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.