Confucian family

On Monday, 27 2024 (incidentally, the 107th anniversary of my paternal grandfather), there was a roundtable on “Philosophy of family” chaired by Roger Ames and Wen Haiming. Roger introduced his intervention by the question of when differences are enriching and when they are fragmenting. (A very broad ontological topic indeed; I am about to embark on this same topic in relation to ecology.) Broadly speaking, family is the prototypical environment where our differences enrich us and where we grow in relationships. Roger also noted the broader use of the term translated by family, jiā 家, “everybody” (dàjiā大家, lit ‘big family’), “country” (guójiā 國家, lit. ‘country-family’), “person” (rénjiā 人家, lit. ‘person-family’), or also “school, fellowship” (mentioned by Daniel Coyle). Roger also reminded that family also involves relations and responsibilities to ancestors and progeny. The same was confirmed by Tamara Albertini in case of Arabic culture, where son’s name and those of father and father’s father are inscribed already in the person’s name. Joshya Mason emphasized that the feeling of family membership is not limited to humans but also involves pets: in case of fire, many would rescue their pet rather than a neighbor. Leah Kalmanson highlighted the structure of host-guest: family is a site of hosting friends, strangers, others. Several female presenters emphasized the fact that family may be, yes, fulfilling, but it is also the site of some of the worst violence, both physical and psychological. I would like to add to that discussion. We mostly discussed, and rightly so, the aspect how family offers security, intimacy, coziness, safety, familiarity, closeness, integration. And how it can also fail to do so in cases of family violence or negligence (discussed by Li Yong earlier in the day). Yet if we would only have this aspect, the Heim (home) would become unheimlich (uncanny), as Fabian mentioned. Because if we would only have this aspect of integration, the other would become too close. From time to time we need closeness for our feeling of security, but if it would be strictly all the time, then we would feel that we are losing our individuality, our borders, that the other is engulfing us, like literally eating us up (Lacan, if I’m not mistaken, once said that children are with their mother as if in the mouth of a crocodile: they never know when the jaws are going to slap together). In short, there is also danger in too much security, too much closeness that stifles, suffocates us. Therefore, I would say that the aspect of integration inevitably has to go hand in hand with an aspect of differentiation by which we explore, go into the unknown, become thrilled by novelty, risk, the unfamiliar, are on our own, engage in new interactions with our environment, without supervision. Of course, we could not have only this aspect either, because if there would be no stability, safety, secure and familiar “surface”, we become destabilized in the bad sense of the word (think of the problems of children who due to the work of their parents have to change living place and school very often: they do not have time to form strong bonds with others, secure friendships; or even worse, of children who do not have family at all, who have been abandoned, or extracted from their family – as thousands of Ukrainian children are in the occupied territories). Too much differentiation leads to fragmentation. One needs a secure ground, a “familiar” setting (that does not necessarily have to be that of biological parents) in order to be able to keep those differentiations together. Otherwise, you are going to disperse or perhaps explode (same thing in different time scale). Or implode, because it is this integration of differences that holds them apart in your own psyche as well. Without integration, they will collapse, and fall into mental problems and in some cases even suicide. So, family has to also foster differentiation, encourage exploration. Raising children is a paradoxical undertaking: you exert supervision over persons with the goal of them being able to act without supervision. If they have a secure place to come back to, children can feel “safe” in their explorations, safe in their risk, so to say: their inroad to the world may go wrong, but in that case they will have someone who would comfort them, rebuild their self-confidence. And if they are allowed to sometimes go on their own, they will not feel suffocated at home, the Heim will not become unheimlich. Rather, home will be reinvigorating, refreshing, restoring – so that you can integrate what you have been able to distinguish, differentiate, develop. With this in mind, we can also broaden the scope of “family”, as Chinn Meilin mentioned, I think (that we must have in mind “more than human”). The most common sources of security are parents and the physical home. But there will always be other familiar persons around, be relatives or non-relatives, other beings (pets, neighbor’s rooster), things (my table, my chair, my bed, my bag, my clothes). The role of “inanimate” things should not be underestimated. Some of them become part of my personality, and any damage to them is damage to myself. Imagine someone destroying the teddy bear of an infant. This scene would be as horrible as if physical harm was done. Indeed, the “physical” and “psychological” cannot be separated very neatly: the horror of the infant seeing its teddy bear ripped to pieces, could surely be investigated in its brain and body in terms of hormones and other chemicals. And of course, the reverse is also true, that physical damage has its psychological counterpart. Keeping these considerations in mind, we reach Zhang Zai’s conclusion in his “Western Inscription” that all people are my brothers and sisters, and all things are my companions. Indeed, the familiarity extends all over the universe, and it is not so much of a dualistic separation between “home” and “not-home” but rather a difference of degree: some places and persons are more “familiar” and heimlich, others are more unfamiliar, unheimlich, risky, uncanny. This is what “safe risk” would lead to. And on the other hand, there will, in principle, be nothing that I could not explore. I would always be different and there is no danger of anything, even my home sucking me in and swallowing me down. I can relate in “harmonizing but not equalizing” (和而不同) way with others, including my close ones. I will have gone to the “end of the world”, and see my familiar world with new eyes.

Transformation

 

Asian transformation

Abstract

Transformation hua 化 in certain Chinese terms (1) has two aspects, an articulation called li 理 and a force or power called qi 氣. In order for there to be change or transformation, there must be certain distinctions. You cannot have a completely homogeneous flow, but there have to be different streams or particles whose relation changes, creating also a distinction between past and present. And of course there has to be force, because without it, the articulations would remain sterile. Also, (2) transformation takes place on different levels of interpenetration tong 通, from hundun 混沌 through the initiation of actualization, a ji 機 or taiji 太極, two breaths of yinyang 陰陽, five phases wuxing 五行, up to the actualized forms xing 形, wu 物, or qi 器. This is the gradual externalization of li 理 and qi 氣. (3) From individual's pespective, the interpenetrating articulation is original knowing liangzhi 良知, and the interpenetrating power is original capacity liangneng 良能. (4) The continuation of the transformation is goodness, shan 善. A good continuator goes back gui 歸 towards the interpenetrating, roaming freely xiaoyaoyou 逍遙遊 through both the interpenetrating and actualized.

Introduction

The following will not be a serious academic presentation, but an impressionistic extraction from certain Chinese thinkers to whom I will mostly omit reference. Some of the serious scholars among you may be offended by such monstruosity or hooliganism, please forgive me.

1. Language

I will claim that everything changes incessantly. But in that case, all claims are misleading, since they will stop the change. First, they will arrest transformation temporarily: each word and sentence coagulates speech and thought into a certain form that endures, subsists. But this is common to all beings – that they coagulate being in a certain form – and is not the worst thing about language. Second, and worse, thing is that words and sentences seem to be about beings, about the world, thus distancing themselves from them, and creating a separate sphere that seems to elude the change and transformation of ordinary beings, and in turn fixing those beings in a system that defies transformation. All the words and sentences that I have used thus far, betray the thing about which they are purported to be. For example, “transformation”. By saying it, I betray what I mean by it.

But my linguistic expression itself is part of what is, and is a certain expression of the general transformation. Hence, while speaking I betray what I mean to say, and at the same time, willy-nilly, I also am truthful to what I mean, since this speaking is an expression of the same transformation that I am talking about.

Does it mean that all speaking is equal? In a sense yes, in a sense not. On the one hand, all speaking (and in general, everything there is) is an expression of transformation, and hence all expressions are equal. On the other hand, some expressions may express transformation better than others, if they are not simply facts or instances of transformation, but if they somehow do the transformation with their own means.

There is an inherent paradox in language, a tension, which is the same paradox as the one of being itself, since all being on the one hand are about other things (in their existence, they necessarily and incessantly relate to other things and express them), but on the other hand, they are “about” themselves, they are themselves a thing.

So, all expression will be double-sided.

2. Transformation, articulations and power

Transformation has two aspects, an articulation called li 理, or the „veins“ of being like veins in a stone; and a force or power called qi 氣.

In order for there to be change or transformation, there must be certain distinctions.¹ You cannot have a completely homogeneous flow, but there have to be different streams or particles whose relation changes, creating also a distinction between past and present. And of course there has to be force that impels the flow, because without it, the articulations would remain sterile.

3. Levels of interpenetration

Transformation takes place on different levels of interpenetration tong 通, from hundun 混沌 through the initiation of actualization, a ji 機 or taiji 太極, two breaths of yinyang 陰陽, five phases wuxing 五行, up to the actualized forms xing 形, wu 物, or qi 器. This is the gradual externalization or juxtaposition of li 理 and qi 氣.

Just as the formation of an embryo or the development of a seed: there are certain initial distinctions, differences, but in the beginning they are interpenetrating; there is no „small man“ inside the fertilized egg-cell of a human being, no grown plant inside a seed; and certainly not in their DNA that is functionally a 2D structure², in contrast to a 3D organism. DNA, together with other structures, forms an articulation (both spatial and temporal) for the organism, and it has to be unfolded during the creative and adaptive process of ontogenesis. The energy becomes more clear and distinguished, and the articulations also become unfolded, with more parts that are more external to each other.

4. Original knowing 良知 and original capacity 良能

From the viewpoint of the individual being concerned, we can speak about its original knowing liangzhi 良知 and original capacity liangneng 良能. The original knowing refers to the interpenetrating level of articulations, to the „root-mind“, benxin 本心. The original capacity refers to the interpenetrating level of power. The original knowing is my presence in my psycho-physical being, the ground or background of my consciousness, inside which I can focus my empirical consciousness variously to this or that. The original capacity is my power that I can direct here or there, I can grab the cup, I can walk over there, etc. All these activities channel my original capacity, they are particular directions for it.

I am just one part of interacting beings, so that in the very bottom, our original minds interpenetrate, and our original capacities also interpenetrate, the „myriad things are already in me“ 萬物備於我.

5. Return

In our ordinary existence, there is a two-way process: on the one hand, interpenetrating articulations and force is unfolded, they become differentiated, distinguished, juxtaposed. On the other hand, these juxtaposing forms remain in contact with the interpenetrating, and there is a feedback from the juxtaposed actualized forms to the interpenetrating virtual level.

Self-cultivation ( 修身、修心、養生, etc.) consists in taking this feedback to the maximum, that is, to return to the maximum of interpenetration, not only of my own consciousness and capacity, but also of all beings. This is a view sub specie transformationis or sub specie interpenetrationis. It is only when all beings are referred back to this maximum of interpenetration that they can be seen in their true differences – they are not simply brought under some universality or generality, a general notion, but they appear in their ownmost difference, the one that they embody in their very being, independently or as distinguished from the forms that this being takes or to where their knowing and capacity is channelled.

So, a good continuator goes back gui 歸 towards the interpenetrating, and by doing this, they are able to roam freely xiaoyaoyou 逍遙遊 through both the interpenetrating and actualized. The continuation of the transformation is goodness, shan 善.

1„Things have articulations, so that they do not get mixed up; if things have articulations and that avoids them being mixed up, it means that articulations are what determines the thing.“ (物有理，不可以相薄，物有理不可以相薄，故理之為物之制, „Han Feizi“, ch. 20).

2In the sense that it is read sequentially (and otherwise it forms a 3D structure). Of course the nucleotides and bonds between them are spatial, but their scale is much lower than that of a multicellular organism, and from the perspective ot that organism, it can be deemed a 2D structure.

Defoort-Raud

Attachment.

Revisiting Defoort-Raud discussion

[Draft]

The following thoughts are inspired by the discussion between Carine Defoort and Rein Raud on the pages of Philosophy East and West, in a series of four articles, two from both of them, to which I shall refer as C1 and C2 for Carine’s papers, and R1 and R2 for Rein’s. Carine Defoort’s article that initiated the discussion, C1, was published in 2001, and the following three articles – Rein’s response, Carin’es response to Rein, and Rein’s further comment – were published five years later, in 2006.

1. Status of the Chinese philosophy

Back in 2006, Carine Defoort says in her response Rein Raud’s comment that “a world philosophy has not arisen and is not on the rise”. What is the situation now, 14 years later? On the one hand, the term “Chinese philosophy” seems to be well established. Some quick statistics (from 18 July 2020)[1]:

	Google	Baidu
“Chinese philosophy”	244 000 000	1 690 000
“中国哲学”	89 000 000	78 100 000

The Wikipedia article on Chinese philosophy is in 53 languages[2]. There is an article on Chinese philosophy in Britannica and Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP); in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), there is no separate article on Chinese philosophy, but separate entries on Chinese + epistemology, science, ethics, medicine, metaphysics, etc.; and an article about comparison with Western philosophy. IEP and SEP include also lots of articles on different Chinese philosophers and schools.

The term also figures in the name of several organizations, journals, books, etc. This summer I participated in three conferences on Chinese philosophy in Europe, and several others in China, in spring and autumn.

On the other hand, the most valued place, university, remains relatively closed. Bryan van Norden likes to bring the example that in U.S. universities there are more professors on Kant than on non-Western philosophies.

-        Yet, I have seen at least a couple of dozen job announcements in North American universities for “non-canonical philosophies”, as they are often called, that includes everything that is not analytical philosophy, i.e. Chinese, Indian, European continental, Africana, Native American, feminist,  etc. And sometimes also specifically for Chinese philosophy.

-        To further complicate the picture, I see some problems with that valued object itself, viz. the university, because I think it is not impossible that university may lose its place as the central place for doing philosophy (as it happened also in the beginning of Modern era, where the leading thinkers, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, and some others did not teach at the university). The capitalist way of organizing processes has gradually turned more and more aspects of our society into industry: first, it happened with industry in the narrow sense of the word (textiles, etc.), then with agriculture, entertainment, sports – and now it is happening with the university. This favors a new scholasticism, churning out papers and discussing minute details (modern angels dancing on the head of a pin). As in warfare, it may be wiser not to try to conquer a very well defended stronghold, but to bypass it.

There is also a resistance to the term “Chinese philosophy” both in Sinology and in philosophy. Anne Cheng, for example, explains her choice of the term “History of Chinese thought” for the heading of her award-winning book (although it also seems to show that the burden of justification lays rather in the “thought”-camp than in the “philosophy”-camp). And then there are Derrida and Deleuze who argue that there is no “philosophy” in China (you also mention it in your papers). And you yourself are the editor of a journal called “Contemporary Chinese Thought”.

2. Detective work

Carine Defoort has done some very interesting “detective work” concerning certain topics of the Chinese tradition. For example, in a paper she delivered in summer 2019, she claimed that the famous leitmotiv of the Confucian “rectification of names” was actually established by Hu Shi, and that this seemingly central theme of Confucianism was defined in its current usage only very lately.

It reminds me of another detective story concerning the supposed “matching of concepts” (geyi) between Daoism and Buddhism, which Victor Mair showed to be a myth, and painstakingly investigated its genesis.

It may be astonishing that so big topics have been handed over in the tradition uncritically – although psychologically it is not uncommon not to notice the most evident (as we see in the famous “Purloined Letter” by Poe).

In this sense, could it actually be helpful to be a foreigner doing Chinese philosophy? Because in this way one is less attached to the tradition (I shall come back to the topic of attachment below) and can perhaps have more critical distance, capacity and willingness to question received ideas, theories, interpretations. Especially in case of some obscure texts like the “Zhuangzi” one has sometimes the impression that so many contemporary commentators are simply repeating the comments of some previous authority who actually may have simply guessed the meaning, without solid proof. Of course, a tradition is very important, with its accumulated knowledge. But if one belongs to the tradition herself, then there may be things that it does not occur to her to question. Just as inside the Western tradition, for example, one may have the impression that the question of mathematics and the ontological status of numbers is a central philosophical issue – whereas from a comparative perspective it is actually a quite marginal topic.

3. Division of labor

In their discussion, both Carine Defoort and Rein Raud agreed that there is a Chinese philosophy (“My divergence with Raud, for instance, is not on the status of “Chinese philosophy,” since we both agree that there are many good reasons for attributing this label to a large corpus of ancient Chinese texts”). But Defoort says that she differs in her “attitude toward the debate” itself: “while he believes that the question can be settled once and for all as soon as Western philosophers get rid of their institutional and ethnocentric biases, I think that, aside from these biases, which Raud has convincingly analyzed, there is an aspect to the debate that will leave it forever unsettled,” namely emotional attachments (C2: 627).

Raud replied that he is “far from assuming“ that it would be so easy, but that he is “not so pessimistic” and hopes that “a new level could be reached in these debates in the foreseeable future” (R2: 662).

Yet there seems, indeed, to be a different attitude involved: in those four articles, Raud seems to be more engaged and Defoort to be more distanced (although in other articles, Raud may be more distanced, and Defoort more engaged). One of the recurring words in Defoort’s second article is “emotion”. Emotion creates attachment and attachment fosters entrenchment. So, the remedy would be to take a step back from the polemic.

-        Maybe to some extent it is a question of tactics. In case of a sizeable group of social activists, it is often recommended that they should divide functions, for example (1) those who shock, attract attention, force the other out of the comfort zone; (2) fact-cannons, who bombard the opponent with cold objective data; (3) diplomats, who do not prioritize truth, but transformation and are able to find the most suitable method or ruse, how to inch the other towards the goal, etc. Effect, truth, transformation. From this viewpoint, could it be that Rein Raud (and Bryan van Norden, for instance) focus more on the first and second, and Carine Defoort (in the articles under discussion) on the third and second? Defoort says that being too blunt or dogmatic may be counterproductive: “Overly self-confident statements on the nature of Chinese philosophy and insistence on its absolute superiority in the world are not only a breach of good manners, but they also indicate one’s incapacity to stand the predicament of being, in Visker’s terms, de-centered. Milder and tentative reflections suggest, paradoxically, a more confident acceptance of this predicament.” (C2: 641)

-        In the framework of the Embodiment theory, it is argued that a certain emotion or mood or affection always accompanies our cognition (cf. Heidegger’s Stimmung). As I understand it, the gist of Defoort’s insistence on the negative role of emotion is not so much that we should somehow cut off feeling, but that the main question is attachment and its modalities: the “emotion” Defoort mentions refers to a tight attachment and “rationality” to a looser attachment. In those terms it may be said that we are always affectively involved in our subject matter and in our tradition (or also in some other tradition that we have investigated with dedication), and we must take it into account when we talk about the “Chinese philosophy”. There are always multiple aspects involved and different kinds of attachments or libidinal investments (national pride; personal ego-image; habits of talking and silencing, etc.). Therefore, indeed, the question about the Chinese philosophy cannot be definitely solved.

4. Privilege-blindness

If we would take, for a moment, the community of Chinese philosophy as an activist group for the recognition of their field, then they face a similar dilemma that several other activist groups do, for example, feminists. The aim of feminism (at least an important part or thrust of it) is to fight for a society where your life choices are not so heavily determined by your perceived gender – to promote a social life where people are not forced into the straightjacket of such categories as a clearly delimited gender with a definite set of requirements for a behavior expected from a member of each of the two groups (societies that allow for more genders are inherently already a little bit more tolerant and flexible).

But in order to achieve this, they have to bring out and denounce the dominant forms of oppression, the patriarchy. So, they inevitably, on the other hand, reinforce those gender categories: the first step in fighting oppression is to overcome the privilege-blindness of certain groups. Those who are privilege-blind, implicitly have a category, but they are not aware of it or do not dare to acknowledge publicly that they have certain privileges due to some unearned and external factors like the male gender they are born with and formed into. So, the first step in fighting a simple and determining male-female dichotomy implies actually to reinforce a dichotomy, to make the privileged group conscious of the problem.

And this is inherently tricky, because one may stuck to those labels and continue to fight the “male” and promote the “female” when actually a further step would be warranted, i.e. the overcoming of a simple duality and the promotion of individual abilities and virtues beyond crude categories. But then again, one cannot omit phases. If one tries too quickly to step into this third phase, without the shocking and exasperating second phase, what one would be doing, is simply to reinforce the current oppression and privilege blindness – oh, let’s not talk about discrimination by men, it is a crude category and should be overcome! Without a change in the real power relations, this sentence, while in itself true, becomes false.

Perhaps this parallel can teach us also something about comparative philosophy. The final aim, as I see it, would be that certain crude terms like “Western”, “Chinese”, “Indian” become obsolete (or useful only in certain specific contexts) and that one can freely take interesting material for thought from any tradition. But in the present situation the academic world continues to be rather privilege-blind. (“the course is not titled “General Western Philosophy”, and yet philosophy is, quite simply, a Western matter. This demands no further explanation; it is taken for granted” C1: 393)

Humanely, it can be understood, because a university philosophy professor has had to go through a huge amount of difficult texts, Kant, Schelling, Hegel, etc., and the opening of philosophy to other traditions would seem to put pressure on him to read even more texts from a vast amount of different traditions (if we include not just China and India, but also native philosophies, traditional ontologies, much of which we access thorough anthropological works, then the sources become virtually illimited). Furthermore, it would be inconvenient to the institutions (“the departments of philosophy all over the world stand little to gain, but a lot to lose: curricula would have to be redesigned, job descriptions would have to be altered. ... Asian philosophies could do the same thing to the Western-type academic philosophical institution that avant-garde art did to the academic art institution in the twentieth century”, R1: 621). Yet, on the one hand, the scholarship even concerning the Western tradition is so huge that hardly anyone has a thorough understanding of all periods and schools; and on the other hand, indeed, it may be good if a student of philosophy would be exposed to at least some texts from non-Western tradition. (I am mainly talking about Western universities; actually also in China the curricula of Western and Chinese philosophy are often not so much integrated.)

So, in order to fight the privilege-blindness of the academia, the promoters of other traditions have to bring in categories like “Western”, “Chinese”, “Indian”, “Africana”, etc. and by doing this they inevitably run the risk of essentialization and reinforcement of these very categories they want to transform in the long run. The fight for recognition of Chinese philosophy has hence inherent contradictions. May be a new level can be reached, but it is in no way easy or definite and free from backlashes (indeed, our whole era seems to move rather in direction of more parochial identities).

5. Texts

In Defoort-Raud discussion, it is mentioned that one of the problems with the Chinese philosophy has been the difficulty of the language, its writing system and the long history of its tradition, so that it would require a very long time of diligent study to master it to some decent degree.

During those two decades that have passed from the first paper in discussion here, a huge amount of scholarship (accumulating on top of previous research) has been produced in the West on the Chinese philosophy: translations, commentaries, interpretations; lots of books, articles, conferences. Mainly in English, but also in other languages.

How does this factor influence the discussion of Chinese philosophy? It seems that in most cases no qualms are made about the term “Chinese philosophy”, which is used in a rather self-evident way. It would seem that we have reached a stage where quite a sophisticated and educated understanding of the Chinese philosophy can be acquired even without knowing Chinese – just as we can attain a decent understanding of the Greek philosophy even if we do not know the Greek language (as it is mentioned in your discussion). Or would the Chinese case be different? Or are there perhaps some other fundamental obstacles?

6. Philosophy

I continue to be frustrated by Deleuze-Guattari’s “What Is Philosophy?” (WIP, 1994 [1991]) where they reterritorialize philosophy to a very narrow ground – not even West, not even Europe, but just France, Germany and England. Sadly, it is a wonderful example of privilege blindness. They say there is no philosophy in China and India – without making reference to any first-hand source (be it even in translation)! When Deleuze analyzes Kant, he has read all of him. But he can denounce the whole Chinese philosophy without having read any of it (well, perhaps he had read Laozi or something, but in WIP he does not mention it). This part of WIP is a monument to prejudice.

Yet, I think that we could take inspiration from WIP itself and have a more inclusive idea of philosophy. Without following too closely that text, we can take a lead from their discussion of relations between science, art, and philosophy (and perhaps adding other fields, like religion etc.). The aim is not a prescription or even a useful description, but rather an orientation for thought (the diversity of phenomena is so rich and so intricately hybrid, that no description can be exhaustive; yet it does not preclude the interest of an orientation).

To start with, Defoort mentions in her article Feng Youlan’s remark that in principle we could make a yili 義理 analysis of Western philosophy, but that is has not been done (C2: 632). For several years now, I have proposed a liqi 理氣 analysis of everything there is: each thing, being, event, process has, on the one hand, a certain articulation (li 理), and on the other hand, a certain force, drive, energy, power (qi 氣), by which it sustains itself, persists, evolves. An atom has a certain articulation in its electron layers, and a force by which it maintains itself; a society has a certain articulation into professions, age-groups, etc., and on the other hand a certain power by which it evolves, though differentiations and integrations.

Now, science would be an attitude by which we investigate the mutual correspondences and relations between those articulations. In physics, these relations can often be expressed in mathematical formulas. In human sciences, this formalization may not be so easy or central, but still, the focus is on the correlations, mostly in the external world, but also in my own person, taken externally: even in the human psyche correlations and regularities can be studied, and I can apply it also to myself, taking a third-person attitude to my inner life, and study, to an extent, its correlations just as I study correlations in astronomical phenomena or in micro-physics. I as a living, embodied person and as a first-person subject, is left aside from scientific research (even when I study my own person, I study it as an object, and leave aside the one who does the studying – when I would like to take it in, things become tricky). The scientific research is “objective”, done from the “perspective of guests”, keguan 客觀. Of course, scientists are persons, and their subjectivity is an inseparable part of their work (they are, after all, living beings like all other humans), but it is left implicit.

Art brings in another central concept besides li and qi – the “heart-mind”, xin 心. The heart-mind denotes a site of individuation of li and qi – these two terms, in Zhu Xi’s words, will be expressed in the individual as xing 性and qing 情, respectively. Art brings in the aspect how I feel about those articulations and forces in the external world or in myself. How I perceive and how I (re)act. It is the “viewpoint of the master”, of the one who inhabits a viewpoint, zhuguan 主觀. Of course, the external articulations and forces play an important role, but the focus is on their relation with the heart-mind and its capacity to affect and be affected, on its changes: this is then expressed in art-works, as well as in the person of the artist itself as a kind of artwork, and spectators (readers, listeners, participants), who become involved in the artwork, as embodied persons.

Philosophy would in a sense bring science and art together, or would be built in the midway, in the sense that it includes both the guest-perspective articulations and forces, and the master-perspective feeling and relevance to a heart-mind. We could say that philosophy is a kind of science of the feelings and a certain feeling of science. It investigates the articulations of my heart-mind and its ways of affecting and being affected; and it includes explicitly the investigating person, her heart-mind, into the investigation of everything there is. This endeavor takes shape in concepts (just as Deleuze-Guattari say that philosophy creates concepts). Concepts are not simply correlations and functions of things and events (like the functions in science), and they are neither a work of art in its irreducible embodiment and expressivity (like in art; usually you cannot really ask a poet to tell her poem “in other words” or a painter to repaint a painting, in order to better understand it, but you can very well ask a philosopher to rephrase her thought – and usually philosophers are very grateful for such requests – if made in earnest –, because they enable her to develop her thought, make it more nuanced, interesting, relevant, comprehensive). Yet it is not true that “anything goes” in philosophy (a common accusation from science-leaning persons towards a philosophy in the continental vein): concepts form a constellation and they have their own logic. They may command multiple expressions and undergo bifurcation and collapsing or transformation of concepts, but they always have a certain coherence. The concepts are “upstream” from actual forms (both the ones studied by a scientist and the ones created by an artist), they are xingershang 形而上 (I claim that while concepts may express both virtual, intensive and actual levels, they themselves, as concepts, belong to the virtual: e.g. qi 氣, for Zhu Xi, is “downstream in the forms”, xingerxia 形而下, but he concept of qi 氣in a philosophical constellation, is itself “upstream”). They capture the actualization process of the world and of myself. Of course, also the practice of science and art involve the “upstream” part of genetic processes, but it is simply not the main focus on and it is not conceptualized.

The philosophical intuition of concepts and their constellations implies a heart-mind, a Dasein, a site of individuation for articulations and forces, in its interactions with other articulated forces. In order to intuit this transformative actualization, one has to transform in one’s own body and mind. Philosophy implies a self-cultivation. Not in the sense of acquiring conformity to certain forms of being polite and simply following rites, but in the sense of letting oneself to be immersed in the forces and articulations of the world and one’s heart-mind, and be transformed in this process. In philosophy sensu strictu, this transformation is mostly only implied, and the focus is on the concepts and their constellations, that capture important points, singularities, of this transformation. Religion, in turn, would be focused namely on this transformation. Religion may also be related to a certain quasi-philosophical notional structure, but that is not the main point. Just as chan Buddhism says, one finally has to become free from scriptures and the urge to build conceptual structures. (Of course, much of what goes by the name of religion, would not be religious in this sense; but this is true also of much of philosophy, art, and science; dull and uncreative, “uneigentlich” mode dominates always, and I can hardly see how it could be otherwise.)

The whole endeavor of science, art, philosophy, and religion, revolves around a center that can never be really reached or grasped, a “way”, dao 道. A center that is always de-centered, transforming.

And we are attached to this (de)center, each in our own way. Yet this baseless base is not easy to endure. Citing Visker, Defoort brings out two tendencies of re-centering this:

Visker identifies two opposite attempts to re-center the de-centered subject. The former is the sort of nationalism (or other types of particularism) that tries to fill in completely the emptiness that comes with a name. It admits that people are attached to something and believes that they can get total access to it. Confident statements about the essence of being Chinese are instances of this strategy. The opposite attempt can be associated with universalism, which sees the particular name as something irrelevant, since it is arbitrary and impossible to describe uniquely. In their opposition to the essentialist claims of particularism, universalists stress the fact that Chineseness simply does not exist, thus rejecting expressions of particularistic attachment as nationalistic delusions. Both are attempts – very common but misguided, according to Visker – to regain control, to undo the uncomfortable position of finding oneself attached to something that one does not totally know, something one has not actively attached oneself to. (C2: 639-640; my emphases)

In view of “Chinese philosophy activism”, the most important question is, how to keep in view the de-center, as well as its re-centerings, and how to accordingly devise strategies. Yet there seems to be a dilemma here (as I said above): if I am overly attached to a goal, then I become stuck, I narrow my field of possible interactions. But at the same time, arguably, if the goal would be realized, i.e. if the Chinese tradition would be widely accepted and integrated into philosophy programs, then the common being in the world would become more nuanced, rich, deep, with new possibilities for philosophical syntheses – as well as rip-offs to other fields, arts, sports, etc. We cannot let go of the goal, yet we cannot hold to it too fast. If in the “activist” group, different people have different functions (or one person consciously shifts between different attitudes), then perhaps we make some progress with the contradictory goal of integrating Chinese tradition and at the same time de-centering traditions. It may well be a never-ending process, as both Defoort and Raud seem to agree.

References

C1 = Defoort, Carine 2001. “Is There Such a Thing as Chinese Philosophy? Arguments of an Implicit Debate.” Philosophy East and West, 51(3): 393-413.

R1 = Raud, Rein 2006. “Philosophies versus Philosophy: In Defense of a Flexible Definition.” Philosophy East and West, 56(4): 618-625

C2 = Defoort, Carine 2006. “Is “Chinese Philosophy” a Proper Name? A Response to Rein Raud.” Philosophy East and West, 56(4): 625-660.

R2 = Raud, Rein 2006. “Traditions and Tendencies: A Reply to Carine Defoort.” Philosophy East and West, 56(4): 661-664.

WIP = Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix 1994 [1991]. What Is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press.

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[1] For comparison, the results on 13 December 2019 (date of the first draft ot the present text) were the following:

	Google	Baidu
“Chinese philosophy”	182 000 000	209 000
“中国哲学”	110 000 000	23 200 000

We can notice that in a little more than half a year, Google results for “Chinese philosophy” have increased dramatically, by 62 million, while the results in Chinese have significantly decreased, by 21 million (is it the result of further restriction on Google materials by PRC?). Baidu shows, in relative terms, an even more drastic increase, an eightfold increase for results in English, and more than threefold increase for results in Chinese (so that the results in Chinese are now comparable: Google’s 89 million vs Baidu’s 78 million).

[2] One language has been added during the period between 13.12.2019 and 18.07.2020.