 Oedipus complex, 251 oil, 395 old age, 135, 244, 326 omission, 125 omnibus, 456 open-mindedness, 422 openness, 424 opium, 237

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Index opposition, 27, 40, 45, 143, 245, 318, 459, 472 oppression, 365, 471 oral, xiii, 30, 220, 266, 283, 432 oral tradition, 266 ores, 113 organ, 205, 329, 398, 413, 416 organic, 23, 49, 97, 100, 329 organism, 141, 145, 146, 333, 374 organized crime, 12 orientation, 252 originality, 365 orthodox, 30, 91, 101, 127, 159, 223, 246, 258, 356, 413, 424, 480 osmosis, 388, 418 osmotic, 391 otherness, 451, 458, 468 overpopulation, 177

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P paints, 16, 212, 402, 406 palpitations, 2 paradigm shift, 114, 345, 469 paradox, 119, 149, 153, 175, 202, 296, 324, 389, 464 paradoxical, 62, 100, 175, 216, 443 parameter, 119 parent-child, 57, 455 parenthood, 169 parents, 31, 45, 71, 77, 107, 127, 138, 143, 144, 145, 157, 167, 174, 183, 189, 214, 222, 242, 247, 254, 278, 293, 304, 333, 348, 361, 367, 374, 384, 388, 393, 394, 403, 405, 407, 454, 455 particles, 264, 304 pasture, 105 paternal, 393, 453 patients, 173, 331, 482 patterning, 5, 139, 205, 299, 302 pearls, 349, 353 pedagogical, 41, 367, 464 pedestrian, 77 pediatrician, 477, 480 penalty, xviii, 12, 192, 244, 314, 362, 413 pendulum, 48 penis, 251 pentagon, 251 perception, 10, 126, 132, 150, 173, 255, 274, 412, 453, 462, 477 performers, 212, 287, 288, 289, 356 permeation, 67 perpetuum mobile, 188, 225, 297

495

personal history, 139 personal identity, 4, 382 personal life, 55, 166, 167 personality, 72, 167, 318, 388, 406, 407 personhood, 150, 153, 382 persuasion, 25, 38, 40, 73, 163, 185, 222, 223, 334, 411, 412, 419, 420, 423, 424 phenomenology, 95, 108, 121, 403, 421 philosophers, xvi, xviii, 3, 42, 46, 80, 121, 123, 145, 154, 169, 202, 231, 235, 239, 276, 346, 387, 415, 423, 453, 476 philosophical, xv, 2, 3, 16, 20, 41, 94, 95, 119, 131, 154, 160, 180, 181, 215, 219, 232, 233, 241, 257, 343, 377, 389, 397, 405, 410, 414, 430, 437, 462, 469, 470, 474, 475 phonemes, 195 photographs, 16 physical sciences, 396 physicians, 76 physicists, 478 physics, 33, 53, 100, 123, 188, 210, 272, 304, 314, 334, 373, 396, 410, 438, 478 physiological, 23, 72, 133, 150, 331, 373, 387, 425, 477, 479 plague, 290 plants, 23, 90, 91, 125, 151, 161, 205, 206, 322, 334 play, xxv, 6, 26, 39, 89, 91, 92, 105, 106, 107, 139, 173, 193, 239, 256, 271, 304, 307, 308, 348, 357, 399, 415, 443, 466, 469 pleasure, 31, 106, 126, 174, 245, 247, 428, 432 plurality, 328, 405, 462 poison, xviii, 16, 85, 341 police, 419 politicians, 37, 454 pollution, 23, 233, 253 pond, 105, 138, 208, 327, 462 poor, 47, 65, 77, 118, 124, 125, 258, 282, 363, 401, 413, 415, 452, 471, 482 population, 45, 124 pornography, 215 porous, 2 positivism, 83, 403 postmodernism, 403, 414, 451, 452, 468 postmortem, 382, 384 posture, 32, 333, 429 pouches, 10, 307 poverty, 20, 66, 177, 186, 253, 282, 297, 399 practical wisdom, 13

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496

Index

pragmatic, xx, 3, 41, 42, 65, 77, 90, 96, 100, 111, 121, 123, 135, 175, 349, 402, 403, 405, 435, 442, 447, 455, 457, 458, 462 praxis, 5, 65, 93, 124, 132, 163, 174, 207, 223, 233, 252, 260, 313, 314, 331, 343, 368, 399, 405, 419, 422, 423, 426, 433, 435, 436, 467, 468, 475, 480 prayer, 177, 239 precedents, 44, 52, 55, 173, 189, 255, 277, 343, 425 preference, 37, 45, 49 pregnant, xx, 18, 145, 148, 180, 263, 266, 311, 343, 474 prejudice, 16, 26, 421 preparedness, 14 president, 86, 87, 339 primary school, 379 primitives, 256 pristine, xvi, 17, 52, 101, 108, 221, 340 private, 45, 71, 75, 237, 253, 256, 327, 345, 459, 460, 469, 475 probability, 54 probe, 144, 205, 244, 257, 290, 430, 442, 444, 445 procreation, 368 production, 256, 357, 464 professionalism, 346 profit, xxi, 33, 48, 57, 95, 108, 120, 125, 146, 247, 394, 395, 403, 465 profiteering, 25, 394, 395, 465 prognosis, 480 programming, 306 proliferation, 121 proposition, 164, 166, 262, 461, 462 prosperity, 201 prostitution, 172 protection, 253, 282, 345, 367, 478, 479, 482 provocation, 62, 215 prudence, ix, xvii, xviii, 45, 89, 201, 231 pseudo, 431, 478 psyche, 410, 421, 479 psychology, 46, 91, 230, 238 psychopharmacological, 479, 481 psychosomatic, 272, 396 psychotherapy, 430 public, xvi, 41, 45, 69, 71, 76, 80, 318, 327, 344, 351, 354, 368, 423, 435, 445 public awareness, 368 pulses, 61, 86, 121, 217, 273, 355, 357, 364, 374, 375, 422 punishment, 58, 281, 317, 369 purification, 313 pus, 39

Q quality control, 86 quantum, 5, 6, 398 quantum mechanics, 5, 6, 398 query, 347, 380, 457, 460, 469 questioning, 81, 101, 123, 169, 251, 326

R race, 35, 124, 275, 335 racism, 253, 431 radical empiricism, 412 rain, xv, xxiii, xxiv, 86, 95, 138, 143, 343, 406 random, 76, 119, 120, 154, 168, 196, 207, 228, 273, 275, 278, 293, 359, 398, 446, 452, 466 range, xv, 37, 415 reading, 2, 9, 17, 20, 21, 35, 36, 43, 66, 94, 95, 122, 148, 155, 165, 166, 194, 220, 224, 239, 301, 305, 331, 354, 363, 371, 399, 408, 437, 460, 463, 473, 480 reality, 4, 11, 41, 42, 95, 108, 113, 129, 132, 136, 187, 191, 233, 245, 255, 344, 403, 441 rebel, 259, 260 recall, 17, 93, 148, 246, 266, 331 receptacle, 330 reception, 49 reciprocity, 87, 143, 146, 185, 333 recognition, 26, 84, 92, 114, 381, 428, 468 reconciliation, 340 reconstruction, 290 recurrence, 381 recycling, 301 redundancy, 373 refining, 464 reflection, 42, 73, 111, 176, 232, 290, 295, 314, 316, 321, 325, 352, 431 reforms, 57, 213 refuge, 43 regional, 85, 139, 342, 388, 447, 448, 455, 471 regression, 425 regular, 42, 54 regulations, 44, 57, 58, 356 rehearsing, 221, 413 reincarnation, 336 reinforcement, 189 rejection, 8, 129, 275, 317, 407, 477 relationship, 5 relatives, 222

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Index relativity, 5, 6, 119, 234, 264, 434 relevance, 12, 27, 28, 54, 75 religion, xvii, 13, 43, 53, 78, 90, 96, 177, 237, 238, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 246, 247, 248, 279, 316, 367, 368, 393, 403, 404, 429, 433, 455, 468, 476 religiosity, 96, 111, 112, 235, 237, 239, 243, 244, 246, 247, 248, 272, 368, 391, 393, 394 Renaissance, 404 repair, 38, 347, 388, 391 repetitions, xv, 238 reproduction, 408 reputation, 48 resilience, 177, 242 resistance, 47, 59 resolution, 84, 125, 315 resources, 173 responsibilities, 32, 33, 85, 247, 424, 479 retirees, 65 retribution, xix, 456 returns, 31, 41, 129, 141, 145, 381, 398 revolt, 260, 283, 477, 479, 480 revolutionaries, 471 rhetoric, xvi, 185, 224, 232, 274, 411, 412, 413, 414, 415, 419, 420, 421, 423, 432, 437, 445 rigidity, 193 rings, 229 risk, 13, 27, 61, 76, 124, 125, 134, 138, 163, 164, 176, 315, 316, 318, 361, 363, 378, 389, 428, 451, 455, 462, 463, 479 rivers, xvi, 19, 52, 57, 62, 205, 269, 374, 441 rolling, 213, 374, 378, 409 routines, 13, 44, 58, 78, 137, 165, 196, 221, 227, 433 royalties, 374 rural, 253, 343 rural people, 253 Russian, 44, 288

S sacred, 17, 217, 242, 302, 305, 330, 339, 368, 394, 464 sadism, 388 safety, 58 salaries, 77 saliva, 258 sanitation, 48 satisfaction, 31, 56, 278, 394 scandal, 468 scarcity, 29, 312

497

scattering, 27, 188 schema, 9, 68 scholarship, xiv, xvii, 135, 313, 316, 328, 456, 459, 462 school, xiv, 10, 17, 21, 40, 86, 92, 114, 138, 159, 167, 187, 238, 343, 354, 365, 366, 370, 379, 389, 408, 413, 421, 425, 438, 454, 471 scientific community, 238 scientific method, 312 sclerosis, 331 scores, 213, 228, 364 search, 84, 119, 190, 250, 326 secret, 53, 221, 357, 363, 366, 476, 481 secular, 241, 242, 302, 394, 399 security, 326 sediments, 119 seed, xxii, 42, 142, 145, 151, 157, 160, 161, 251, 252, 291, 311, 474 seedlings, 15, 18, 177 seeps, 108, 110 seismic, 410 self, vii, 1, 101, 113, 133, 134, 139, 143, 192, 222, 299, 326, 332, 333, 373, 405, 408, 416, 427, 448 self-actualization, 359 self-awareness, 334 self-consciousness, xviii, 15, 374 self-descriptions, 209 self-destruction, 31, 361 self-expression, 166, 407 self-identity, 142, 192, 194, 292, 359, 389 self-interest, 363, 394, 395 self-knowledge, xviii, 133, 134, 136, 467 self-management, 60 self-reflection, 73, 325, 352 self-regulation, 356 self-understanding, 468 seller, 14, 104, 394 senile, 418 sensations, 336 sensing, xi, xiii, xiv, 2, 167, 199, 213, 232, 279, 300, 303, 354, 410 sensitivity, 2, 3, 4, 11, 28, 29, 30, 35, 39, 72, 75, 94, 95, 121, 123, 124, 126, 127, 146, 172, 194, 205, 229, 230, 232, 235, 249, 265, 316, 353, 377, 395, 400, 423, 442, 444, 448, 457, 458, 462, 463 sentences, 165, 167, 180, 220, 223, 229, 258, 263, 277, 290, 380, 382, 383, 398, 399, 402, 405, 443 separation, xv, 32, 49, 65, 83, 96, 197, 234, 275, 318, 348, 435

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498

Index

series, xiv, 10, 26, 36, 123, 154, 155, 191, 219, 256, 272, 360, 399, 414, 445, 453, 481 severity, 188, 479 sex, xv, 30, 31, 57, 125, 126, 127, 183, 228, 242, 330, 332, 333, 368, 445, 464 shade, 179, 206, 208, 216, 225 shame, 139, 313 sharing, xv, 28, 31, 168, 206, 332, 393, 395, 415, 445, 465, 466 sheep, 76, 84, 101, 148, 247, 454 shock, xxii, 71, 239, 253, 335, 344, 368, 414 shoot, xv, 151, 156 short period, 254 short-term, 72, 108 shoulder, 106, 107, 297, 363, 454 shy, 62, 86, 363 siblings, xxi, 20, 75, 101, 367, 393 signs, 48, 84, 95, 242, 396, 402, 409, 417, 431, 432, 445, 447, 471 silk, 146, 219 silver, 231 similarity, 245 sine, 388, 448, 449, 455 singular, 262, 424 Six Dynasties, 339 skills, 123, 196, 481 skimming, 155, 344 skin, xiv, 117, 228, 345, 387, 388, 389, 391, 397, 400, 417, 418, 427, 431, 438, 448, 469 sleep, xxi, 9, 68, 75, 176, 214, 216, 217, 243, 248, 323, 353, 399, 477 smiles, 67, 104, 145, 207, 235, 278, 304, 346, 469, 473 smoking, 230, 233 sobriety, 184, 185 social fabric, 192, 368, 414 social justice, 403 social movements, 243 social order, 57, 213, 393, 425 social relations, 57 social rules, 22 social structure, 184 social work, 480 sociocultural, 425 socioeconomic, 69 sociology, 238, 396 soil, xxiv, 58, 151, 234, 235, 245, 263, 376 sorting, 15, 191, 263 sounds, xi, xv, 54, 57, 72, 90, 143, 156, 167, 168, 172, 205, 230, 262, 273, 274, 281, 283, 284, 295,

302, 304, 325, 327, 329, 335, 344, 348, 356, 381, 382, 396, 402, 407, 412, 417, 426, 443, 457 Southeast Asia, 200 sovereignty, 470 spatial, 191, 259, 384, 402, 421, 428 spatial analysis, 421 spatiotemporal, 192 species, xxiv, 32, 33, 45, 208, 316, 319 specificity, 388, 400, 415, 447 specter, 421 speculation, 197, 343, 432, 462 speech, 9, 113, 129, 205, 262, 263, 402, 415, 434, 463 speed, 55 spheres, 54, 272, 327, 337, 398 spin, 137, 153, 259, 272, 326, 353, 476 spinal cord, 331 spindle, 208 spine, 138, 231, 296, 479 spiritual, 51, 475 spontaneity, 194, 197, 200, 227, 335, 344 sporadic, 23 spouse, 53, 120 springs, 126, 297, 304, 340 sprouting, 151 SSS, 370, 371, 384 stability, 37, 68, 120, 254, 428, 456 stages, 157, 287, 295, 411, 450, 460, 467 standard of living, 259 standards, 255, 356, 424 stars, 54, 429 starvation, 86, 125 steel, 327 stem cells, 67 stereotypes, 464 stock, 31, 173, 260, 334, 354, 414 stomach, 58 storms, 62, 68 strain, 225 strategies, 40, 66, 71 streams, 392, 410 strength, 36, 252, 276, 355, 442, 468 stress, 26, 78, 95, 100, 112, 147, 213, 214, 238, 282, 328, 340, 407, 457, 466, 469 stretching, 15, 45, 471 strikes, 54, 62, 156, 172, 273, 332, 422, 480 string theory, 6 stroke, 1, 226, 331, 342, 356, 405, 409, 481 students, 42, 67, 86, 93, 128, 139, 148, 151, 158, 165, 244, 278, 291, 306, 317, 367, 430

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Index substitutes, 480 suffering, 17, 71, 143, 167, 238, 239, 242, 254, 255, 281, 284, 343, 369, 445 suicide, xviii, 85, 88, 242, 281, 313, 336, 341, 477 superpower, 389, 395 superstitious, 239, 242, 243, 396 supplements, 409 supply, 39, 154, 388 surgical, 185, 331, 395 surging, 288 surprise, xx, 159, 190, 279, 293, 369 survival, 14, 27, 37, 43, 122, 174, 220, 261, 274, 275, 319, 388, 389 suspense, 48 swarm, 39 sweat, 144, 282, 313, 365, 422 symbiosis, 33, 235 symbiotic, 417 symbols, 238 sympathetic, 157, 172, 197, 355, 430 syntax, 2, 119, 189, 224, 225, 411, 452 synthesis, 375, 420, 428, 450, 467 systematics, xxiii systems, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, 3, 191, 234, 402, 426, 428, 451, 453

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T tactics, 413 takeover, 363 tangible, 252, 256, 305, 388, 394 tangles, 2, 296 Taoism, xviii, 2, 21, 36, 40, 44, 45, 55, 59, 68, 76, 77, 79, 90, 92, 114, 126, 159, 160, 189, 193, 240, 243, 332, 335, 344, 363, 365, 366, 370, 389, 395, 404, 410, 429, 441, 443, 471, 481 taste, 13, 37, 216, 230, 301, 330, 331 tea, 410 teachers, 10, 38, 146, 189, 244, 247, 285, 291, 306, 352, 367, 393, 419, 430, 437, 464 teaching, 12, 30, 41, 66, 78, 183, 238, 243, 244, 248, 278, 284, 291, 306, 317, 403, 430, 436, 437 technology, 23, 96, 348, 366, 389, 391, 395, 457 tellers, 21, 278, 458 temperament, 105 temporal, 191, 243, 414 tension, xvii, 40, 276, 281, 283, 357 tenure, 87, 371 territory, 253, 342, 343, 362, 437 terrorism, 124, 253

499

The Economist, 14, 331 theft, 296 theology, 458 therapists, 481 therapy, 44, 255, 329, 396, 481 third party, 206 threat, 36, 57, 137, 175, 247, 307, 431, 434, 444 ticks, 121, 258 time warp, 264 timing, 59, 60, 78, 90, 193, 359, 362, 373, 380 tobacco, 16 toddlers, 106 tolerance, 47, 403 tonic, 257 top-down, 451 torture, 334, 369 toxic, 419 traffic, 68, 137, 168, 176, 212, 352, 458 training, 60, 124, 159, 197, 207, 233 trans, 38, 94, 96, 229, 243, 285, 287, 289, 292, 451, 458, 462 transcendence, 345, 369, 436, 469 transfer, 93, 95, 272, 289, 292 transference, 93, 229 transformation, 11, 57, 58, 62, 68, 266, 289, 303, 311, 451 transition, 14, 292 translation, 77, 92, 93, 94, 95, 100, 204, 206, 220, 221, 225, 229, 231, 272, 285, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 301, 328, 335, 351, 361, 362, 365, 367, 391, 395, 399, 462, 470, 472 transmission, 131, 140, 220, 282, 436 transmits, 436 transparent, 368, 413 transpose, 292 traps, 460 travel, 47, 48, 155 trees, xx, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, 2, 4, 22, 30, 44, 58, 123, 138, 144, 145, 150, 160, 169, 200, 233, 284, 285, 306, 335, 339, 345, 347, 373, 398, 399, 428, 430, 431 trial, 291, 334 tribal, 388 trust, 101 turbulent, 48, 51, 138, 203, 234, 283, 342, 343, 423 twins, 450, 467 two-way, 4, 25, 147, 458

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Index

500

U uncertainty, 119, 202, 244 unhappiness, 200, 296 unification, 97, 189 universal law, 472 universality, 188, 223, 337, 412, 451, 468 universe, 6, 22, 54, 104, 195, 197, 205, 337, 442 unpredictability, 259

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V vacation, 91, 176 validity, 12, 68, 157, 277, 319, 346, 347, 348, 349, 350, 351, 411, 417, 419, 420, 421, 422, 423, 424, 425, 427 values, 56, 197, 248, 410 vapor, 243, 418, 475 variation, 79, 395 vegetables, 206 vehicles, 68, 71, 368 vein, 208 vibration, 54, 204, 304 victims, 313 vignette, xix, xxiii, xxv, xxvi, 14, 105, 431 village, 39, 45, 227, 235, 247 violence, 28, 30, 108, 201, 284, 317, 333, 334, 336, 337, 346, 371, 474, 475, 477 virus, 147 viscera, 28, 29, 30, 85, 87, 333, 362, 363 visible, xiii, 23, 44, 53, 60, 80, 114, 137, 173, 251, 321, 322, 407, 479 vision, xix, 39, 114, 150, 207, 223, 232, 252, 387, 418, 447, 467 voice, 190, 266, 301, 377

W waking, 358 walking, 13, 28, 29, 30, 62, 66, 71, 76, 102, 104, 105, 107, 140, 142, 146, 150, 165, 185, 234, 240, 244, 247, 263, 306, 323, 324, 325, 371, 374, 381, 423, 432, 435, 436, 464 war, 41, 124, 134, 222, 253, 363, 390, 394, 395, 468 warrants, 37 wastes, 62, 156, 242 watches, 148, 160, 259, 456, 481

weakness, xxv, 36, 72, 73 wealth, 86, 94, 146, 242, 367, 403 weapons, 194, 222, 434 web, 10, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 213, 259, 414 weeping, 57, 411 welfare, 367, 392 well-being, 406, 442 Western culture, xiii, 312, 431, 471 wheezing, xv, 248 wholesale, 235 wilderness, 39, 57, 254 wildfire, 174 wind, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, 20, 27, 41, 46, 58, 67, 89, 163, 248, 272, 276, 284, 300, 306, 330, 339, 344, 345, 374, 376, 377, 387, 398, 418, 428, 478 windows, 175 wine, 399, 401, 472 winning, 40, 134, 395, 478 witnesses, 436 wives, 77, 242, 363 women, xvi, 306, 436 wood, 22, 29, 58, 127, 145, 151, 256, 263, 306, 333, 353, 442 working conditions, 43 World War, 69, 253, 313, 394, 468 World War I, 69, 313, 468 World War II, 69, 313, 468 worry, 209, 256, 308, 340, 353, 357, 368, 382

X x-rays, 447

Y yarn, 3, 259, 426 yield, xvi, xxiv, 58, 84, 121, 137, 357, 428, 451, 470, 479, 480 young men, 244

Z zen, 13, 159, 187, 296, 305, 312, 366, 381, 394, 395, 404, 407, 441, 445, 449, 476, 480, 481

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