On Chinese Body Thinking: A Cultural Hermeneutic 9004101500

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KUANG-MING

WU

diis n Chinese

body Thinking

rp

Cultural

Hermeneutic

BRILL

This book uses Western philosophical tradition to make a case for a form of thinking properly associated with ancient China. The

book's thesis is that Chinese thinking is con-

crete rather than formal and abstract, and this

is gathered

in a variety

of ways

under

the

symbol ‘‘body thinking". The. root of the metaphor is that the human body has a kind of intelligence in its most basic functions. When hungry the body gets food and eats, when tired it sleeps, when amused it laughs. In free people these things happen instinctively but not automatically.

The metaphor of body thinking is extended

far beyond bodily functions in the ordinary sense to personal and communal life, to social functions and to cultivation of the arts of civilization. As the metaphor is extended, the way to stay concrete in thinking with subtlety becomes a kind of ironic play, a natural adeptness at saying things with silences. Play and indirection are the roads around formalism and abstraction. Western formal thinking, it is argued, can be sharpened by Chinese body thinking to exhibit spontaneity and to produce healthy human thought in a community of cultural variety.

Kuang-ming Wu, Ph.D. (1965, Philosophy), Yale University, is Professor of History, National Chung-cheng University, Taiwan; Rosebush University Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin, USA. He has published extensively on the philosophy of Chuang Tzu and distinctness of Chinese thinking.

ON

CHINESE

BODY

THINKING

A Cultural Hermeneutic

PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY AND

CULTURE

Series Editor

Michael Krausz, Bryn Mawr College Advisory Board

Annette Barer (University of Pittsburgh), Cora DIAMOND (University of Virginia), William Dray (University of Ottawa), Nancy FRASER (Northwestern University), Patrick GARDINER (Magdalen College, Oxford), Clifford GEERTZ (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton), Peter HACKER (St. John’s College, Oxford), Rom Harré (Linacre College, Oxford), Bernard Harrison (University of Utah), Martha NussBAUM (University of Chicago), Leon Pompa (University of Birmingham), Joseph Raz (Balliol College, Oxford), Amélie OKsENBERG Rorty (Brandeis University), Georg Henrik Von WRIGHT (University of Helsinki) VOLUME

12

ON CHINESE BODY THINKING A Cultural Hermeneutic

BY

KUANG-MING WU

BRILL LEIDEN : NEW YORK ` KÖLN 1997

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

ISSN ISBN

0922-6001 90 04 10150 0

© Copyright 1997 by Koninklijke Brill, Leiden, The Netherlands All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authonzation to photocopy items for internal or personal use 1s granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910 Danvers MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. PRINTED

IN THE

NETHERLANDS

To my Ruth --One and Only... Without Whom Not...

CONTENTS Acknowledgments ....................................... Γοτεννοτἆ..............................................

DIVISION ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

A Preliminary Remark

...................................

PART ONE:

CHINESE CONCRETE

THINKING

1. Concrete Notions ...................................... 1.1.

Demonstratives

..............................

1.2. Affirmatives .................................

1.3. Negatives ................................... 2. Concrete Argumentations ............................... 2.1. Metaphorical ................................ 2.2. Compact

...................................

2.3. Ironic...................................... 3. Chinese Concrete Thinking:

A Summation .................

3.1. "Iam Not Here"............................. 3.2. Extraordinary Ordinariness ..................... 3.3. A Multiple Summation (part 1) ................. 3.4. (Part2)....... 3.5. (part 3).....................................

VI

CONTENTS PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING

4. Concrete Universals in Chinese Thinking................. 4.1. The Spread................................ 42.

Imperative ................................

4,3. Concrete Universals ......................... 5. The Hiddenness of the "["............................. 5.1. The "I" as the Base of Thinking................ 5.2. The "I" as Tacit............................. 5.3. The Structure of the "I" ...................... 6. Hidden "I" in Interpersonal Relations .................... 6.1. Love as Plerosis ............................ 6.2. Positive Nihilation--Home.................... 6.3. Wombing Forth Persons ...................... 6.4. Inner Touch............................... 6.5. Confucianism .............................. 6.6. Negative Nihilation--Hell ..................... 6.7. Humanity................................. 6.8.

Life Drama................................

CONTENTS

VII

7.3. Fluidity....................................

162

7.4. Evocation eene

174

7.5. Polar Continuity .............................

177

PART THREE:

TWO

CONCLUDING

REMARKS

8. A Summary of Parts One and Two .......................

195

8.1. Our Expressions .............................

195

8.2. The Texture of Reality ........................

200

8.3. Summation .................................

201

9. Cultural Mutuality .....................................

204

9.1. Mutual Benefiting ............................

204

9.2. Five Points on Comparative Hermeneutics . ........

214

9.3. Comparative Hermeneutics for Our Survival ........

225

DIVISION TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING A CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING A Cultural Understanding .................................

227

A Preliminary Remark ....................................

228

PART FOUR: ON BODY THINKING 10. Two Themes: Movement, Comparison ....................

229

VIII

CONTENTS

10.1. From Self-Movement to Self-Transportation....... 10.2. Western vs. Chinese on Body Thinking (1)........ 11. Thinking, Pointings, Body Thinking ...................... 11.1. All Thinking is Body Thinking ................. 11.2. Pointings.................................. 11.3. Body Thinking as Embodied, as Body-Wise....... 11.4. Objection, Response .......................... PART FIVE: LINEAR LOGICALITY

Linear Logicality .................................... 12. Body Thinking as Thinking ............................ 12.1. Universality and Necessity in Body Thinking ...... 12.2. Six Characteristics of Body Thinking............ 12.3. Western vs. Chinese Thinking on Body Thinking (2) 12.4. Self-Emptying, Self-Forgetting................. 12.5. Bodily Death ............................... 13. Thinking as Βοά]ν................................... 13.1. Contingent Conditions, Logical Operations....... 13.2. Four Levels of Performance of Thinking......... 13.3. Structure of Body Thinking...................

281

13.4. General Bodily Validity ......................

287

CONTENTS

IX

14. The Thinking Βοάν..................................

291

14.1. Universals in Human Existence................

291

14.2. On "To Be Is To Be Perceived"................

292

14.3. The Bodily Performative A Priori..............

294

14.4. The Body as the A Priori.....................

309

PART SIX: CIRCULAR CONFIGURATION 15. The Configurative as the Concrete ........,.............

320

15.1. Part-Whole Configurative Argumentation . . . . . . . . |:

320

15.2. Concrete Concepts, Concrete Arguments.........

321

15.3. Analytical Goldinger, Chinese Cua..............

323

15.4. Merleau-Ponty and Chinese Body Thinking . . . . . .

328

16. Practical Significance of Body Thinking..................

335

16.1. Sociality in Configurative Thinking.............

335

16.2. Historicity in Configurative Thinking............

338

16.3. Analogy in Configurative Thinking..............

344

16.4. Analytical Truths and Perceptual Truths..........

352

17. Some Concluding Remarks .............................

358

17.1. Beauty in Logic and in Life....................

358

17.2. Self-Clarifying West, Bodily China..............

373

17.3. Four Questions on Body Thinking ...............

375

CONTENTS

EPILOGUE 18. The Historical, the Processive ........................... 18.1. The Partial, the Analogical, the Historical......... 18.2.

The Processive ..............................

APPENDIXES : On "Why did modern science not develop in China?".......... : Western Philosophy, "a Series of Footnotes to Plato".......... : The Pragmatic Turn in the West........................... : Tillich and Concrete Universality .......................... : Predominant Trends and Attitudes ......................... : Referent vs. Meaning ................................... : Consciousness vs. Self-Consciousness ..................... : Universals in Images ................................... : Feminism, the Gulf War, and Name-Rectification............ : Affirmatives and Nature ............................... : "a of not-a" vs. "a and not-a".......................... : Wittgenstein vs. Lao Tzu............................... : Pragmatic Explanation of Deconstructionism ............... : Mencius, Wordsworth, and the Baby ......................

CONTENTS

15: Tillich and the Non-Metaphorical Matrix .................. 16: Cognitive Fallacy in Plato and Socrates ................... 17: History, Usage, and Etymology ......................... 18: "Elements" as Concrete Universals ....................... 19: Specific and General Descriptions in China................ 20: Concrete Phrase-Concepts .............................. 21: Historical Understanding vs. Genetic Fallacy............... 22: The Hidden Self.................................... 23: Grabau and Existential Universals ...................... 24: The Dog, the Music, the Person ........................ 25: Philosophy as Existential Biography .................... 26: "Elements" as the Elemental Powers of Being ............. 27: "Renewal in the Wide βεποο'.......................... 28: Mind-Body Involvement in the West, in China............ 29: Logos, Mythos ...................................... 30: Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Philosophical Taoism.......... 31: On Chinese Horoscope ................................

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Mr. Robert J. Nixon for his preparation of the index and the camera ready version of this manuscript. A great deal of work is involved in the process of taming a final draft, and his efforts are greatly appreciated.

FOREWORD

After this book, no discerning philosopher can doubt that Chinese philosophy has entered the conversation of the world philosophy on a par with the Western tradition. To be a philosopher now means coming to terms with, and reconstituting for our time, the philosophic traditions of East Asia as well as those of Europe and North America. In fact, students of Western philosophy who think that tradition is sufficient unto itself are now in the position of being parochial. This book is the most recent major addition to the growing corpus of Wu Kuang-ming, a genuine philosopher with what Ralph Waldo Emerson called "an original relation to the universe." Deeply erudite in both Chinese and Western classical philosophies, trained at Yale in late modern Western philosophy whose true meaning, I believe, will be revealed to be the door to a rich field of world philosophies in dialogue, Wu has written a book here that is equally Chinese and Western. Or something inclusive of but beyond both. Its ostensible topic is the sense in which Chinese thinking is nonabstract but concrete, embodied in the flesh of culture and individuals. In a rough way, this thesis can be compared with the claim of Roger Ames and David Hall (in Thinking through Confucius), SUNY Press, 1987, and Anticipating China, SUNY Press, 1995) that Chinese thinking pays very little attention to transcendent principles and rather focuses on immanent forms of order. But their approach takes the form of a comparative philosophy of culture, talking about China from an outside transcendent perspective, as it were. Wu's approach by contrast is internal, exemplifying what he calls Chinese body thinking while describing and evaluating it. To do this he cannot enter the Chinese tradition and merely exposit it for the West. Rather, he has to enter into an internal exemplification and criticism of the European tradition of hermeneutics as well. There is far more discussion in this book of Western philosophy's approach to thinking than that of the Chinese, although the ostensible topic is never lost from view. Wu enters, and brings the reader, into both Chinese and Western philosophy on this topic, and enlarges both into one body of thought. His philosophy is not Chinese body thinking alone, nor Western hermeneutics, but a position in world philosophy grown from both.

XVI

FOREWORD

All this praise of his erudition, intelligence, and originality is not to say that I agree completely with Wu's position. In fact, there is an irony in our fundamental disagreement. He praises the concreteness, subtlety, and irony of body thinking, and is extremely suspicious of systematic philosophy of the sort I do. His suspicion takes the form of the claim that systematic thinking reduces phenomena to the categories of a system, which are abstract, thus losing the concrete, subtle, and ironic in the general, the rough and averaged, and the literal. I, on the other hand, praise the power of 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. Abstract and systematically criticized representations allow us to engage realities with a genuine sense of humility. And I am suspicious that talk of concreteness will yield in the end a sense that reality is itself an organism, one thing, however complexly functioning. Long before the concrete hardened in Hegel's Absolute, Wang Yang-ming provided an interpretation of the ancient line about being "one body with the world" that amounts to a recipe for totalism, if not totalitarianism. I think the way to honor the emptiness of Laozi's bowl is to engage it, but always with some distance, so that when the need arises it can function in the system as a hat as well. Wu Kuang-ming makes out the case here extraordinary thoroughness and systematic rigor. scholarly appendices! I am very pleased to say that for his conception of Chinese body thinking makes my

for his position with Imagine! Thirty-one this magnificent case case as well.

This book is transformative. No reader will think of Chinese or Western philosophy in the old and customary ways after this text works its magic. I recommend it with great delight.

Robert Cummings Neville Boston University March 9, 1996

INTRODUCTION This is an exercise (a wholesome one) in perspective shift in thinking, from abstract to concrete, from mental to somatic. Specifically, this essay describes concrete thinking with its tacit bodily matrix. The essence of concrete thinking lies in the concrete mode of thinking. This corrects our prevalent assumption that thinking as such 1s formal, abstract, and nothing else.

The essay calls our attention to the

fact that besides a formal abstract thinking is concrete, natural and has been routinely for thousands of years. The latter concrete coherent as the former formal one, with thinking is somatically systematic, whereas toward having a system. In all this, the word,

"mode,"

there is a body thinking that practiced in Chinese culture mode of thinking 1s fully as a proviso that the concrete the formal thinking aspires

is pivotal.

Being

human,

both

Chinese and Western people are subject to the same moods and environmental conditions, and deal with the same kinds of objects of thinking. Whatever Western thinking has Chinese thinking has also, and vice versa.

It is in the mode--the way, the how--of treatment of things,

of thinking, that they differ. But difference does not imply exclusion. Precisely the opposite should be the case. Neither Westerners nor the Chinese has a monopoly of truth or perfection. The Western formal thinking must be used to clarify and describe the Chinese concrete thinking; the Chinese concrete thinking must be embodied in fine-tuning the Western formal thinking. Both must thus come together to make up healthy human thinking. But before bringing together, we must be certain about what these two different modes of thinking are. This essay is intended to serve this crucial preliminary purpose. A much respected philosopher conversant with philosophies both in the West and in China has kindly read my manuscript and forwarded me his comments. They can be broken into seven points, my responses to which should further clarify the main intentions of this essay. The reader says, in effect, that the essay says that: concrete thinking is the best kind, body thinking is its symbol ana metaphor, and

2

ON CHINESE BODY THINKING A CULTURAL HERMENEUTIC Western abstract formal

besides

thinking is bad;

but the West has also concrete thinkers such as Kierkegaard, this essay draws much from Western thinkers, who must then have something good to offer to the world. Also this essay is written non-historically, and concentrates nearly entirely on the pre-Han thinkers, hence not concretely historical. Finally, the Western thinkers treat actuality, therefore they are concrete, whereas the essay treats thinking and proposes a theory of thinking, therefore it is not concrete.

My responses are as follows. The essay does not claim a value judgment; Chinese concrete thinking is not "the best kind" of thinking but merely one that has been undeservedly neglected. It is as full of (opposite sorts of) defects and dangers as the other formal abstract thinking. Both kinds must come together. ' Concrete thinking has the human body not as "its symbol" or "metaphor" but as a tacit matrix, whose activity and performance concrete thinking is. Western formal abstract thinking is not "bad" but is a powerful tool, to be presupposed and fine-tuned by Chinese concrete body thinking, which needs it as its corrective. This explains how and why the essay "draws much from," and 15 in a constant critico-appreciative dialogue with, Western thinkers, when considering Chinese concrete body thinking. Concrete body thinking is as natural in our living as our body is. Body thinking is a natural mode of thinking. "Kierkegaard" did urge Western thinkers to think on concrete matters, not to play with abstract generalities; in this sense Kierkegaard did "treat actuality." But he had his eyes on what we should think about. Kierkegaard's mode of thinking 15 quite complex, contrived, often even contorted, as his modern progeny of deconstructionists also amply show. They (as he) often rant, push, ! See below, 9.1.2.3., 9.2., 9.3., 10.2., 12.3., 14.4.5., 15.4., 16.3.2., 17.2., and Appendixes 3, 10, 11, 13, 22, 27, 29.

INTRODUCTION

3

and argue copiously ("argue" in both senses of "demonstrate" and "quarrel"). Their metaphors constitute acid wits that are often unnatural, cutting, scary, and acerb, betraying thinly disguised arguments.' In contrast, Chinese thinkers quarrel by following nature, dipping in history, peppering their "arguments" (often couched in one image or story after another) with (imaginative) actuality; even their ironies are quite natural and metaphoric. To cite history is one thing; to argue historically is quite another. To cite history in an abstract argument is what Western thinkers do; here history is an extraneous aside merely to reinforce a self-sufficient argument. To imaginatively have many thinkers in history come together, letting them jostle naturally, is quite a different performance;

here historical personage and their words are constitutive of an "argument." This essay engages in not the former logical process but the latter historical performance and delineations.

Finally, if this essay "proposes a theory," it would have produced a separate system, an abstract framework, in terms of which things concrete are seen to hang together. But this essay has no such system. How dare it? Besides, such a performance would have been self-contradictory, both claiming concrete thinking as something concrete-comprehensive (without exception), and thinking theoretically, trans-concretely (which is an exception). Instead of offering a system, this essay presented a coherent description of body thinking as practiced in China. This is why the essay is an intuitive "bodily" flow, first presenting body thinking in Chinese mode (Division One), then describing it by contrasting it with the Western mode of thinking, in a journal-like manner which reflects the mode of body-thinking (Division Two). Responding as above to the reader's comments hopefully brings out the real intention of the essay, namely, to appreciatively delineate and thereby call our attention to a concrete mode of thinking dubbed "body thinking," routinely practiced in China for many centuries, all too often undeservedly neglected. Unfortunately, the notion of "body thinking" offends our Cartesian common sense. Thinking operates everywhere and nowhere, indissoluble in chemicals, unanalyzable by empirical science. Body 1s, in contrast, always somewhere in particular, composed of chemicals and i Kierkegaard's stories and metaphors are conveniently collected and arranged in Parables of Kierkegaard, ed. Thomas C. Oden, Princeton University Press, 1978.

4

ON CHINESE BODY THINKING A CULTURAL HERMENEUTIC

so dissoluble in(to) them, and subject to empirical analysis.’ In response, this essay calls attention to the bodily nature of our thinking and the thinking nature of our body--in actual thinking, as exemplified in "concrete thinking" practiced in China. Yet, as we are oblivious to our body during our manual labor, so we do not notice our body while we think. This is the way the body works. Nor do we, as we engage in manual work, "see" the thinking quality of our bodily operation. That is the way concrete thinking goes. Body thinking is so spontaneous a natural fact of our life that we only notice our body sometimes,

and attend only to our thinking some other times.

Hence,

our Cartesian offense at "body thinking." The above mentioned two qualities, the offense of "body thinking" (bodily thinking, thinking body), and the unnoticeableness of this natural unity, exhibit two facts, which will be considered in the following manner. One, our offense points to the concrete nature of our thinking that involves thinking body; Part One considers "concrete thinking." Two, our not noticing so concrete a thinking indicates the tacit nature of the thinking bodily subject; Part Two treats the "hidden nature of the 1." But how did we come to such a theme in the first place? Part Three answers the question by considering what enables us to write on this theme of pervasive yet unnoticed body thinking. The answer is revealing: A mutuality between Chinese thinking that innocently practices body thinking, on the one hand, and Western thinking that throws critical suspicion on it, on the other. To realize this fact is to sense the imperative indispensable to our being human, the task of furthering a human community of cultural differences. Division Two is an elaboration on how attending to and taking advantage of these cultural differences yield rich harvests in our understanding of the bodily matrix of thinking. Embodied, thinking body-wise, and always pointing bodily at something, body thinking 15 our matrix of all thinking (Part Four). Body thinking exhibits fully the twin characteristics of thinking, necessity and universality, bridging the gap between contingent perception and logical analyticity (Part Five). Such a bodily encompassing manifests body thinking as configurative, encircling the part-whole, the analogical-analytical, and the historicalprocessive character of our cosmos (Part Six, Epilogue). All this is a small step toward exemplifying what body thinking is in China, compared with formal thinking in the West. ! Cf. 17.3. below.

DIVISION ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING: AN UNDERSTANDING

A PRELIMINARY REMARK "Body thinking" has two words, "body" and "thinking"; it is thinking that 13 bodily, saying that our body is full of thinking. We must then consider what "thinking" is here and what "body" means here. And so this essay is divided into two parts: (One) "thinking" as "concrete thinking," which leads us to understanding that such a thinking is (Two) "body thinking." What is "thinking" in this context? The answer is "concrete thinking." This description cuts two ways. First, "thinking" means not information or knowledge but an activity of dealing with information or knowledge.

The

interior

decorator,

say,

does

not

delve

into

the

information about when this famous painting was painted and under what circumstances; the decorator's only concern is how best to place the painting within the milieu of the room, and arrange the room so as to enhance the atmosphere thereof. Similarly, "thinking" is less concerned with accuracy or details of whatever informative data from whatever sources than with critically treating the data, so as to link ideas coherently, and place them significantly, in the living milieu of the world. Secondly, body thinking is "concrete," not abstract, flying off from the actual details toward their empty forms. Abstract thinking proceeds like "If P is true, then Q is; P is; hence, Q is." Here P and Q are just blanks, devoid of factual contents; the blanks can be filed with

false or nonfactual contents ("propositions"), and the argument (thinking) is still "valid." In contrast, concrete thinking works in the interior decorator who, although not a historian, utilizes historical data to

enhance the atmosphere of the room: "This historical painting should hang behind this historical vase." Body thinking is thus concrete interior decoration

of the Heaven

and earth;

it never

leaves the situation, the

skies and the field. Concrete thinking discerns the structure and significance of the situation,

and

draws

its implications--in

relation to others, within

the

whole universe. The intelligibility and even the validity of concrete thinking are actual and situational. For instance, Socrates met Euthyphro about to accuse his father of murder; not challenging directly his action, Socrates looked for what makes all pious acts pious.' In ' This

is the story of a significant early dialogue

of Plato, Euthyphro.

One

could construe

8

CHINESE BODY THINKING

contrast, when Duke of Yeh praised a Mr. "Straight Body" who testified to his father's sheep thievery, Confucius poignantly replied, "Straight bodies in my group differ from that. Fathers and sons cover each other; herein lies straightness."' In other words, “straightness” means nothing until the situation 1s ascertained.

such a concrete thinking 1s.

In Part One, we will describe what

Then, in Part Two, we shall come to realize that this concrete

thinking is concrete because it starts at my body, operates in my body, and results in bodily consequences. We shall realize that concrete thinking 15 basically bodily, operating in a bodily concrete milieu, and is aimed at something bodily. In all our consideration of such a body thinking, we must be concerned with one thing in particular. Since writing about body thinking is writing about thinking, we must watch out for questions that arise from the viewpoint of thinking, from a formal perspective, that is, from the angle of linkage of ideas. At least six questions can be seen: Thinking about the body is not "body thinking." Body thinking Is thinking in terms of the body, in the perspective of the body, thinking body-wise. Can we, how do we, think about the body in terms of body thinking? The body is a particular, not something universally present; thinking covers universally. Besides, the body 15 contingent--it can be and it can not-be; thinking can proceed in a necessary chain of reasoning--"2+2" must yield "4." Thus the body is contingent, not necessary, while thinking can be necessary. What should the two cardinal characteristics of thinking, "necessity" and "universality," mean in body thinking? Body thinking proceeds in Aristotle's epistemological order; formal (universal, disembodied) thinking proceeds in Aristotle's ontological order. The order of knowing (e.g., addition precedes Socrates to be challenging Euthyphro; unless Euthyphro knows what piety is, how could he accuse his father of impiety? And perhaps Socrates was wondering aloud: Whatever piety is, doesn't Euthyphro's act--of accusing his own father--itself amount to an impiety? If so, how could he accuse his father of impiety? In contrast, Socrates was going to be accused of impiety; he was consistent in seeking after the definition of piety. Although this is a possible interpretation, the entire tenor of the Dialogue seems otherwise. The Dialogue seems to use that situation as a springboard toward abstract theorization about the definition, the essense, of piety as such: Socrates was going out of his way to deny Euthyphro's all-too-concrete definition of piety by enumerating its examples. ' Analects, 13/18. All English translations from otherwise. I tried for more fidelity than felicity.

the

Chinese

texts

are

mine

unless

notc«

A PRELIMINARY REMARK

multiplication) multiplication) make up "body All the

9

and the order of being (e.g., addition is subsumed under go in opposite directions. How can they be combined to thinking"? above questions presuppose that "thinking" differs from

"body"; thinking is, then, necessarily disembodied.

We should examine

(a) whether this assumption is correct, (b) if not, why not, and (c) show how the body "necessarily" thinks, how "thinking" can be an activity of the body. Concrete thinking is experiential thinking, thinking from experience, thinking in terms of experience. Body thinking is not entirely synonymous with concrete thinking, though related thereto. How are they related? All the above questions arise from the point of view of Western formal theoretical thinking, and sounds foreign to Chinese sentiment. Should we not see Chinese thinking in a Chinese manner? But does "Chinese body thinking" differ from "Western body thinking"? Can't both be subsumed under the common rubric of "thinking"? But then what 15 this overall "thinking"? The task of this essay is to consider the questions above in an Organic manner, then organize my answers to them, thereby shedding light on the significance of Chinese body thinking vis-a-vis Western theoretical thinking. The best way to elucidate Chinese body thinking in a nutshell 13 to answer the last question above. We must see how we can, and why we need to, attend to the peculiarly Chinese mode of thinking, then look into what Chinese body thinking 15. To begin with, how and why should we attend to the Chinese mode of thinking? The answer is that the mode of thinking enables an understanding of the peculiarity of a culture. The importance of understanding cultural differences between China and the West is being widely recognized. What these differences really are, however, 1s seldom looked into. All 0715 being human, whatever the people of China have the people in the West have also. Yet all of us can see they are different.’ Their differences must lie, then, not in what they have but in how they

arrange and manage

what they have, that is, in the perspective and

! Cf. 14.4.5. and the first note there. I argued for the typical differences between thinking in China and that in the West in Chapter Four of my History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei, Taiwan: Academia Sinica, 1991.

10

CHINESE BODY THINKING

manner in which they manage them. For instance, all of us require about the same amount and proportion of nutrition to stay healthy, yet the Chinese

cuisine, table manners,

various

names--ethos,

and even the Chinese view of dinner,

differ from the Western. We take in foods physiologically; in the dinner culturally. And it is the dinner--the perspective of our nutrition management--that manifests differences, which indicate our multifarious humanity. The manner and perspective in which things are culture,

etc.;

it can

also

be

we take part manner and our cultural

managed has

called

"mode

of

thinking." For it is the way we think about things that begins, directs, and typifies the way we treat and manage things. And the way of managing things 13, in turn, expressed in their management. This 1s because "thinking" is an act which goes on between facts (or bits of information). Science digs out facts; "thinking" arranges and manages them to make out meaning therein. Syllogism, for instance, is a way of arranging-managing facts to bring forth a meaning we did not notice before. Thinking is then a technique with which we manage information and facts. If manual performance is making and managing facts, then mental management (on manual performance) is thinking. What is the case (fact) is what is made to be the case (manual performance), which in turn is what is made out to be the case (mental performance). The way we think and the way we manage are the twin sides of the same coin--"humanity." Thus it is crucial to investigate the peculiarities of Chinese modes of thinking in comparison with the Western. This exploration is the precondition for understanding the Chinese culture as distinct from the Western. For the mode of thinking is the essence of culture; to know the former 15 to understand the latter.

The pragmatic significance of such a cultural understanding by understanding its modes of thinking goes beyond satisfying a dilettante curiosity about an exotic culture. (See Appendix 1.) Since different modes of thinking arrange things differently, a dominant cultural mode of arranging things can be evaluated and improved upon by another ! C. below, 9.3. K. C. Chang, in fact, has conducted food-in-culture studies, in the belief that the "importance of food in understanding human culture lies precisely in its infinite variability--variability that is not essential for species survival," that "food as a cultural, rather than chemical, process" is a fruitful "framework for studying human culture." See K. C. Chang, ed., Food in Chinese Culture: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977, pp. 3-4. The book contains the entire gamut of Chinese thought-patterns.

A PRELIMINARY REMARK

11

cultural mode. At present, the Western theoretico-technocratic mode of dealing with things predominates in the world. We, all of us humankind, are called upon to enhance the strengths of our dominant Western mode of thinking and managing, and redress its havoc. To this end our understanding of Chinese modes of thinking can much contribute. How this 1s so 15 explained as follows. Today, the Western theoretico-technocratic mode of managing things dominates the world, to national weal (industrialization, upping GNP) and personal, ecological woe (depersonalization, environmental pollution). This is because the traditional Western "thinking" is something abstract, formal, and imposing. In this context, J. B. Schneewind's overall impression of Kant is instructive:' "The distinction between 'pure' concepts and ‘empirical’ concepts is central to Kants philosophical enterprises. Whereas most ordinary concepts are, he believes, derived from experience, some concepts are imposed by the mind on experience. . . . [P]hilosophy must explore the a priori concepts, explaining how it 15 possible for such concepts to be valid and showing their connections with one another. Thus philosophy does not deal with the specific details of physics, but it must explain how there can be /aws of physics showing necessary connections between events2. And philosophy does not provide the empirical information needed to apply the moral law in particular cases. But it does have to show how there can be a moral law, a law imposing necessity on our free actions." (emphases added) It is Kants contribution to make us understand our understanding as "connection" of notions, and a priori notions as the basis of empirical ones. Kant betrays his Platonic leaning, however, when he takes pure a priori notions to "impose" themselves on empirical ones, so as to give them "law," that 15, rational form.

This "imposition"

at once separates ("distinction") the theoretical from the experiential, । J. B. Schneewind, ed., Moral Philosophy from University Press, 1990, p. 662-63, n. 1.

Montaigne

to Kant,

Vol.

II, Cambridge

? Basil J. Hiley and Marco Fernandes, Process and Time, Department of Physics, Birkbeck College, University of London. An excellant discussion about the fundemental structure of reality at the quantum level and how events may be linked together.

12

CHINESE BODY THINKING

and bulldozes over the experiential with the theoretical. This is the origin and, indeed, the essence of modern Western technological operation. We learn from Kant that "thinking" as connecting of ideas, and that experiential "connection" as originating in the priori. a We replace the pure rational abode of the a priori with the non-metaphorical bodily self, and replace the mind's imposing operation with a natural somatic and experiential expansion from the primal a priori matrix of I-herenow, out of which metaphorical connections flow forth in all directions,

flooding the skies and the fields, the Heavens and the earth. Let us continue considering the Western mode of thinking. A. N. Whitehead characterized thinking as an aeroplane-like flight of imaginative speculation from, then toward, the situation.” Thinking is, then, as detached from actuality ("abstract") as the airplane is from the ground. Detached from concrete particulars ("abstract"), such thinking surveys them objectively and systematically ("formal"). For instance, a traditional syllogism says "All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; and so,

Socrates

is

mortal."

Here

the

three

concrete

notions,

"men,"

"mortal," "Socrates," have nothing to do with ("abstract") the syllogism itself ("formal"), of which these statements are mere dispensable examples.’ The result is impersonal management with one-principled effectiveness for horrendous effects. The formal theoretical principle applies universally because it is formal and abstract, detached from the unmanageable niceties of concrete particulars. Its universal "application" tends toward its uniform imposition on actuality, bulldozing over actual twists and turns, manipulating them at all costs. An operation can go with textbook precision, and the patient (ecological, societal, medical) can die. For abstraction of forms--formal structure--out of concrete particulars stifles the flexibility of thinking that should follow, not dictate, the flowing turns and variations of events. On this point, Wittgenstein’ and Merleau-Ponty' have done a superb critique. Gilbert । A.N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, N. Y.: The Macmillan Company, Edition (eds. David R. Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne), 1978, p. 5.

1927, p. 7; Corrected

2 Perhaps this is why Socrates objected to Euthyphro's definition of piety by enumerating examples. He wanted to know what piety itself is, not what activities are called "piety." ? In his Philosophical Investigations.

A PRELIMINARY REMARK

13

Ryle said it picturesquely’ that the application of logic to the concrete situation is "rather like what geometry is to the cartographer. He finds no Euclidian straight hedgerows . .. Yet he could not map the sinuous hedgerows . . . save against the ideally regular boundaries . . The possibility of his map being approximately correct . . . is the gift of Euclid." sadly, the convenience of Euclid bewitches us into imposing it onto nature, as Kant unabashedly proclaimed that in experiencing and understanding we put questions £o nature; we demand answers from it. In this overall context of form, no matter how much we refine, revise,

improve, and even overhaul our thinking, even in pragmatism which takes formal system to be mere "instrument" to action and living, we either get constant revisions of our system that is forever not-quite-right for actuals, or run the risk of erecting another system, or both.‘ Now, it is crucial to remember that the above evaluation is made

possible by another sort of thinking, "concrete thinking." The genius of Chinese body thinking lies in that it accomplishes the task of understanding for acting and living without the "gift of Euclid." There is a "logic"

that

is "informal,"

that

is, the

logic

without

form

that

is

abstract and imposing. The flowing body thinking sees the ever emerging and merging of notions and things (such as the Yin-Yang, the I- Thou, the here-there), opalescent layers of implications in simple facts and descriptions (compact affirmations, negations, metaphors and । In his Phenomenology of Perception.

2 Gilbert Ryle, Dilemmas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964, p. 123. Cf. my The Butterfly as Companion, Albany, N. Y.: State University Of New York Press, 1990, pp. 371-72. + Of which Robert C. Neville is the most sophisticated proponent to date. 1 have an essay comparing such a spirit of pragmatism in the West and the pragmatic spirit in China, in Robert C. Neville and Thomas P. Kasulis, eds., a Festschrift to Professor John E. Smith, The State University of New York Press, forthcoming. 4 Neville, completed. One can see Creator with

for instance, has five Parts to his magnificent system, of which three have been How he is going to "revise" them, after or before the completion, is anyone's guess. how much he has improved on his systematic thinking by comparing his early God the his recent Recovery of the Measure.

> The notion of "informal connotations.

logic"

is Ryle's,

in his Dilemmas,

pp.

115-29.

I use it with new

14

CHINESE BODY THINKING

ironies), sinuously following things, letting them grow, and thereby Itself growing with them.’ Thus concrete thinking is as "concrete" as spontaneous mores and customs are that move with and within actuality; it is free from abstractness of Western formal analysis. In addition, such a thinking 13 as careful and coherent as Western formal analysis is consciously systematic; it is free from looseness of popular mores. Chinese concrete thinking unites formal analysis with mores and customs, without their contrastive defects. It exhibits a coherent thinking that runs through the individual's thick and thin of daily ongoing, the history of the community, and throughout the skies and the earth. Here natural symbiosis between Nature and humankind obtains. So far how and why we should attend to the Chinese mode of thinking has been discussed. Now we should look into what Chinese body thinking is. A sinologist Arthur 7. Wright once said that China has no philosophy but "thought" which lies between philosophy as abstract formal analysis and common people's uncritical mores, customs, and mythologies.’ The saying can point to a new implication, that China's peculiarity lies in having succeeded in capturing the mode of thinking that runs from abstract formal analysis to conventional mores and mythologies, yet without falling into the defects of either, that is, abstract irrelevance and imperial imposition of set principles, on the one hand, and uncritical mindset (prejudice, dogmatism) and mere implicit hints at thinking, on the other. Chinese thinking lies between abstraction and convention, theory and common sense. Formal ratiocination is for logicians and metaphysicians to pursue, to make a coherent sense out of everything thinkable. Customary mythologies and mindsets are for sociologists, psychologists, and cultural anthropologists to study, to draw forth certain patterns of | All these will be described in the following pages. These "labels and categories" look dangerously similar to systematic forms, and if not watched, threaten to ossify into them. But they are mere convenient trails in the forest of nature, soon to be taken down; no thinker will take them seriously enough to erect a system on them. Hence the most protean "form" of "random" collections of analects, journals, story-bits, and argument-bits that typify "Chinese philosophical writings." ? Cf below, 9.1.2. H. G. Creel, ed., Chinese Civilization in Liberal Education, The University of Chicago Press, 1959, p. 141. The saying easily invited an attack, saying that it begs the question, and provides a challenge to characterize Chinese philosophy, as I elaborated on in Chapters Four and Six of my History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991.

A PRELIMINARY REMARK

15

thinking hidden in them. Chinese modes of thinking differs from both above, and requires logico-scientific sensitivity to discern. Chinese thinking is concrete--yet explicit--thinking; it is fully reflective as formal analysis is, yet without leaving actuality, as our customary common sense does not. This 15 why such a concrete reflective thinking lies. "between" formal-theoretical and pre-reflective thinking. It is the bridge that links the two, without the defects of the two.! "Philosophy" can be defined as (a) thinking of necessary, universal sort, as (b) rigorous analysis of concepts--one mode of Western cultural enterprise, and as (c) thinking that is basic, coherent,

comprehensive, and significantly relevant to life and actuality. From the viewpoint of definition (a) China has no philosophy. From definition (b), thinking defined in definition (c) 1s not philosophy. Thinking in definition (c) includes logic, examination of arguments, and perhaps entire analytic philosophy; from definition (b), they are not philosophy but, respectively, a critical organ of, a process in, and an introduction to philosophy proper. Definition (c) excludes, while definition (b) includes, ethics, religion, mythology, literature, fine arts, some psychologists (Freud), some political thinkers (Marx), some critics (Lessing), some scientists (Einstein) as belonging to philosophy; definition (b) includes, while definition (c) excludes, some "philosophers" (analytical Hume, logical positivists) from philosophy proper. Thinking of definition (a) is problematic. It is this area and thinking in sense (c) that this essay explores.’ Despite the prevalent outcries these days against the practice of essentialism,’ Western philosophers generalize, argue, and make points with common nouns and concepts, literally "grasped" out of actuality. Chinese philosophers compress stories; they do not use concepts. They ! This does not mean that Chinese body thinking is not defective in its own ways. Its needs for Western formal thinking will be considered in Section 9 and Division Two, to envisage the human community of cultural differences and symbiosis. ? Cf. also Note 5 to my "Sound, Sight, Sense--the Chinese Mind and the Prospect of Comparative Philosophy," in Bulletin of the College of Literal Arts, National Taiwan University, No. 36, December, 1988, pp. 229-84, reprinted in History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taiwan: Academia Sinica, 1991, 125-74. > Garth L. Hallett's Essentialism: A Wittgensteinian Critique, Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York Press, 1991, critically surveys the essentialism--the practice of abstracting theoretical forms from the common concretes--still prevalent in philosophical reasoning, then inquires into the source of life of essentialism.

16

CHINESE BODY THINKING

"metaphor" and spread; they do not universalize. They "ironize" (affirm in their denying) to discern sense in actuality; they do not make theoretical points. This is because Western thinking affirms, while Chinese thinking af-firms, that is, firms up, confirms. Western philosophy negates propositions; Chinese philosophy emphatically affirms with negatives. The Western thinker talks about performatives; the Chinese thinker per-forms, that is, forms life with life performance. The Western thinker talks about integrity of persons; the Chinese thinker exhorts and exhibits integrity that forms itself in the midst of behaving fatherly or filially, sovereignly or loyally, brother-ly and friend-ly, and to all people kindly, i.e., kin-ly. Such a behavior is not mere playing one's social role, fitting oneself into a slot in the society, but acting oneself out appropriately in a specific social context so as to per-form the society. And all this Chinese concrete thinking is made possible by the bodily subject. In Chinese thinking the bodily self manifestly accompanies every affirmation and accentuation, every metaphor and irony; Western thinking may say so and describe it. Now, all above amounts to describing how Chinese concrete thinking bodily spreads and effects "universality," a traditional characteristic of thinking in the West. Another characteristic, "necessity," is discerned in the constraining inevitability in a personal situation, as expressed in phrases such as "hurt, pained at heart" (compassion), the "heart of not bearing people [to suffer]," which are compressed stories evoked by casual situations Mencius noticed. Here "necessity" is no longer that universal oppressive constraint lurking therein, as noted by Wittgenstein. And, again, such concrete universality and necessity are incorrigibly bodily. This essay explicates such a Chinese body thinking. But the essay itself engages in general description, reminiscent of Western thinking. Is this practice in this context justifiable? The last section of Division One picks up this topic, and characterizes the essay as an appreciation, which is an outsider's empathetic performance. The ! P.F. Strawson's performative theory of truth says that to assert that a proposition is true is to emphasize, endorse, concede, or confirm the proposition, not to attribute a property (of truth) to it. The word "true" is a linguistic device of agreement with a claim; to search for the nature of the truth misses the point. (This last point differs from Chinese thinking.) This view is related to John Austin's "performative utterance" (to utter words of promise is to vow to fulfill it), L. Wittgenstein's "meaning as use" (to know the meaning of a word, watch how it is used), and R. B Braithwaite's noncognitive theory of religious language ("God is love" means "I adopt the policy of loving people"). None of these, however, has been adopted as an overall assumption of thinking in the West.

A PRELIMINARY REMARK

17

"logic" of appreciation is a token of the ideal human community of cultural differences that 15 to come, to complement and enrich one another. xxx

नैः k k

kkk

κ κ κ

ἘΚ κ

Description. of Chinese body thinking can take either of two routes. On the one hand, we can start redefining the body according to the classical Chinese thought, and proceed to describe how such a body, flowing perceptually, personally, interpersonally, and pervasively throughout the cosmos, also flows thinkingly. Here thinking is understood in a novel manner via the bodily flow. On the other hand, we can start watching how concretely thinking, as we take it today, is performed in our bodily behavior (in China), and how such a body thinking that never leaves actual specifics understands and connects things--metaphorically, compactly, ironically. Here the body is understood in a novel manner via its thinking performance. In both descriptions a revolution both of "body" and of "thinking" is effected-one spreading from the body to thinking, the other from thinking to the body. This essay begins (in Part One) by taking the latter route of description--from concrete thinking to body thinking--because it is easier to follow in our modern milieu of thought; then (in Part Two) we follow the former route, and look into how thinking flow from the bodily here-now to all others in the flow of the Cosmic Ch'i. The following pages consider Chinese body thinking first (in Part I) as incurably concrete, then (in Part II) as based on our bodily self in interpersonal relationship, and then consider how logical moves are possible in body (which is an enclosed entity) thinking (in Division Two). Let us now consider what concrete thinking 15, then how it proceeds in China. “Concrete thinking" sounds like an oxymoron. For we usually take thinking to be by definition abstract and theoretical, and we take whatever concrete to belong to things, not to thinking. Thus, "concrete" pertains to things, "thinking" is not a thing, and both realms seem different in kind. But it is crucial to remind ourselves that as long as thinking 1s one of concrete human activities, thinking can naturally be concrete as well, although it often flies off into abstraction. To understand concrete thinking, we must see what theoretical thinking is. What is thinking that is both abstract and formal? Whitehead characterized it ("thinking," he called it) with "the flight of |

. In the sense to be explained soon.

18

CHINESE BODY THINKING

an aeroplane." "It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation". (See Appendix 2.) Whitehead simply called it "thinking," without even bothering to say "theoretical thinking." This shows how typical theoretical thinking is in the West. But it is so difficult for Whitehead's aeroplane to come down. (See Appendix 3.) And Whitehead's descent was another interpretation of Plato's Matter taking part in Form. Although Plato took Form to be really real, it is difficult to see how Matter can fill in something really real. As a result, Form came to be taken as a categoreal blank. In "All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; so Socrates is mortal," for instance, particular notions, "Socrates," "man," and "mortal" are neither

important nor relevant for the argument to hold.

One is here really

thinking of "M-blank is O-blank; S-blank is M-blank; so S-blank is O-

blank," which is a formal scheme of blank forms separate from the concretes. One can fill in blanks with anything one wishes, as long as one fills in the same thing in the same blank; and so this scheme is valid indifferently among any three notions.’ Such a formal scheme is applied to specifics in the world to "explain" them; their intelligibility depends on their explainability by this formal theoretical scheme. Formal universality is a hallmark of theoretical thinking. Let us follow the lead of this theoretical thinking to get a picture of what concrete thinking is. At the cost of oversimplification, we can agree, first, that facts differ from thinking about them.

connection than a net but related now" may

For thinking is a

among facts, and connection is not the connected any more is its contents. Yet difference can have two kinds: different and different and unrelated. "It is fine today" and "I am full both be true facts; "Today is fine because I am full" is their

wrong connection, an invalid thinking; the invalidity is due to the factual

contents of the statements. Here facts both differ from and related to thinking. Again, "All milestones are octopuses; this snake is a ! This "indifference" in application amounts to a bulldozing over concrete specifics, violating the integrity of the concrete. One can think of impersonal "management" (manipulation) of company personnel, ecological destruction of our natural environment, medical (surgical, medicinal) invasion of our organic harmony, homeostasis, in the name of "therapy," and son on.

A PRELIMINARY REMARK

19

milestone; therefore this snake is an octopus" 15 false in facts yet valid in thinking. Here facts both differ from and are unrelated to thinking. Now, validity in the first example has its base in actuality; validity in the second does not. The second example is valid because theoretical thinking is formal thinking, thinking in terms of formsschemes which are empty of concrete contents. Such a formal empty thinking is valid independent of experience, and when applied to the experiential world it tends to bulldoze over it, causing ecological hazards. In contrast, concrete thinking is valid in concrete actuality, so much so that when actuality 15 pulled out, the thinking collapses. For concrete thinking is actuality thinking, not (just) actual thinking. Actuality thinking is where actuality is part and parcel of thinking, not just one item among others to be treated by thinking. Logical thinking pays homage to actuality, saying that actuality is logically involved in thinking; actuality thinking says that to say so is real and actual, that logical thinking is (not an illusion but) actual. Actuality thinking is not just a trivial claim that all thinking (including dreaming) is actual thinking, but that this triviality is the very backbone of thinking, that without actuality the very thinking collapses into a nonentity. By logical thinking actuality is thought about; in actuality thinking logical thinking originates, moves about, and has its being. Actuality thinking is the prius and principle in which everything, including logical thinking, becomes intelligible. In actuality thinking "concrete thinking" is a matter of course, because the actual and the concrete are synonymous; in logical thinking concrete thinking is a contradiction, because the concrete is something thought about, not thinking itself. In actuality thinking, logical thinking must be explained; in logical thinking, concrete thinking must be justified. The two, as two approaches, are different if not mutually incompatible. Secondly, that we have two kinds of net-thinking may not, however, be widely known--the net within facts, and the net outside them. Men on the street usually find the example about snakes hard to swallow because they usually operate on the net within facts. The above distinction between net-thinking and its fact-contents is seen from the perspective of the net outside facts.' ! But in order to appreciate had only by passing through the net outside facts should this point in the final section

the net within facts we must possess logical sensitivity which can be training in net-thinking outside facts, and at the same time beware lest become a Procrustean bed for the net within facts. We shall take up of Division One (9.3.).

20

CHINESE BODY THINKING

The intuitive net-thinking within facts is important for understanding life. History is a matter not of memorizing facts but of discerning connections among them, what Lao Tzu called the "Heavenly net." We smile at the boy who, when asked about his age, answers, "I don't know"

and, when

asked

about his name,

says,

"I forget;

Mom

knows." The boy has historical net-thinking; his "name" is in his Mom. Besides, our smile is significant. Net-thinking outside facts may say, if we smile, so we do, and that is the end of the matter. Only net-thinking within facts sees that this our smile connects us to, thereby enables us to understand, Mencius's puzzling pregnant saying, "The Great One is one who does not lose the heartmind of the baby in oneself." And so there is concrete thinking besides theoretical thinking. In China thinking is not formal abstract. theorization but a sensitive discernment of many-layered meanings of a concrete experience. This concrete thinking is what 15 to be appreciated in this essay. Thus thinking can be of two sorts. In abstract thinking meaning (as some sort of immutable form) is produced by abstracting from the situation. In concrete thinking meaning is performed forth by the subject within the situation; meaning spreads concretely to the reader who experientially understands what is said. Here universality is of a concrete sort. (See Appendix 4.) And this thinking has built-in situational implications which, once taken away, collapses the thinking; it is no longer thinking. Here necessity is also of a concrete sort. What is important is that concrete thinking is our bodily performance; thinking is based on and performed by the body. And so this Division proceeds in three parts. Part One treats concrete thinking. Chinese concrete thinking has two modes: concrete understanding and concrete argumentation. Concrete understanding (section 1) is an understanding of notions (demonstratives, affirmative notions, negative

notions)--concretely and performatively. Concrete argumentation (section 2) is a concrete notional shuffling to make a point-metaphorically, compactly, and ironically. This shuffling (which 15 the so-called Chinese "thinking," "argument") is not abstract logicizing but story-telling and -summarizing (in gnomic phrases).^ In Part Two concrete thinking is described as body thinking. । Mencius, 4B12. 2 In this essay I have purposely chosen only stories and phrases in wide circulation in China to demonstrate the predominant feature of Chinese thinking as incorrigibly concrete. This is not the place to display sinological exotics.

A PRELIMINARY REMARK

21

Concrete thinking (section 3) is found to base itself on our bodily self as its pervasive "universal" (section 4), which is "hidden" (section 5). Then (section 6), looking into the hiddenness of the self we discover "relationship" and the "other"--as "my" hell and home. Finally (section 7), we see that logical moves obtain in body (enclosed entity) thinking because everything is by nature fluid (ch'i, flowing into one another. In Part Three, we sum up what has gone before (section 8), to see (section 9) how all these descriptions amount to using Western formal sensitivity! to appreciate the peculiarity of Chinese body thinking. We consider what this appreciative discernment requires, what dangers we should avoid, and how imperative such an appreciation of the "other" is for our very survival as human.

! See Appendix 5.

PART ONE: CHINESE CONCRETE THINKING Chinese. concrete thinking has two modes: concrete understanding and concrete argumentation. Concrete understanding is an understanding of notions (classified as demonstratives, affirmatives, negatives)--concretely and performatively (section 1). | Concrete argumentation is a concrete notional shuffling to make a point-metaphorically, compactly, and ironically (section 2). This shuffling (the so-called Chinese "thinking," "argument") is not theoretical logicizing but story-telling and -summarizing in gnomic phrases. 1. Concrete Notions. Let us first examine concrete understanding of notions--demonstratives, affirmatives, and negatives. 1.1. Demonstratives. Demonstratives are such peculiar words

as

"L"

because their known only by changes. This concept worthy Demonstrative

"you,"

"here,"

"now,"

and

the

like;

they

are

peculiar

referent (concrete meaning-moorings in actuality) 15 looking to the speaker and his situational context', which is a violation of our usual logical requirement that a of its name must have the same referent throughout.

has, in contrast, its referent determined by the situation

which changes. Let us look into "I." Five points can be raised. "I" is understandable by us all, yet the meaning-mooring of the I lies in the actual situation; its referent depends on the situation. Every statement is made from its base, the I-subject. Its meaning depends on the I. The I is an action-word, a performative.* The I is the spot where to know is to know the truth; it is the primordial original point of the identity of knowledge and truth.” The I in China (e.g., Mencius) spreads socially and cosmically. ! And so they are also called "indexical signs," "egocentric particulars," "token-reflexive words." See Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, N. Y.: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1967, IV.151-55. ? Chuang Tzu, among others in China, was sensitive to this point, so much so that he was mistakenly dubbed a relativist. See Chuang Tzu, 2/27-28, 85-96. This point was noted and very insufficiently argued about by Wayne E. Alt in his "Logic and Language in the Chuang Tzu," Asian Philosophy, Carfax Publishing Co., PO Box 25, Abingdon, Oxfordshire, OX12 3UE, United Kingdom, Vol. 1, No. 1, March 1991, pp. 61-76. > Cf. M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, N. Y.: The Humanities Press, 1962, on the Cogito, especially in pp. 374-77, 396-98.

1. CONCRETE NOTIONS

23

The meanings of demonstratives being sensitive to situational context, demonstratives stand at the crossroads of reality and assertion, and undergird assertion. Let us consider the "I." The I is usually taken to "refer to myself" when I use "I," while when you use "I" you refer to ("pick out") someone else. But a word should only refer to one thing determinate and unchanging; hence the problem. (See Appendix 6.) "Context-sensitivity" or "indexicality" are a clue to the peculiar nature of demonstratives, and so on.!

All these above true enough observations are put in a wrong context.

First of all, "I" does not refer,’ but is the origin of reference. Nor is the I "picked out"; it 1s the subject-base for picking something meaningful.

All this comes from the nature of the I to take stand, and to show and

express For "I" and an taking

the stand-taking, the undertaking, in this case, of understanding. is a subject, someone literally thrown-under an active research assertion of its result, af-firming what is being done or said, a stand. And so, in an ordinary spontaneous context (unless

consciously

describing

oneself’),

"I am

here,"

"I thank you,"

and the

like, express that / stand behind what I say, so much so that these statements can be rewritten as "Here!" and "Thank you!" The assertion, "It 1s raining," is an existential abbreviation for "I believe that it is raining, and I claim so," so much so that to say "It is raining but I do not believe it is" is less a logical contradiction than a "situational oddity" (Nowell-Smith).^ Here "oddity" implies that Nowell-Smith is at a loss on how to explain the situation of this utterance. This oddity is really a situational contradiction; the saying contradicts its implied base, its situational matrix, of the "I" claiming and standing behind the saying. Thus "I" is a situational verb,’ a sort of performative, making

! Cf. Yourgrau, Palle, Demonstratives, N. Y.: Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 1. And the whole book continues in this fashion, trying to solve and make out objectively this peculiarity of demonstratives. ? This is so except for purposely referring to it, as in this essay. Does "I" refer? Perhaps it sometimes does, as in "as for me," "on my part," and the like, but we must remember that even here the confessional "I" stands behind them. + P. Nowell-Smith, Ethics, Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1954, pp. 79-84. ? This justifies Buckminster Fuller when he wrote a book, / Seems to Be a Verb, N.Y.: Bantam Books, 1970

24

PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

and backing up a sentence. And, as Yourgrau says,' the meaning of the "I" depends on the situation, on who utters it. The performative is a performative, forming a meaning by performing it. John Austin’ alerted us to the fact that to say "I promise A" is in itself to perform an act of promising. But if this is the case, performatives would not be limited to some specific statements. To extrapolate from Austin, by my statement of any sort I per-form meaning, i.e., the I is forming meaning by performing it via the statement, because the statement is asserted (meant) by the I who stands behind the act of asserting and meaning that assertion. Besides, the I at the base of every statement has an important implication for truth in a statement. For the I is a conscious subject, and consciousness is where what appears coincides with what is real, especially the reality of myself. If I am conscious, then I am, truly. This Is a pivotal point in our inner-outer unity and an indubitable truth.’ Consciousness,

which

is

the

hallmark

of

our

subjecthood,

the

I,

undergirds the truth of our knowledge. (See Appendix 7.) Chinese thinkers fully accept this fact of the I as a demonstrative (though they do not use this term); they give it an ethico-sociopolitical connotation. Confucius, for instance, connects the metaphorically expanding I to being human (jen), then to its knowledge:*

"Being-human (jen) is [this]: The self desiring-to establish[-oneself],? [help-Jestablish people; desiring-to attain[-oneself], [help-]attain people. Being-able-to pick metaphor [from among the] close-at-hand,° [this] could well be called 'the-scheme’ of being-human."" ! Ibid. * John R. Searle came much later and elaborated on Austin's discovery of the performative aspect of promising. John L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words, ed. Urmson, J. O., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962, London: Oxford University Press, 1965, 1970. John R. Searle, Speech Acts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. ? This point is obviously related to the Cartesian Cogito. 4 Analects, 6:30. > Literally, to stand or take a stand. ° That is, oneself. 7 Fang also means directive, way, method, metaphor. as "(sense of) direction."

Both D. C. Lau and Arthur Waley render it

1. CONCRETE NOTIONS

25

Here the self, moral principle, knowledge, and being human are talked about at one breath. They belong together in the demonstrative of the active 1. This is why Mencius is so intent on taking the self? as the base first of moral behavior and then of political welfare. He claimed three interrelated points: All destructions start at the self; no one destroys me except through my self-destruction. Mencius said,’ "People must insult themselves before [other] people insult them; families must destroy themselves before [other] people destroy them; nations must invade themselves before [other] nations invade them. T'ai Chia says, '[When] Heaven makes calamities, [man] still can thwart [them]; [when man] self makes calamities, [he] cannot survive." Again, he said,‘ "One-who discards oneself cannot be cooperated. . . . 'not being-able-to reside myself [in] humanness, [or act] from rightness' is called 'self discarding.’ Humanness is man's home [that] nestles [him]; rightness is man's correct path."

i Chuang Tzu seems to laugh at this view at one point; he began his castigative Eighth Chapter with "much patterning-after (fang) jen-i." He wants us to look to "no myriad things not patterning after (pi fang) the sun" instead (21/19). The entire section there in Chapter Twenty-One, "T'ien Tzu Fang," is worth reading in this context. Two general points can be noted in this connection. (a) Metaphorical reasoning was much practiced by both Mencius, but neither said much about it. Whatever I cited here and in the main text are all I could find in them about it. This fact reinforces my observation that all Chinese assertions are performances. (b) Chuang Tzu's Three Words roughly correspond with my threefold division: his Lodged Words (yü yen) corresponds with my metaphorical reasoning, his Doublet Words (ch'ung yen) [or Authorized Words (chung yen), same characters] with my compact reasoning (which captures both implications of ch'ung or chung yen), and his Goblet Words (chih yen) with my ironic reasoning. On Chuang Tzu's Goblet Words (and related matters such as metaphor) see my previous two books, Chuang Tzu--World Philosophers at Play (first half of the book), and The Butterfly as Companion, pp. 12, 21. 69, 107, 263, 370, 392, et passim. ? See Mencius, 2A7; 4A8, 10, 11, 12, 15; 4814, (18), 19, 28, et passim. The entire Great Learning is concerned with precisely this point--going to world concord from the base of the self. 3 Mencius, 4A8. 4 Mencius, 4A10.

26

PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

All social reformations and political concord are based on the self and nourished at their root, the self. As Mencius said '

"Occupying [a] low position and not winning among superiors, people [would] not obtain governance. Winning among superiors has [a] way; no confidence among friends, no winning among superiors. [Winning] confidence among friends has [a] way; serving parents without pleasure, [then there is] no [winning of] confidence among friends. Pleasing parents has [a] way; returning-to oneself [if one finds] no sincerity, [then there is] no pleasing to parents. . . .[For] this reason being sincere is [the] Way of Heaven; thinking [in] sincerity is [the] Way of man. Attaining sincerity and not moving [others;] such hasnever-been [the case]." planned, oneself.

And so, anytime something is amiss and a new beginning 15 the place to look for trouble and start a new beginning is Mencius said,’

"Humanness is like archery. [An] archer correct himself and then shoot. Shot and not hit, [he] does-not resent [the] winner; [he] return-to seek it [in] himself--that's all." Thus the self 15 the root and the power of things worth accomplishing-morality, politics, world peace. Chuang Tzu began his Eighth Chapter by castigating this view as "much patterning-after (fang) morality (jen-i)." He wants us to look to "no myriad things not patterning after (pi fang)" the sun instead.’ While affirming the importance of demonstratives such as the I, Chuang Tzu seems to stress its spontaneous situatedness, the here-now that goes with the "I," who exists as naturally as the here-now, and should not be disturbed by "morality" or "self-cultivation" of which the Confucians made so much.

The hiddenness of the "I," the self-loss that

' Mencius, 4A12. See also 4B28. 2 Mencius, 2A8.

See also 4B28.

° 21/19. The entire section there in Chapter Twenty-One, "T'ien Tzu Fang," is worth reading in this context.

1. CONCRETE NOTIONS establishes the self, can be understood

in this context.

27 Demonstratives

must be concretely and spontaneously demonstrated, not selfconsciously molded forth. The entire controversial tone of Taoist writings can be reduced to this single point. But both Chuang Tzu the Taoist and Mencius the Confucian are at one in recognizing the spread, as it were, of the "I to the "things." Mencius is justified in taking the "I" (by nature) to spread socially and cosmically, while Chuang Tzu is justified in taking the spontaneous selfexistence to be the pivot that overhears rhythmically the Three Pipings-the human, the earthly, and the heavenly.' For in the spontaneous identification of the self is the germ of the general identity of things. How so? First, self-identity as self-awareness generalizes itself to undergird the principle of identity, "A is A." Why? Because as to be conscious is to be conscious of something, thereby affirms that "something," so being (unself-conscious) aware of the self establishes the "I" (a "something"). Secondly, the "I" thereby affirms "A 15 A" for things (another "something"). And "A is A" explains what we mean by a "this," another demonstrative. It is thus that every consciousness of the "I" spreads to every awareness of "this" thing; the Cogito accompanies every "this." Two basic demonstratives, the "I" and the "this," are now seen to be intimately connected. Now, "this" is the "I"'s affirmation of a thing-as-"this." As the appearance 15 the real in consciousness (of the self), so in an affirmation of "this" what appears is what is really "this." This is why MerleauPonty said,’ "Perception is precisely that kind of act in which there can be no question of setting the act itself apart from the end to which it is directed. Perception and the perceived necessarily have the same existential modality, since perception is inseparable from the consciousness

which

it has, or rather is, of reaching the

thing itself. Any contention whereas the thing perceived an ash-tray, in the full sense ash-tray there, and I cannot see something."

that the perception is indubitable, is not, must be ruled out. If I see of the word see, there must be an forego this assertion. To see 15 to

' Cf. Chapter Two. ? Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, tr. Colin Smith, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962, p. 374. Italics in the original.

28

| PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

The phrase "in the full sense of the word see" above signifies that "A (in my perception) is A (in front of me)." It is in this "A is A" that MerleauPonty's perception causes a thing to appear. This "A is A" is perhaps what he called our "primary opinion"^ in which our subsequent affirmation or denial originates. "Primary opinion" is the primal origin of what the so-called "verification" handles. In this light, we see that "verification" should not just mean a passive check-up on the truth (as in sciences) or meaningfulness (as in philosophy) of a claim, as it came to mean in the West. "Verification" should mean, instead, the self's primal shaping of "this" state of affairs

into conformity with what it should be, af-firming (confirming, establishing) what is into what it should mean (what is meant to be)? This is where Chinese epistemology has a moral and socio-political twist, as expressed in the famous cheng ming, which can be translated as "correct naming" (including "correcting (wronged) names" or "rectification") of "this," an existing state of affairs into what is meant ("ought") to be. Such a primal verifying (in the mode of transitive verb) is an active shaping (rectifying) "this" situation into its legitimate verity." Thus, in general, all sentences can be translated in terms of "this," and "It was raining" 13 now "An occurrence of rain 15 (timelessly) earlier than this." In Bertrand Russell's words, "what really happens is that we pick out certain facts . . . ;they all radiate out from 'this'." "This" is the pivotal point of the "top" of our thinking that is turning in the ambience of actuality. Actuality is no longer a mere collection of occasions to be manipulated--and manipulated away--by thinking; thinking is now a part of active actuality, radiating from the "I" and the this. This is what the Great_Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean tirelessly harp on--always starting with oneself to develop humanity-! Ibid., pp. 396-97, 456. * Ibid., pp. 396-97, 456.

"Primary opinion" is our original and fundamental opinion.

3 Cf. 1 4.3.1. below, for the performative character of verification. * This is one implication of the traditional Rectification of Names. come in the following section (Section 1.2.) on Chinese affirmation.

Another implication is to

? Bertrand Russell, "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism," Monist, Vol. 28 (1918) and Vol. 29 (1919), Lecture IV, pp. 55-56.

1. CONCRETE NOTIONS

29

through the family-throughout the entire spheres "under Heaven." So much for demonstratives. All these rectificatory implications bring us to the Chinese treatment of affirmatives and negatives. 1.2. Affirmatives. I pointing at "this" and af-firming it as "this" make up the Chinese affirmative notion. Let us go into Chinese notions that are affirmative. Affirmatives express the self's act of af-firming. To consider how this is so is to see how intimately the self (a demonstrative) 15 actively connected to the affirmatives. For this purpose we must look again into how we come to note our "self identity" via noting perceived objects. Terence Penelhum describes David Hume's distinction between identity (X that lasts identically) and diversity (A, B, C, that relate successively), and claims that Hume wrongly assigns the status of one "object" only to identity. For, Penelhum says, oneness can also be assigned to diversity, though as a "class" ("kind"), not as identity. And so he accuses Hume of so restricting oneness as to miss the self.' I think Hume's

intention lies elsewhere;

Hume

could not have

been as naive as that, but must have instead been dissatisfied with taking the self as a mere "class" of disparate things” Hume mentioned "identity" because he wanted to find a "personal identity," the self as a distinct individual thing, not a "class" or collection of composites. Then he confessed he found only "a bundle or collection of different perceptions," not an individual whole ("personal identity") with many parts. Penelhum failed to distinguish a complex whole with many parts ("identity") from a collection (class, "diversity") of different things. To bring out this point is not to justify Hume but to point out his conscientious mistake and its lesson for us. His mistake lies in his failure to note what it is who finds a bundle of perceptions. His lesson for us is that this "what it 1s" 1s not to be found in the same way in which perceptions are found, i.e., objectively, as he tried to do. The self is not a perceivable object but the subject apperceiving its perceivings. What ! Terence Penelhum, "Hume on Personal Identity," The Philosophical Review, LXIV (1955), 57189. “As Penelhum apparently does. ? David Hume, the Treatise of Human Nature, Part IV, Section 6. Clarendon Press, p. 252.

Selby-Bigge edition, Oxford:

30

PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

does it mean? My sense-organs sense; my inner sense (my heartmind, hsin) senses that I sense. Thanks to my eyes I see; thanks to my heartmind I am aware that I see. Being aware, my heartmind senses my senses, thereby integrates my sense experience, what is experienced (as) outthere. Sense-organs perceive actuals; mindheart-organ apperceives perceptions. Apperceiving with the mindheart, the self af-firms, that is, integrates perceived actuals into a scene, con-firming a cohesion of actual scene of the world. Thus I perceive with my sense-organ, apperceive with my mindheart-organ, and thereby af-firm and con-firm with affirmatives a meaning, a concept or concepts that describe a scene. This 1s the rationality of the actual. This is how the demonstrative-"I" 13 connected with affirmatives.!

Immediately, however, this bodily sensing subject falls into oblivion, buried both in the affirmatives that point to the actual and in the corporate convention called language as recognized, used, and regulated in sociopolitical environs.” The actual appears as meaningful, as affirmative concept, via bodily self, which is hidden’ Only affirmatives and their sociopolitical matrix remain, to produce legitimate, apposite, and meaningful concepts. Thus, tacitly, the I points at "this" and af-firms it as "this," and

such an ostensive performance makes up the Chinese affirmative notion. Affirmatives mark the I-here-now's primordial contacts with the world. Affirmatives are the first appearances of things with demonstratives (I, here, now) as they confront each other. This thing-appearance is a scene pregnant with a story about it. As a result, every Chinese "concept" can be said to be a scene, a pictograph, a compressed story; for all "formal theoretical concepts" in China are generalized concretes that are "this," and "this," and so on, affirmed as such. Here are some examples of Chinese story-concepts. "Tao is the road walked out" by things, by us; li is the vein of things's similarity, the grain of the wood of things; ch'i is the Breathing of life of things and of us; fe (virtue) is what 1s obtained (te) by nature; jen is what is (truly) human(e); Asing (nature) is what we ! Hsün Tzu is very clear on this point.

In fact, the above explanation is a summary of 22/15-21.

* Hsün Tzu, 22/25-50, 60-62. > This theme of the hiddenness of the "I" will be treated in Part Two.

*Chuang Tzu 2/33.

1. CONCRETE NOTIONS

31

are born-with; shen (divine, spirit) is what spreads dynamically in the world; wu (things) is the oxen of things (as precious and powerful as the ox); tzu-jan (self-so) is the naturalness of things, the so-called Nature. Often a four-character phrase sums up a short story that makes a point. This phrase then comes to be a "concept" to circulate among "theoretical" treatises. Two examples will suffice. "Cite one, infer three" (chü i, fan san) comes from Confucius's description of his manner of teaching:' "No

resolution,

no

revelation;

no

vexation,

no

evocation.

Having raised one corner, [if] three [other] corners [were] not returned, then [I do] no more." Again, "Clothes off, legs apart" (chieh i pan po) sums up the point-nonchalant naturalness--of Chuang Tzu's pungent story:? "Duke Yüan of Sung was-about-to [have some] picture painted. Crowds [of] artists all came. Receiving orders and standing, [they] licked brushes and [mixed] ink, [while a] half [of] them stayed outside. There-was one artist who came late; leisurely, leisurely, [he did] not rush. Receiving orders [he did] not stand [but] went straight to [the assigned] studio. Duke sent [a] man [to] observe him, who [was found] clothes off, legs apart, naked. Duke said, 'Good. This is [a] true painter." Thus compressed phrases--often of four characters--are affirmatives, concrete specifics logically (analogically, metaphorically) spreading to concrete universals (See Appendix 8). So much for affirmative notions. We now consider how active the affirmative statement 15. J. L. Austin says that "to say 'I promise to . ον. . Just is the act of making a promise." This speech-act, though cannot be true or false, can become "unhappy" by virtue of [a] the ! The Analects 7/8. "Chuang Tzu 21/45-47. 3 J. L. Austin, "Performative-Constative," in H. R. Searle, ed., The Philosophy of Language, Oxford University Press, 1971, p. 14. It is instructive to note that the Chinese thinkers have for thousands of years been performing affirmation (affirmative utterances) while the Western philosophers only recently (in the twentieth century) began to study what it means to have performative utterance.

32

PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

utterance not fitting the situation (inappropriate), or the speaker not fitting for that sort of speech-act (by either [b] being insincere, or [c] failing to fulfill his speech-act, or [d] not being in a position to do so). The first case 1s exemplified by Confucius when he pronounced differently on filiality and humanness on different occasions to different disciples.’ The "sincerity" of the speaker is much stressed by Confucius as the integrity (Asin) essential to being human.’ The above points have much to do with "fulfillment" of promises, explicitly stated or implied in ordinary speeches, as a precondition of being human. If I say "I promise to do A" and later break my word, then I am not in order.’ This "order" is picked up by the Legalists and made the basis of their proposed legal system. This 15 why Confucius stressed being "alert in (discerning the) events and circumspect in words."* "I order you" is null and void if I have no authority over you, says Austin.” "To speech-act" appropriately as befitting one's social "position" is also much stressed by Confucius." Furthermore, Austin warns that we have no verbal criterion by which to distinguish the performative from the constative utterance, and that the constative is liable to the same unhappiness as the performative, via situational or logical inappropriateness; "I state that . . . " is closely similar to "I warn you that... .." This fact indicates that the declarative utterance has more of the performative force than the performative utterance has of the constative. Saying is more of acting (expressing, changing) than acting is a mere saying. On the whole, saying and acting are affirmative performance, ! Mencius has something similar in his notion of ch'üan, which is usually "expediency" but is really a "[situational] weighing." See Mencius, 4418. 2 E.g., Analects, 1/3, 7, etc. 3 Austin, op. cit., p. 14. 4 Analects, 1/14, etc.

> Op. cit., p. 19. 6 Analects, 12/11.

1 Op. cit., p. 20.

translated

as

1. CONCRETE NOTIONS

33

expressing myself as I make differences in the situation, and expressing the situation and making difference to myself. The affirmative is an interaction between myself and the situation, a concrete existential engagement.

What does it mean to affirm something? Affirmation is a confirmation of my expectation with (the help of) the other of which (or whom) I have expectation. "It is hard" is true to the extent that my expectation that it is hard 1s confirmed by the "it" of which I speak. What is important is that this confirmation 1s initiated by me the speaker, and corroborated by the "it." For to affirm that it is hard is to manifest and confirm that "it is hard" is right. Confirmative manifestation of the rightness of my affirmative statement requires a corroboration by the other, the "it." I af-firm that it is hard as a result of my corroborated confirming act, and thereby making my affirmation a foretaste of future repeated confirmations. This is the righting of the affirmation

of truth.

Truth

affirmed

is con-firmed

truthfulness;

truth

affirmation is corroborated "righting." There is here a performative community of confirmation. This performance as corroborative, and therefore communal, is none other than the political activity.‘ This accomplishment of affirmation presupposes that the "it" that one affirms is alive with its own recalcitrant integrity of actuality. To affirm is an active transitive verb. Scientists labor on their hypothesis- and theorymaking for true affirmation of actuality; artists labor no less in their artworks that truly express reality.’ But natural sciences inevitably lead to technological innovations; artists cannot help but to create forms and visions that are "new" to actuality, in the name of reality. The transitive quality of active affirmation harbors a venturesome normative thrust. We achieve as we affirm, shaping actuality--recalcitrant, treacherous, even fickle, "as if treading on thin spring ice’ -- into a new form, with patient and ! For an exploration of cosmic reciprocity implied in this, see section 7. Albert Hofstadter said that to affirm, "It is hard," is to be confirmed by the other, "it," that "it" is indeed hard ("Philosophy is the Confession that Being is Communion," The Monist, April, 1971, pp. 156-74). He then said, "The thought that the thing is hard is not the same as the thought that it would offer strong resistance to pressure,but is rather the ground of the latter thought, which is one of its many consequences." (p. 266) Confucius, Mencius, and Hsün Tzu said in effect that both thoughts are the same--to af-firm is to con-firm, to per-form together, i.e., to form by communal performing, to achieve together; "affirmation" is political. Hofstadter did not develop "communion" or draw political implications therefrom. ° We remember how Kant took "knowledge" to result from our posing of question to nature. > This phrase occurred first in the Shih Ching (Book

of Poetry),

Poem

No.

196 (in Bernard

34

PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

often tragic effort.’ Affirmation is righting, not only in the sense of making our statements right by enlisting the corroboration of actuality, but also of making the situation right by molding actuality into what it ought to become, where "what it ought to become" is compressed rm the "name" it has because we give it. Hence, importantly, the affirmation of notions (names) takes on a normative existential significance in the famous "rectification of names (cheng ming)," the righting of wronged names back to what they ought to mean. That this has an unexpected (but natural) political ramification ("Cheng-politicizing is cheng-righting"?) is graphically put by Confucius, when he said,’ "Names [being] not right, then words [would] not accord [with actuality]; words not [in] accord [with actuality], then affairs [would] not accomplish; affairs not accomplished, then rites, music, [would] not flourish; rites, music, not flourish, then

punishments [would] not hit-right; punishments not hit-right, then people have nowhere to put [their] hands, feet." (See Appendix 9.)

This per-formative affirmation ("rectification," cheng), rightful confirmation of names, is what government (cheng) 15 all about, says Confucius. Hsün Tzu expanded this theme into a full-fledged moral epistemology (Chapter 22); The Great Learning and The Doctrine of the Mean expanded this theme into a political cosmology; the book of Mencius can be taken as an elaboration of this theme on two fronts-Karlgren, The Book of Odes, Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 1974, p. 144; James Legge, The She King, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1960, p. 333) and repeated in a slightly different form in Shu Ching (the Classic of History), in the Chou Shu, Chun Ya (James Legge, The ShooKing, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1960, p. 579). Both concern the treacherous danger of governing people. Tseng Tzu used it for the difficulties of preserving one's integrity (including physical integrity) to fulfill one's filial obligation, in Confucius' Analects, 8/3. All these share concerns for treacherousness of preserving integrity, political or personal.

! Cf. the last chapter in my History, Academia Sinica, 1991. 2 Confucius's Analects, dares not right [affairs]?"

12/17.

Thinking,

and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei:

He continued, "[Once] you, sir, lead by righting [affairs], who

3 Analects, 13/3. ^ Analects, 12:11, 17, 19. Cf. 16:2, 3; 18:5; 20:2.

1. CONCRETE NOTIONS

35

becoming human[e] (which we are) in all aspects of life,’ on the one hand, and ruling human[e]ly always,’ which governance means, on the other. Let us take Hsün Tzu's elaboration on rectification of names in Chapter Twenty-Two, in our own modern manner of understanding. First, naming makes things to appear. I asked my boy of five, "Peter, bring me a watch on my desk.",

"OK, Dad...

. It's not there, Dad.",

"That's funny. I just put it on the desk. Go find it.", "OK, Dad... I cannot find it, Dad.", "That's funny." I went into the house with Peter. "Here it is, Peter!", "Oh, I didn't know that that was a watch." This incident shows two points: no name, "watch," no watch to be found, and

having the name, we are brought both to the thing and one to another. Name brings people and thing together (po ), and we call this bringingtogether "understanding"; name also brings people and people together, and we call this another bringing-together "mutual understanding," 1.e., communication. This is the first subjective implication of naming, of the rectification of names. Secondly, if we ask Hsün Tzu why this is the case he would answer that it is because name is our "replica" (Asiang^) of the Tao (way) ofthings. That name is our subjective replica of how things objectively are has two implications: subjectively, the replica is our common making, and so we can communicate one with another thereby; the replica is that of a thing, and so it objectively directs and maps our appropriate behavior in relation to the thing referred to. This is the second objective implication. Let us first consider the second objective implication. How does usual nouns that describe things carry normative significance? Names are nouns and words, words are forms of things, so as for us to (normative "to") con-form to the things through the words we use about them. Our behavior replicates the way of the thing with its "name" (noun). For instance, "This is a book" tells us that how we behave must conform to the way the "book"-thing exists; our behavior must be "book"-conformed. We must open it and read, but not wet it or throw it. ! Cf. Mencius, 1A7. ? Cf. Mencius, 188, 4B3. 3 Hsün Tzu, 22/41-42. * Hsün Tzu, 22/40.

36

PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

The baby tears the book because he does not have the word, "book," that

is, does not know what "book" means, any more than he fully understands what "mother" means as he hits and kicks his mother. Name thus carries a normative significance for our behavior. So much for the second objective implication. But where does the name or noun come from? This question brings us to the first subjective implication mentioned above. Names (and right and real ones, too) come into being by our having common sensory experiences that classify ("name") things that appear to be the same as "same," and those appearing to be different as "different." This is the bodily origin of words; demonstratives (my being here and now to experience things) originate nominatives and affirmatives (names, nouns, words, and concepts). Without such a "naming" nothing will appear to exist as such and such a thing; remember how unable Peter was to find a watch without the name "watch." Furthermore, our having common experiences requires convention and regulations to legislate "right names." Were Peter not to agree to use the name "watch" in the way I and others do, there would not be a watch for Peter. Convention is what people are used to, what people customarily use in calling things. Regulations come from two sources, tradition (convention stretched over time) and regulations (by authority, scholarly or political). "That lady" must be specifically "named"; is she my sister, my mother, my student, my daughter, or my wife? "That lady" must be definitely named according to convention and regulations, so as to shape my proper behavior thereto. These names cannot be confused without confounding social order and destroying orderliness of nature. And so, thirdly, "right names" are quite important, being the source of right behavior that contributes to the right order among things. "Names" and nouns (words) then must be "right-ed." Names cannot be privatized without confounding the order of things. Names then must be socially regulated by three channels: convention, tradition, and government. First, names must be used according to convention, for names are "real" (shih’), to the extent to which people agree to using them in certain ways and no other. Secondly, names must conform to the time-honored tradition wherein words are discriminated. Thirdly, । Hsün Tzu, 22/15-25. ? Hsün Tzu, 22/26-27.

1. CONCRETE NOTIONS

37

the government must come in to regulate how the words should be used, serving as the people's bureau of standards. To regulate the usage of words amounts to regulating people's behavior by laws and statutes, and enforce people's responsibility to fulfill their words. To privatize words and names amounts to a breakdown of communication, resulting in social disorder. All this comes down to becoming human as we are, through nominatives and affirmatives.

And, as Mencius said, "Jen-humaneness

is jen-humanness,"' humaneness ("Jen) is what being human (jen") is all about. This dynamic attainment of humaneness is what the name of humanity means; to affirm and mean a notion is to achieve it in life. (See Appendix 10.) In general, to understand an affirmative notion is to explore its meaning, as coherent as a picture, in order to affirm it in life. To af-firm a notion means to confirm and firm up its self-identity ("this" as "this," a as a) throughout life, "[letting the] father [be a] father, son, son, etc." The affirmative notion is a performative, accomplishing its meaning contents in life. And all these af-firmings (firmings-up) of one's identity are achieved only with the corroboration of others. I am myself only in my fatherliness which I achieve (per-form) only in my relation with my son(s) and in my sonship, with my father. This paternal-filial relationship is a basic one that extends to other four relationships, and a community is per-formed (formed forth by being performed), confirmed (confirmed together) that is, af-firmed (firmed up in affirmation). Affirmatives, by rightly (socially) describing things, regulate people's behavior. To rectify names (affirmatives) is to rectify the society. Thus in China, affirmation is to af-firm, a performance of confirming. But interpretations differ on the meaning of "con-firming." For Confucianism,

it

is

an

active

consolidation,

ethically,

socially,

politically, in conformity with defining standards of what the situation ought to be as obtained by honorable historical precedents (the "Three Dynasties"). The Taoists take con-firming to mean (not an active firming-up but) a con-forming salute, a nodding recognition, an admission, of things as they are. This admission amounts to a letting-be, an emptying of the | Mencius, 7B16. ? Analects

12:11.

38

PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

subject's prejudgment (pre-judice, ch'eng hsin'), a retreat of the subject's imposition ("How should I know2" Hence, a self-forgetful kenosis (hsü chi) in which things appear of themselves.’ To af-firm things is to con-firm them by con-forming to them, that is, by rooming and accommodating things as they are. Chapters Two, Three, and Four of the Chuang Tzu are particularly noteworthy in this existential sort of epistemology. In Taoism the Confucian rectification and verification* are replaced by the selfs simple spontaneity that con-firms things by blending with and within them unobtrusively.

Taoism affirmation is often expressed Confucianism), to which we now turn.

It is natural, then, that in

in negatives

(shared

also by

1.3. Negatives. Let us consider negatives in China. Friedrich Waismann, after the manner of Wittgenstein, sensitively enumerated experiential variations of connotations in a simple negation: graded “more or less," "not quite"; directional "not yet," "no longer"; hollow and empty phrases ringing false; "not only . . . but also . . ." against the completeness

of a statement;

weakened

negation

in "hardly";

or even

vagueness and indeterminate impressions in "roughly like that," and so on. These are all varied shades of experiential meaning of "negation." Chinese philosophy includes all of the above and more. Chinese negations affirm, even emphasize affirmation; Chinese argumentative thinking (especially Taoism) takes a full advantage of these positive connotations in negative proposition. In Chinese philosophy negative statements have at least four features:

First, negation indicates meticulous total coverage, such as careful maintenance of an engagement, as in "day [and] night without slackening" (ssu yeh fei hsieh) This phrase is so famous as to have | Chuang Tzu, 2/21.

? Chuang Tzzu, 2/64-65. 3 Chuang Tzu, 2/1-4, 4/32. * Cf. 1.1. above and 14.3.1. below. ? Friedrich Waismann, How / See Philosophy, ed., Harre, R., N. Y.: St. Martin's Press, 1968, 7882.

6Shih Ching 260/4, 261/1.

1. CONCRETE NOTIONS

39

been adopted in the national anthem of the Republic of China. Secondly, negation directs our attention to all areas other than the one negated. "Without worries" (wu lü), "without limit" (wu ch'iung, wu hsien), "regardless" (wu lun), etc., readily come to mind as having an affirmative expansive connotation. "Wu shang" or "wu fang" means "no harm" and so "quite all right." Similarly, "wu t'a (no other)" is "nothing else" and "wu ti (no enemy)" is "matchless.'? Thirdly,

because

of such

an affirmative thrust in negation,

double

negatives have an emphatic concentration of affirmation. "Wu pu" (nothing not) is "without exception." Confucius cited "people not know [you] and [you] not hurt"* (transcending what is denied) as a sign of a gentleman. Mencius used "pu... wei... +" as in "It is impossible for their prince not to be a true king," as a powerful conclusion after a long persuasive series of arguments from metaphor. In general, wei (not-yet) is an emphatic affirmation in the form of a negative, "never." Chuang Tzu's "wu fei" as in "what [I] see is nothing but (wu fei) oxen"’ is much stronger than "all oxen." The mindheart that (can) not bear to see others suffer (pu jen jen chih hsin), our empathetic intolerance at people suffering unjustly, is the heart of morality.* Finally, we see a subtle play on distinct nuances of negation in Chinese philosophical exposition. That famous "wu wei" (non-doing),

! Mencius 1A7, 7B19. ? Mencius 1A5, 2A5, 4A8, 7B3. The Analects 1/8, 4/14, 7/24, Chuang Tzu 5/26, 6/42.

10/5,

11/4,

12/7,

17/13, 20/3, Mencius

7A4;

Tao

Te Ching 3;

*The Analects, 1/1. This phrase is one of those that begin The Analects. > Mencius, 1A7; D. C. Lau's translation, M 23. for this construction 1A3, 1B4, 2A5, 6B4.

We are going to examine this argument soon.

Cf.

° See wei in Mathews’ Chinese-English Dictionary, Revised American Edition, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977, p. 1056. See wey in W. A. C. H. Dobson, A Dictionary of the Chinese Particles, The University of Toronto Press, 1976, pp. 776-79. See also the many occurrences of wei in Harvard-Yenching Sinological Index on Mencius.

1 Chuang Tzu, 3/5. ° Mencius 1 A7, 2A6, AA], 7831.

As we saw before, this phrase is a compression of the story of

our unbearably empathic alarm at seeing a baby about to crawl into a well.

40

PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

different from "pu wei" (not-doing), has enamored Confucius’ and Taoists? alike? "Forgetting" (wang)* and "losing" (sang) are Chuang Tzu's constant favorites. Similarly, "wu ch'ing" (feeling-less, beyond feeling)? is not unfeeling but imperturbableness; "wu yen" (wordless)’ is not blank silence but expression without word; "pu jen" (ruth-less) IS not "ruthless" but without sentimentality’; "wu chih" (i-gnorant, without knowledge)» is not stupidity but not cluttered with knowledge; "wu ya" (desire-less)u is not desiring nothing but unswayed by desires; "wu yung" (use-less)» is not "useless" but not obsessed with usefulness. One of the most complex and subtle Chinese (Taoist) notions is "wu chi" (self-less) that is not "no self." There is Chuang Tzu's “sang wo" (selflosing) (different from "sang chi" [losing oneself])^ and "wang chi,"" "wang shen,"5 "wang wo" (self-forgetting). In mind-fasting (Asin chai)" oneself away, in this active self-losing, the true self manifests ! The Analectes, 15/5.

? Tao Te Ching 2, 43, 48; Chuang Tzu 6/29, etc. 3 Roger T. Ames has a whole chapter Chinese Political Thought, Honolulu: philosophical exposition of wu and wu World Philosopher at Play, N. Y.: The Press, 1982, pp. 61-114.

on wu wei in his The Art of Rulership: A Study in Ancient The University of Hawaii Press, 1983, pp. 28-64. On a wei in Chuang Tzu, see Aria 1, Aria 2 in my Chuang Tzu: Crossroad Publishing Company and Chico, Calif.: Scholars

* Chuang Tzu, 2/92, etc.

` Ibid., 1/35, etc.

° Chuang Tzu, 5/55-59. 7 Chuang Tzu, 27/6. 5 Tao Te Ching 5. ? This point will be concretely described in connection with the other as my home, in Sections 6, 7.

Chuang Tzu, 4/32, 9/10. I! Tao Te Ching 3, 34, Chuang Tzu, 9/10, among others.

'2 Chuang Tzu 4/73; 9/2. 3 Tao Te Ching 3, 34, Chuang Tzu, 9/10, among others.

^ Chuang Tzu 4/73; 9/2.

1% One is reminded of Adam and Eve's shame-less (wu k'uei) innocence into Cain's shameless (wu ch'ih) fratricide (Genesis 4:9).

'© Chuang Tzu, 1/22. 17 Chuang Tzu, 2/3.

(Genesis

2:25) falling

1. CONCRETE NOTIONS

41

itself. This subtle negation is really a discernful description of affirmation in actuality. As pleasure is lost when consciously pursued (hedonistic paradox), so self-integrity is obtained only through selfforgetfulness, losing oneself in the enjoyment of something else. This is because pleasure is part of self-possession (tzu te}, a nod to oneself, a self-affirmation, self-satisfaction, and such a basic congeniality (literally, "self-fit," tzu shih)? and homecoming -to-oneself has a quality of self-oblivion to it. Self-possession obtains in self-forgetful oblivion; affirmation is a via negativa*. Thus negation is not pure negation, but a directive as to where not to go, an emphatic direction on how to think and behave. Negatives are a sort of directive for our life performance. All the above examples of Chinese concrete thinking come from our ordinary experience of the commonly human in our actual ongoing of daily living; Chinese logic is experiential understanding, concrete thinking.

! Chuang Tzu, 16/21. 2 Chuang Tzu, 12/45.

> Chuang Tzu, 14/10.

* Chuang Tzu, 4/26-28.

42

PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

2.

Concrete Argumentations. Let us go a step further and consider how such a concrete thinking proceeds, that is, how Chinese concrete thinking shuffles those notions to make a point, in short, how it argues. We have at least three modes of concrete argumentation: metaphorical, compact, and ironic. As the following explanation shows, the metaphoric is really an affirmation of "that" through "this," the compact is an unpacking of an affirmation, and the ironic is an elaboration of affirmation via negation. Chinese argumentation 1s then Chinese understanding at work in life. 2.1. Metaphorical. The first mode of concrete argumentation is the basic one, the metaphorical. This is the mode "we live by"! as we understand things and deal with them. To understand is to undergo the experiential process of knowing the unfamiliar "that" in terms of the familiar "this." To say "that" is already to point at "that" from this "here and now." All these are compact metaphors. And "here" and "now" are synonymous with "I." All these are demonstratives, because they can only be shown (demonstrated), not perceived. It is thus that metaphor extends from identified demonstratives to an identifying of objects. "Existence" is a metaphorical project making sense of percepts, going from the subject to the object. Demonstratives "metaphor" themselves to affirmatives of things and situations. Let us look into an important demonstrative, the "I," on how it

metaphors

itself to perception

and

objects.

Hume

conscientiously

observed and tabulated what he perceived, and obtained only "a bundle,"

an arbitrary series, of haphazard perceptions. But these perceptions cannot be perceptions without their perceiver. They are no perceptions until we answer the questions, "What is the one of whom these are perceptions? Who is the one to whom these perceptions belong as his or hers?" This "one" is termed the subject, without whom "perceptions" are not perceived, hence, no perceptions. Perception entails its perceiving subject. Furthermore, perceptions are those of an "object," to be sure. But how are these perceptions to be unified and organized into, say, the "soft green lawn" out there, of which these arè perceptions? Ultimately, this last question concerning the object is an extension, a metaphorical ' On self-losing see Index under "self," "loss of self" State University of New York Press, 1990.

in

my

Butterfly

as

Companion, Albany:

2. CONCRETE ARGUMENTATIONS

43

extension, of the previous two questions concerning the subject. As those perceptions are what I perceive, so the soft green lawn 15 what | perceive. As these perceptions gather and entail I, so I gather and organize (as Kant correctly pointed out) these perceptions into "that soft green lawn." This "as... so" is a metaphorical extension. Ian T. Ramsey from a slightly different perspective talked about rearranging a haphazard series of haphazard events into a circle, and then the circle disclosing its center to which all these circled eventpoints refer. The center is what all these circle-points point to and "entail," but characteristics

from the center one cannot deduce the concrete of the circle as to, say, how big the circle is. Then

Ramsey went on to see how many of our other assertions are similarly centered, assertions about an object to which these characteristics belong, assertions about God's existence disclosed via a certain arrangement of facts, called an "argument" or "proof," assertions about moral duty disclosed in a certain arrangement of facts in a story, as one told by Nathan to King David, etc.' In this context, to continue Ramsey's circle metaphor that he elaborated from C. D. Broad, we may say that "I" is a circle whose center is definite and everywhere, and whose circumference 15 indefinitely everywhere; an "object" is a circle whose center and circumference are definite and resides in the subject-circle, that 1s, depends on the subject. "Depends" here signifies a metaphorical extension from the subject "here-now" to "this object." Without the sense of the self, there would be no object, however keen one's perceptive capabilities are. Dr. Oliver Sacks told us of a Dr. P, a previously gifted painter and singer, who lost his sense of himself, thereby mistook his wife for a hat and was unable to identify a series of qualities as those of "a glove." Dr. P is a modern Hume who embodies a negative existential truth. First he was unable to form a "circle" out of percepts to evoke a realization of its center, the subject. Then, lacking the sense of the I, he graphically demonstrated that without the subject sensing, there exists no object to be sensed; percepts make no sense without myself the ! Jan T. Ramsey, Christian Empiricism, Grand Rapids, Mich.: 44. * Oliver Sacks, The Man

13-19.

Wm.

B. Eerdmans,

Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, N. Y.: Summit Books,

1974, pp. 41-

1970, etc., pp.

44

PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

sense-maker. Senses are senseless, a haphazard "bundle" of random percepts, until they are seen (sensed) to cohere themselves to make out a subject (sense-1), who then makes out what "it," the "object," 1s, another sense (sense-2) of the percepts sensed. Thus, as I sense myself to exist via percepts seen to cluster into myself, so I sense the object to exist via percepts seen to cluster into "it." No percepts sensed, no existence identified; without the sensing subject,

sensed via percepts to exist, there can be neither sensing subject nor sensed object. It is thus that metaphor extends from identified demonstratives to an identifying of objects. Existence is a metaphorical project making sense of percepts, going from the subject to the object. Demonstratives metaphor themselves to affirmatives. What is the metaphorical process? Peter Elbow's graphic description recurs:' "When you make a metaphor, you call something by a wrong name. . . . [You are] thinking of something in terms of something else. There is always a contradiction. . . . Don't make the mistake of thinking you are a 'literal-minded person' who doesn't make metaphors: such people don't exist. It is well demonstrated that everyone dreams, and dreams are nothing but metaphors . . . If you find it hard to use them, it merely means you are out of the habit of listening to them." Metaphor is a working out of our inherent ability to remember what has gone and to project what is yet to come; such projective capability makes us human. Our power to metaphor beyond the present-sensibly--frees us from the ever-fleeting moments of the now? to constitute our continuity, our identity as human that continues in history. And this capability to stretch and to connect with understanding is what makes up our thinking; the systematization and configuration of experiential givens is called "thinking." This capability to spread--to continue metaphorically to gather and web together--is also the root of universality in thinking. In China, universality, necessity, and concrete personal thinking

| Peter Elbow, Writing Without Teachers, London: Oxford 2

.

.

Animals are forever locked in the present.

University Press, 1973, pp. 53-54.

2.

are inter-involved.

CONCRETE ARGUMENTATIONS

45

For instance, Chu Hsi insisted that!

"Although things of the world are thousands in heads and myriads in threads, actually they argue for one single principle (tao li) that divides itself variously (/i i fen shu). As we go to the spot, things naturally resonate from top to bottom, the 'head' reverberates with the ‘tail.’ Sometimes it starts here and the outside responds, sometimes it comes in from outside and it feels in me. They are all matters of one principle." Everything "feels" (kan) with everything else. Resonance reciprocates back and forth between one's heart and events outside. That is how the li-principle pervades, reverberating between depths of the personal within and utmost horizons of the Heaven and Earth. And no man can anticipate, help, thwart, much less destroy, its pervasive workings, as those thousands of years of abuses were incapable of doing. This is not a Hegelian dialectic in history, a dialectical necessity of history of which Marx was so fond. Hegel's (and Marx's) Reason dialectically and inevitably grows through history; history is part of the cosmic Reason that develops necessarily, inexorably. Chu Hsi's liprinciple has no necessary development that dialectically pushes everything willy-nilly to the grand utopian Apex. There is instead a rhythmic involvement of everything with everything else in all their free interaction. Chu Hsi's li-principle is always perfect and thorough, penetrating interactions among things (as laws of nature); and It urges men through sages, Its human agents (not as laws of nature), to actively bring things into conformity with It, that is, to manage things in It, to embody Its Heart (of birthing) in their human hearts (to love men and benefit things) and in things (thriving together). Li is not just the principle of things or events but the principle of their free development, and at the same time, the principle that 15 itself their free development, the principle working itself out through free human interactions in the world. Thus the /i as cosmic principle is profoundly political and historical. History for Chu Hsi traces their free interactions, sometimes in line with /i, sometimes not, but always coaxed by pivotal individuals to regulate themselves in conformity with It. In Chu Hsi's view, we people originally did so but then later came to ! Chu Hsi, Lun Yu Huo Wen (Some-questions-on The Analects), chapter 15, p. 4b. myself in slightly free rendering, seeing that here the overall sentiment is important.

I indulged

46

PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

violate It.

This is why Chu Hsi called on his disciples to revert to the

Golden Past; hence reverence for tradition.'

Such historical reversion is

predicated upon /i as embracing free human interactions with things, and would have been impossible for Hegel. Chu Hsi's "call" itself is in line with /i's "heart" and is termed "education." Chu Hsi's education is then both metaphysical and historical. Is history brutally "factual"? Sartre said that any storytelling is telling a lie, because facts do not have a sensible sequence; facts have no

reason, no climax, no excitement, and afortiori no morals.

But man by

nature, he said, loves to tell stories? presumably

man

because

cannot

live without meaning, i.e., a sense of identity both of himself and of things. Any seeing of an object is a seeing-as (cf. Wittgenstein's "duckrabbit"), an interpretation, an experiential reconstruction, i.e. an arranging-forth of identities of the perceiving subject and the perceived objects. The same holds for the historian's insight that names a seemingly random series of bloody events as the "French Revolution" or "D-Day"; every historical "fact" is as much an interpretation as every "object" seen to exist out there. "Fact" is as much an experiential construct as any "object" is; without such experience-construction percepts are "senseless." But what is this "sense" that is "factual"? It is a story-sense, sense made out in storytelling. History is a story of facts. A story that is "historical" can be factual, and "factual" can be anecdotal, i.e., either a memorable story that is more likely true than not, or an unlikely story that had better be made true. They serve as an object lesson, a moral drawn from our observation of events and interpretation thereof from a particular perspective. ! Reverence for tradition (besides being reverence for business as well) is exemplified today in some watches made in Taiwan that are stamped with the trademark of "Rolex." They are as solid, punctual, and long-lasting as real Rolexes (only much less expensive and weighty); they deserve the name of "Rolex." They are in the tradition of commentaries on the Classics; commentaries are in the realm of "classical" excellence. ? Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, tr. Lloyd Alexander, N.Y.: New Directions, 1964, pp.56-59. 3 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr. G.E. M. Anscombe, N. Y.: The Macmillan Co., 1958, etc., pp. 193-204, etc. Cf. John Hick, "Religious Faith as Experiencing-As" in Talk of God, ed. Godfrey Vesey, London: Macmillan, 1969. * Cf. my History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991, Chapter Two, "History as Thinking," pp. 45-77, for further elaboration of this point.

2. CONCRETE ARGUMENTATIONS

47

An interpretation and a moral are always from a specific angle, the angle of a particular metaphysics. Chu Hsi is no exception. His metaphysics was as much his interpretive perspective on history, as history was the "factual" development, a story, of his lived metaphysics.

History is the anecdotal indices to the character of events. The historical indices are concrete universals that tellingly reflect reality; they are condensed general truths that direct our true living. He used history to exhort people, be they disciples or rulers. This is because history is the drama wrought out by factual inevitability and human freedom. | The mutual involvement of freedom and inevitability is an "historical necessity" that incessantly jolts us with freshness. This sort of actual-historical necessity! is beautifully exemplified in good music, where its ineluctable progression weaves out a tapestry of surprises. And the goodness of music lies in the legitimacy, that is, the convincingness, of its necessity as it is borne out by its resonance it calls forth in the performers and generations of its audience. It is thus that the musical order of harmonious progression charms and tunes us into ourselves, our innate integrities, in harmonizing interactions with things. This is why both the Greek and Chinese Classics have looked to music for cultivation of good personality and good governance. Conspicuously, the universal cosmic /i-principle is graphically personal, in contrast to the impersonal metaphysical systems of Aristotle, Leibniz, Spinoza, and so on. Chu Hsi's /i-metaphysics decisively and crucially involves human participations. This personal involvement in the necessity of cosmic principle is quite remarkable, peculiar to Chinese thinking. The universality, and its applicability, of li-principle is profoundly personal and (derivatively) social. It is not the law of metaphysical necessity that determines everything human and nonhuman. It is the vitality of everything, especially of human lives, that is part and parcel of the metaphysical principle of the cosmos. Since the human vitality survives within this vitalism of /i, to follow li is to thrive; to pervert it is to perish. Let us take this interaction first on a time scale, then spatially. We grow by repeating the daily routines of sleeping, of heart-beating, of eating, of walking, etc.

Every time we rehearse the old, we come alive

anew. To warm up the old repeatedly is to know (assimilate) the new, as Confucius said. If to be alive means to renew itself daily, then to live is ! Cf. ibid., pp. 52-60. 2 Analects, 2/11.

48

PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

to live up repeatedly to the old (best). Both children who have no past and music which lives in the present compose themselves in the rhythm of repetition, which 1s by definition that of the past, to live forward to the future. And this 1s also the essence of education, whereby we grow into ourselves. For to be alive is to come alive by absorbing the past best, by a repeated lived embodiment thereof. And education is precisely an absorption ("learning") of what is there (the past best) so as to draw forth ("grow in") one's integrity. How? By creative repetition. Repetition often comes in ingestion, inversion, and evolvement,

as Rachmaninoff and others did (called "variations") on Paganini's Caprices. This is how repetition in life spreads via resonances of different sizes and sorts, bringing forth unique distinct integrities in its path. And within such repetition-in-innovation is the eternal joy of indwelling, a living now; as Confucius exclaimed'. "To-learn and fromtime-to-time repeat it; [1s it] not rather delightful?" This rhythmic repetition is the way "presence" and "eternity" emerge in time that is always in transition. And this is what it means to be alive, the unity of being in presence now, on one hand, and repeatedly harking back to the old best, on the other. This is how the universality of the living law of nature obtains, i.e., how the law of life spreads universally and necessarily. It is by repeating the old to renew itself, by education that is repeated ingestion (of others and the past) to grow (into oneself). This is the rhythm of development of life. And the process of such inter-involvements weaves out history. And so history is our object lesson of free interactive li-development. Learning history calls the ruler to come to himself, return thereto, to govern the world well. For the historical law of rhythmic development Is "Things 'extremed' must return" (wu chi pi fan) that can be directed by human agents into harmonious conformity with /i-principle. This is why what necessarily 15, metaphysically, in free rhythmic interactions, is also what ought to be morally and sociopolitically. Here natural necessity, natural law, is moral imperative; here the physical law of nature is the moral law of human nature. For (we now go into everything interacting spatially) everything is "one body" (i t'i) in /i-principle; those who go with it succeed, those

' Analects, 1/1. This simple moving passage will be appreciated soon.

2. CONCRETE ARGUMENTATIONS

49

who go against it reap defeat. What does it mean to go with it? Well, what is at the heart of this /i-principle? Its "heart" is like the human heart: "Heaven, earth, take giving-birth-to things as their heart. This heart of Heaven-earth was obtained by every man as [his] heart at birth. The-virtue[-power] of [this] heart penetrates through everything,

[and

is] perfect,

and

can

be

covered

in a word,

humanness. ... What [sort of] 'heart' is it? Within Heaven, earth, it pervasively gives-birth-to things; among men it warmly loves people [and] benefits things, wrapping Four Virtues, penetrating [Mencius'] Four [moral] Buddings." Thus those rulers who embody this cosmic heart to "warmly love people and benefit things" thrive with people and things that thrive thereby; those who act exclusively for themselves court damage to themselves with their people who are damaged thereby. All this happens because the /i-principle is one "heart" throbbing penetratingly through everything in the Heaven and earth. This amounts to a cosmic justification of morality. Or rather, the cosmic /i-principle is none other than the moral imperative, the enabling ennobling standard of integrity that runs through everything, spreading from the inner heart of an individual to pervade the entire universe. Thanks to this principle, we judge and come to know (during or after an event) whether an event is "unprincipled" (wu li) and ought to have it rectified or have its agent removed, or not. The pervasion of /i-principle has its law. We usually say it is the law of causality;

Chu

Hsi said it is the law of throbbing rhythm,

turning to and returning from extremes, swinging from one pole of extreme to another; "things 'extremed' must return" (wu chi pi fan). The agent of such a cosmic rhythmic change is not the masses or natural events but the pivotal (often charismatic) individual, the ruler. It is one who paradigmatically initiates either a pervasion of /i-principle in sagely rule, or its perversion by dictatorial rule, using small men to administer

the policies stemmed from royal selfishness.

! Chu Hsi, Chu Tzu Yu Lei (Classified Sayings of Chu Hsi), 3243.

Vol. 35, p. 3231, and Vol.

^ Chu Tzu Wen Chi (Collected Works of Chu Hsi), Vol. 36, p. 2306.

136, p.

50

PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

Chu Hsi seems to say, following Mencius’, that the heavenly /iprinciple raises (through the cosmic law of rhythmic returns) the crucial pivotal Reformer-Sages at the right moments when things get really "bad," unprincipled. Thus the rectification of unprincipled matters is not performed by the masses, much less by the inexorable dialectic of Nature, but freely initiated by the paradigmatic individual (sages, kings) and spread socially, institutionally, laboriously, to the people. This

is how

we

men follow,

that is, conform

to and thereby

shape, the normative trend of Nature, the heavenly /i-principle.

Martial

art, for instance, is a human somatic knife that either kills or invigorates,

both of which conform to laws of physical nature, but only invigoration fulfills the "true intention" (the "heart") of the law of Nature, the heavenly principle (t'ien li), in Chinese thinking. To say above, however, may raise some logical eyebrows. According to our common sense, universality is of three kinds: universality, of a contingent sort, universality, of a necessary sort, and universality, of an inductive sort. Universality, comes about when our understanding of a specific situation is extended to understand another situation, then another, then another, and so on, indefinitely, until the

entire universe, Heaven and earth, is covered. Universality, 15 produced when pure logical calculus imposes itself everywhere irrespective of circumstances. Universality, tries to mix or bridge the two. In reaction, three points can be raised. First, the complexity of their relations owes much to the sharp distinction, to the point of separation, between the body and the mind, when body-mind is what we are. We usually attribute the separation to Descartes, but its root goes back to Plato's dissection of reality into the really real Idea or Form on the one hand, and the fleeting opinions and formless matter on the other. The whole issue of separation must now be examined anew. Secondly, to oppose tripartite separation does not entail opposing threefold distinction. The above classification of universality may well be valid, but should be taken as classification within a common

frame

and context of the thinker-in-a-situation,

in short, the

bodily self. This bodily self 15 both the Archimedean fulcrum and its lever of thinking. Our thinking is based on our bodily self; our thinking is operated by our bodily self. This 15 the basic, prior, and primitive matrix out of which the threefold dissection above emerges. The body must then be defined anew, as much more than just an empirical | Mencius, 7B38.

2. CONCRETE

ARGUMENTATIONS

51

contingent entity. To think of body as purely contingent is to put the cart before the horse, nipping in the bud the discussion about the body. Finally, on this base of the bodily self, these three sorts of universality can be seen to form a continuum, mutually distinct yet continuous,

much

as our life is divisible

into, yet continuous

among,

childhood, adulthood, and senescence. Perhaps a redefined universality, leads to a redefined universality,, which then culminates in a redefined universality,; they together compose an organic, integral, and concrete universality. Mencius pointedly said,’ "Words close-by and pointing-at afar are good words. Holdingto the-essential and giving wide [application] is a good Way. . . . Gentlemen's holding [lies in] cultivating his self and [all] under Heaven [becomes] peaceful."

In any case, concrete universals are as metaphorical as Chinese argumentation. Concrete universals will be treated later’. Here we are concerned with argument by metaphor. Mencius stands out in Chinese intellectual history primarily because he concretely argued with heartfelt metaphors. Three examples suffice. The first 1s 1A7 where he noticed that his discussant, King Hsüan of Ch'i, unable to bear the frightened jitters of an ox being led to consecrate a new bell with its blood, spontaneously ordered to release it in place of a small animal; Mencius termed it the "policy of human[e]ness.". Then Mencius urged the king to "bring such a heartmind and add it on to others . . . to push such behavior" by "age-ing our [own] aged [folks], then extend to others' aged [folks]." To "extend" and to "push" whatever self-feeling we have in our spontaneous nature, this extension and this push is "argument" by metaphor; and such a metaphorical thinking is forever dipped in the situation, from the spontaneous reaction, the push, to the resulting benevolent government. The second example is 2A6 where Mencius reminded us of our-whoever we are--instantaneous jitters on seeing a baby about to crawl Mencius, 7B32. ? In Sections 4., 12.1., and 14.1.

52

PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

into a well. This sense of alarm, however short-lived, is completely uncalculated, completely independent of social consideration; we cannot help it. Without this sense of alarm, this unbearable feeling on seeing others suffer, we are not human. To know it and expand it to the full in our lives, as the fire let go, as the spring let loose, results in keeping no less than every territory within Four Seas; not to fill our lives with this sense of not-bearing-others-suffer deprives us of our ability to provide even for our own parents. Again, the clinching urgency of the argument comes from the vivid inescapability of the concrete metaphorical pushing of our spontaneous experience. The final example is 6A8. The bald Ox Mount was originally lush with beautiful trees. Trees being continually axed and seedlings daily grazed, no amount of night rest and morning mist could restore its original beauty. Is human nature any different? Nourish it and it stays; continually "axing it" with violence and immorality, it disappears. Here vast ecological Nature is tightly coupled with human ethical behavior. Human ethics is as ecological as ecology is profoundly ethical. Our survival, whether individual, communal,

or cosmic-natural, depends on

this inter-involvement of our nature and the Nature in which we move and live. Here the ethico-ecological punch of concrete argument by metaphor is unmistakable. Mencius is an expert in metaphorical argumentation, deep, fresh, and surprising; so also is Hsün Tzu, conspicuous, extensive, and systematic. The book of Hsün Tzu deepens and pragmatically anchors the Confucian morality. Sentences are crisply parallel, constituting wave after wave of repetitive concretes; the entire book makes an elegant and powerful reading. Hsün Tzu argues in what I would call a logic of metaphorical definitions. Anytime a series of definitions begins to appear, there emerges a new section packed with examples and metaphors,

concluding

with

quotations

from

classics,

well-known

sayings in the tradition or those among scholars. Hsün Tzu's metaphorical logic of systematic definitions goes as follows. A surprising, fresh and convincing series of definitions evokes our attention; these affirmative definitions are hierarchically arranged to promise further implications. They are often three in a group, such as "scholar (shih), gentleman (chün tzu), sage (sheng jen),"' or "the way of the strong (ch'iang tao), the way of the despot (pa tao), the way of the

। Hsun Tzu, 2/35-end, etc.

2. CONCRETE ARGUMENTATIONS

53

sovereign (wang tao)."' Then an elaboration of each category follows, peppered with apposite metaphors as support, all concrete, penetrating. These elaborations can go very long, often comprising major portions of the chapter. Finally the entire explication is wrapped up in a quotation from the Classics, an apothegm in the tradition (chuan) or a saying circulating among scholars (hsiieh); these sayings are often further metaphors. It is thus that Hsiin Tzu argued metaphorically; metaphors organically constitute his book, the Collected Works of Hsiin Tzu. Here metaphors make points; metaphors systematically advance and clinch arguments.

In short, this is to say that thinking is basically metaphorical. Metaphor is the ferry that carries us from the shore of the known to that of the unknown, turning the strange unknown into the new known. At the same time, the reverse process takes place. The new known changes and enriches the old known, which now sparkles with new depths and implications. To understand a concrete situation is to metaphorically undergo such an experiential shuttle between two meaning shores, turning the novel into the new familiar, which in turn makes the familiar sparkle with new significance. Metaphor 15 this two-way traffic, back and forth; this two-wayness, what Chuang Tzu called "double walk (liang hsing),"? differs from analogy which is a one-way going. This is what makes metaphor alive. To stem this dynamic tide of metaphoric ebb and flow is to deaden oneself in literalism. Perhaps this is what Peter Elbow meant by "cooking-- . . . words and ideas interacting into a higher, more organized state."* The result 15 that we ourselves come to partake of the subtle web and texture of reality. And we must note that such a metaphorical process of understanding never leaves the situation; such an understanding consists in probing deep into the inter-texture of concrete reality and bringing it out into our expressive text. And mind you: this operation of metaphorical cooking (our understanding) changes the situation; after all, what cooking does not change its ingredients into a new whole? ! Hsun Tzu, 9/25-63,

etc.

* This is not to say that all thinking is concrete, but to say, instead, that even theoretical thinking is developed out of concrete thinking. 3 Chuang Tzu, 2/40. 4 Op. cit., p. 67.

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PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

There emerges a new intelligible world. So much for an explication of the first mode of concrete thinking, argument by metaphor. 2.2. Compact. The second mode of concrete argumentation is the compact one. This is one of the modes in which thinking by metaphor is expressed. What is said, ostensibly as description, is packed with a tight hierarchy of situational implications, layer by layer, forming an organic integrity in pithy (concrescent) statements. We must first (a) unpack these situational implications one by one, and then (b) discern their reciprocal systematic unity. This is an explication (unfolding, unpacking) of the affirmative concrete notions and statements. Confucius, among othets, was an expert in this compact mode of concrete argumentation. Confucian apothegms share three renowned features, compactness, simplicity, and elegance, with Einstein's gravitational field equations.' They differ in approach. Einstein attained compact elegance by the top-down route, from formal computation to experience; Confucius reached compact elegance within our daily experience, starting here, staying here. Failure to appreciate Confucius's experiential compactness reduces our impression of him to a pedantic spouter of platitudes. Confucius was anything but a theoretical idler; his polythetic multiplemeanings naturally welled up in his conversations. They are constant parts of our spontaneous everyday lives to which Confucius was forever sensitive. Confucius' Analects consists in compact stories defining human(e)ness (jen), government (cheng), learning (hsüeh), filiality (hsiao), etc? Two examples can be given. The first one begins the entire Analects, 1:1. An almost literal translation is given here to convey its poetic parsimony, cadence, and ' And our eventual ideal of physics is to unify the relativity theory with quantum theory into one compact vision of nature. Cf. Superstings: A Theory of Everything?, eds. P.C.W. Davies and J. Brown, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 7-8. This whole book is a terse statement of the typical Western ideal of knowledge in one of its most modern forms, "Superstring Theory." ^ Nor is Confucius's approach the bottom-up route of Western sciences; they systematize laboratory raw data into regularities, refine regularities into postulates, then general laws, and then gradually formulate a theory with predictive power beyond immediate laboratory experiments. (ibid., pp. 7-8) Scientific theory is a formal system empty of concrete contents; Confucius's sayings are reflections of experience, not its empty form. 3 Going over just Chapters One through Four of the Analects, I found the stories of Jen in 1/2, 3; 3/3, 4/1-7; Cheng in 1/5, 9; 2/1, 3, 19-21; 3/13; Hsueh in 1/6, 7, 14; 2/9, 11, 15-18; 4/17; and Hsiao in 1/11, 2/5-8, 4/18-21.

2. CONCRETE ARGUMENTATIONS

55

urgency. "O, learning and often practicing it, [is it] not rather pleasant? O, having alumni-friends from afar come, [is it] not rather happy? O, not known [by] people and not hurt, [is it] not rather princely man[like]?" Without circumstantial considerations these three questions sound pale and trite; "What else is new?," we would think.

On a closer look we

These are, first of all, questions with sighs.

Questions welled up

detect at least five implications, each inter-involved with the other.

from inside, and repeated similarly, rhetorically, express a life urgency for communication. Confucius the educator in China drew-out people by conversationally inciting their deep thinking, deeply echoing their own situation. His is existential education in dialogical provocation. Secondly, Socrates the gadfly also did dialogical provocation. But Confucius was a tragic hero throughout his life. He could no longer stand the widespread atrocities of his days and frequent slightings of the royal tradition. He shouted for reforms in court, and rulers turned their deaf ears to him. Hence his urgency in question form, "Is it not rather . . ον O!" His meditative searching questions, firing a burning idealism, spread to young people--a spontaneous education. Furthermore, this series of rhetorical questions exhibit a crescendo of fulfillments--of oneself, of social ‘solidarity in character-formation, of being unsulliedly at home in one's cosmic destiny. Besides,

this

crescendo

of fulfillments

show

what

his

character-

education consists in, stages of the growth of a person. And each stage is nothing but joy and pleasure, deeply mutually echoing. For Socrates, an unexamined life 13 not worth living; for Confucius, nothing deserves supreme joy than the growth of oneself. And, finally, this joy of becoming oneself finds its ultimate home in one's cosmic destiny, which can only be expressed negatively, in a rhetorical question, "not known and not hurt, is it rather princely-manlike?" In fact, all these passional ideals of joys are expressed (not asserted) in great yearning in negative rhetorical questions.? The above

' This is the Original particle, hu.

word

order,

always

ending

in that memorable

exclamative-interrogative

2 Someone may ask for the ground on which my interpretation is based. I can cite the broad Chinese sentiment, undercurrent, and tradition of sympathetic self-cosmic unity, explicated in the

56

PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

five situational implications implicate one another, interlocked seamlessly in three simple rhetorical questions, with sighs, without fanfare. A great passional parsimony indeed. Another example is 1:15. "Tzu-kung said, 'Poor and no fawning, rich and no boasting-what about [it]?! The-Master said, '[It] will-do. [It is] not-yet like those poor and happy, rich and fond-of /i-decorum.' Tzukung said, 'Odes has-it-saying,

"As cut, as filed, as ground, as

polished." Is this referring-to such?' The-Master said, 'O, Tz'u! With [you, I] can begin-to talk [about] odes now. [I] tell youabout what-is-gone and [you] know what comes."

This seemingly unpretentious conversation is packed with a fourfold inter-involvement of character-education in joy. First, we see that character-education takes place in conversation. Tzu-kung the student initiated by asking, wherein he was taught. And in the conversation each party both proposes and accepts, both at once. The series of give-and-take statements concerns how people, poor or rich, should live, feel, and behave. The first proposal by Tzu-kung, though couched in negatives, 1s already a rare ideal of being human, "poor without cadging; rich without swagger." Confucius accepts it ("It will do."), then returns with a positive ideal, "poor and happy; rich and fond-of li-decorum." Accepting this, Tzu-kung responds with a quotation from the Odes, which pleases Confucius so immensely as to promise a further conversation ("Now we can begin to talk together about odes."). These three stages of progress in the insights of the ideal of being human, in riches or in poverty, culminate in the joy of reciting the Odes. This 15 the joy of becoming human (Jen) in all circumstances. Thirdly, what is amazing about the conversation here is that this becoming-human takes place in the very conversation about it--"O, Tz'u! Now we can begin to talk together about the odes. You have progressed Five Classics, the Four Books, and later variously developed among the Neo-Confucians such as Chu Hsi, Wang Yang-ming, Lu Hsiang-shan, etc. ! This is Arthur Waley's translation in his 1938, p.87.

The

Analects

of Confucius, N. Y.: Vintage Books,

2. CONCRETE ARGUMENTATIONS

57

to the stage where you can see what is coming when told what is the case." Finally, let us take stock. In this pedagogic conversation, there are two parallel series of progressing discussions about human excellence. The first series of conversations are about what are the best poor and the best rich: from a negative prudential maxim, through a positive spontaneous joy, to a crowning beauty of the Odes that chants and enjoys this joy. Then, accompanying this series is the second one, showing how the student actually grows: from a sincere negative proposal, through a turn-around for the positive--joy and respect, to a novel application of the beloved Odes to all this. And these two series involve each other, converging to and constituting Joy. This is the becoming-human which 15 a fourfold unity: joy, beauty, effort, and Nature. The unity is the "joy" (in Confucius' saying, in Tzukung's implied joy of proposing and counter-proposing, and in Confucius's expression of joyously approving of such a keen insight) of the beauty (Odes, the entire conversation) in human efforts (exhibited in their pedagogical conversation) of carving, filing, grinding, polishing, the precious stone (implied in the Odes quoted), that is, Nature that includes our human nature. Here is character-education at its best. Thus what is said here, ostensibly as simple description, is packed with a tight hierarchy of situational implications, layer by layer, forming an organic integrity in pithy (concrescent) statements. We must first unpack these situational implications one by one, then discern their reciprocal systematic unity. This is an explication (unfolding, unpacking) of the affirmative concrete notions coming together as a description. This is the compact mode of concrete thinking by metaphor. There is a simple conversation (the what) and life growth (the how) in one; the one involves and constitutes the other.

This mutual constitution

of elements, that is, constitutive implications, is what might be called logico-concrete "necessity" in Chinese concrete argumentation. Everything concrete is necessarily related to every other concrete thing. Now, Chuang Tzu has a paradoxical twist in his compact presentation; as a result our unpacking goes in all directions like a flood. We have, in explaining the two-way process of "metaphor," turning the novel into the new familiar, which in turn makes the old familiar sparkle with new significance, unpacked one possible meaning of that enigmatic phrase of Chuang Tzu's, "double-walk" (how could one walk two roads in a walk?). Another direction in which the phrase can

58

PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

be unpacked has been tried elsewhere.! And just take the opening sentence of the Book of Chuang Tzu: "In the Northern Darkness there exists a fish called K'un-the-roe. It is so huge that no one knows how many thousand miles it is." What's so extraordinary if in the northern dark waters there is a fish? What does it mean to have a fish so big ("No one knows how many thousand miles it is") and so small (fish roe) at once, as the name "K'un" itself indicates? But as one ponders on it one sees many a layer of lively implications. This is because as we unpack Chuang Tzu's mini-story or his compact phrase, we notice elements which are mutually opposed. To go into why mutual opposition breeds numerous implications is to go into the ironic mode. In Taoism the compact mode of argumentation tends to collapse into the ironic mode. In any case, the compact mode of concrete argumentation is a positive metaphoric reinforcement among layers, one on the other. 2.3. Ironic. The final mode of concrete argumentation is a negative mutual reinforcement among layers of situational-contextual implications. This is the ironic mode of concrete thinking by metaphor, an extension of "negative affirmation," as it were, of concrete notions. This section has four sub-sections: (2.3.1.) what ironic argumentation is; (2.3.2.0 how it works; (2.3.3.) the natural as ironic; (2.3.4.) the I as ironic. 2.3.1. What irony is^ We saw Chinese affirmation as an active af-firming of contrary elements in reality, and Chinese negation as an active affirmation with pervasive emphasis. It is a matter of course, then, that affirmation and negation should come together to become two correlative and contrary aspects of one concrete thinking about actuality* that is a unity in opposition. To proceed in such a thinking is the ironic mode of thinking. What is there in this contradiction turned contrast? "A is not ! Cf. my Chuang Tzu: World Philosopher at Play, N. Y.: Crossroad Publishing Co. and Scholars Press, 1982, pp. 73-74. ? | have tried my hermeneutical hand on it in my The 86, 95, 96-97, 181.

Butterfly as Companion, pp. 56-57, 69-71,

3 Cf. below, 9.2.5. * The famous Yin-Yang unity is too well-known to require comments. For further elucidation of this actual unity of opposites see my "Chinese Aesthetics" in Robert E. Allinson, ed., Understanding the Chinese Mind: The Philosophical Roots, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 236-64, especially, 238-39.

2. CONCRETE ARGUMENTATIONS

59

not-A" establishes A. This sentence has three meanings: First, the existence of A is due to its contrast with its negation (not-A). Affirmation exists by virtue of Negation. Everything stands out existing--"lives"--on its contrast. Contrast brings forth and solidifies existence. Secondly, if A is true, then not-A is false. The Affirmation of the truth (or validity) of A depends on its active Negation of not-A's being true; the possibility of not-A being true, to be negated by A's truth, amounts to A's falsifiability.

Therefore, the truth-or-falsehood, that 1s,

meaningfulness, of A lies in its falsifiability. Thirdly, to have A (as true, meaningful) implies negating not-A. A's being A obtains by contrasting itself with not-A being not-A. A's being A requires, then, not-A's being not-A. A and not-A are therefore co-incident, co-happening. Such co-happening of contraries among all things 1s the cosmic Irony (tiao kueiy. This 15 the root of the Yin-Yang theory, saying both that Yin is implied in--dependent on--Yang, and that both are opposed to each other. This is Chuang Tzu's theory of cobirthing (fang sheng chih shuo, 2/28). In other words, everything is the same in that everything depends for its existence on mutual contrast and difference, for to say all the above applies to A as well as to not-A. To say something is to point at it. Therefore "Heaven and earth are one pointer" (2/33)--this somatic self "pointing" to everything as A, as not-A, enabling A to point to notA, and not-A to A. This pointing is, to change metaphor, the socket into which everything fits and turns (2/30-31). From this perspective we understand that "Heaven, earth, with I-myself are born together, and myriad things with I-myself make one" (2/52-53). All this activity evens out things and theories, hence the enigmatic title of the famous Second Chapter of the Chuang Tzu, ch'i wu lum. This cosmic oneness is oneness in Irony. What 15 to be noted is that this ironic oneness of the concrete world is ineffable. This ineffability is itself ironic. How so? Ludwig Wittgenstein cited several items that lie "outside the world" and cannot be said.’ They are: the sense of the world, value, the Chuang Tzu, 2/84. ? Op this fascinating enigmatic title, see my Butterfly, p. 472 (in the Index) pages where the title is discussed. ) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trs., London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961, pp. 144-51.

D. F.

which shows various

Pears and B. F. McGuinness,

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PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

whole sphere of what happens and 15 the case, ethics, aesthetics, will, change, death, solution to riddle, riddle, that the world exists, the world as a limited whole, doubt, life as a problem, things and their

manifestations.

To cite such items lying outside the world immediately

generates a series of /evels for us to climb out of, and into, the world.

Let us enumerate them, and we will see how they constitute an ironic unity of the actuality of nature.. Level 1: (a) We can only say what/how whatever is 15 what it 1s and as it is. (b) Anything beyond (a) is meaningless. Level 2: Now: to say (a) and (b) is to say something metaphysical, and to say (a) is to reach (b) that is unsayable. But to say things metaphysical as (a) and (b) belongs to the realm of the unsayable, the realm between (a) and (b), and the between is also (b). But we have just said it anyway. Level 3: For what purpose? We say the unsayable--Levels 1, 2-in order not to be understood (since it 13 meaningless) but to be used as steps "to climb up beyond them." They are steps of the "ladder" to be "throw[n] away" after we have "climb[ed] up." But climb up to where? We climb up out of (a) into (b), so as to enter (a) afresh, 1.e., to gain "the sense of life" (Tractatus, 6.521) that cannot be said. We have thus just completed our tour of the ironic unity of actuality, the world. Let us put all this another way, this time performatively. To draw a line is to manifest a thing--making sense out of it--by distinguishing its inside from its outside, thereby connecting (contrasting) the two. To say so is to draw a line and to ferry us outside. Since one can draw such a line only from outside, which is unspeakable, to say so is not to say but to act, not to describe but silently to ferry. Metaphor ferries us out of our familiar realm to the other shore of meaning.

To say so, then, is silently to metaphor.

One who draws

such a line to draw us out is one who is out when we are in. Having silently made sense of life, the outside, the Outside One says all this, without saying, to metaphor us out. The Outside One is the FirstAwakened awakening us, beckoning us out, with words of no words. And such 1s what Taoism does, saying without saying.' Lao Tzu began his pungent Tao Te Ching by saying (he tao-ed), "The Tao taoi Wittgenstein innocently consciously stayed in it.

did this irony-work,

and

left

it

at that.

The

Taoists

did

it, and

2. CONCRETE ARGUMENTATIONS

61

able is not the constant Tao." By admission of the saying (tao-ing) itself, this saying is "not the constant Tao," then. Then why say it? Lao Tzu did say it out, did produce the not-Tao, thereby bore forth, by contrast, what is Un-tao-able (the ineffable Tao), which is not said at all. Yet, thus, what is inexpressible is then expressed after all. How? By calling attention to the saying's character of being not-tao, these no-tao's non-expressed the inexpressible. All Lao Tzu's 5,000 odd characters are these no-tao's, and so are

all Chuang Tzu's, those 33 extant chapters in all! All between the "Heaven and earth are one finger," says Chuang Tzu, pointing to Something unsayable. For "The Great Tao cannot be called [so]"; even "tao" is a sobriquet, the way-things-go which alludes to that from which the way proceeds. And all other Chinese thinkers (historians, poets, "philosophers") followed suit. They "lifted one corner [of a square-ofthings, for us] to return (fan) to the other three"; they talked and wrote by metaphoric implication, not by exhaustive explication. Why the way of implication, implicit logic, indirection? The structure of a living thing, the pattern of life activities, is the bones that betray their presences only within the activities themselves. When the bone appears, it must be medically put back in. Philosophy is a Socratic therapy, and body thinking is such a medical practice to put the bones back to where they belong, inside concrete actuality. What 15 said is manifest only as a pointer to what is there, unsayable. That is the structure of the concrete, a concrescence of metaphor into irony. The "hiddenness" of the structure of the concrete can be pointed to through the hiddenness of the body in thinking. And it is this hiddenness that constitutes irony. The structure of irony is "a constitutive of not-a, and vice versa." This performance constitutes metaphor as a kind of two-way traffic. How so? We remember that metaphor is said to be a verb, a two-way traffic ferrying us from the familiar to the not-familiar, which is turned into the new familiar, and then ferrying us back to the familiar,

making the old sparkle with a new significance.

In irony, the two lanes

! See 14.4.4. below for another implication of this ironic way of thinking.

* Chuang Tzu, 2/33. ) Chuang Tzu, 2/59. ^ The Analects, 7/8.

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PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

of traffic are somehow mutually negating and mutually constituting. And there is no way of predetermining this "somehow," which changes its mode with the change of the situation. This is that famous root reality-paradigm, the Yin and the Yang, at work in our expression and our thinking, reflecting the concrete situation. And so, ironic thinking goes by claiming a to be supported by (implicitly or explicitly) not-a, so much so that a 1s constituted by not-a and vice versa. By mutual constitution we mean that a is a component of, dependent on, and illuminated by not-a, and so is not-a in relation to a. There is in irony a built-in self-involved inconsistency. This leads to our second sub-section. 2.3.2. Modus operandi of irony. How does irony work? An ironic statement means not what it explicitly says. One can say something patently false and make us laugh and nod. And one can also say something that includes its own denial. The Taoist writers (Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu) are experts at both ploys. We see at least three ways in which all this operates. First, one can say something false. Chuang Tzu says, "Thesages decease not, the-great robbers cease not." This saying contradicts our common sense; we would have thought that the sage stops robbery. But this affront to our common sense jolts us into thinking on our own. Perhaps robbery is a spontaneous protest against maiming of spontaneity by morality, whose embodiment the sage is. And maiming spontaneity contradicts the very purpose of morality, the growth of autonomous spontaneity. In fact, Chuang Tzu begins his book with "In Northern Dark [waters] there exists a fish called K'un the Roe-Whale [the smallestbiggest].". How can anyone know anything exists in total darkness? How can a fish be both the smallest roe and the biggest whale? But reading such a fantasy calms our daily hustle and bustle. We are somehow put at ease, and leisurely probe into its implications. Perhaps to be big is after all to know that one is small; perhaps only in darkness (of personal indwelling?) can one feel someone's presence. Secondly, one can say something self-effacing, an oxymoron, such as "nothing (wu), "no[n]-doing (wu wei)," "losing oneself (sang 112)

t"

! Chuang Tzu, 10/16. ? Cf. Chuang Tzu, 6/46, among referent is--it means--a nothing.

others.

The word

is something and means

something;

yet its

2. CONCRETE ARGUMENTATIONS

63

wo)," or "the-great Jen (human[e]ness) [is] not jen,"* "doing with others without doing with them."* They all share one characteristic--"a of nota." (See Appendix 11.) We can go beyond--negate--the usual a, and find the true a. Reverse our perspective, see the other side, negate what you negate, then you become flexible, cautious, and alive, come what may. And so on. Finally, often the situational matrix of the saying can negate the saying itself. The very saying (some "being") of "non-being" (wu), the Socratic knowledge of "non-knowing" (wu chih) as well as the conscious mentioning of being "natural, spontaneous" (tzu-jan) which is non-self-conscious, abound in the Taoists's writings and the artists’ works. Here are four examples, 2.3.2.1. through 2.3.2.4. 2.3.2.1. Let us look into the two sentences at the beginning of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching. The first is intensely parsimonious, saying, "Tao can tao, not always Tao," that is, "The Tao [way] tao-able 1s not the

Always-Tao." This is to say that the Tao that is identified as Tao, whether by naming it as such, or by telling us about it, for instance, misses the real Tao that always exists. To say so, however, offends us on two fronts.

First, it is usually

the case that identifying something as something brings out that thing; a little boy, Peter, said that the watch he was supposed to bring to his dad was not on the desk, until he was pointed to "that thing" as the "watch." But Lao Tzu tells us that to point to and tell of the Tao is to lose it. Perhaps it is because the Tao is the way things go spontaneously, and spontaneity evaporates as soon as it is pointed out.’ Secondly, if what ! Cf. Chuang Tzu, 11/54, among others. 2 Chuang Tzu, 2/3. 3 Chuang Tzu, 2/59.

* Chuang Tzu, 6/61. > S. Kierkegaard told us of a sandwich man carrying boards, saying, "I am normal." Normalcy is evaporated by its display. That this is not so fantastically counterfactual as we think is shown by a big sign, "Pure," over a small barber shop in Taiwan (to distinguish itself from whorehouses with signs of "barber shop.") The necessity of displaying the "normalcy" of being just a barber shop, true to its advertisement, shows the abnormality of Taiwan culture. The importance of this point is underscored by "rectification of names," af-firmation, of which Confucianism makes so much, albeit somewhat ironically, since stressing af-firmation maims its spontaneous integrity, as the Taoists tirelessly warn. But then the Taoists' own irnonicty must be dealt with (see 2.3.2.).

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PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

Lao Tzu says is true, the rest of his book 15 itself a "not the AlwaysTao," amounting to an exercise in missing the mark. Then why say it at all? But he did say it in 5000 or so characters. He must have then exercised this futility on purpose. Perhaps Lao Tzu was not saying anything at all but evoking and arousing our attention to this situation, the concrete ineffable Way of things, by using such a situationally contradictory utterance as this, "Tao can tao, not always Tao"; here the act of saying contradicts "what" is said. Lao Tzu's second saying is similar: "Name can name, not Always Name." Naming is one way of identifying something as something, thereby letting it to appear as such; we remember the watch appeared to the little boy, Peter, only after it was named as such. But to name something 15 to define it as a, excluding it from all non-a's. This a is something

definite,

something

finite; and

so a can be defined

and

named. To name something is to de-fine it', thereby to let something come-out (ex-ist) as definite. But a exists by virtue of being in the environment of (wider) non-a's; this thing 15 in this room is in this house in this city in... in the universe. And the universe 15 all that 15. Can "all" be named? No. For once it is named, de-fined, it is no longer "all." Given the reason in the preceding paragraph, "all"--"the Always Name"--is indefinable, and so unnameable. Hence, "the Name name-able is not the always Name." Perhaps this second saying explains the first one. But, again, Lao Tzu said something about the Name, after all, that It is unnameable. To say something is to name--describe, define-something, and the above saying names something (definite and nameable) about everything (not nameable). And so, again, this act of saying contradicts what 15 said. "I know," Lao Tzu must have responded, perhaps not in words but in gesture, in the gesture of these sayings. "You are right; and so in my saying I said nothing. I just exploited--used--this saying to remind you of that truth, that the Name name-able is not the Always Name. And so, after the reminding, you can and should throw away the reminder-saying. (See Appendix 12.) That is to say, I did not mean what I said. I merely used the saying to point at what is not said; I pointed at ! We

note that to de-fine is to cut off alternatives,

thus negative in connotation.

2 "Everything" is a singular de-fined out of--though synonymous with--"all," and so "everything" is perhaps nameable in a peculiar manner. But what "manner" this is, remains a problem to be considered further.

2. CONCRETE ARGUMENTATIONS

65

the unsayable not-a when I said the sayable a." This is what irony amounts to--a spontaneous unity of opposites, saying for not-saying, not-saying in saying. 2.3.2.2. Let us try another route. To render a coherent account of the above, to bring out the intricate dynamism of the two statements that begin Ching, Zao Te here 15 a peripatetic round of pseudo-dialogues, A: through D:. Round A: Tao is the way all things go and are. Now, "Tao can tao, not always Tao." Why? The next statement supplies the explanation: "Name can name, not always Name" for, presumably, to name something is to de-fine it, that is, to delimit it, and so to name "all

(things)" is to de-fine and delimit "all," and this 1s an impossibility. not-A: But the above two statements did "tao" and "name" Tao after all (albeit negatively).! Round B: But Lao Tzu did say: Don't you dare name it, tao it, or else you'll miss it. not-B: But, now, Lao Tzu did say it, after all, for he did open his

mouth. Lao Tzu would have replied: "All right. I am wrong (with smiles )." Round C: Looking back, Rounds A through B amount to this: Either way (to say or not to say) we are wrong; either way we are right.’ C': Going through above (Rounds A through C), we realize the Way things go, the Tao. We have walked out the Tao; "Tao [we] walk it, and form [it]." We formed it by performing it, back and forth. In this spontaneous walk-around, this "ambiguity," 1s the always Tao. Round D: This way of ambiguity says nothing, for saying-anddenying-it amounts to nothing said; this way was instead walked out to the Way, and that in the ineffable Way, Yin and Yang always intertwined, interchanging, "either way," "i is right... is wrong." And such a way, we realize, is the Way all things go; this is the Way of nature, the natural Way. D': The way to pre-sent (let exist before us) Tao, to ex-press (press out in words) Tao, is to juxtapose an affirmation and its denial; ! We are reminded of President Nixon's famous quip, "I am not a crook," which the journalists reported zestfully. 7 We can compare the situation to President Nixon's. He could have remained silent, or said, "I am a crook," or said, "I am not a crook." Either way they all amount to the same thing.

! Chuang Tzu, 2/33.

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PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

this way amounts to saying nothing, and so does not violate the rules set down in the two statements in Round A. And this is how the expressive way in which Tao Te Ching is written. "Ruling a big state is like cooking small fish." "Act without action." "The strong is inferior; the weak is superior." "Nothing is weaker than water; nothing better for attacking the strong." And so on. This is Tao Te Ching; it says nothing, because whatever it says it negates. D":

This

is indirection;

there

is no

directives

in the

7ao

Te

Ching because it is filled with opposing directives. The reader is impaled, and stimulated by the conflicting statements. It is thus that we are evoked, called forth, into ourselves and our own realization of the

Tao of all things. This is the zenith of being. This is the world of beauty--we appreciate on our own. This is the world of ethics--we act on our own; our "kind actions" can both be one thing (e.g., opening the door) and its opposite (e.g., closing the door)? Much space has been devoted to meditating on the beginning couplet of the 7ao Te Ching, because the couplet specifies the hermeneutical principle of the entire book. For example, it says,’ The-greatest [ruler] above, [people] below know there-exists such; the next [best ruler, people] love and praise him; the next [good ruler, people] fear him. We demur, saying, "The ruler merely known must have done nothing, the worthless one; the ruler loved and praised must be the best,

then the one feared comes next." Again, it says, "Not going-out-of doors, [we] know [all] under Heaven." "O, no," we laugh, "staying indoors shuts us in ignorance." And then we are suddenly reminded that "Top men, hearing Tao, assiduously walk it; middle men hear Tao, [It appears] as-if there, as-if not-there; low men, hearing Tao, greatly laughat It; not laughed, [It would] not be-enough [to be] taken as Tao." The truth must lie on no side, then; and such a thing cannot be ! These sayings are taken randomly from the Tao Te Ching, Chapters 60, 63, 76, 78. ? Cuteness belongs here.

For an infant to say "I am cute" and to say "I am not cute" are both cute.

> Tao Te Ching, Chapter Seventeen. * Tao Te Ching, Chapter Forty-Seven. > Tao Te Ching, Chapter Forty-One.

2. CONCRETE ARGUMENTATIONS

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said. It goes this way (as quoted from the Tao Te Ching) and back (as we laughingly protested). Can we name it? No, but we can "nickname (tzu) it 'Tao," says Lao Tzu.' "Forced, we name it, saying "Great." "Inside the realm there exist Four Greats: Heaven, Earth, Human, King." "But nothing as great as these can be inside anything," we again protest. Well, they exist inside the realm of "naturalness (tzu-jan), to which these Four pattern-themselves," says Lao Tzu? But of course naturalness is ineffably spontaneous, to be ex-pressed only in irony. Actuality, spontaneity, ineffability, and irony, they are synonymous. But why not just say spontaneity and naturalness and leave it at that, why irony of roundabout futility? The answer is, Because the reader's natural spontaneity can be evoked? only by the author's route of futility, a circuitous affirmation via negation. 2.3.2.3. Let us trace this itinerary by way of another example. A contemporary sculptor Ju Ming* devotes so many years of energy, meditation, concentration, preparation, skill and effort to "hacking, gouging, ripping" out raw blocks of wood and boulders, so as to express natural effortlessness of Unbroken Flow in the Ch'i of T'ai Chi Boxing. Our immediate response 13, What 15 all this fuss, if nature 15 just here, as natural as can be? Is not T'ai Chi, Ch'i, and nature everywhere

in nature? Why capture it? Can fish swimming in water capture water?” Isn't T'ai Chi already in the supple strength of waving twigs, kicking babies, jumping frogs, water freezing and unfreezing, seasons and seasonal birds persistently coming back, and simple persisting rocks? Ju Ming's artistry through effort to naturalness, through artificialism to nature, this laborious artless art--what is all this?

Isn't it an insane life,

an exercise in futility, a self-mockery? Ju Ming could have replied,? "Of course, my effort is spent to let ! Tao Te Ching, Chapter Twenty-Five. 7 Ibid. 3 Spontaneity cannot be taught; it can only be caught. ^ His story appears in Michael Sullivan, "The Art of Ju Ming," Hanart (Taipei) Gallery, as quoted in Pacific Cultural Foundation Newsletter," No. 176, February, 1992, pp. 16-20.

Cf. Chuang Tzu, 6/73, 17/88-90. ? He does not, of course, and here lies his greatness; silence is the answer. For clarity, however, | concocted a conversation. This is another example of an exercise in futility.

68

PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

itself spend, to negate itself. My struggle amounts to saying that it is wrong; effortlessness cannot be reached. The very idea of "reaching" is wrong. But to live is to tread the strenuous road (Tao) of making mistakes; without such a show of self-defeating effort, effortlessness of

nature would This by exhibiting not, "making

not show forth." is, then, self-mockery with a wink, showing what nature is what it is not; people then realize it by negating what it is learning [by] daily decreasing." It is only in this Way that

we can come back, just fall back on what there is, naturally.

To study

history, e.g., the history of Western philosophy, is to study a series of human mistakes since Plato. We must undergo them to realize what it means not to make mistakes.^ Our study is a self-mockery for us to note, sigh, and nod. What

15 this nod?

An

affirmation,

to be sure.

But

it is an

affirmation that negates itself, an affirmation of effort/essness that contains in it the "-less-," the self-negative. The negative shapes the positive; the positive lives in the negative. Here is the affirmative performance of the negative, the ironic at work. Hence the Taoist penchant of negatives; the Tao Te Ching begins with its self-negating couplet. Looking back the way we trod, we realize something significant. This ironic self-recursive negativity is a dynamic one, always moving. It has to move, an affirmation via self-negation, the negative contained in the positive, the negative contributing to effortless self-affirmation. 2.3.2.4. Let us for the final time tread this route (Tao), this time through artistic creation, in three steps. First, Van Gogh's "A Pair of [worn out] Shoes," Beethoven's "Pastorale" Symphony, they themselves are neither shoes nor rustic countryside. They are "false," however lifelike they are. All artworks are "false," as Plato warned. Yet, secondly, those

falsehoods

are laboriously

produced;

the

artists devote their entire lifetime to creating them. Why? Because they are produced there, their very falsehoods, to jolt us to the real smelly discarded shoes to discern what they exhibit, and to force us to dip

! Tao Te Ching, Chapter 48. ? Reading a Chinese student's essay filled indiscriminately with "the"'s shocked me into realizing what it feels like to use "the." I can now use "the" less incorrectly.

2. CONCRETE ARGUMENTATIONS

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ourselves in the real countryside we take for granted.’ Their falsehoods ferry us over, by a jolting evocation, to the reality pointed therewith. Evocation to truth via falsehood amounts of course to a unity of incompatibles; here artistic irony as unity of falsehood and truth (via contrast, via resemblance) performs the ironic task of metaphoring us (via jolting, via reminding) to truth via falsehood. Finally, in all these metaphors through falsehood, falsehood is set aside when realization is evoked. In "raising one to [evoke the] returning [of] three," the "one" can never be "three," and so is always "false." That "one" can be what the teacher puts forth before the student; it can be, in the final analysis, the teacher himself.

one can really follow the teacher only after his death.”

This is why

"When you meet

Buddha, kill him," said a Zen monk.

Similarly, the task of artwork is to render themselves superfluous, so that we can feel the depths of worn, discarded shoes when we see them, and can feel the depths of rustic beauty when we are in the countryside. Artwork brings us to af-firming actuality by presenting it via falsifying it in them. This circuitous walkout of the affirmative is a natural one, the

Tao of Nature. Nature is a natura naturata, always nature-ing maturing itself, an incessant nascence and concrescence. The always Tao 15 always tao-ing itself, not to be artificially tao-ed by people’; it is people's task, then, is to "tao it out" to realize how not to tao it at all.

Hence the

ironies of the Zao Te Ching and other Taoist writings. We call it "ambiguous," a drive-around in meaning via negatives. This is the Way

to live, always to grow from mistakes, again and again, back to Nature,

to the naturalness of actuality.

2.3.3. The natural as ironic. Nature has a way of surprising us; Irony awakens us to this fact. Irony is somewhat like aphorism, for both shock us. ' On the latter, see my "Deconcentration of Morality: Taoist Esthetic of Person-Making," in Han Hstieh Yen-chiu (Chinese Studies), (Taipei), December, 1983, pp. 625-55. 2 Analects, 5/9, 7/8.

> Cf. my Butterfly. pp. 9, 328. 4 Recently, Victor H. Mair translated the beginning sentence of Tao Te Ching--no longer the beginning in his version--as "The ways that can be walked are not the eternal Way," in his Tao Te Ching: Lao Tzu--The Classic Book of Integrity and the way, N. Y.: Bantam Books, 1990, p. 59.

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PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

Aphorism shocks us, says Michael LaFargue. The point of aphorism is both to shock and to compensate for our comfortably held common "truths"; aphorism is no general truth for all situations. He gives us two statements: (a) "Slow and steady wins the race," and (b) "The race usually goes to the swift." Statement (b) is not a proverb, says LaFargue, because it "has nothing to compensate for." I am not so sure. For statement (a) also states a general truth, that being "slow" inside makes for composed "steady" pace, thereby contributes to victory. But, mind you, to say so does not quite exhaust the significance of statement (a), for it has more than this general truth; much less 15 this "more" exhausted by the statement (a)'s having a specific "target" to "compensate" for conventional wisdom. The crisp surprise of (a) jolts us alive, to make us fall back on ourselves. For "slow" jabs our common sense that connects "swift" to "win." Connecting "slow" with "win" challenges us to see that inner slowness is steadiness that finally wins; this truth is shocking (to our common sense) for all its general applicability. The same holds for the weak who are strong (Lao Tzu) and the meek who inherits the earth (Jesus). This is not just a compensatory exception to the rule of common sense; this has a universal ring to it.” Universality is ironic. Seeing his two disciples in hot dispute, the master said to one, "You are right," then, turning to the other, said,

"You are also right." A third disciple responded, "But, Master, they cannot be both right; they are disputing." The master thought for a while, then said, "You are also right." Now the master's saying has two points: (a) "also" and (b) "right." "Also" exhibits the freedom to affirm everything; "right" indicates the affirmation everywhere that includes negation. This freedom of universal affirmation with a gentle touch of irony keeps itself steady and integral; the statement, "You are also right," applies everywhere.

! Michael Lafargue, The Tao of the Tao Te Chine, Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York Press, 1992, pp. 201-02. On my overall comments on this book and other two (by Mair, Chan) on the Tao Te Ching, see my feature review article, "On Reading the Tao Te Ching: Mair, LaFargue, Chan," Philosophy East and West, October, 1993, pp. 745-50. 2 Perhaps LaFargue confused a truncated proverb or aphorism with a complete one. Fritz Kreisler's injunction, "Don't practice," is a shocker (a truncated proverb) for the violinist, complementary to a complete proverb and aphorism, "Practice and don't practice." The latter saying stands on its own feet, and is a glaring paradox. A. N. Whitehead the mathematician's dictum, "Seek precision and distrust it," belongs to the same genre.

2. CONCRETE ARGUMENTATIONS

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One is reminded of Chuang Tzu's breezy story-bit, "Morning Three." "Monkey Uncle gave [monkeys] chestnuts, saying, 'Morning, three and evening, four. Crowds [of] monkeys all raged. '[If] so, then morning, four and evening, three.' Crowds [of] monkeys all rejoiced." Chuang Tzu continued, saying that this is to "harmonize them with 'Yes No’ and rest in heavenly equality [that] 'double walks' [among them ]."' In short, aphoristic irony more than merely compensates; irony jabs us alive to the unexpected truths of actuality. Jay F. Rosenberg said,’ "The fundamental principle of empiricism 1s that 'all knowledge is derived from experience. Like all such philosophical maxims,

however,

the

principle

of empiricism

is aphoristic,

more easily formulated than properly understood. By varying one's readings of 'knowledge,' 'derived from,' and 'experience,' in fact, one can extract from this compact maxim a staggering variety of mutually incompatible systematic stories."

Rosenberg is right in discerning both the fundamental principle of empiricism and its variety of elaborations in "systematic stories." At the same time, he exhibits ("however," "[not] properly understood") his aversion to such an ambiguous principle capable of generating "mutually incompatible" systems. Thinkers in the West thus quickly "go forward" into specific details of definite arguments and elaborations, leaving this ambiguous aphorism behind. In contrast, the Chinese thinker would have daily pondered on the aphorism, treasuring it as a "compact" statement that sums up all empirical philosophies in the past, the present, and the future. Lao Tzu expressed this darkness (hsiian) of ambiguity in paradoxical ironies, and persisted in them, variously reflecting (unfolding) the peculiarity of the concrete; so did Chuang Tzu and, more spontaneously and inconspicuously, Mencius and Confucius. Now,

all above

is a story, our own,

on how

we

walked

out,

ironically, the way of natural Tao. Storytelling is a fitting form of conveying such a self-recursive inconsistency in the irony of an actual ' Chuang Tzu, 2/38-40. Cf. my Butterfly, pp. 178, 387, 419, Note 48. * This is the opening statement of Jay F. Rosenberg's Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986, p. 3.

illuminating book,

The

Thinking Self,

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| PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

situation. A classical example is that delightful story of Chuang Chou (that concludes the Second Chapter) dreaming to be a butterfly, then, awakened, denying being a butterfly, then, on second thought (awakened from being awakened) denying his own denial, ending up wandering in an uncertainty that is now clearly grasped. Another delightful story (that begins Chapter Three) tells of the butcher Ting dancing with his thickless knife undoing-loosening an ox; the story presents us with the unity of death and life, butchery toward nourishment. Taoism thrives on ironies. This does not mean that Taoism monopolizes the ironic mode of thinking. Ohama, Akira has shown that the unity of opposites, that 1s our ironic mode of discourse, belongs to the Chinese usage of words, expressed in sentences and in paintings.’ Confucius, Mencius and other Confucians are certainly experts in this mode also, only that they are less conspicuous and dramatic, hence less evocative, than the Taoists. For instance, the Confucians habitually mention "selfcultivation" (tzu hsiu) as if it were a matter of fact, without bringing to our attention that the one self here plays two roles, the cultivator and the cultivated. This is brought out, albeit inconspicuously, in the famous (though hardly dramatic) notion of "caution [when] alone" (shen tuy “Caution is another transitive verb requiring a cautioning subject and a cautioned object. Yet in "caution [when] alone" the subject is the object Mencius has a no less famous story (amusingly selfinconsistent) of someone "pulling seedlings [to] help [them] grow'"; helping something usually benefits it, but helping growth stunts it. The book of Hsin Tzu has a most subtle chapter (No. 26) simply titled "Fu (Prosepoem)," which beautifully lists nothing but whatever we know already, and beautifully claims that the "Great Thing" (ta wu) is ' Ohama, Akira, Chugoku teki Shi-i no Dento--Tailichu to To-ichi no Ronli (The Tradition of Chinese Thinking--the Logic of Opposition and Synthesis), Tokyo: Keiso Shobo, 1969, 1982. * The Great Learning, 7; the Doctrine of the Mean, |. > Other similar phrases from Mencius are: "self-reflection" (tzu fan, 2A2), "self-loss" (tzu shih, 2A9), "self-possessedness" (tzu te, 3A4). “despise oneself" (tzu wu, 4A9), etc.

* Mencius, 2A2. > The "Great Thing" is, like Chuang Tzu's "Great Piece-of-Clod (ta k'uai)," a self-abnegating sobriquet pointing to the ineffable Tao. The "Great Thing" is specially impressive because i appears in Hsün Tzu, a most pragmatic Confucian.

2. CONCRETE ARGUMENTATIONS

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none of them which depend on it to exist. Here is an unobtrusive coincidence of opposites, a unity of the common and the uncommon, the humdrum and the beautiful, a description and its denial. The Yin-Yang proto-paradigm as well as the Five [cosmic, elementary] Goings (wu hsing), both internally internecine and inter-nascent, hardly require a reminder. Subtle irony is also commonly found in Confucius. Three examples may suffice. First, as we juxtapose his two sayings: "No befriending those not as [good as] oneself" (1/8), and "Among three people walking, there must-be my teacher" (7/22). We can say that the latter saves the former from self-inconsistency; following the former advice, we would end up being friendless. On second thought, however, the two sayings seem to contradict each other. The former assumes a possibility of having someone not as good as oneself; the latter saying seems to deny this possibility We thus feel uneasy about the two sayings; they come together neither well nor not well. Such Confucius' subtle irony naturally came out of his loyalty to actuality. Secondly, although Confucius' "instruction" was "without discrimination" (15/39), he must have sadly seen limits to his pedagogical universalism. He did not continue lessons with those who failed to be evoked to discernment (7/8), was despaired over "women" and "low people" for their erratic moods (17/23), and was furious over an old friend of his (in both age and friendship) for having failed to learn decency (14/43). Hence, a mild inconsistency in Confucius' insistence on universal pedagogy. Thirdly, on one occasion Confucius confessed to being content in managing his own family well without going to governmental service (2/21), yet on another occasion he was all too eager to sell his talents (9/13), wandering as he did from state to state looking for employment at the court. Impressive thus was Confucius forthrightness, as publicly visible as eclipses of the sun and the moon (19/21). He tossed out ! Cf. Hsün Tzu, 1/1-16, 34-36, 39-43, et passim. * The latter saying only seems to deny the possibility of having a friend "not as good as oneself," for choosing one out of three persons to learn from assumes that the other two may be "not as good as oneself." But there must be at least one who denies the description "not as good as oneself" before one can choose him to be one's "teacher." In any case, the reader's uneasiness is not assuaged.

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PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

sayings as occasions required, paying no attention to their coherence. This forthrightness was shared by Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, who were perhaps more daring in packing those inconsistent sayings together for all to see. Their inconsistency constituted irony. Why

use

irony?

Because,

as shown

in the examples

above,

irony reflects the structure of the concrete, which is literally a concresced unity (of contraries). Pointing at one pole of the unity reminds us of the unity, the concrete actuality, which we call "fact." To capture the unity of contraries in the real, or rather, to be caught in it, 1s

life; this unity constitutes life-logic--to be exhibited in moral living, to be expressed in literature and painting to reflect life. Metaphor initiates such an expression; irony 15 its zenith, integrating contrary elements into each other to depict, naturally, unobtrusively, concrete daily living. 2.3.4. The "I" as ironic. That the actuality of the concrete is infused with irony is borne out when, in the famous beginning of his First Critique of Pure Reason, Kant said,' "Human reason has this peculiar fate that . . . it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it 15 also not able to answer. The perplexity . . . begins with principles which it has no option save to employ in... experience . .. Rising with their aid . . . to ever higher . . . conditions, it soon becomes aware that . . . its work must always remain incomplete . . . [and] precipitates itself into darkness and contradictions; . . . while it may . . . conjecture that these must be . . . due to concealed errors, it is not... able

to detect them."

He called this area that of the "principle," 1.e., "conditions" of "experience," and the study of this area he called "metaphysics." This indicates that this dark area was the subjective one ("conditions") for Kant, following Hume who also could not find it or understand it within his experience. Kant went on to fix the bounds of reason, and everyone in the West followed his path, the twist at the philosophical road called the Copernican Revolution. When Michael Polanyi proclaimed the ! Norman Kemp Smith, ed., Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, N. Y.: St. Martin's Press, 1968, p. 7, [A vii].

2. CONCRETE ARGUMENTATIONS

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"tacit dimension" of our cognition,’ and Wittgenstein the mystical "that the world is," its "value," "significance," they were really following Kants transcendentalism. And transcendentalism of reason and its "perplexity" are ciphers for the ironicity of the "I." All this clearly shows that we had to resort to irony to call attention to the peculiar character of reality. After unwittingly resorted to ironies, however, Kant, Wittgenstein, Polanyi then immediately dropped them. The Western attention is directed away from the irony to the peculiar character of our cognition (when confronted with reality) and its precise systematic explication. It belongs to the Western contribution (albeit unwittingly) that the irony of the actual and natural Is considered via the ironic "I," and that without the ironicity of either. Let us, then, start all over again, to see how the ironicity of the

actual-natural contains the ironic "I." Chuang Tzu has a curious passage that goes as follows: "Storing-hiding [a] boat in [the] ravine . . . --[people] call it stable. Although such, [at] midnight someone with strength shoulders it and walks-away. . . There-are proper [methods of] storing-hiding small [things in? and?] great; still things-have somewhere-to escape. If [we] store-hide [all] under Heaven in [all] under Heaven, then [things can]not obtain [anywhere] to escape; this is [the] great reality of [the] always-so [of] things."

Storing something means hiding it in a bigger thing, because that "something" is precious for everyone. But something precious means something is named as "precious"--de-fined, carved out, in contrast to other things, perhaps in contrast to that "bigger thing" wherein that precious thing is stored; that "bigger thing" is usually so common that no ! Michael Polanyi devoted his life to explicating this notion. See, e.g., his Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, N. Y.: Harper Torchbooks, 1958, etc.; The Study of Man, The University of Chicago Press, 1959, etc.; The Tacit Dimension, Garden City, Anchor Books, N. Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1966, etc.; ed. Marjorie Grene, Knowing and Being: Essays by Michael Polanyi, The Univeristy of Chicago Press, 1969; with Harry Prosch, Meaning, same press, 1975. ? Wittgenstein did so as he concluded his 7ractatus. "That the world is" sounds more objective than subjective cognition, but the fact that he surrounds this phrase with "value" and "significance" indicates that he was thinking of our reactions to the world. After all, that the world is is simply that; it is "mystical" only to us. 3 Chuang Tzu, 6/26.

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PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

one wants it. Sadly, hiding something precious in it often results in "losing" that thing in it, "nowhere" to be found. "Lost" and "nowhere" are synonymous. In short, to "hide" is to hide something precious in something else common-and-not-precious, in order to deceive others and prevent them from possessing that precious thing. This is the "proper method" of hiding; yet this is a deception that is not failure-proof. The precious thing is either apt to be found by others, lost to myself, or apt to be so hidden that even I cannot find it, again lost to myself. In order for this deception to work and become a real Swindle (tiao kui),' I must hide all "under Heaven" in all "under Heaven." Here everything is a precious collectible item, for Tao is in everything (in ants,

grass,

shards,

piss and

dung’).

We

must

then

hide

everything

precious in everything precious; everything will be somewhere and not lost, for "somewhere" is not "nowhere," and so nothing is "lost." Paradoxically, here is nothing lost because here 15 nothing (named, defined as) "precious"; "everything precious" is equivalent to "nothing precious." We have a further problem. This sort of "hiding" violates the very meaning, the "proper methods," of hiding; hiding is hiding something in something e/se, which does not exist here. In short, one cannot hide "all" in "all." But Chuang Tzu insists that in this violation of hiding 1s hiding fulfilled, and such 15 the Swindle of actuality; nothing gets lost here, all being hidden in all where "hiding" makes no sense. In other words, all hidden in all amounts to all lost in all, and nothing gets lost. The Swindle of the actual 15, then, a paradox; to lose is not to

lose. Here the "I" and the actual see eye to eye on this paradoxicality. Nothing is more precious than myself. I lose myself in my naturalness, which is synonymous with Nature nature-ing itself, and I become selfpossessed in Nature. Mencius said, "[The] Great One is one who does not lose one's heart of [a] baby." Chuang Tzu would have added, "by losing oneself in one's 'baby' inside, and then one will be self-possessed in Nature." | Chuang Tzu, 2/84.

* Chuang Tzu, 22/44-58. 3 As Chuang Tzu said--continuing the story of hiding the Under-Heaven in the Under-Heaven--in 6/26-29.

2. CONCRETE ARGUMENTATIONS

77

This amounts to becoming natural and spontaneous, which on the surface is as paradoxical as hiding all under-Heaven in all underHeaven. For how can being natural be attained by becoming it? How can a self-conscious becoming lead to being unself-consciously spontaneous? And how can hiding--by definition hiding in something else--be turned into hiding in something equal to itself? All this amounts to what Chuang Tzu called the Swindle (tiao kui)'--the supreme paradox--of Actuality. Losing the self (sang wo) in nature--in one's original "baby," perhaps--is to become self-possessed without being self-possessive. And this is to be one with Nature; being natural is thus to be in Nature, where what one cannot help being is ipso_facto what cannot be helped in Nature.’ And in being thus spontaneously helplessly itself, the "I" 1s manifested as being included in the ironicity of the concrete. The ironic "I" came from ironic Nature. The ironicity of the "I" is typically conveyed in Taoism by storytelling. Storytelling is a fitting form of conveying such a selfrecursive inconsistency in the irony of an actual situation, which contains the I. A story begins, and another ends, the famous Second Chapter of Ch'i Wu Lun (haltingly translated as "Things Sorting Themselves Out"). And Chuang Tzu said all this in an absolutely matter-of-fact manner. The Chapter begins with a master confessing perhaps in a trance to his disciple, "I lose myself" (wu sang wo). This state is a meditative loss that af-firms the "I" to enable the master to freely join--lose "myself"--in with the Pipings of Heaven, of Earth, and of Men. The "I" is thus established in the performance of self-losing. And this self-establishment is a dynamic one, as shown in the story that concludes the Chapter. Chuang Tzu says, "Let me tell you a story: Once I dreamt"; and who, incidentally, has not dreamt? Everyone often dreams, even in the daytime; dreaming is our most common experience. And storytelling is a way to dream; we so love to tell stories that Sartre characterizes us as storytellers.“ What did Chuang Tzu i Chuang Tzu, 2/84. ? Chuang Tzu, 2/3. ) Chuang Tzu expressed both subjective and natural inevitabilities with a single phrase, pu te i (4/43, 53; 6/15, 18; 23/79). * Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, tr. by Lloyd Alexander, N. Y.: New Directions, pp. 56-59. I reflected on storytelling and the butterfly story in my 7he Butterfly as Companion, pp. 7, 67-68, 175-78, et passim. See the Index on "butterfly" (493), "dream" (495), "story" (506).

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PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

dream?

What is the story?

"Last-night Chuang Chou dreamt to-be a-butterfly;/Fluttering, fluttering, [he] was [a] butterfly,/[Going on as he him]self pleased, as [he] wanted; [he did] not know 'Chou.'/Suddenly, awakened./Then, thoroughly, thoroughly, [he] was Chou./[But now he did] not know[--did the] dream of Chou make [the] butterfly? [Did the] dream of butterfly make Chou?/Chou and a butterfly then must have [a] division./This it [is which people] call 'things changing.'" The story implies at least three interrelated points, each with three implications: In the first place, I am like a butterfly flitting-fluttering between two identities: a man and a butterfly. When I am awakened, I know that I am not a butterfly. When I am awakened from that awakening, 1 am not sure that I am not a butterfly. Now what does this mean? Doubt is a negative notion. The dream world is where things (subject, objects) dissolve into one another. In this respect, dream functions like doubt, and perhaps more radically cuts into the base of doubt itself.

In short, since "I dream," (that is, I doubt),

| exist; since "I dream," I may be just a butterfly, not myself. Let me put all this in a Cartesian threefold point: (1) I can say that the butterfly does not exist because it does not doubt; only I do. (11) And yet, who knows, perhaps the situation may turn out to be as I suspected; perhaps I am really the butterfly dreaming and thinking. And then, because I doubt, I the butterfly exists. And yet, for all I know, all this may be a dream, in fact, my dream.

I

exist, then, not the butterfly. And I am back to (1). (iii) But, after all, no one knows which is true, (i) or (ii). As soon as I think (1), I think (11); while I think (i1), I am led to (1). This going back and forth is itself a butterfly-like flittering and fluttering! So much for the first implication.

The second implication is this: Since I am puzzled at myself, 1

! This is the famous story (2/94-96) that concludes the Tzu. Cf. Butterfly, Second Chapter.

famous Second Chapter in the Chuang

2. CONCRETE ARGUMENTATIONS

19

am two in one and one in two. First of all, I am wandering between two identities--I am two, a man and a butterfly. But then, I am one, because I am "puzzled." "I am puzzled at myself" means that there has been the same "I" throughout who is same enough to compare two self-identities and be puzzled at "them." I have to be the same self to be puzzled at my different selves! What does this mean? It means that in such puzzling acts I am one in two and two in one. In other words, and this is the third point, in such puzzlings we

have two activities in one--differentiation and interchange. Puzzling means that I differentiate two self-identities in me, and experience the one sliding in and out of the other, constantly interchanging. Such puzzling is itself very puzzling indeed.

3. CHINESE CONCRETE THINKING: A SUMMATION

81

3. Chinese Concrete Thinking: A Summation. Let us take stock. After a brief comparison of Descartes with Chuang Tzu, we (3.1.) experiment on denying the self, and think about what "I am not here" can mean, then (3.2.) see how Chuang Tzu described the concrete situation as compared with modern deconstructionists. We then (3.3.) take stock again in the Confucian, the Taoist, and general terms. Then (3.4.) we caution ourselves that all this meditation on the self, words, thinking, and actuality entails that they are necessarily connected. And so (3.5.) we see how the entirety of actuality-thinking is couched in terms of demonstratives, resulting in negative uses of language. Let us now begin at the very beginning of all our thinking, the "I." Descartes's "I think, therefore I am" shows a logic of straight awakening. Chuang Tzu's story of the butterfly dream shows a logic of awakening from awakening. If the logic of Western philosophy is in a straight line, an awakening logic (see how Socrates the gadfly stung us into self-reflection), then Chuang Tzu has the logic of a dream, moving in a circle, the opposites assuming each other, the logic of roaming back and forth. Western philosophy is awakened from dreams; Chuang Tzu awakens fo dreams. Chuang Tzu seems to be saying that to think that we can leave our dream is another dogmatism. For to have the Great Awakening is to be awakened from both the uncritical dreaming and the uncritical awakening, to know that it is impossible to check on whether I am dreaming or not. And so, to make a long story short, Chuang Tzu said that every judging-doubting, growing-revering self is changing its very identity, neither just growing into itself, as Confucius would have us do, nor just judging into itself, as Descartes would have us do. If both Descartes and Confucius engage in an "egology," then Chuang Tzu engages in a nonegology. The "I am" is constantly on the move, forever "here" yet "not here," forever awakening from awakening to a dream. This surprising insight is, moreover, anything but surprising; it 15 part and parcel of our daily routine, for everyone of us dream, both at night and in the day, in fantasy, planning, creativity. This is the growth of life-integrity. Nothing is more ordinary than this, and nothing more extraordinary. Such an amazing ordinary fact of the life of the self can be captured only in a matter-of-fact ironic mode. 3.1. "I am Not Here." But suppose we deny the existence of the self; we will find that the self still exists, and exists in a variety of ordinary ways, to be denied. Let us take a simple mundane example: "I

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PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

am not here." At least eight concrete implications can be seen in this saying: logico-existentially, psychologically, sarcastically, mundane-ly, poetically, dialogically, phenomenologically, and ordinarily. Logico-existentially, the saying denies mutual implications between

two

demonstratives,

"I" and

"here,"

for

"here"

means “where I am"; "I" implies "here," or "I am here."

existentially

The saying, "I

am not here," then, is an existential contradiction.

To say that "I am not here" is a contradiction 1s to say that its denial, "I am here," 1s necessarily true, that 13, "I" and "here" are as co-

implicative as are "being a bachelor" and "being single." The two pairs are of course different.. The "I"-"here" is an existential co-implication expressed--meant as such--in a language. The "bachelor"-"single" is a meaning co-implication via linguistic definition. Yet both share a sort of "logical" necessity, though the former is existential and the latter, definitional. This may be a clue (though we do not pursue it further here) for saying that the definitional necessity of "bachelor"-"single" connection may well be derived from the existential necessity of "I""here" connection. Psychologically, the saying shows escapism, "I" avoiding the situation "where I am." Sarcastically, by the saying I call your attention to my being here, similar to the conversation, "Is someone here?," "No,

no one 15 here." The saying can also serve as a mundane notice: "I am not here in the office; I am currently somewhere else." "Here" is a stand-in for "where you are, in front of my office door," which is "I" putting myself in your shoes; as "I" means

"I am here," so "you" means

"here" which

happens to be "in front of my office door." Poetically, the saying warns you: I am in a creative writing, or deep meditation, or enjoyment of music; I am somewhere else, do not disturb. Dialogically, the saying invites a good-humored friendly response, "O, that's a good place to be!" Phenomenologically, I am always elsewhere, never here. In fact, I am everywhere but here; I am my self-transcendence.'

Ordinarily,

the saying merely dramatizes the fact of growth. Self-transcendence makes self-referential inconsistency that, integrated with self-referential consistency, makes for life-growth.” "I am not here" is a part of my ' We remember intentionality of Brentano, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty, homo viator of Marcel,

Care, concern, and anxiety of Heidegger, and the For-Itself of Sartre. * See my Butterfly as Companion, pp. 263-64.

3. CHINESE CONCRETE THINKING:

A SUMMATION

83

growth.

3.2. Extraordinary Ordinariness. Chuang Tzu said as much but, surprisingly, in an absolutely matter-of-fact manner. A story begins, and another ends, the famous Second Chapter of Ch'i Wu Lun (haltingly translated as "Things Sorting Themselves Out"). The Chapter begins with a master confessing in a trance to his disciple, "I lose myself" (wu sang wo). This state is a meditative loss that af-firms the "I" to enable the master to freely join--lose "myself"--in with the Pipings of Heaven, of Earth, and of Men. "I lose myself" is "I am not here" in a concrete mode. But how do we bring together all these implications of "I am not here"? Let us bring them to Chuang Tzu. He would have smiled at them and said, "They are very interesting. Now I will tell you an ordinary story--I always tell stories--where most if not all these points cohere into an ordinary happening, a dream, which characterizes human existence, as if saying, 'I am not here." This is the amazing, because thoroughly ordinary, story (in poetic rhythm) that concludes the Chapter about things thriving together, "CA'i Wu Lun." Nothing is more ordinary than this, and nothing more extraordinary. Such an amazing ordinary fact of life can be captured only in a matter-of-fact ironic mode. Now,

shorn of this ironic ordinariness that all Chinese thinkers

appreciate and express, our description turns monstrous. Deconstructionism in the West is one such recent example. It capitalizes on this ironic character inherent in our saying, and our saying of something about concrete reality. Let us follow its contribution first, then think about its danger. First, as to the contribution of deconstructionism. Following its sentiment, we can say that Taoism deconstructed Confucianism, as Buddhism

did

Hinduism,

Zen

Buddhism

did

classical

Buddhism,

Christianity did Judaism, Protestantism did Catholicism, and Socrates did Greek religiosity. In fact, Western philosophy deconstructed religion" as Confucius did the Chinese religious tradition.’ In all these cases, the old was

"warmed

to understand the new"* which,

in turn, is

! [bid., pp. 155, 185-86. ? Cf. F. M. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy, N. Y.: Harper and Brothers, 1957. ᾿ By paying homage to religious awe and tradition (cf. Analects, 7:1, 7:5), revolutionized its religious sociality with his pious morality and moral government. 4 Analects, 2:11.

Confucius

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PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

not to "destroy but to fulfill" the old'--perhaps by announcing, "you have heard it said A, but I say Α'." All this shows that to deconstruct is to reconstruct, neither to discard nor to accept.’ And so life is a tension between, or rather, a tensed unity of, two

tendencies, such as inheritance through renovation, keeping the old by changing it. History is largely a process of the present's continual deconstruction of the past toward the future. Hegel struggled to understand this complex process by his dynamic dialectic, as the Chinese people did by their primal paradigm of Yin-Yang interaction, elaborated into the / Ching configurations. There is a danger to this tensed unity: its collapse either by simple scrutiny or by simple acceptance. Socrates the self-examiner (the first deconstructionist?) was accused of destroying the precious Athenian legacy; in fact, after him the Greek religions were less embraced than examined if not discarded; from then on the Greeks went

"from religion to philosophy" (F. M. Cornford). But the Athenians revered their tradition, unquestioningly accepting the tradition, and an orthodoxy was born which chokes the vitality to grow; Socrates was condemned to death. The same happened in Confucian institutionalism, Protestant churchism, Zen schools.

Our observation of deconstructionism has a final note. There are deconstructions and there are deconstructions. Better be a piquant Chuang Tzu than a piquing Socrates; people tend to flock to the laughing Buddha, away from the austere Theravadin. One can chime in with the aim of Western deconstructionists without following their convoluted acidity, pompous truculence, and formidable jargon. (See Appendix 13.) Natural unity must be restored naturally and unobtrusively, not convolutely and vitriolically. Deconstructionism 13 too ireful to be irenic and instinctively ironic. The actual is not only ironic but ordinary as well, arid when its ordinariness is not respected, the ironic turns monstrous to destroy ordinariness, the very actuality of the actual. I asked a little boy, "How old are you?"; he matter-of-factly answered, "I don't know." "What is your name?"; "I forget. Mom knows." Here is the heart of a baby that has no self; his self is lost in the self-possession of nature. "[The] ultimate one [has] no self; [the] ' Iam freely quoting from Jesus's words in Matthew 5:17. 2 Jeremiah

1:10 makes Yahweh

a deconstructionist.

3. CHINESE CONCRETE THINKING:

A SUMMATION

85

discerning one [has] no name,"' "1 because "[The] great one is one-who does-not lose his heart of [a] baby." Here nothing escapes and nothing Is lost, through all hidden in all and oneself lost in all. This point leads us to later sections 5 and 6 where we consider the hidden unobtrusive nature both of our cognitive execution called "thinking" (not its result) and of its matrix, the I-here-now.

3.3. A Multiple Summation. Let us take stock. Let us do so (3.3.1.) 1n terms of Confucianism first, then (3.3.2.) in terms of Taoism, and lastly, (3.3.3.) in general terms. 3.3.1. Confucianism goes to world concord from the base of the self. The self, the moral principle, and being humane-communal are all of a piece. The base is the I, here and now (demonstratives). And this "go[ing] from . . . to" 1s accomplished by affirmatives that af-firm the this, then the that, then the world, and by negatives that emphatically and subtly affirm so. And this process of "going" is described by metaphoric extension as Mencius adeptly performed, arguing metaphorically from our innate heartmind that tolerates no suffering, through familial empathy, to world concord, by compact pungency as Confucius aptly engaged us in his pedagogical evocation, and by ironic indirection all Confucians exhibited in their hortatory performances befitting the primordial Yin-Yang paradigmatic principle, as subtly as their phrases "self-cultivation," "non-doing," and "the Great Thing" adumbrate.

And this expansion from the unobtrusive self to world harmony is an argument that is fully rational, natural, situational, and persuasive, with profoundly ethical, sociopolitical, and cosmic reverberations. 3.3.2. Now, let us go to Taoism. Let us look this time at the entire concrete thinking in terms of the ironic. The ironic can be understood as a coincidence of opposites in actuality, one of whose features is affirming in negating and negating in affirming; this ironic feature of actuality and its judgment is particularly noted by Taoism. And so to describe the entirety of Chinese concrete thinking in terms of the ironic is particularly, even bitingly, appropriate in Taoism. First,

let us consider

demonstratives,

the

"I," the

"here,"

the

"now." On the one hand, demonstratives must be there to undergird both our judgment and our existence. The Cartesian Cogito is noted for the | Chuang Tzu, 1/21, 22.

* Mencius, 4B12. Cf. Appendix 14.

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PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

striking implication that ". . . [T]he existence of consciousness is inseparable from the consciousness of existing . . . " In the world of consciousness to be conscious (of oneself) is itself to exist (as consciousness). And this inherence of subjective existence both in consciousness and (by implication) in judgment (if not its validity) demonstrates the existential apodicity of demonstratives. Their existence is absolutely essential for a judgment as its basis and support. The "I" stands behind a statement as its raison d'étre. This is the positive side of demonstratives. On

the

other

hand,

Chuang

Tzu

insists

that,

in reality,

the

existence of the "I" is usually not expressed; it is often not even noticed in judgment. This is the zegative side of demonstratives. Thus the "I" is both absolutely presupposed and not noticed; the "I" exists unawares throughout my judgment, hidden therein in un-selfconsciousness. And the same holds for the "here" and the "now" which are co-implicated with the "T." Now let us consider first the indispensability of the positive side of demonstratives. Without making due allowance for the basic fact that the "I here now" undergirds our judgment, even a spontaneous situational description becomes dubious, and the dubiety is all the more "silly" for its logical legitimacy. A dramatic case for this point is made in a justly celebrated story of Chuang Tzu's^ In the story Hui Tzu the speculative sophist confronted spontaneous Chuang Tzu on why Chuang Tzu could exclaim at all how happy the minnows were by just seeing them darting around under the Hao bridge. Hui Tzu's reason was a logically legitimate one: Chuang Tzu was not minnows. After a brief round of logical darting on the bridge, Chuang Tzu called Hui Tzu's attention to the simple fact of how enjoyable it was for them right there to have talked ("darted") back and forth, how immediately parallel their case was to that of minnows darting around under the bridge, how this parallel situation was the cause for Chuang Tzu's exclaiming on minnows' joy, and how all this could be summed up in one word which Hui Tzu had forgotten--here, "above the Hao" bank! And to lose sight of this situation. here-now in long-faced logical ! This is Maurice Merleau-Ponty's comment on the Cogito Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964, p. 64. ? The story concluded Waters.

the entire discussions

in Chapter

in The

Seventeen,

Primacy

of Perception,

Ch'iu Shui, the Autumn

3. CHINESE CONCRETE THINKING:

A SUMMATION

87

wrangling is more than inappropriate. It is plainly silly under the balmy sunlight and above the shimmering water. Hence, the significance of the negative side of demonstratives. The above story ends there with that brief phrase, "Here, 'above the Hao’ bank!" Perhaps this abrupt ending has a point. It may be nudging us to see how important it is, after all this, to forget it all, and simply go back to the original life-situation, "How happy these minnows are!" This is the way to appreciate actuality, the flesh-and-blood actuality of that exclamatory sentence. Thus, after having been made aware of the ontological basicness of demonstratives--I, here on the bank, now--we must /ose them, to be

really judgmentally alive to the situation. This is the essence of that enigmatic sentence, "I lost myself" with which the Second Chapter began. It is thus that the story demonstrated the co-incidence of opposites, that is, being there and being lost there; such a co-happening of opposites is at the center of demonstratives. All this consideration makes it easy for us to see how interinvolved affirmatives and negatives are. The "shih" (yes) and the "k'e" (can, approved) in actuality, Chuang Tzu noted, are always stuffed with their respective denials. This fact is responsible for Chuang Tzu's realistic descriptions, to the point of bordering on relativism, about them.' And the unity of opposites here issues in "How should I know?," a knowledge of ignorance that goes beyond a Socratic one, for Chuang Tzu went through no less than three stages on this peculiar knowledge: he emphatically affirmed by a rhetorical question, "How should I know?," that he did not know of which things have the same approval of Yes, nor did he know what he did not know, nor yet did he know things had no knowledge. Socrates stressed, explicated, and even dedicated his life to, only the second stage. Chuang Tzu's is a truly radical realism that affirms reality ironically. This completes a description of the Taoist ironic understanding of demonstratives, affirmatives, and negatives. We note, furthermore, that we have an interesting coherence of the metaphoric, the compact, and the ironic modes of argumentation in Chuang Tzu's own famous Three kinds of Words, i.e., Lodge Words (yü ! Cf. especially Chuang Tzu, 2/20-34, 90-91. * Chuang Tzu, 2/64-65, 70.

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PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

yen), Layered Words (chung or ch'ung yen), and Goblet Words (chih yen). Lodge Words are words lodging as they are with one meaning, which evokes in the reader other meanings, all congenial to this Lodge. And this congeniality must emerge anew, not ready-made, as the fluid situation forever turns to churn up new meanings. They are, in Wang Hsien-ch'ien's

words,

"words

that are

entrusted

and

lodged,

i.e., the

intentive meaning that is here is entrusted, lodged, and expressed there." That 13, these words "lodge" us strategically here for us to understand and bring about new implications there. The Lodge Words let us metaphor. This explains the metaphorical mode of Chinese argumentation. Thus lodged, Lodge Words thereby become Layered Words, opalescent with layers of implications, pregnant and "heavy"? both with the ancient authorities (connected to the past; hence, chung yen) and hitherto unforeseen implications (logically and situationally contextualized; hence, ch'ung yen). This explains the compact character of Chinese sayings. Finally, all this amounts to explaining Chinese sayings as Goblet Words, the words that tip to the ever-changing trend of the concrete; implications are variedly, situationally lodged. These implications opalesce with many layers and plies of situational import, both ancient and modern, both concrete and logical. No wonder Chuang Tzu says that Goblet Words lodge most of the time ("nine out of ten") and opalesce frequently ("seven out of ten"). It is thus that Goblet Words are "daily emerging (and pouring its meanings)" out of concrete actuality.’ All this amounts to describing the peculiarly concrete nature of Chinese concrete modes of thinking from a Taoist perspective. All Chinese notions (affirmatives, negatives, demonstratives) and all Chinese modes of argumentation (metaphorical, compact, ironic) describe how Chinese thinking operates by going from the "I" to the "this," from which to the "that," and then another "that," and then comes i They begin Chuang Tzu's Chapter Twenty-Seven titled "Lodge Words." ? The same character in the original Chinese can be pronounced either "chung" or "ch'ung." And so Layered (ch'ung) Words can be interpreted as words "heavy" (chung) (presumably) with the authorities of the ancient classic. > These sentences begin Chapter Twenty-Seven titled "Yü Yen," "Lodge Words."

3. CHINESE CONCRETE THINKING: A SUMMATION

89

back to reshape the "this" and the another "this," and so on (Lodge Words of metaphorics), all packed in seemingly ordinary compact descriptions (Layered Words of compacts, ancient, situational), to nudge us toward evocative enlightenment (Goblet Words of ironics). All this describes the typically concrete Chinese thinking from a Taoist perspective, with profoundly human and cosmic reverberations. All this, mind you, has been performed in an utterly ordinary manner. 3.3.3. Now, let us conclude our explanation of concrete thinking in many modes--demonstrative, affirmative, negative, metaphorical, compact, ironic, and storytelling, by looking at the entire concrete thinking, again, in terms of the ironic but this time in a general manner. All descriptions so far of concrete thinking can be viewed as the ironic at work. The ironic can be understood as affirming in negating and negating in affirming, and this mutuality of indwelling can be called "hiding." Thus demonstratives are hid in affirmatives, and affirmatives in

demonstratives. established, hid I who stands Propositions are philosophizing,

In af-firming a proposition the I-here-now is in it. At the same time, a proposition is proposed by the by it and warrants its veracity with my integrity. always someone's. Even in such impersonal activity as ideas are always someone's. We customarily say, e.g.,

Platonism, Aristotelianism, Cartesian Cogito, Kant's transcendentalism,

Hegelian dialectic, and so on. Demonstratives are hid in affirmatives and affirmatives in demonstratives. Similarly, to affirm is to de-fine, which is to negate what is not affirmed; to negate in turn is a way of emphasizing what is affirmed. Affirmatives and negatives thus belong together, and this is by definition the ironic, the internal unity of the Yin and the Yang. Then the evocative is hid in the metaphoric as its situational initiation and its motivating power to call our attention and call forth metamorphosis of the familiar. And metaphorics are hid in evocatives, because without the hidden metaphoric similarity of the novel situation with the familiar one, evocation as excavation of such a similarity would not have happened. Furthermore,

notional

a story 1s summed

connections

(called

up in notions, notions evokes

"argument")

and

historical

further

connections

(processes of implementations, inventions, revolutions, in sociopolitics,

technology, industry). Mutual indwellings of metaphorics and ironics is specially interesting. First metaphorics are hid in ironics. Ironics point to many metaphoric ways working (walking) out various understandings of

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PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

notions and actuality; only in elaboration of these new metaphoric ways is the ironic manifested as ironic. Then ironics are hid in metaphorics. The novel, having been understood in terms of (with the metaphoric use of) the familiar, redounds to renovate the familiar; to understand the novel

is to metaphor,

to renovate the familiar is to anti-metaphor,

to

ironize metaphorics. If we warm up the old to know the new, as Confucius said, then we warm up the new to rejuvenate the old. The former is to metaphor forward; the latter is to metaphor backward, to ironically metaphor. This two-way metaphoring both invigorates us and prevents our fixation in one exclusive manner of life, on its way to disaster.’ Actuality is forever actualized-actualizing, staying at any start of the stage. No one can be in two places at once, but any one has the equal possibility of being in either place. And the former fact ends to start actualizing the latter possibility. To live is to be alive to this lively process. Life generates a series of amphibolous expressions because actuality is ambi-guous, wandering-around, forever posing to posit, positioning to begin a metaphoric process.’ Reflecting such life vicissitudes, ironics are playfully peripatetic, ever on the lookout for new meanings in the familiar situation and saying. We should be like the proverbial Uncle Sai, always expecting the unexpected "horses" of events.’ "Commiserated on losing his horse beyond the border, an Uncle Sai (rich man living close to the border-fortress) said, 'How [do we] know it may-not turn-out auspicious?’ Later, congratulated on the horse returning with a fine horse from beyond the border, he said. 'How [do we] know it may-not turn-out inauspicious?' Then, commiserated on his son's broken leg in the fall from the horse, he said, 'How [do we] know it may-not turn auspicious?’ Soon a war broke out and nine out of ten ! After giving their children their hand-me-downs, the parents often come to wear their children's hand-me-downs. This event is heart-warming and instructive, as well as jocular. ? Of course, one can agree to someone protesting that one should be unambiguous about ambiguity (i.e., driving-about in meaning), that definiteness of meaning is essential for polysemous play. But, it is the play of freedom that is our focus, not its conditions, however "essential" they may be. Kant may have found the definitive law of freedom, but to claim that one understands freedom because one understands its law is tantamount to "understanding" a game by understanding its rules. The rules of a game is what renders the game possible; the rules are no substitute for the game, much less its equivalent. The postulate of freedom is not freedom. + See Huai Nan Tzu, Chapter 18, Jen Chien Hsün.

3. CHINESE CONCRETE THINKING:

A SUMMATION

91

(conscripted) youth perished; his son--in his condition--was spared." Let us take note of some examples of how words and notions are turned about, played around with, by great Chinese thinkers. Mencius's saying, "The Great One is one who does not lose one's heart of the infant" (4B12) nudges us to note a new positive meaning of "infant" besides its negative connotation of infantility; Chuang Tzu's "Sages not deceased, great thieves won't cease" (10/16) calls our attention to a new negative connotation of "sage" besides its being our ideal. Mo Tzu's not-so-honorific

use

of

"princely

man"

(chün

tzu,

superior

man,

gentleman) and Chuang Tzu's of "Confucius"! serve the same purpose. Similarly, Confucius the sincere moralist quipped twice in the Analects, "[I] give up; I have yet to see anyone desiring virtue as [he] desires sex!" (9/18, 15/13); Mencius who championed the growth of our nature-buds (tuan) warned, "Never help grow" (2A2). This parallels Martin Luther the devout Christian's "Sin boldly!" and Whitehead the mathematician's "Precision is a fake!" In fact, all paradoxes and inconsistencies in literature and all ironies in history belong here. All of these discerning thinkers alert us to the rich polysemy of actuality. Mencius calls for policy-flexibility’; Chuang Tzu for playfulness*; Lao Tzu urged us to tend toward soft nimbleness of the living imperfect against hard fixation of the dead perfect? One of the reasons is perhaps that the nimble vitality bespeaks flexibility to go in either direction as the changing actuality demands. All this life's ambiguity is reflected in amphibology. And actual ambiguity reflected in verbal polysemy leads to punning equivocation in writing and then to arguing by punning, as often practiced among the great Chinese essayists, such as Chuang Tzu, Liu Ssu,° even Han ΥΠ. Chuang Tzu "K'ung Tzu," not "K'ung Ch'iu" or "Chung Ni." usages of these terms.

Cf. my Butterfly, p. 400, Note 10, for distinct

? This is Whitehead's last statement in one of his two essays in Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, N. Y.: Tudor Publishing Co., 1941. 3 Mencius, ch'üan, 4A18, 7A26. * hsiao yao yu.

This is the title of his first chapter.

> Tao Te Ching, Chapter 76. ? Liu Ssu wrote the celebrated book on literary criticism, Wen Hsin Tiao Lung, completely in the mode of arguing by punning. So did Lu Chi who wrote Wen Fu, Yen Yü who wrote Ch'ang Lang Shih Hoa, and Wang Kuo Wei who wrote Jen Chien Tz'u Hua. The list goes on.

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PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

leads us all the way to playful humor. double entendre, and have fun in life.

living.’

3.4.

For to pun is to have fun in

Jest-ful life is a zestful life, a true

This is, mind you, far from an interesting but unnecessary

alternative. There is in the Chinese mind an inherent connection between words and thinking (argumentation), on the one hand, and the actual process of events, on the other. Since Chinese language 15 conveyed by ideographic-onomatopoetic characters, argumentation by punning is accepted on the principle of "like sound, like sense." The like resounds with the like; similarity calls for and connotes similarity. Thus even actual pronunciations of words are both essential to their meanings and constitutive of the argumentative process. That such a connection is anything but arbitrary can also be seen in the practice of the Bible, which is a product of Oriental mentality. It is full of exegesis of meaning via etymological punning.* That this practice has long been a respected tradition runs contrary to the typical reaction to it of German scholars’; their disparaging tone shows something about Germanism itself--dismissing "loose" etymological contrivance in favor of strict logical connection. But that such etymological punning shows more than primitive mentality can be seen in its close connection with prophesying from actual events, historical or current. Playing with meaning and arguments has a very serious heuristic value. The alternative to playing with arguments,’ deductive

! On argument by punning see my History, Thinking, and Literature Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991, Chapter Four, especially pp. 143-50.

in Chinese

Philosohy,

? See my Butterfly, Epilogue. ? See Note 3 above.. 4 E.g., in Genesis alone, we see 3:20, 17:5, 19-37-38, 25:25-26, 27:36, etc., etc. > E.g., in Gerhard Kittel, ed., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1965, etc., III: 1071-72. ° The story in Jeremiah 1:11-16 collates the connection of meaning of words with future events with the connection of current insignificant event with future grave ones. So do Matthew 16:18-19 and 1:23 (fulfilled in the concluding passage of the Gospel). Cf. the Epilogue in my Butterfly. 1 See my "Playing with Arguments," in Southwest Philosophical Studies,

1982, pp. 58-67.

3. CHINESE CONCRETE THINKING:

A SUMMATION

93

determinism in a fixation of meaning, is an oppressive disaster, as seen in the process of corruption of high Confucian and Taoist insights into methods of brutal statecraft. Mencius' righteousness (i) turned reciprocal benefiting (hsiang li) in Mo Tzu, and then turned enriching the state (fu kuo) in Han Fei Tzu. Similarly, "Heaven" the Awesome came to mean the impersonal natural laws, then the awesome state laws; moral "righting names" turned logical casuistry, then the statecraft of self-implementation of legal statutes; even Lao Tzus ineffable hiddenness of Tao and Name was invoked to justify the "righting of legal names" impersonally enforced by the hidden sovereign. All this happened, mind you, because ambiguous notions were fixated into one meaning and pushed to its tyrannical extreme. Instructively, Chuang Tzu's happy meandering proved too much to fixate, and was either silently passed over (by the legalists) or laughed off (by the Neo-Confucians). He and his manner of life was left alone to the delight of artists, painters, writers, calligraphers, who freely roamed in the poetic atmosphere of nature that is Nature and naturalness. Nature is actuality full of ironicity. Demonstratives are hid in affirmatives

and

affirmatives,

affirmatives and affirmatives,

in demonstratives;

in negatives.

negatives are hid in ironics and metaphorics,

negatives

Again,

are hid in

affirmatives and

in ironics, and ironics in

turn are hid in all these hidings, especially in the first hiding, a peculiar and least noted one of the hidden I, to which we now turn.

3.5. We began section 1 with demonstratives; we will finish this section 3 with demonstratives. It is significant that "I," "here," and "now" are primitives; they imply one another to form a nonmetaphorical matrix.’ In fact, "I," "here," and "now" have "similar logical placings" and mappings, and "the elusiveness of the 'T' is," for Ryle, "on all fours with the daily elusiveness of a diary, . . . Diary entries, reviews, and 工

have the same logic." Without them, all metaphorical pointings will be a floating concatenation of pointings without their binder, source and anchorage, the primal pointer out of which all pointings proceed and in terms of which all metaphors make sense. (See Appendix 15.) ! Cf. section 5.3. below. 2 Both Gilbert Ryle and Ian Ramsey talked only about the close relation between "I" and "now," but I think "here" also belongs to them. The quotations are from lan Ramsey's essay (on Ryle), titled "The Systematic Elusiveness of 'I'," in Ian Ramsey, ed. by Jerry H. Gill, Christian Empiricism, Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1974, p. 20.

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PART ONE: CHINESE BODY THINKING AN UNDERSTANDING

Three implications follow: (3.5.1.) the world-formation by metaphors, (3.5.2.) the non-metaphorical as indescribable, and (3.5.3.) such indescribability being shown in negative and ironic expressions. 3.5.1. Out of this primitive matrix of "I here now" comes the first metaphorical

step, "this"; as "I" am

immediately here now,

so 15

"this" understood to be actually here now. Then comes "that"; as "this" is here now, so "that" 15 there, perhaps now, perhaps later or sometime ago. And then come many "those," then a society of "those" things and events, and then the world 15 born.

In China, the above logical process takes on an existential character.' Chuang Tzu begins and ends his Second Chapter on "things" and "theories" with a meditation on the "I."

In Confucianism, "this" 15

"my" parental "old folks"; I have my ontological base in "my old folks." And so it behooves me to "old (verb) them," that is, treat them accordingly, with respect and solicitude due to them; to do so is the basic metaphoric act that makes me me, "establishing"? my very self. Such a "this"-ing of the basic "this" my old folk extends (chi, t'ui) metaphorically to "that"-ing the other's "old folk" as I do my own. To extend my basic treatment of my old folks (my filial behavior to my parents) to others' old folks (as I would treat mine, as others would theirs) is to af-firm (confirm and acknowledge) others in a basic humane manner.* Both Confucius’ and Mencius‘ saw in these basic humane acts the root of humane government and society. This is how metaphors of sociality concretely emerge out of their non-metaphorical matrix of Ihere-now in China. 3.5.2. What the non-metaphorical is cannot be described, simply because description is by nature metaphorical, therefore what 15 | Although the Great Learning (at the beginning) puts "investigation of things" (ke wu) before making the "will sincere" (i ch'eng) and "mind rectified" (Asin cheng), the order of progress in our dealings with the world--the self, then home, then government, then the universe--conforms roughly to the order specified here.

? See my Butterfly as Companion, pp. 17-19, 171-78, 275-77. ? Li, ] iterally to "stand" (transitive verb) something. * This is none other than the "righting of names" (cheng ming), an af-firmation of things as they legitimately are and as they deservely to be treated--confirmed--as they are. s Analects, 1:2. ९ Mencius, 1 A7.

3. CHINESE CONCRETE THINKING:

A SUMMATION

95

non-metaphorical is indescribable; "that" is described always in terms of "this," which in turn is described by the ineffable non-metaphorical. What is non-metaphorical here is the actual immediate presence of the "I," the now, the here, which cannot be described but can only be expressed, shown, demonstrated (hence, the epithet, "demonstratives").

And all we have is language, and language describes, without being able to describe the describer. 3.5.3. Actuality is what is immediately present; the immediately present is what is here now; the here-now appears as such, as the phenomenon of the actual present, through the "I" that is present here now. But our language only describes, and the non-metaphorical actuality of immediate presence defies description as above indicated. Yet somehow the actuality of the present requires indication, if not expression. Sadly all we have is language. We must then use both a linguistic device of the denial of description (via negativa) and a linguistic self-denial ("contradiction," irony) to express the immediately actual, the concrete. Denied and selfdenied, descriptive language can now metaphorically refer (point) us to the concrete. Hence, the Taoist penchant for negatives and ironies. It is thus that the Taoist language both is incorrigibly concrete and exists for the sake of the concrete. The Taoist language tells us that concrete thinking about actuality inevitably uses negatives, metaphors, and ironies. We see a further implication from above. Indescribability shown in negative and ironic uses of language entails that concrete immediacy is hidden to our consciousness; the "I," language, and metaphor are by nature tacit. "Tao tao-able is not Always-Tao; name nameable is not Always-Name," and many similar sayings 11 all their pungent self-denial are "literally true" of actuality. The beacon of awareness does not shine on its own base--the self, the language. The actual and the immediate are somehow synonymous, and immediacy is immediacy to the self. The concrete has an immediate base in the self, which 15 hidden; this hiddenness generates irony. Thus both metaphor and irony are based on their hidden matrix of the immediacy of the concrete, of the self, and of language. This brings us to sections 4, 5, and 6, in the next Part Two.

PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING We have been considering what "thinking" is in "body thinking"; it is concrete. Now we are to consider how "body"-ly this "body thinking" is; our "body" manifests itself, performs itself forth, in our "thinking." Concrete thinking (especially as practiced in China) is performed by the I-here-now. Concrete thinking proceeds on the basis and dynamo of the bodily self, and spreads throughout the universe in the mode of concrete universals (section 4). Yet of the thinking "I" the "I" is naturally not aware (section 5). This bodily self can exist neither without nor with the other self; they form home that wombs forth selves and hell that destroys them. The home-hell dialectic forms human history (section 6). But how are such "movements," dialectical as in section 6, logical as in section 5, possible? The answer is that things are by nature the flow of Ch'icurrent.

We then see all our thinking and understanding in this light of the fluidity of things (section 7). Such a description of concrete body thinking is an appreciative discernment of Chinese thinking with Western logical sensitivity. Comparative cultural hermeneutics with all its dangers is an imperative for our human survival together, a homocosmic symbiosis (sections 8, 9). 4. Concrete Universals in Chinese Body Thinking. In this section we consider concrete universals in Chinese body thinking, and then in the next section 5 the hiddenness of the "I." To begin with, we note that "knowing" in the West differs in meaning from "knowing" in China. Knowing in the West has been traditionally that by intellectual mind, as distinct from feeling by emotional appetites, willing by voluntary drives. Rather than feeling in things and willing to go through things, we know by thinking over things and abstracting forms from them. In China, in contrast, we know by experiencing things at the heart-of-our-body (Asin). Thus the Chinese characters meaning to "think" (ssu, hsiang) has a hsin-radical to them. The mind in the West, distinct from feeling, willing, sensing, knows about things; the heart-of-our-body in China, pervading feeling, willing, sensing, discerns something sensible in matters of fact.' The former is ! Mencius 6A15.

The entire section is worth reading.

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PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING

mind-thinking; the latter is body-thinking.! To "know" (chih) is much used in Chinese writings, both Confucian and Taoist. A casual survey of Confucius's Analects and Mencius's writings convinces us that "chih (knowing)" is thoroughly bodily. This can be graphically demonstrated in our enjoyment of music, as amply shown in Chinese literature on knowing, poetry, politics? Music is to be understood to be enjoyed; dogs do not enjoy music, at least not as much

as human

children do.

Besides, music

1s

rhythmic, rhythm is repetitious, and so repetition is an essential feature of music. Not figuring much in logical reasoning, repetition is meaningful, or rather, sensible, only in being experienced. Children thrive and grow in repetition; it is alimentary. Music, with repetition, is alimentary. Thus music is alimentary intellection that nourishes us; to know music is to know it with the entirety of our body, at the gut level. And then, after having been fed, we come to realize that rhythm is, after all, something reasonable, something that makes "sense" and its repetition is not dead mechanical drones but the heartbeat of life, the

regulatory undulation, the law of life and Nature, the law of the living pulsating cosmos against randomness, or rather, the regulatory pulsation that keeps chaos alive as room for "flexing of the muscle" of creative novelty. Rhythm is thus repetition keeping undulatory freedom lawfully alive, keeping it from its chaotic explosion, repetition with variations embodying the law of freedom, seasons of life and nature, both in individual life and ecological nature.

! Thus D. C. Lau translates "know" (chih) in Mencius 6A11, 12 as "has sense enough to," that in SA1 as "take interest in," and that in 6A13 as "know how to." ? John C. H. Wu has two chapters (in Nei hsin Yüeh-loh chih Yüan-ch'üan [the fountain of inner joy], Taipei: Tung-ta T'u-shu Kung-ssu, 1989) on the essence of Confucius as a man of sheer happiness (loh, yao); Lin Yutang has a chapter on the Confucian ideal of "government by music (yüeh)," as Chapter 8 in his Between Tears and Laughter, N. Y.: The John Day Company, 1943, pp. 65-73. See also, Chang, Hui-hui, ed., Chun-kuo Ku-iai Yüeh Chiao Ssu-hsiang Lun-chi [collection of ideas on teachings of music in ancient China], Taipei: Wen-chin Ch'u-pan Sheh, 1991. "Loh (happy)," "Yao (enjoy), and "Yüeh (music)" are three different meanings and pronunciations of this selfsame pregnant Chinese character. Out of a which are Shih Lun Shang-wu

staggering amount of writings, I cite only an anthology on "theories" of poetic writings pervaded by the pragmatic and cognitive significance of music: Chu Jen-sheng, ed., Fen-lei Ch'üan-yau (Essential Classified Collection of Theories of Poetry), Taiwan: Yin-shu Koan, 1971. What I put in the main text is my summary of their sentiment.

Significantly, "music" (yüeh), "joy" (loh), and character; these three phenomena are experiential.

"enjoyment"

(yau)

are written

as the same

4, CONCRETE

UNIVERSALS IN CHINESE THINKING

99

It is thus that true knowing is musically sensible and somatic; it comes by hearing the Way, tasting its music and its meat,’ in people, in an ox, in a child? Knowing people (including oneself)? knowing experience,’ knowing how,” knowing life and destiny,° and the like, are hardly confined to mental activity. Even knowing "words" are not just understanding the meaning of words; it is to know people.’ It is not surprising, then, that universals with which thinking and knowing operates, universals that holds true in many situations, and then in all possible situations, can be obtained in two ways. One way is to see what feature several different objects share, by an metaphorical extension. We usually say in the West that this chair 1s like that chair, which

in turn is like another one there, and so on.

And

so all these

things are called "chairs" because they share "chairness" in common. Or, as Mencius

says, for the beauty of tastes, sounds, sights, we share

the same criteria? This is the usual understanding of "universals," features that things share in common. Another way, often neglected, is to discern meanings through things and their expressions. This is depth hermeneutics. One must listen beyond what is actually said, beyond angry hurtful words. "You don't love me; you don't care about me" means "I wish you loved me,

! Analects, 4:8, 7:14. In Confucius, enjoying music, tasting meat, and knowledge are synonymous. His musical enjoyment so overcame his meat-enjoyment that he "did-not know meat taste [for] three months." Music, meat, and enjoyment are bodily experiences called "knowledge." The same piece of music is enjoyed repeatedly as the same meal taken daily. Music nourishes as meal; such bodily nourishment is called "knowledge."

2 Ibid., 2:11. Mencius, 1A7, 2A6. ° Analects, 1:1, 16; 9:6; 13:2; 14:30, 39; 15:19, etc. ^ Analects, 6:22, 7:19, 9:28. Mencius, 6A13, 7A15. > Analects, 6:22. Mencius, 6A13.

© Analects, 11:12, 14:35, 16:8, etc. T Mencius, 242. Aristotle did notice "practical syllogism," "practical knowledge," in his Nicomachaean Ethics and Politics. Unfortunately these notions were understood in terms of "thecretical knowledge" and theoretical syllogism, and never served any major role in Western philosophy; they serve as a sensible warning, an important footnote, to the thriving theoretical reasoning. 8

, . . ， ， Mencius, 6A7. Here we already see Mencius normative tendency in the seemingly value-free realm of epistemology.

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showed me you loved me." "You don't appreciate me" means "I want you to appreciate me, and show me you appreciate me." "I don't want to be your slave" means "I am not happy with my life; I need to change my life." "I am going to divorce you in December" means "I'm serious. I am hurting. Take me seriously." Thus behind what is actually said one can and should listen for what is really said. This way of listening is to attain the Foucault-esque archeological insights into the deep real. Plato said that the really real is the form in which the actual participates to become real; we say the deep real is beneath what is actually said to render the actual bitingly actual. The first way is that of sharing the similar features; the second is that of seeing into and through the actual manifestations. The first 15 the way to expand further out; the second is to get behind deeply. Both are ways of hermeneutics, of systematic understanding of the meaning of things. The first way is taxonomic; the second, depth-ontological, psycho-ethico-social. The Western philosophy has traditionally concentrated on the first way of obtaining universals. But the second is a no less penetrating way of reaching the "universals" of things. This is what Husserl called the "essence" which is "what" an individual thing 15 in its "intimate selfbeing,"

the so-called "factual essence," or "matter-of-factness," in short,

"factuality" (Tatsachlichkeit). Such an essence of factual objects of experience can be expanded to that of objects of possible experience.’ Chinese body thinking goes the second discerning way. What is peculiar here about concrete universals is this. Instead of conceptual grasp of the essence out of the situation, Chinese thinking has an intimate understanding of the situation. In response to an evocation of actuality, Chinese thinking has hermeneutical insight into what is really the case. Then this hermeneutical insight is pushed to sociopolitical and

even cosmic universal normativity.

|

The intimate probing into the real sentiment in the situation leads to its metaphorical expansion, which in turn results in a historical tradition of sociopolitical rectification. The entire operations of Chinese body thinking considered so far--demonstratives, affirmations, negations, evocation, metaphor, irony, compact argumentation, and |

Lowe this insight to my daughter, Dr. Mary A. Wu, a finc pediatrician.

? Edmund Husserl, /deas, tr. W. (1962), pp. 47-55.

R. Boyce-Gibson,

N. Y.: Macmillan

(1931), Crowell

Collier

4. CONCRETE

UNIVERSALS IN CHINESE THINKING

101

storytelling--are for the sake of attaining this concrete unique unity and factual universality, one to all, one in all, one and all. Concrete universality of Chinese body thinking is considered under three headings as follows. (4.1.) Such a thinking spreads from my bodily center through all common (names of) things to my family, then to the state, then to all things under-Heaven. (4.2.) These concrete universals have progression. And this progression is not an interesting nonessential, but our very life-imperative, both categorical and hypothetical. (4.3.) Such a thinking operates with universals as any thinking does, to be sure. But the difference is that this Chinese body thinking operates with concrete bodily universals roughly divisible into three sorts: common names, sign graphics, and story-summarized concretes.

4.1. The Spread. Chinese body thinking spreads from myself as the bodily center to all under-Heaven. How is it possible? We considered previously demonstratives as to how they are both individual particulars and general universals, how in this "both" there exists the warranty for the metaphorical tie between the I and the this, the this and the that. This relational activity has the power to turn the unfamiliar that into the new this. And this is how the metaphorical expansion of our knowledge goes. Now we can consider why the turning of strange things into the familiars, the family of our known this's, comes about, in the first place. The reason is something ontological, that is, something intimate (innermost) to our being, at the base of what we call "morality." It goes as follows. The demonstrative "I" is at the base of all other demonstratives--here, this, that, now, then, etc.

Let us consider

"L" then. "I" means an active immediate self-presence. "Presence" is a being-before b; self-presence is a itself as b being-before b, I myself immediately being-before, present to, myself. Here I automatically (that is, of myself) accept myself; self-presence is self-acceptance.’ And so one is always at home in oneself. One is never negatively predisposed to oneself; one never accuses oneself. MerleauPonty put it well: Merleau-Ponty used this point to support Sartre's "absolute freedom" (see the next footnote), not realizing that this goes against Sartre's basic ontological formula of the For-Itself as self-nihilation, which is opposed to self-acceptance. Merleau-Ponty may have shown, perhaps unwittingly, that at the base of self-nihilation is an In-Itself-like self-acceptance; I have to survey all the self-split of the For-Itself as "it is not what it is; it is what it is not" and take it all in as mine. ^ Maurice

Merleau-Ponty,

Phenomenology

of Perception,

tr. by

Colin

Smith,

N.

Y.:

The

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PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING

"For myself I am neither ‘jealous,’ . . . nor ‘hunchbacked,' nor ‘a civil servant." It is often a matter of surprise that the cripple or the invalid can put up with himself. The reason is that such people are not for themselves deformed or at death's door. Until the final coma, the dying man is inhabited by a consciousness, he is all that he sees, Consciousness can never objectify itself into invalid-consciousness or cripple-consciousness, and even if the old man complains of his age or the cripple of his deformity, they can do so only by comparing themselves with others, . . "

One is never "hunchbacked" or "handsome" to oneself; no one takes oneself as "ugly" or "deformed." These epithets are judgments from outside. Even an Al Capone would say, "I am the kindest man in the world," for he is automatically, that is, immediately,

intimately, tender

and kind to himself. Such one's natural kindness to oneself is due to one's being kin-to oneself because, finally speaking, one is oneself. Without this law of identity at the core of oneself, one simply loses one's identity, and one loses oneself. If a ship were not always ship but can be anything that is not ship, then "ship" will cease to exist, as Aristotle correctly pointed out in his Metaphysics, Book III.' This ontological law of identity implies self-immediacy, which is one's intimate relation to oneself, And intimate relation bespeaks kinship, where tender kindness prevails naturally. Thus one is always tender and kind to oneself, naturally.

One is tender to oneself; one is

one's own tender spot, and tenders one's own aching tooth or injured leg. And this natural sense of kinship spreads to others; one cannot help it. One is jolted by, thereby become tender to, the sight of an ox tremblingly led to sacrificial slaughter or the scene of an unwary baby about to crawl into well, as Mencius observed.

One is as much "tender

to" an exigent situation as one's own sore spot is to the touch.’ Humanities Press, 1962, p. 434.

! This is why, incidentally, religious remorse--the so-called "repentance"--is an ontological crisis, a self-crumbling that requires healing and rescue from the Beyond-Outside. ^ A mother's sudden (strong) urge to drown her bawling child in the bath is superficially similar to our sudden (however faint) jitters on spotting a child crawling into a well. Yet we can immediately see that they differ. The former does not deserve "a positive entry, however small, on the initial 'desirability matrix." But, with Mencius, we intuitively value the latter as the budding of humanness. This point has not been challenged in the history of ideas in China; Hsün Tzu at most raised another (possible) incident of fighting with elders for food and shelter

4. CONCRETE

UNIVERSALS IN CHINESE THINKING

103

And this is because one is kind to oneself. "Kindness" is basically one's relation to oneself; one is an immediate "kin" to oneself. One 13 tender to the sight of other's suffering because the sight is part, a tender place, of oneself. One feels akin--kin--to that suffering; pity 15 akin to kin, to kindness, expressed all too poignantly in tenderness, in both senses of the term, for one is tender to others because of one's being tender to the hurt, other's and one's. And to expand on all this is to become "moral," and finally to become truly "political." For doing so is to spread kindness from one's intimate tender self-acceptance to all others, by extending our kindness to our elders to others' elders, extending our tenderness to our tender-aged family members to others' tender-aged, said Mencius. All this shows why Chinese body thinking is morally inclined in its epistemology. Epistemology is moral because morality is at the base of knowledge, and this is because knowledge starts at one's intimate tender-kind presence to oneself. To affirm a name is to rectify the situation to fit the description of that name. To negate something is to shear off something inappropriate for a name, thereby negatively reinforce, that is,

af-firm, that name for that situation.

To continue in

this process of affirmation and negation is to expand our (moral) knowledge metaphorically, to expand our familiars, to widen our "family" of the knowns. If Chinese epistemology is moral, Chinese argumentation tends "existential." Confucius said that what is desirable of the superior man is to be slow in words and quick in action,” perhaps because he is quick in [discerning the] events and-so cautious in words. All examples of argument cited so far have situational implications as constitutive layers of hidden meaning. And "constitutive layers of meaning" are steps in concrete argumentation, almost to be called "ethical reasoning" in a wide sense. (For its philosophical significance, see Appendix 16.) (23/18, cf. 19/1). (The example of a mother's sudden negative urge and comments on it are proposed by Gary Watson in John Christman, ed., The Innder Citadel, Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 112-13.) Mencius took the ideal king to regard his people "as if hurt (shang, Mencius 4B20)." It was an extrapolation from the famous Classic of History (shu ching); cf. Legge's comments on this passage. The Classic, the earliest extant collection of public political ideals, mentions how the King should treat his people "as if having illness" (jo yu chi, 17/0433, 29/0373), "as if protectingnourishing [his own] baby" (jo pao ch'i tzu, 29/0382). ? Analects 4 :24, 1:14.

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PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING

Two actual examples can be given about situational reasoning. The first one is about a conversation with a professor! who gave a paper on Taoism: as a "violent" doctrine. Everyone thought he was wrong. Then a Taoist? sat with him at a dinner table, and politely reported to him that two persons said that it was about time someone exposed the truth about Taoism. The speaker was elated. Then the Taoist quietly reminded

him,

"It is I, who

is reputed to be a Taoist,

someone else's impression on your paper."

while, then sighed with a wry

smile,

who

'reported'

The speaker was silent for a

"You

the inscrutable

Oriental!"

The point is subtle but clear. The speaker agreed to (the report of) the Taoist who was absolutely nonviolent, thereby agreeing that Taoism is nonviolent; the way the Taoist behaved did him in. Another example concerns a Buddhist who was asked how compassion and emptiness could possibly be the two wings of Buddhist teaching, for we must have compassion on beings whose existence emptiness denies. The Buddhist said that he did not have an answer but that he would go back and study more, and warmly smiled at the inquirer, and then gently massaged the aching back of the inquirer. In his not-having-answers he was empty; in his smiling and massaging he was compassionate. Thus the Buddhist achieved the unity of emptiness and compassion; he answered the inquirer--via his total manner of existence. Chinese body thinking, both in its epistemology and its argumentation, is thus an "ethical reasoning" of a sort, via a hermeneutics of intimate self-knowledge, self-presence. As ethicoontological, Chinese body thinking is intimately hidden in existence. We see how bad people don't want to be exposed to the public; nor do good people. For it hurts (when one is bad) or embarrasses (when one is good) to be exposed. Morality thrives in secret; there is something unnatural and difficult about a "Good men; good deeds" campaign. And "judge not; let no right hand see what good the left hand does; take no revenge, for ‘Vengeance is the Lord's'." "Doing good, approach no fame; doing evil, approach no cane."’ This is because morality belongs to the secret core of our being; it is something intimate, a part of us, ! Professor James Buchanan, in the early 1980's in Montreal. 2 Myself. > These are free renderings of Matthews 7:1, 6:3, Romans Tzu, Chapter Three, respectively.

12:19, and the beginning of Chuang

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what constitutes us as human. To "behave" is to be, humanly. 4.2. The Imperative. The above consideration amounts to saying that such an ethico-ontological progression of our thinking and knowing is not an interesting nonessential but belongs to our very lifeimperative, both categorical and hypothetical. The progression from my bodily center to all under-Heaven is categorical in that, positively, it is what it means to be human, it is a human sprout that grows inevitably, that is, empathetically in an ineluctable and unbearable manner. To oppose it is to commit a strange sort of existential inconsistency; "your grace reaches birds and animals, dear King, yet fails to reach your own dear people."' | The progression is an exigently hypothetical imperative because, on the one hand, without it, that 1s, per impossibile stopping it, we cannot even preserve our own family, nay, our own bodily selves, and on the other hand, to tender its growth 1s to prosper together, one and all. We cannot help but choose between these two opposing alternatives, and our choice is made by how we behave, whether to cultivate or stifle our sprout of humanness. That is, our survival together exigently depends on our choice whether to cultivate the progression by seeking (ch'iu) it and pondering (ssz) on it, or to neglect it, resulting in self-abandonment (tzu ch'i).^ Here there is no distinction between self-preservation and cosurvival, or selfishness and altruism; to go for one is to benefit the other. In this unbearable (pu jen) unstoppable (pu te i) exigency of our empathy 15 our ontological necessity that is ethical. In the categorical character of the spread of this unbearable empathy is our ethical necessity that 1s ontological. And this ontological necessity is human to the extent that it 1s ethical. For at the level of animals the urge to preserve oneself and one's immediate

family

is automatic

and

immediate,

that

is, "instinctive."

Nothing is more beautiful than to see how mother animals protect and raise their young. But then animals fight against other animals of their ! This is Mencius' urgent nudging to King Hsüan of Ch'i in 1A7. ? Mencius said that not being able to dwell in humanness (jen) and [abide] by rightness (i) amounts to self-abandonment (4A10). For "tzu ch'i" (or "tzu pao tzu ch'i") James Legge has "throw oneself away." D. C. Lau has "no confidence in himself." Lin Yutang has "give up hope in oneself, lose self-confidence (self-respect), self-degradation" in his Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1972, p. 1211, line 15-18. R. H. Mathews has "reckless; to throw oneself away; blind to one's own interests; unambitious" in his Chinese-English Dictionary, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977, p. 1208 (item No. 145)

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kind to secure and defend their turf. Only the humans raise this immediate feeling of self-kinship to the level of universal co-thriving, symbiosis of all under-Heaven. This raising requires a conscious effort; we call this effort ethical achievement of humanness. This effort is none other than our conscientious seeking (ch'iu) and pondering (ssu)' that is the cultivation of our innermost resonance, our automatic response to the suffering of others seeming unrelated to us, even an ox we have not previously seen. Perhaps this is the seed of altruism (other-ism). Morality stems from our intimate feeling of pain when we get hurt, the pain that results from our intimate self-presence at the scene of others suffering. The jolted alarmed pity (156 yin), the unbearable empathy (pu jen), at meeting the suffering of others is an integral part of (bodily-)self-preservation (pao shen). How the self and the other are related is a mystery; they are so tightly together. Here the intimacy of self-presence is the immediacy of pain when someone is hurt, and whether that "someone"

is oneself or someone

else matters

little. All this is intimately instinctual.’ But this immediate pain, that "unbearable heart," must be cultivated. And here lies the human difference. Unless actively cultivated (as the farmer cultivates his crops), this self-ish and altruistic instinct will wither and die. This is self-abandonment that no animal would do. Only humans are capable of self-abandonment, because only humans ought to preserve themselves and extend such preservation to others and their elders and tender-aged. Only humans ought to ponder on it and seek it. Such is the concrete universality of Chinese body thinking. 4.3. Concrete Universals. Such a concrete thinking operates with universals as any other thinking does. The difference is that this Chinese body thinking operates with concrete bodily universals. We consider first (4.3.1.) what these concrete universals are, then (4.3.2.) how my body originates them. 4.3.1. Let us first consider what sorts of concrete universals Chinese body thinking has. It has at least three kinds: common names, sign graphics, and story-summarized concretes. These concrete universals can be called inevitable universals. Chinese thinking produces common names out of usual nouns, | "Pondering" here could be instructively compared to "thoughtfulness." 2 Dogs howl at hearing their fellow dog yelp in pain.

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verbs and adjectives. These concrete nouns "bleed" general universal significance for daily living, for dynastic periods, for many situations, for history. (See Appendix 18.) In this manner concrete names serve as concrete universals. Five Primary Elements (wu hsing) (metal, wood, water, fire, earth),' and Twelve Branches (shih-erh chih) (twelve common animals-mouse, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, lamb, money, rooster, dog, swine) are correlated with zodiac, hours, years, human characters, etc.’

This is an example of common names as universals. Sixty-four Hexagrams are sixty-four types of activities--verbs--compressed into sixty-four types of paradigmatic situations. This is an example of common verbs as universals. Finally, in Chinese medicine many adjectives are used to typify bodily disharmonies. The Six Pernicious Influences (/iu yin), for instance, list the six climatic (internal as well as external) phenomena--Windy, Cold, Fiery-Hot, Damp,, Dry, and Summery-Hot.* The second group of Chinese concrete universals is sign graphics. These are configurative patterns, almost painterly, inspired by natural objects. The above mentioned Hexagrams are really patterns analogous to oracular bone scripts obtained from making cracks on tortoise shells or bones (chia ku wen). Chinese scripts called "characters" are ideographs originating in this tradition. Originally indicative of specific concretes only suggestive of meaning, these patterns are filled with layers of implications, always situational, and always suggestive of general meanings. In the perceptive is the

! See Appendix 18. ? For a convenient summary of these correlations, see Lin Yü-tang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1972, Appendix A, pp. 1451-1452. See also Mathew's Chinese-English Dictionary, Revised American Edition, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977, pp. 1176-77. Cf. also Suzanne White, Suzanne White's Book of Chinese Chance, N. Y.: M. Evans and Co., 1976. > The I Ching or Book of Changes, The Richard Wilhelm Cary F. Baynes, Princeton: Princeton University Press, comprehensive essay on the matter available in English.

Translation rendered into English by 1967, etc. is stillthe best and most

* For a most intelligible and comprehensive explication of Chinese medicine, see Ted J. Kaptchuk, The Web That Has No Weaver: Understanding Chinese Medicine, N. Y.: Congdon and Weed, 1983. The Six Pernicious Influences appear on p. 127, et passim. See also Ilza Veith, tr., The Yellow Emperor's Classic of Internal Medicine, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949, 1966, etc.

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circumstantial, in the painting is the poetic'--in short, in the concrete is the universal. These sign graphics can and did become horoscopic, numerological, and occultic. Fortunately, the scholarly circle did not think much of these trends. These graphics hover between pure formal theoreticals and pure empiricals, unifying them both. These graphics are like the word "holiday," religious holy day turned conventional vacation. They produce their power of signification through concrete metaphoring and its patterning, its systemization. The third form Chinese concrete universals can take 1s, for want

of a better term, story-summarized concretes. They come in many ways, but perhaps conveniently we can see three sorts--conceptual concretes, common (likely) experience, and historical incidents and stories. Each idea is neatly packed in a gnomic phrase of two or four characters that sum up a story of memorable experience. Summarized concretes are really summary stories, a short, short story enshrined in a phrase, which can be as long as four characters or as short as one. For Chinese thinking is a storytelling thinking; it functions by stories and gnomic phrases. "Story" is a shorthand expression of concrete experienced reality; "gnomic phrase" is a short-shorthand expression of a story; "concept" is so shorthand an expression of a gnomic phrase that a concept is either unobtrusively embedded in a character or two of common use, or circulates in the form of a gnomic phrase of two or four characters. This indicates that in China "universal" exists

as

a short-short-shorthand

compression,

that

is, a story,

or a

gnomic phrase, of concrete reality. Universals are compacted concretes arrived at by our metaphoric-ironic thinking that cooks and composes "concentrates" (not extracts) of historical actuality. Conceptual concretes are something like "[May] happy omens [come] as wished" (chi hsiangju i), where both "chi" and "hsiang" mean concrete-conceptual "lucky omen, auspicious fortune." Zi is the grain of wood or jade, which has come to mean the principle running through things and events. Luo is a net, a connection. Combined with ching (pass through) "ching luo" is the medical Meridian, that is, the web of

channels for blood and vitality through the body. Combined with "meh" (pulse), "meh luo" is "vein" or "grain" or "thread (as in thought)." Phrases of common experience abound in Chinese essays and

i Wang Wei was a painter and a poet. Su Shih said of him, "Read carefully the poems of Mochieh (Wang Wei), and you will see that there are paintings in his poems. Look carefully at the paintings of Mo-chieh, and you will find that there are poems in his paintings." Lin Yü-tang, tr., The Chinese Theory of Art, N. Y.: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1967, p. 95.

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conversation. "[By] a-falling leaf, know the-fall-season" (loh yeh chih ch'iu) means reading the signs of the times by a small incident. Similarly with phrases of likely experience. "Pulling-up seedlings [to] help [them] grow" (yah miao chu chang) came from Mencius's own concocted story’ appealing to our common sense (our likely experience, thought-experiment) to advise us not to help our precious spontaneous growth of human[e]ness-? Since history is my socio-ontological root as my body is my ontologico-social root, metaphorical argumentation that originates in my bodily self naturally takes on an historical dimension. As I argue metaphorically from myself, so we argue mythically from history, our common root. The Chinese people tell stories from history to teach themselves how to behave in the world. "We must learn from history; we ought to live by our tradition," so they keep telling themselves. Historical stories are used to make points in the arguments, and even constitute the arguments themselves. A story of "Darmok--The Children of Tarma" in the TV saga, Star Trek: The Next Generation; tells of the "Children of Tarma" who talk and think only in mythical stories; they have no abstract expression such as "Thank you." The story above tells us, in effect, that to think concretely 15 to think in stories. It is to think in coherent metaphors of a historical tradition. To communicate with such a historical thinking is to share one's root with the other; it is a body thinking in togetherness, to commit bodily to the other, to compose a symbiotic front against a common enemy. And the story of the children of Tarma tells us all this in a storyform, historically, mythically, metaphorically. The children of Tarma tell stories to communicate. They are story-thinkers, concrete historical thinkers*; they are "Chinese" people. Mencius, 2A2. 2 Incidentally, this Mencian phrase-concept is significant for its Taoist strain. ? Produced sometime in the fall of 1991. This excellant example is a saga full of symbolic significance; the saga tells of the time when the Western abstract theoretical mind (Capt. Picard of Star Fleet) has achieved the future of space exploration into the novel, then meets the children of concrete thinking. We need each other, life to life, to make together a symbiotic community of cultural differences. It is necessary for mutual survival, as was the case in this particular episode. * See my History, Thinking, 1991, especially Part One. 5

In

C

.

.

and Literature

.

.

.

in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei: Academia

.

.

.

Sinica,

China, this concrete communication is carried to an extreme, a concretization of the argument

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PART TWO: CHINESE

BODY THINKING

Theoretical forms, devoid of concrete contents, can be grasped conceptually once the meanings of their constitutive terms are known. Graphic gnomic phrases, being compacted concrete stories, cannot be understood even after the meanings of those terms that make up the phrase are known; "push knock" (t'ui ch'iao) makes little sense even if we know what "push" and "knock" mean, any more than does "not bearing people (pu jen)." After knowing each word in the phrase, one would still often be at a loss as to what is conveyed without understanding the content of the historico-mythical story and its interpretive tradition. For example, "Push, knock" (t'ui ch'iao) makes no sense until we remember the story of Chia Tao riding horseback, pondering on whether "monk pushing the moon-lit door" or "monk knocking the moon-lit door" is better, bumping into Han Yü, who, impressed, decided on "knock." Here history is internal-essential to meaning. If one wonders why this is the case, a reply would be that history is a story, and story reveals life as nothing else can. Lin Yutang's words recur? (that perhaps puts Sartre upside down’): "The purpose of a short story is, I believe, that the reader shall come away with the satisfactory feeling that a particular insight into human character has been gained, or that his knowledge of life has been deepened, or that pity, love, or sympathy for a human being has been awakened. . . . The instinct to listen to a good story is as old as humanity itself." It

is

natural,

then,

that

the

graphic

concretes,

"concrete

universals," that make up Chinese thinking-writings are really compressed stories. This is why historical precedents are told in stories and compacted into handy gnomic phrases, such as "push, knock" cited itself where the argument is unintelligible without the concrete contents within it. i Literally, "door under the-moon" (yüeh hsia men).

soon.

We will consider this and other stories very

? Lin Yutang, Famous Chinese Short Stories, N. Y.: John Day Company and Pocket Books, Inc., 1948, 1951, 1952, p. xi. + For Sartre said that we always falsify facts by telling stories, although he agrees with Lin that we just love to tell stories. For Sartre we always tell tall stories; for Lin our storytelling reveals our life.

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UNIVERSALS IN CHINESE THINKING

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Then, for an abstract notion of "contradiction" we have in China

a phrase, "spear shield" (mau tun), which is unintelligible until we hear its origin, a story told by Han Fei Tzu:! "A-man from-Ch'u was-selling spears, shields. Praising them, he-said: My shields are so-hard-that [of all] things none can defeat-them. Again, praising his spears, he-said: My spears are so-sharp-that [of all] things none can defeat-them. Someone said: What if with your spear [I were to] defeat your shield? That man was not able-to respond." Again, to say "considering the right word" is abstract, for which we have in China "push, knock" (t'ui ch'iao). The phrase is again unintelligible until we hear a famous story behind it: "Arriving-at the-City for the-Examination, [Chia] Tao rode ona-mule composing a-poem. He-got 'Monk push under moon gate. 'Desiring-to correct 'push' as 'knock, he-drew hand postures, 'push, 'knock, undecided. [His-mule- Junwittingly bumped Governor Han Yii['s horse]; so [he] told [him] all [about it. Yü said: The-word 'knock' is good. Whereupon, reins abreast, [they went-on] discussing poetry."

Finally, "Boiling beans [with] burning beanstalks" (chu tou jan ch'i) came from a sad story of a poem by a genius poet Ts'ao Chih, forced forth (in seven steps, on pain of death) by the decree of his jealous brother emperor Ts'ao Ts'ao. The phrase, itself so trivial, comes alive charged with two heartrending lines, “stalks under pot burning, beans inside pot crying; Originally of same root burn, mutually boiling why so dire?

The four character phrase, "boiling beans, burning stalks,”

sums up the poignant story to represent a concept of "family feud,"

! This famous story appears in the early part of Han Fei Tzu, Chapter Thirty-Six, Nan I (collection

of difficulties, No. 1).

? Annals of T'ang Poetry (T'ang Shih Chi Shih), No. 40. Such anecdotes abound in China; their anthologies are legion. Two in English come to mind; no comments on their merits. Arthur H. Smith, Proverbs and Common Sayings from the Chinese: Together with Much Related and Unrelated Matter, Interspersed with Observations on Chinese Things in General, N. Y.: Paragon Book Reprint Corp. and Dover Publications, Inc., 1965 (1914); C. C. Sun, 45 the Saying Goes: An Annotated Anthology of Chinese and Equivalent English Sayings and Expressions, and an Introduction to Xiehouyü (Chinese Wit), Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1981.

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without leaving the situation of family feud.' (See Appendix 19.) Here the thinking's connection to concrete historical content catches our attention. For instance, whoever would doubt the poetic punch of Peter Pan when he told us all to think pleasant thoughts to fly to Never Land? Whoever would doubt that it means that our pleasant thoughts lift us up to a positive posture in life, but that to say as we just did fatally leaves out that powerful effectiveness of Peter Pan's imagery actually lifting us up in the child's smiling flight toward the Land so wonder-full that it simply has to be called Never Land? For to propose as Peter Pan did is itself pleasant--"pleasant thoughts," "can fly," "Never Land," in a boyish voice, with twinkling eyes. Peter Pan pre-sented, and thereby present-ed^ his proposal by performing (forming by performing) it; in fact, "Peter Pan" himself is as Peter-Pan-esquely pleasant as his proposal is--cute, clean, mischievous, flying, singing, mythical--and who does not like the Never Land of myth, a pleasant thought demanding nothing, simply relaxing us to live out our enjoyment? Having said all this, however, whoever would have thought of incorporating such a Peter-Pan-esque punch into the serious process of thinking (argumentation)? For there is a crucial difference here. Peter Pan per-formed and lived his own proposal; we thought about it. To say as we did about Peter Pan, and add that such pleasant thoughts render us pleasantly positive, is rather bland, neither pleasant nor unpleasant; we are out of the magic of Peter Pan. Peter Pan does not belong to the realm of philosophical thinking--at least so we think in the West. By the same token, no one would doubt the power of Aram Khatchaturian's ballet, Spartacus, which reenacts that rebellious heroism

of the ancient Greek Slave of all slaves.

But few? in the West would

| This incident appears in Shih Shuo Hsin Yü, "Wen-Hsüeh P'ien (Chapter)." J. N. Mohanty (Transcendental Phenomenology: An Analytic Account, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989, p. 7) distinguished a specific empirical description from a general philosophical one. This distinction is made possible by an "analytic" perspective, that is, from a theoretical standpoint. In China, the distinction may exist, but very subtly and almost imperceptibly. A general philosophical description such as "localized pain" is presented with a story-description of its circumstances and compressed into a gnomic phrase such as "boiling beans [with] burning beanstalks." ? "Pre-sented it" means brought it forth before our eyes, there-by he "present-ed it," that is, made it vividly present, at this moment, to us. 3 Except for Albert Camus who did the same in his The Myth of Sisyphus, N. Y.: Vintage, 1959. Even this rare case in the West is condemned and trivialized as "romantic and slightly self-

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think of bringing such extra-cognitive power of the poetico-historical into the realm of understanding and arguments. Yet the Chinese body thinking routinely does so in all its concrete thinking. All Chinese annals and chronicles are packed with thoughtful points and arguments.’ Thus stories, history, and concrete universals go together. For the Chinese lack of linguistic devices to distinguish among factuals, non-factuals, and counterfactuals, makes the argumentation

flexible in

regard to the past. Chinese historiography is full of have-beens and might-have-beens--thus concrete universals--in the counsels of imperial

strategists, court historians, itinerant teachers to tacitly guide, warn, and

remonstrate with rulers. | Confucius had the idealized past as his stock object lesson; Taoism thrives on skillful counterfactuals, story-arguments about the Never

Never

about,

moves

Land,

that had

better come

true.

Coming

from

facts,

counterfactuals are in touch with the world. Countering actuality, counterfactuals challenge this world. Being imagined, counterfactuals freely arouse the world's self-reassessment.” In fact, the above concrete universals--common names, sign graphics, story-summarized concretes--are all summaries of stories.’ The so-called "formal system of things's relations" are achieved in China by this art of collage (put-together) of stories and their summaries (in gnomic phrases), as well as their moving montage (one mounted on another) of argumentation. Chinese argumentation is a series of what-ifs and so-it-follows in a story form. Thus Chinese universals are concretely metaphorical (See Appendix 20.), to achieve concrete argumentation which is also metaphorical. 4.3.2. All in all, we see how all this describes my bodythinking. Here "body" means the locus of the thinking "I" that walks about;

the

locus

of thinking

is its arena

invisible

to

thinking itself, a sort of "demonstrative," as explained previously in this pitying" by a typical Western philosopher, Thomas Cambridge University Press, 1979, pp. 22-23). ' cf 199].

my

History,

Thinking,

and Literature

Nagel

(Mortal

in Chinese Philosophy,

Quesitons,

Cambridge:

Taipei: Academia

Sinica,

? For more details on Chinese counterfactuals, see my "Counterfactuals, Universals, and Chinese Thinking," Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies, December, 1989, pp. 1-43. 3 E

ven such seemingly abstract "commentaries"--in stories.

line-patterns

as

Hexagrams

have

their

spread-outs--called

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PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING

essay. "Body" means our thinking forming-forth itself (hence, performative), embodying what is thought, growing into the subject, the I. My body is (a) my behavioral arc (Merleau-Ponty), that is, the characteristic mode and shape of all my behaviors in life, (b) the "herenow" that starts, surrounds and imbues my behavior in life, and (c) the fulcrum and lever for my metaphysical horizon, that horizon itself. The problem is how my body can be all of these, that is, how they, being so different among themselves, can come together as so many aspects of one focal point, my body, and one focal activity, my body-thinking. To trace out answers to this problem is the proper task of the philosophy of that incurably concrete sort, the philosophy of bodythinking. To answer this problem is to see how those three characteristics are three ways of describing the activity of my body, how they dovetail into one coherent description of my body-thinking. Let us begin by considering what existence is. Existence is never "existence as such," an empty abstraction. Existence is always concretely existing, never an abstraction, but is always existence "as something" concrete, and "something concrete" is always something "somewhere, sometime." But "sometime-where" is obtained by reference to, in terms of, the here-now. And the here-now 15 precisely what describes my body. Here the obtaining of sometime-where is accomplished by metaphorical extension of the here-now, as previously described. And this is possible because my body is here-now, that is, my body is part and parcel of this world, one of the physico-empirical concretes. Now things around me can only call me up (evocation) for their establishment, their af-firmation; they cannot affirm themselves as "existence as something sometime, somewhere." Merleau-Ponty's words recur:' "Our freedom does not destroy our situation, but gears itself to it: as long as we are alive, our situation 1s open, which implies both that it calls up specially favoured modes of resolution, and also that it is powerless to bring one into being by itself." To accomplish this metaphorical extension in response to the call (evocation) of things around me, my body, is the task of my body! Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, N. Y.: The Humanities Press, 1962, p. 442.

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thinking; hence, my body is my "behavioral arc." This "arc" is my horizon of the world, the world of my living,’ my ethico-ontological world. The traditional Chinese ideal of "all-under Heaven [to be] made public" (t'ien hsia wei kung) is "made" in this way, this body-thinking way, and the "public" here is ethico-cosmic, that is, bodilymetaphysical. Such universality is how Chinese body-thinking operates and what it accomplishes. Thus in Chinese thinking, epistemology is a bodily hermeneutics (ch'üan, tw) into the heartmind; consider how Mencius penetratingly caught King Hsüan's secret empathy, unbearably intense, with the jitters of an ox being dragged to sacrificial slaughter. This empathy is identified as what he shares with everyone human.’ This insight was then used to urge the King; the King's heartfelt jitters must be expandedgeneralized throughout his political realm; otherwise, Mencius reminded the King, a strange inconsistency will result! How could the King empathize with animals but not with his own people?* And this selfcontradiction of failing to extend heartfelt jitters for animals to jitters for people shall in the end cost the King's power and his own family. In other words, Mencius' probing heartmind hermeneutics? is for the sake of moral rectification of name, the name of human(e)ness.' And this name-rectification should initiate the sharing of what the ruler's needs and loves with his people, the spread of his central-heart where "[he] cannot bear [to see], [what he] cannot help [but do and feel]," that is, his com-passionate feeling for animals and people around him.* Furthermore, such a sociopolitical sharing has been what is handed down to us since ancient days as our moral-political-cosmic imperative. ! Cf. Husserl's Lebenswelt, our lifeworld. 2 Mencius, 1A7. ὁ Mencius 7831. * Mencius 1A7. > Mencius 147. ° Mencius 647.

1 Mencius 246, 646. 8 Mencius 181, 2; 1B4, 5; 4832.

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"Ancient people are good at pushing-applying (t'ui) what is [naturally] done"; namely, "eldering one's elders to reach (chi) eldering others's elders." This is our historical tradition; the ruler must revere it and carry it on? The sharing amounts to historico-cosmological togetherness. Thus, in short,

"Mencius said, 'Words close-by and pointing far, are good words. Holding-on-to the-essential and giving-it wideapplication, is a-good way... . The superior [gentle]man holdsto his bodily cultivation and all-under Heaven [are at] peace."

What makes possible the togetherness of all these normative hermeneutics, morality, and politico-historico-cosmological unity*, is this evocative probing and this metaphorical expanding. These make up the Chinese "universals." And so, as was said above, Chinese universals carry with them a normative imperative to actively seek (ch'iu) and think (ssu) after this connection.

That is, the core-heart of alarm in us we notice is none other

than our very nature of being human(e) (jen) that traditionally carries the force of universal concord throughout all things "under Heaven." So far we have been considering what "universality" could mean in Chinese body thinking; it spreads from the I to the this, then to the that, then to everywhere. This "spread" constitutes the concrete universality of body thinking. We now must note that this spread is not just spatial, from the I to the this to the that and so on. The spread 15 also historical, in time.

Chinese thinking 15 a peculiarly body thinking because it is itself an itinerary of embodying (the process of) thinking. This is why genetic, situational, historical understanding of a theory is an absolute Except for Albert Camus who did the same in his The Myth of Sisyphus, N. Y.: Vintage, 1959. Even this rare case in the West is condemned and trivialized as "romantic and slightly selfpitying" by a typical Western philosopher, Thomas Nagel (Mortal Quesitons, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, pp. 22-23). ? For more details on Chinese counterfactuals, see my "Counter-factuals, Universals, and Chinese Thinking," Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies, December, 1989, pp. 1-43. > Cf. Mencius 7832. * Cf. Mencius 7A13. ? Cf. Mencius 6A6.

? Mencius 2A6, 4A3, 10, 6A6, 6B3, 7A45.

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UNIVERSALS IN CHINESE THINKING

117

must. In fact, the entire description of this essay concerning how our body thinks, that is, how our body thinking develops (evolves, extends) from a particular bodily locus to universal validity of knowledge is a genetic understanding of thinking. This is what validates the historical understanding of Chinese philosophy and the emphasis on interpretive tradition in Chinese textual understanding, which are at the heart of all Chinese philosophers. (See Appendix 21.) Before concluding this section, let us look at what has been considered in a broadest possible manner. On the one hand, this section shows

that all things

in nature

have

human

(that

is, ethical,

social,

political) significance. Besides stories from nature (an ox trembling, the Ox Mountain)', all concrete universals cited above are imbued with human flavor. A conspicuous example is the Chinese Zodiac signs that use animals to indicate human personalities. On the other hand, the reverse is also true: All human affairs have cosmic--that is, natural, universal, ontological--significance. What

is notable is that this cosmic universal aspect of Chinese body thinking is free-flowing in all its vitality. "My Tao, with one [thread, please] run-through," told Confucius to a disciple of his, Tseng Tzu. And out came two characters, chung and Shu,

truthfulness

to

oneself

and

to

others,

or

loyalty

and

considerateness.? They are what Tseng Tzu took to be the "universals" running through Confucius's teaching and living. But it can be equally and convincingly said that filiality (hsiao) and brotherhood (ti) at the root of humanity (jen), and all these three, are Confucius's universals, or decorum-ritual (li), or Heaven (t'ien), or

love of learning (hao hsüeh), or virtue (fe), or enjoyment (loh, yao)‘, or

' The trembling ox is in Mencius 1A7; the Ox Mountain is in 6A8. I cite from a typical Confucian who is supposedly human, all too human. Taoism is more obviously intimate in its description of nature as human and in its description of the human as natural.

2 Analects, 4:15. 3 Analects, 1:2. + John C. H. Wu has joy], Taipei: Tung-ta happiness (loh, yao); (yüeh)," as Chapter 8 pp.65-73. See also,

two chapters (in Nei hsin Yüeh-loh chih Yüan-ch'üan [the fountain of inner T'u-shu Kung-ssu, 1989) on the essence of Confucius as a man of sheer Lin Yutang has a chapter on the Confucian ideal of "government by music in his Between Tears and Laughter, N. Y.: The John Day Company, 1943, Chang, Hui-hui, ed., Chun-kuo Ku-tai Yüeh Chiao Ssu-hsiang Lun-chi

[collection of ideas on teachings of music in ancient China], Taipei: Wen-chin Ch'u-pan Sheh, 1991. "Loh (happy)," "Yao (enjoy)," and "Yüeh (music)" are three different meanings and pronunciations of this selfsame pregnant Chinese character.

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PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING

straightness (chih)', or even unspeakable naturalness?, are Confucius's universals. And at the same time, in a// these flexible choices of universals, Confucius stands out as typically Confucius and no other. Here is nothing arbitrary; Confucius's universals are freely multifarious and uniquely typical of Confucius. The point is that Confucius's thinking is alive, that is, his thinking is his living and teaching, and his practices of living-teaching are his thinking, so much so that. his "universals" can be seen from an indefinite number of angles. Thinking is living, expressing itself variously in its various universals. This does not mean that anything goes in life, but that things in life-thinking are flexible and growing. The flowing freedom of Confucius's multifarious universals in his living-teaching-thinking reminds us of the grass style (540 shu) of Chinese calligraphy. As the grass sways to and fro with the wind blowing this way and that, so the brush freely flows at the inspiration of the moment. Hence, the grass style, the rapid cursive draft, grassy in the wind of life-inspiration. Yet in all its free sways the grass expresses itself as this specific kind of grass and no other. Similarly, although each time the character is written differently even by the same writer, the brush strokes invariably adumbrate a particular character and no other. The grassy strokes, in all their free various flows, express both that character and the character of that writer. Here many-ness and oneness come together in the free varied wind(s) of inspiration. And mind you, Chinese characters are themselves universals, suggestive of meanings in situations, and that concretely; they are ideograms.

Analects, 12:20, 13:18, 18:2, etc. 2 Analects, 11:25. ? This is one of the reasons why Analects is not rigidly treatises.

systematized

as in usual theoretical

* Ts'ao can mean grass, rapid, to draft, to pioneer, and (540 shu is usually translated as "rapid, cursive style of writing." Cf. Lin Yütang's Chinese-English Dictionary of Modern Usage, The Chinese university of Hong Kong, 1972, p. 256. It is interesting to note that "draft" connotes both a current of air or wind and rough, quick, and preliminary outline or plan. These two meanings are internally related, if "wind" is taken as inspiration. > This wind-grass relation has ethico-political significance. Confucius said, "You govern; why use killing? You desire good and people [will be] good. The superior's virtue is wind; the small man's virtue is grass. The wind over grass surely bends [it]" (Analects, 12:19). This famous analogy is quoted in Mencius 3A2.

4. CONCRETE

UNIVERSALS IN CHINESE THINKING

119

Herbert Read said:!

"[W]hat is . . . distinctive about Chinese calligraphy is. . . that it is not a separate . . . craft, but an essential element in the artistic life of the Chinese people. . . [T]his is a universal principle... all art... should . . . be organically vital. In Chinese calligraphy, . . . the main principle is . . . lively movement." This "lively movement" is the blowing of the inspiration of nature. Amaury de Riencourt said.

wind

of life,

the

"The . . . calligrapher . . . Wang Hsi-chih defined his art [saying], 'Every horizontal stroke is like a mass of clouds in battle formation, . . . every dot like a falling rock . . . every drawn-out line like a dry vine of great old age... .' Every artist had his own personal style of writing which he developed from his observations of nature: the bending of a reed under the wind, the struggle between a tiger and a . . . snake, a waterfall dissolving into a misty cloud." Writing is thinking in living in nature, imbuing the vital movement of nature. We shall soon see this aspect by considering ch'i, the breath-energy of cosmic nature that freely flows throughout human living, whether individual or social. All this is not surprising if the human body thinking has its lively and inevitable metaphorical extension throughout the universe. We have considered the human side of the universality in body thinking. We have to consider the cosmic side of such bodily universality, on how the cosmic-natural energy of ch'i flows through the human life. It flows through the hiddenness of the I to the reciprocity of I and Thou. The first theme of hiddenness of the I we now consider in section 5; the second theme of personal reciprocity belongs to section 6. Then the flow itself will be treated in section 7.

Chiang Yee, Chinese Calligraphy: An Introduction to Its Aesthetic and Technique, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973, etc., p. viii. 2 Amaury de Riencourt, The Soul of China, N. Y.: Harper and Row, 1958, 1965, pp. 6-7. Cf. my "Chinese Aesthetics," in Robert E. Allinson, ed., Understanding the Chinese Mind: The Philosophical Roots, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 236-64.

120

PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING

S. The Hiddenness of the "I." We have seen how the "I" undergirds the "this"; the "this" metaphorically expands to the "that" and all "affirmations" came about af-firmed, in a compact manner; and affirmation goes through negation to consolidate itself, ironically. We see here that all thinking (understanding, arguing) is based on, emerges from, and spreads out from the self that is concretely situated here and now, as shown in demonstratives and metaphor. What are the consequences of all this? Nothing short of extraordinary; we see here a sort of thinking that contrasts with what has been circulating as "thinking"--formal, theoretical, analytical, abstract.

Theoretical thinking has been traditionally taken to be the only kind there is. Whitehead characterizes it as an airplane flight from and then toward particular concretes; the problem here is that once flown away--separated--from the concrete, thinking has difficulty coming back to it. The Western philosophy, traditionally having thrived on theoretical thinking, is shot through with yearnings and strivings to come back down to the concrete. Hume said, for instance, that logical necessity tells us nothing we did not know before, sensory experience tells us nothing necessarily true, and the twain shall never meet. Kant said that concept without percept is empty and percept without concept is blind, and his proposal of synthetic a priori judgment is a label more than a solution to how theoretical thinking can come back to concrete particulars. Idealisms of Hegel and Bradley, trying to explain the universe with pure logical schematization, ended up in Berkeleyan solipsism, attacked by modern logical "therapists" such as those in the Vienna Circle and by Wittgenstein later. The "therapy" of word and concept usage ("Common sense," for instance) gives us no new factual information. The "profundity" of the logician Quine's ontology is a "brilliant solution" to a conundrum concocted out of thinking's theoretical flight from the concrete. No wonder there came along Richard Rorty's "end of philosophy" as logical speculation, and his proposal of philosophy as an edifying discourse, to which there understandably arose an attack on it as merely a rhetorical-sophistic exercise. Deconstructionists are in the meantime busy interpreting interpretations of texts which are themselves interpretations. The notorious "hermeneutical circle" is as insoluble as logical "psychologism" of Mill, Brentano, and Husserl. And the list goes on and on. What we should remember in all this is that all this is a consequence of our thinking, having left from the concrete like an

5. THE HIDDENNESS OF THE "T"

121

airplane, trying in vain to descend back to the bodily perceptual ground. In contrast, concrete thinking has no airplane flight, and so it can have metaphysics that is both contingent and necessary. In the following we consider three points: (5.1.) The base of all our thinking is the "I"; (5.2.) This "I" is hidden from our awareness; (5.3.) This "I" is structured in a threefold way. 5.1. The "I" as the Base of Thinking. To explain how all described above can be, let us consider "I am here."

This sentence 1s

concrete and tautological (necessary). For "I" existentially implies "here" and "here" implies "I," so much so that "I am not here" is existentially contradictory to the point of being unintelligible--though "logically" no "contradiction" can be detected. By the same token, "here" implies "this" (place), and "this" implies "here." And "here," as "this (place)," appears only where I am, bodily. And so "I am here," that is, "I am (in) this (place)," is bodily-internally-existentially tautological.’ From all this, we see that "I-this-here" is my root-bodilyreference point from which I come to understand the "this" out there beside me; this outer-"this" is outside of me, the first that I call "this."

Thus when I say "this" and understand it, I am already performing a metaphoric act of understanding the that in terms of the this; here the this is "I" and the that is "this." The "I" here is the non-metaphoric point of initiation for my metaphoring, the activity of "I" pointing to "this." This pointing belongs to the essential activity of the "I" as pro-jective, as my act of consciousness ("conscious of") thrusting myself forward beyond myself. We see now how factual ("contingent") yet ontologically inevitable ("necessary") this metaphoric move of the "I" is. All this is an explanation of what was exigently urged by Kao Yao in the C/assic of History (Shu Ching): "Be-scrupulous-about [having] your bodily-life cultivated, thinking far-and-long. Generously put-in-order distinctions-ofnine-classes of families; [then] people-at-large, enlightened, willbe-encouraged-in service. That-the-close-by can [go] far, lies here."

' In fairness one must note that Samuel's "Here am I!" in response to the Lord's call (1 Samuel 3:4, 5) is more than a mere tautology. This is perhaps because "here" in this context emphaticaly connotes readiness in response. ^ James Legge has a different interpretation in his The Hong Kong University Press, 1960,pp. 69-70.

Chinese Classics:

III: The Shoo King,

122

PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING

Let us explain all this. When "that" is understood in terms of "this," "that" becomes something (newly made) familiar, that is, a new "this."

We

then

move

on,

from

this new

"this,"

to a new

"that',"

metaphorically; we understand the that' in terms of the now familiar that which is a new this. This is a replication, in a new setting, of understanding new "that" in terms of new "this." And so, the metaphorical move of the "I" toward the "this" to the "that" to the new "that" to, etc., is replications of the metaphoric move from "this" to "that," turning "that" into a new "this." All this finally becomes a metaphorical web of sundry "this's" and "that's," "this's" enriched by "that's" turning into new "this's." If "familiar" is a shorthand expression of "family resemblance," then this web is a family of things seen to belong together. This family web is now, if extended long enough, the world and its metaphysics. This is a concrete metaphysics that is as inevitable as family, and as concrete as history. All this family metaphysics comes from my bodily self; Chuang Tzu said in his Chapter on Equalizing of Things and Theories, "I and all things are one," that is, "one family." Metaphysics is what Mencius called the "treading-forth [of my bodily] form" (chien hsing, 7A38). Chinese metaphysics, instead of expanding on the studies of physis the cosmos in general, is really a "meta-medics," a veritable "hsing erh shang hsüeh," the body-self (hsing) metaphoring (erh) ana-logically (shang) to a metaphorical metaphysics (hsiieh) of all things as a family of beings. Bruce Holbrook says,' "There is one basic, universal Chinese scientific theory of which each discipline is a further specification, and Chinese medicine is at the center of and overlaps with all of them. That is, Chinese physics is partly Chinese medicine, Chinese social science is partly Chinese medicine, and so on. This is because each specific science--each aspect of the world, that is--is recognized in traditional Chinese culture as worth understanding for no other reason than to promote human survival and welfare. Survival and welfare are one with health. This is reflected by the Chinese proverb: Liang hsiang, liang i: He who makes a good scholar-official makes a good doctor." The

Chinese

"scholar-official"

। Bruce Holbrook, The Stone Monkey: An Morrow and Company, 1981, p.10.

would Alternative,

reply that Holbrook's

"human

Chinese-Scientific, Reality, N. Y.: William

5. THE HIDDENNESS OF THE "I"

123

survival and welfare" is a true reflection, not replacement, of cosmic survival and welfare, and that this is why every physics and astronomy is meta-medics, and every meta-medics is a veritable metaphysics. Actually,

this is what

all Chinese

philosophers

take

for granted,

and

what is explicitly stated in The Great Learning, The Doctrine of the Mean, and by all the Neo-Confucians. Thus after the this, is found in terms of myself, I can find the that as a new "this," we call "that" in terms of the familiar this,; this move from "this" to "that" is an act of metaphor. Since the new "this" was really (originally) a not-"this,," this move is always "wrong," meaning that the metaphoric move always surprises our accustomed frame and stock of knowledge (this,); this amounts to an increase in knowledge, a "contingency." And yet, such an increase is no random amassing of knowledge but belongs to a systematic inevitable ("necessary") connection, touched-off (hence, "contingent," from contingere, to touch) by metaphorical move of familiarization of the unfamiliar. . To quote from Mencius (1A7), to notice a trembling ox is one thing; to detect in it our innate unbearable feeling of compassion 15 another; to see in this innate intolerance the seed for human(e) government is a surprise. Who would have ever thought of understanding government in terms of ox-watching? What does an ox have to do with government? A factual contingent connection, indeed. And yet, once the novel connection is seen to hold, it is seen to hold inevitably and appropriately. Thus Mencius' insight here is both "contingent" and "necessary." A systematic connection of many a "there-then" constitutes the world. But "there" is as much a metaphoric extension of "here" as "then" is of "now." And "here-now" describes the "I." Kant said that all our categoreal reasonings came from our "subjective" distinction of the right hand from the left. All our reasoning is bodily, the "I" here-now. George Schrader's comments on this point bear quoting. He said,

! Kant should have added that this right-left distinction

is bodily, however.

? George Schrader in Charles W. Hendel, ed., The Philosophy of Kant and Our Modern World: Four Lectures Delivered at Yale University Commemorating the 150th Anniversary of the Death of Immanuel Kant, N. Y.: The Liberal Arts Press, 1957, pp. 30-33. Cf. Immanuel Kant, “On the First Ground of the Distinction of Regions in Space’ and ‘What is Orientation in Thinking?" in Stuart F. Spicker, ed., The Philosophy of the Body: Rejections of Cartesian Dualism, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970, pp. 90-97.

124

PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING "Immanuel Kant is the only philosopher who ever wrote an essay on... orientation. In 1786 he published an essay . . . : What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking? [Cassirer, IV, 349ff.| . . . It is really very simple to orient oneself geographically, he says, for I can always appeal to [my] right and... left hand. "Without the capacity to distinguish between motion from left to right and that in the opposite direction. . . I would be unable to determine a priori any difference in the position of objects... .' Thus I orient myself geographically by all the objective data of the sky only by virtue of a subjective ground of distinction [namely the right or the left hand]... ' [What Is Orientation in Thinking?" in Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy, tr. L. W. Beck (1949), p. 295.] This isa... simple observation, but not so ordinary . . . , for it lies at the base of Kant's theory of space and time, and thus of his theory of knowledge. One of the reasons which Kant gives for holding that space is intuited is the impossibility of . . . interchanging a right-hand for a left-hand glove. [Cf. Prolegomena zu einer jeden kunftigen Metaphysik, Sec. 13, Cassirer, IV, 34ff.; see also Von dem ersten Grunde des

Untershiedes der Gegenden im Raume, Cassirer, II. 395.] ... [I]n our intuition and construction of space, . . . the frame for... experience, we begin with our own body... . However elaborate and comprehensive our conception of space and the world in space may be, it is always tied to . . . our having a right and a left hand. . . . [A] map... is of little use unless he [a man lost in a forest] knows what actually is to the right and what is to the left. It is necessary to establish a connection between the map and the situation of one's own body before one can make an intelligent move. We must begin where we are, with our own existence. This shift in orientation from transcendent reality to the finite subject constituted an essential moment in the 'Copernican Revolution.' It gave rise to a reassessment of truth and a new interpretation of knowledge." Knowledge has, according to Kant, a "subjective ground" of right-left "distinction." The distinction is made on the matrix of "where we are," the "I" here now. My thinking involves an orientation in the world. My

5. THE HIDDENNESS OF THE "T"

125

world-orientation begins with the "I" who am "here and now" distinguishing my right hand from my left. The Chinese people also have been impressed with the right-left distinction and made much of it. One of their earliest writings, Shih Ching (the Classic of Poetry), abounds in references to this distinction.! "Right, left hands" (tso yu shou) stands for "mutual help" in the Sun Tzu? Since then, "right, left" was applied profusely to practical affairs; Mencius used the phrase often;* some armies during the Han period were named "right left guards" (tso yu wei), and the capital of T'ang dynasty, Ch'ang An, was structured Right Three Streets and Left Three Streets. And so on. Kant was not unmindful of "up, down" distinction, either, when he concluded his celebrated Critique of Practical Reason with the much quoted statement‘, "Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me." The up-down distinction was for Kant a conclusion to his theoretical probing into morality; the distinction is for Chinese people a beginning of their concrete understandings of life. A common Chinese phrase, "head-supporting the-skies, stand-founding the-ground (ting t'ien li ti)," initiates our up-down distinction at the root-reference point, my body.’ | Shih Ching, 38/3; 59/2, 3; 67/1; 79/3; 180/3; 211/3; 214/4; 220/1; 222/4; 235/1; 237/4; 238/1,2; 258/7; 263/2; 284/1; 304/7.

? Sun Tzu, "Chiu Ti" Chapter. > The phrase often means "all over," symbolizing universality.

* Mencius, 1B6,7; 2B10; 4B14, 31. ? Murohashi Tetsuji, Dai Kanwa Jiten (Taishukan Shuppansha, 1960, several pages (4:346-49) to the phrase, "right, left."

etc.), for instance, devotes

? One cannot help but notice, however, Kant's tendency to emphasize "the mind of thought" that flies away from the somatic "me" that initiates the "above"-"within" distinction. In contrast, among the Chinese people the up-down distinction has been predominantly concrete, as will be seen immediately. 7 The phrase appears in Yuan Ch'ü (Tunes in Yüan dynasty), "Chao Shih Ku Erh" (Mr. Chao the Orphan).

126

PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING

Shih Ching (The Classic of Poetry) used the phrase, "up, down"; so did Mencius.?

Since then, "up, down"

has never meant something abstract

but concrete matters such as ruler and subjects, superior position and inferior,

elderly

and

tender-aged,

heavens

and

earth,

mountain

and

marsh (or flat land), harvest year and lean, ascending and descending, etc.’

All these are concrete elaborations of the map of the world that is charted from our bodily distinctions of left, right, up, and down. A map is useless without its reference point, the "I" here and now. My thinking and my knowledge is based on the matrix of the "I" who am "here and now." All too naturally, I assume a posture of simple presence here now in my thinking; I talk about the past and the future as if I were present there, and indeed about every "there" as if it were "here" where I am. Someone claims that, astronomically, the sun is the center around which the earth revolves; metaphysically, the earth is the center around which all stars revolve. We must add that the "I"-here-now is the metaphysical center of astronomical thinking and objects, the earth, the sun,

the

stars,

and

everything

else

besides.

And

so,

naturally,

cosmology, an understanding of the world, is anthropomorphic; Chinese metaphysics is a homo-cosmology. Confucianism is morally and compactly so; Taoism is tacitly and ironically so. 5.2. The "I" as Tacit. The tacit dimension of the matrix of Ihere-now for thinking deserves a comment. No actual daily thinking pays attention to this basic fact, which is hidden from my attention, and can only be brought out ironically. We have to ask (1) why this is the case, and (2) how we came to find all this, by uniting the abstract theoretical thinking of the West and the concrete metaphorical thinking of China. The first point 1s to be considered immediately in the | Shih Ching, 136/1,2; 207/1; 258/2; 287/1. 2 Mencius, 1A1; 1B12; 3A2; 4Al, ruler and subjects.

Sometimes,

13; 5B3; 6A2; 6B6;

"down, up," as in 28/3; 33/2; 189/6. 7412;

7B2, 12, 18, often standing for

> Cf. Dai Kanwa Jiten, op. cit., 1:197-98. * When Whitehead said, "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato," he meant "Plato's general point of view" as well as "the wealth of general ideas scattered through them [his writings]." (A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, N. Y.: The Macmillan Company, 1929, 1957, p. 63; Corrected Edition, 1978, 1979, p. 39)

5. THE HIDDENNESS OF THE "I"

127

following. The second point shall be considered in section 7, after considering the interpersonal implications of the hiddenness of the self (section 6). First of all, why is the basic fact of the self as undergirding concrete thinking so persistently hidden from our attention? Why did not Chinese thinkers, much less philosophers in the West, explicate what is explicated above? Chinese thinkers merely go on telling stories and arguing in a peculiar metaphorical-ironic manner. Why did they not consider the self and its here-now situation as the matrix of their thinking? Because doing so will put a wrong emphasis and turn our attention away from whatever is talked about. Saying "I believe it is raining" would lose sight of "It is raining." In "Look at the moon!" we do not point at the finger; pointing at the finger would point us away from the moon.

The saying, "Look at that!" wants us to look at that, not

at the saying, "Look at that!" In "It is raining," "I believe that it is" is hidden. In the "that," the "this" is there (as the reference point, as a contrast, to bring about "that"), yet hidden. In our noticing the moon, the finger is there; yet, we do not notice the finger. The hedonistic paradox’ warns us that our pursuit of pleasure shall cause us to lose it. In "The Great Man is one not losing his heartmind of [the new-born] baby infant [in him?],"° the heartmind of an adult is obviously not the heartmind of a baby; the baby is there,

hidden.

When

we

walk,

we

attend to the scenery

destination; we are above (noticing) the road and our walking. Otherwise

disasters ensue.

One cannot claim,

"I am

and

the

normal,"

without becoming abnormal.

Similarly, our virtue (manliness, being-

' Even such a sensitive thinker as Chuang self (tzu wang), the fasting of the heartmind etc., without explaining, as this essay did, heaven and the earth. On these notions and mind, see my 7he Butterfly as Companion, 1990.

Tzu only poetically chanted about the forgetting of the (hsin chai), the emptying of the heartmind (hsü hsin), as to how and why the self is the empty center of the their explications with the above explanations tacitly in Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York Press,

* See Appendix 22. 3 Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, London: Chapter 3, pp. 136-37, as previously noted.

Macmillan and Co.,

1874,

1963, Book 2,

Mi Ta jen" is "big person," "adult," perhaps "the true adult," "the truly mature person," and so "the great one."

? Mencius, 4B12.

128

PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING

human) is anything but the virtuosity of the technique of do-good-ism, any more than our body is noticed in our thinking activity. The man who displays his normalcy is less a tragic hero than a very potential maker of the tragic world. History (and Chinese political history in particular) is littered with blood-tattered people, "royal families," who turned their exclusive attention not to popular welfare (as rulership requires) but to themselves. Egomania quickly turned megalomaniacal, and tyrannies ensued. We shudder and are chilled just to read their selfproclaimed names and titles. When we name something, something appears through the name; we attend to that something, not to the name. Something appears when I-name it; "I-naming" is a tacit activity secretly implied in the appearing of that something. Thus demonstratives, connected with our bodily presence, must be hidden. For to display our names makes for as much a politico-historical disaster as displaying our bones evinces a medical misfortune; here nothing is healthy. We are healthy (which we usually are) when our health is as hidden from our view as our bones are.” Argumentation is the bone of thinking. To talk about "concrete thinking" is thus like talking about "health" which 1s really silently there (even while it is talked about). "I-name" is a demonstrative-metaphor performance, for naming is talking about the "that" in terms (the name) of the "this." Metaphor and demonstrative are both tacit performatives of thinking. No wonder Chinese philosophy seldom explicitly talks about logic, and whatever logic talked about in the Chinese classics is fairly primitive and foreign to their actual heated discussion. Universals are really universals-in-existence, existential universals’; they are out of sight and buried in actual existence. 5.3. The Structure of the "I". To bring out the dialectic of the hidden subject-object complex, the self can be phenomenologically described as follows. My boy told me, "Dad, You know what?

I have three names:

! Lao Tzu said, "Great Tao gone, benevolence-righteousness come-to-be." (Tao Te Ching, Chapter 18). Chuang Tzu said, "Great Tao [does] not profess; great debate [does] not [utter] words; great humanness is not human[e] . . . Tao shines and [it is] not Tao" (2/59). "Holy men decease not, great robbers cease not" (10/16). ? See the concluding section in my Chuang Tzu: World Philosopher Crossroad Publishing Co. and Scholars Press, pp. 134-37. + See Appendix 23.

at Play,

N.

Y.:

The

5. THE HIDDENNESS OF THE "T"

129

me, myself, and I. Bye, Dad." And out he went to play. The casual spontaneity of such a profound remark caught my attention, and I began looking into it. The order is significant--"me," "myself," and "I." First, colloquially, we say, "It's me," not "It is I," perhaps because the most noticeable is "me" the object, as related to other people who make "me" appear for attention. Then comes "myself" that is blended in a total act-complex, such as "I talk to myself"; "talk-to-myself" 15 one act-complex that claims our attention. Here talking to myself is talking myself, myself talking; the subject and the object are one. An "act-(to)-myself" is an act-Cogito, as it were, that accompanies, sustains, and shows forth every act I perform. This is why, in explaining the act-Cogito of affirmatives, negatives, and the metaphorics of compact and ironic argumentations, the hidden "I" 13 explained. This must be what Merleau-Ponty meant when he characterized the body as my "behavioral arc." In the arc formed out of my various behaviors, my body does justice to itself as the "I." This arc is my act-complex of "act-myself." The complex is a blend of the noticed "me" and the unnoticed "L" This is where a transition from "me" to "I" takes place. Finally, it is the "I" which initiates and sustains both "me" and "myself," yet the "I" itself remains hidden from our attention. To find the "I," we must attend to the behavioral arc of I-act-(to)-myself. And then we find "I" as hidden in the performative Cogito. This was explained before (3.5.) as the non-metaphoric reference point that initiates my metaphoring performance of "knowing" something. Now, we see that this non-metaphoric reference point not only initiates metaphoring; it also performs it and accompanies it. And only the performance of metaphor is noticeable; the non-metaphoric "I" tacitly accompanies my metaphoric act. And so I have three names. "Me" appears as an object overtly noted by the other; "myself' appears as a self-relation, that is, as performative Cogito, as behavioral arc, as an act complex, that is tacitly picked up by the "I"; the "I" tacitly assumes both the self-relation and ! It is interesting to see their Chinese equivalents. "Wu" means "I" which, emphasized, is expressed by "yü" ("I, for one"); "wo" is "me"; "tzu" is "myself." "Myself," be it noted, can be implied in "wo ("me")," and "tzu" ("myself") often goes ahead of the verb which qualifies it. Thus "talk to myself" is "tzu yen tzu yü," and "self-possession" is "tzu te." Perhaps "myself" in China comes out stronger--more noticeable--than in English.

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PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING

the behavioral arc.

Here to "pick" and to "assume" is to attend to, to

relate to, as a matter of fact; to relate to oneself is to return home to

oneself spontaneously.' "Me" comes first, because it is the easiest to be noted as an object of attention by others; the "I" notices it "myself"; then "I" realize what I have been through, that is, noted by others; and then, following their attention I note myself. And so, to repeat, "me" comes first as an object noted by other people. Then noting this fact of being noted, I note "myself" to be myself by my performative Cogito; in "myself" the subject ("I") and the object ("me") are one. Lastly, in both these notings--being noted by others, noting thus noted--the "I" appears, supporting these notings, yet hidden

in them.

hidden

from

appears twice.

In "I have three names,

me, myself,

and I," the "I"

The "I" appears, first, as the subject, as a matter of fact,

attention that is directed to "three names";

the

"I" then

appears for the second time as a "name" noted, yet as the last of the three. Only after the other two are mentioned do I note the "I" who is (am) saying all this. Thus the "I" is hidden from attention, tacitly initiating, sustaining, and accompanying every object attended to. No wonder in Chinese? sentences, written or uttered, the "I"? is ordinarily omitted unless it is emphasized. To describe "I," we must describe I-in-the-act-affirmatively, negatively, metaphorically, compactly, and ironically. "I have three names" means "I am three." These are the riches of the "I," its inner wealth, three in one. These subjective-objective riches of self-possession are produced by a reflective dialectic that expands metaphorically from the hidden non-metaphorical point of "I," through my act-complex of "acting-(to-)myself" that accompanies all my acts, to the object "me" that accompanies every "this," and then on to every "that." All these describe all modes of existence. It is thus that I and the world of things are born together as one; I am the microcosmos that tacitly makes rounds of seasons with the heaven and earth.* I the ! This returning home to oneself is much emphasized by Mencius in 147, 1B12, 2A2, 2A7, 4A4, 4A13, 4B28, 7A4. Here returning (fan) is related to our root (1B12), our no need to shrink (in unease) (2A2), our humanness (4828), and our ontological sincerity (4B13, 7A4), all of which are basic and cosmic. Chuang Tzu came to see how impossible consciously to do so, without disputing its importance. 7 And in Japanese sentences, too. ? And "we" and even "you" as the subject. * | am here freely quoting from Chuang Tzu's pungent phrases, "Heaven, earth, with I-myself are-

5. THE HIDDENNESS OF THE "T"

131

hidden microcosmos is the world, the macrocosmos.

The (Taoist) ironic mode of argumentation 15 a device to call our attention to the above hidden base--microcosmic, macrocosmic--of our

thinking.’

Trying without trying’ is a "no doing" that leaves nothing

undone, a "nothing" that cannot even be mentioned; for "nothing" is after all nothing, yet mentioning it is an act, a something. The basic cosmic point in all our activities (thinking included) 1s the "I" which must be "lost," "forgotten," to really function. All Chinese philosophy does is then to tell stories, to wander through life in various thoughtexperiments (duplications of living) during which we "raise one corner to infer the other three." This is a creative metaphoring; metaphoring is creativity in action.

As

said

above,

the

this

that

the

"I"

understands

leads

me

metaphorically to understanding the that in a new significance, new depths and implications that systematize my experience into a new configuration. This new configuration is the subtle web and texture of reality as I understand it. We usually call this reality-texture "universals." Plato extracts and extrapolates from experience the ideal forms. In contrast, metaphorical extension (not formal extraction) gives us concrete universals in China. Instead of chairness that is abstracted from concrete specific chairs, Chinese universals are situational through and through; the concrete specifics remain specific to point me toward, and generate a metaphorical understanding of, other concrete similars.*

born together and myriad things with I-myself make one" (2/52-53), and "[Beng] so at-ease, with heaven, earth, [it] makes [rounds of] springs, autumns" (18/27). This is analogous to later Heidegger's crossing of the words, such as "Being"[-crossed]. For instance, mentioning a name, one must immediately cross it to let the name's real referent appear without the obstacle of the name. l

T "4

5

.

.

.

.

F

? See my Chuang Tzu: World Philosopher at Play, "Aria Il: Trying Without Trying: A Phenomenology of Truth," pp. 91-114. In fact, the entire book is about this ironic point in the universe. 3 Confucius, the Analects, 7/8, cf. 5/9, 10. * This is due to the fact that "metaphors . . . and double- and triple-meanings . . . arise naturally and spontaneously in our writing . . . because they are constant parts of our everyday lives. Once you begin looking for them in your life, you'll see them everywhere. (And you won't be making them up; they're really there.)" (Scott Edelstein, The No-Experience-Necessary Writer's Course, Chelsea, Mich.: Scarborough House, 1990, p. 132)

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PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING

6. The Hidden "I" in Interpersonal Relations. We shall now probe into what the hiddenness of the self means, in our interpersonal relationship to the other.’ We noted in section 4. that the Cogito accompanies every "this"; the self has been taken epistemologically for us to understand how we think. Ontologically, "hidden" (as adjective) here points us to a non-being, a nihilation, within the self; "hidden" (as verb) points us to an active accommodative relating toward others. Epistemologically I hide myself to manifest things in my knowing act. Ontologically, my hiddenness is my becoming empty, self-nihilated, to room the other person. This rooming is a wombing forth of the other. In this otherwombing in my self-emptying I also become myself as I am. Such is my relation to the other, and the relation is a home-coming to myself, fulfilling the "I." Marriage in China, as in other cultures, marks my becoming-a-full-person (ch'eng jen) A young lady marrying is described as "this child, O, coming-home" (chih tzu yii kui) to her husband. But actually coming home to the other (spouse) and thereby becoming a fulfilled person applies both to the woman and to the man. A girl or a boy, I come home to myself when I come home to you. I am social; in my socialization I become truly "I." Thus, combining Chinese concrete thinking and Western logical sensitivity, we are initiated by the "hidden self" into our relationship to others. We shall find that the other is "my" hell and home. Relationship is twofold: self-identity and otherness, both of which come from the "I" as a person? The I is a relation (Buber) and generates relation (Kant). To adapt Sartre's terminology’ to our purpose, the "I" establishes the In-Itself as self-identical (A is A; A 13 not not-A), and establishes the personal For-Itself as the other (A is not ! This section is an extension of "affirmation" (an af-firming of self-identity in corroboration with the other) (1.2.), the first mode in our explication of Chinese body thinking. ? The I is a relation, says Martin Buber in his little classic, J and Thou, tr. by Ronald Gregor Smith, Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1937, etc., tr. by Walter Kaufmann, N. Y.: Charles Scribner's

Sons, 1970, etc. Buber says the I is really a part of the word-pairs, I-Thou and I-It. This makes the

obtaining of It and Thou to hang on the I, who is a person. This means that all relationships (personal, non-personal) are personal. The entire book of 7 and Thou is an elaboration of this point; why the book did not say so is beyond my understanding. ? Kant's "categories," "forms," and the like, generate relations with the world. * [n his Being and Nothingness, tr. Hazel Barnes, N. Y.: Philosophical Library, 1956.

6. HIDDEN "IT" IN INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS

133

A; A is not-A). The other-establishment internalizes negativity ("not")-nihilates itself--to establish the "I" as a person. To note A is to note nonA, the other; the "non-A" lets A appear as A. Negativity is involved in otherness which supports me ; in personal otherness negativity is internalized in the subjects. Sartre calls it "nihilation," and terms the other "hell." This section explores various facets of the positive side of personal nihilation in relation to the negative side. To do so, we must return to the bottom of the self as self-identical and as self-nihilative.

The former is the plerotic love that fulfills the self; the latter is the

kenotic home that nihilates forth the other. The former leads to the latter which renders the former possible. (6.1.) The lover ruthlessly takes everything from, thereby to depend totally on, the beloved, and both become one "flesh" (one "body") wherein "justice" has no place. (6.2.) This taking-depending happens in nihilation, an inner nihil enabling personal accommodation in resonance that makes "home." (6.3.) Home is being-with-other(s) which makes a person a person. (6.4.) The person is with-others, by way of reciprocal inner touch. (6.5.) This is shown in education that spreads to politico-cosmic concord. (6.6.) Sadly the home-relation can turn into a relation of hostility. (6.7.) A person can dwell in hell in the other, however, because the person originally dwells at home in the other. (6.8.) How the two dwellings shift into each other constitutes historical dialectic. Such a history makes up the person. 6.1. Love as Plerosis. We first consider love as plerosis, selffulfillment. We begin by putting love in the baldest of terms. To give someone her due is not love; it is justice. Justice is an appropriate relation between equals and outsiders. Desert and recompense apply here. Even considerateness applies here; here the amount given equals the amount needed. ' Robert C. Neville has a logical treatment of otherness in Recovery of the Measure, Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York Press, 1989, pp. 204-19. Mark C. Taylor, Altarity, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989, devotes its entire book to the problem of otherness. None of them seem to see that otherness stems from personhood, much less from personal self-nihilation, or how otherness can be both home and hell to personhood. But see Paul Ricoeur, Oneself As Another, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992, and Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith, eds., Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1990. ? "Nihilation" occurs in Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, op. cit.; "Hell is Other People" occurs in his No Exit, tr. Stuart Gilbert, N. Y.: Knopf, 1948.

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PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING

But love is not justice. In love, ruthlessness' applies. Love ruthlessly robs the beloved of everything, thereby ruthlessly robs oneself of everything. Having taken everything from the beloved, love ruthlessly depends on that beloved. Love totally consumes and totally needs that beloved.

"All I have, all that I am, is yours,"* because "all of

you is mine; you are mine, me myself. Without you I am nothing; I need you to be myself." Total taking in giving, total giving in taking, that is love. Considerateness is not love but a just concern, a virtue that fulfills the needs of strangers, friends, equals. Love never has equals, only totals, or rather, one total person. "Cleave to her, and become one flesh." Love is the take-all in give-all, the grueling master-slave in one. It is messy. This total ruthless love is shown by Jesus when he offered himself; "Take, eat; this is my body." He gave his total self for me to "eat" as my personal nutrition. By the same token, he ruthlessly demands my total following, carrying the cross with him, a total discipleship. The ruthlessness of his total self-giving is matched by the ruthlessness of his "commandment" to give myself totally, to present my whole "body as sacrifice,"* to love him with all my heart, soul, mind and

strength, and to love my neighbor "as myself." "Son, you are always with me. All I have is yours." No condition attached. "But this your brother, he was dead and is now alive, lost and is now regained. We ought

to rejoice."

No

condition

attached.

Love

is total,

ruthless,

uncalculating, the slave and the master in one.’ If I were to give her her due, then I am a quiet, satisfied man. For I thereby atone for whatever wrongs I did her and quell my conscience. I attain equilibrium, justice, peace. And then the above

! Ruthlessness here means so beyond the bound of fairness as to scandalize justice. Such a violation of justice is felt as, and so described as, "ruthless." This is a healthy bland ruthlessness of life and love, more accurately designated as "ruth-less." This point will be elucidated in 7.5.

? Cf. Luke 15:31. > Matthew 26:26. + Romans 12:1.

> Mark 12:30-31. ° Luke 15:31-32. 7 Cf. Jesus Christ our Lord as the Suffering Servant.

6. HIDDEN "T" IN INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS

135

messy turbulent love is gone; no more ruthless slave-and-master-in-one. Quiet freedom is here instead, freedom from love to do anything one wants. No more love, just give what is due to her. One 1s perhaps sad, sadly liberated. In love, however, is the suffering of total taking and giving, even an occasional hurt by each other; even teeth can hurt lips. Then I will apologize and do repairs, for when I hurt her, I hurt myself, we now being one flesh. But if I apologize and repair because I was, perhaps inadvertently, inconsiderate and have infringed on her rights, then she 15 not myself anymore but someone else, perhaps a stranger, perhaps a friend of mine, just one among many others. "I will make it up to you" is no longer love but justice. Obviously love described above is a narrowly defined one, in order to bring out its crucial aspect often neglected, love on the self-side, ruthless one-flesh, master-slave in one, as "myself." Descartes said that the mind-body relation 15 not like the sailorvessel relation.

"Nature also teaches me . . . that I am not only lodged in my body as a pilot in a vessel, but that I am very closely united to it, and so to speak so intermingled with it that I seem to compose with it one whole. For if that were not the case, when my body is hurt, I, who am merely a thinking thing, should not feel pain, for I should perceive this wound by the understanding only, just as the sailor perceives by sight when something is damaged in his vessel; and when my body has need of drink or food, I should clearly understand the fact without being warned of it by confused feelings of hunger and thirst. For all these sensations of hunger, thirst, pain, etc. are in truth none other than certain confused modes of thought which are produced by the union and apparent intermingling of mind and body." With this observation Merleau-Ponty was so impressed as to say,

' The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trs. by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, Cambridge at the University Press, 1967, Vol. I, p. 192. Cf. Philosophical Essays: Descartes, tr.

by Laurence J. Lafleur, Library of Liberal Arts, Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1964, pp. 134-35. | This passage shows that even the staunch dualist Descartes could not but notice this fact, which Merleau-Ponty also acknowledged in The Primacy of Perception, p. 5, as quoted in the text.

136

PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING "As Descartes once said profoundly, the soul is not merely in the body like a pilot in his ship; it is wholly intermingled with the body.

The

body,

in

turn,

is wholly

animated,

and

functions contribute to the perception of objects--an long considered by philosophy to be pure knowledge."

all

its

activity

The pilot or sailor also "loves" his vessel, so much so that he may sink into the ocean with it. But he never feels pain when the vessel is damaged; he just repairs it. We should call such togetherness, considerateness. This is a sort of (retributive) justice in that the "repair" balances the damage up tc its original equilibrium, and that objectively; the repair does not concern the repairer. Such is also the relation between the doctor and the patient. The doctor qua doctor is by definition never sick; otherwise he would be unable to cure the patient. Once he becomes sick, he is not a doctor but a patient, unable to cure. For to cure is to repair from outside. The doctor cures, and so does not intimately "intermingle" with the patient into "one whole." Love in a narrow sense is often confused with doctor-like considerateness. But love differs from the doctor's objective considerateness. Love so becomes one with the beloved other that the otherness of the other is lost.

The husband 15 the head and the wife, the

body, said St. Paul. Put in modern terms, the spouses are mutually head and body, bodily head and mental body; they are one integral "flesh," as Merleau-Ponty often said about the mind-body relationship. Thus between spouses there is no gratitude, no appreciation, no dedication. One cannot dedicate one's book to oneself, nor can one thank one's hand.

One merely moves one's hand to write. One can of course rejoice in having a good hand, and be grateful for having-a-hand. One can likewise rejoice in one's spouse, and be grateful for having-a-better-half. They can enjoy each other as the mind enjoys health, as the body enjoys discernment. In this natural togetherness there is no room for justice, considerateness. They simply take care of each other as they do of their bodies; they simply support each other as their bodies do their minds. Deprived of each other they die, as surely as the mind or the body dies without the other. The spouse is sometimes hurt, pressed under exigencies of the situation. The other spouse then temporarily "doctors" her with care and considerateness. One should take care of one's spouse as one should of oneself (e.g., by not sitting up too late). But ordinarily spouses pay no

6. HIDDEN "T" IN INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS

137

attention to each other any more than one does to one's hand while writing; the spouses are as unified a flesh as the hand and the writing self are.

Thus love has in it a bland healthy ruthlessness. Of course I take

everything from you; of course you take everything from me. You are my half; whether or not you are a better half of me than I am of you matters little. You are me, I am you, for better or for worse; we act in concert. If one can think aloud in front of a friend, love can thinktogether in the beloved. Not thinking alike, we can think together to "compose one whole" (Descartes) thinking. We mutually "compose," constitute,

one

flesh,

which

is

"one

point

of view

on

the

world"

(Merleau-Ponty). Mutual composition here means mutual adjustment and complementation, perhaps by mutual discussion, by feeling mutual feelings and expressions. And it is in this manner that we grow together. Only in such an intimate--innermost--togetherness do I grow into myself as you do into yourself. This is "home." But how does it happen? By becoming oneself by virtue of taking in all of the beloved. How could such a ruthless self-plerosis be possible? Because the beloved allows it to happen by offering the beloved's total self to be thus taken. This ontological allowing is the nihilative self-emptying aspect of love that wombs forth self-plerosis." This wombing-forth is the essence of "home." turn.

To this love-kenosis,

this nihilative-plerotic

home,

we

now

6.2. Positive Nihilation--Home. Here we utilize Sartre's insights on nihilation in a positive manner. Sartre discovered that "hell is other people" and pursued its structure. Other people can be hell because my consciousness both "is what it is not, and is not what it 1s." This "not"--nihilation--constitutes me as a person. I am a lack; I exist as nihilation, executed by the other. He "founds" me, for whom I remain responsible. Thus Sartre grasps nihilation solely as annihilation by the other. The other's look shapes me by shaming me; I exist as the other's annihilation (of my being human). This is one ontological possibility often actualized; the other is often my hell. This is Sartre's discovery. But this is a one-sided

view

of self-nihilation,

which

can

be

positive as well. That is, my nihilation can also be my becoming nihil to enable the other to be, and thereby becoming myself. And the other can, ! In Christology, kenosis is the basis for plerosis, both subjectively for himself (Philippians 2:611) and objectively for others (2 Corinthians 8:9), both subsumed under love called "Jesus Christ."

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PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING

by his self-emptying, shape me by letting me be myself, acknowledging me as I am, without shaming me into a thing. The other, precisely in Sartre's ontological description,.can be my home to womb me forth as I am, who can likewise womb forth the other. "He became poor for your sakes, so that you by his poverty might become rich."! Sadly, this possibility has often been actualized to turn into a Sartrian hell, then again to turn around to become a home. I am being born in my home, the other, only to be killed in my hell, the other, only to be born again in the other my home, and so on. The Sartrian dynamic nothingness can become my hell as well as my home. How can "home" obtain? It cannot obtain in one person, but in at least two persons. ."I am at home" means "I am at home in you (singular or plural)." Being at home means that you accept me (as I am), I accept your acceptance of me, and I am born in this reciprocal acceptance. My acceptance describes three factors (or facts) You accommodate and acknowledge me as a person; you nihilate yourself into rooming me to be myself. Then I myself in turn accommodate your acceptance of me. I also become a chamber to accommodate you. Finally, I resonate with your (mode of) acceptance. Our mutual acceptance gives room wherein I freely chime in with your acceptance; our ontological resonance lets you become--come to be--yourself, and thereby enables me to become myself. To begin with, you objectively acknowledge me as I am, and cannot dispose of me as a chattel. Your acceptance bespeaks an emptiness in you as an environment wherein I can breathe and have my being as a person. You make yourself a home for me to be me. Then, for a "home"--being-at-home--to obtain, I myself must not be self-imposing, either, but must also sensitively accommodate your approach and your acceptance. I must become an empty chamber, selfless, before I can respect you, allow you to be you. To accept you is to be roomy enough for you to disturb me with your suffering. Mencius observed our felt jitters at an ox's frightened jitters on its way to sacrificial slaughter (144), and again at seeing a baby about to crawl into well (८.46). Here Mencius saw in the "self" "human(e)ness (jen)," in which is our "home"; to discard this jen-home 15 to discard oneself (4A11), and to dwell in humane neighborhood,

! This

is St. Paul's description of Christ's kenosis

for our plerosis in 2 Corinthians 8:9.

6. HIDDEN “I” IN INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS

139

beautiful (2A7y. Sartre's nihilation is not discarded, but seen in its positive function.’ Finally, I have to so care about you that I accept your acceptance of me and respond appropriately, in my own manner. This is how I come to un-selfconsciously dress "appropriately," comb my hair, follow social etiquette, and behave in a socially "acceptable" manner. The way I dress I myself do not see; without caring about others' acceptance of me I should not have had to care at all. Yet I expend time, effort and money on how I "look"; otherwise I am uncomfortable. "How I look" means "how I look to you"; my concern about it is due to my internalization of your acceptance of me. But whence is this internalization? It comes from my need of your acceptance to be myself. We are social; we are at home in the society. This possibility of others being my home has often been actualized because my birth through my parental others makes myself. Home is where I both was born and am being continually born, within that womb called other people, in their being not me. Thus my being includes a "not," a nothing. Sartre's formula of my being is now "It is what it is not (I room the other) and it is not what it is (I self-nihilate for the other)." 6.3. Wombing Forth Persons. But how does the other's selfnihilation "womb" me forth? And how does my nihilation in the other positively found me? | First,

the

other's

self-nihilation

can

"Womb"

me

forth.

The

womb is an enablement and letting-become, an all pervasive metaphor for the formative ontological power. Such cosmic creativity so impressed Lao Tzu that he said,’ "The spirit of the valley never dies./ It is called the subtle and profound female./ The gate of the subtle and profound female/ 1s the root of ! Arthur Waley has "It is Goodness that gives to a neighborhood its beauty." Confucius, N. Y.: Vintage Books, (George Allen and Unwin, 1938), p. 102.

The Analects of

? Michael Polanyi's "tacit dimension," ingrained in our knowing something, has its social root here. Cognitive tacit dimension is an aspect of social self-nihilation applied in the realm of knowledge. 3p

or an interesting explanation of "someone" embedded in social roles and norms and "no one" the non-comformist, see Kenelm Burridge, Someone, No One: An Essay on Individuality, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.

* Tao Te Ching 6; cf. 25, 28, 52.

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PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING

Heaven and Earth./ It is continuous, and seems to be always existing./ Use it and you will never wear it out." A void serves an empty chamber, enables life. This "womb" is a selfnihilation, continuously letting a person self-create. The womb-power can be seen unobtrusively everywhere--in water, in roots,’ in valleys.’ And this wombing motherliness continues throughout life--in the teacher who draws forth ("educates") the best in the students," among friends who teach and learn from one another,’ and in serving one's parents.* Every human relation worthy of its name is a mothering and wombing-your being vacuous draws me forth, lets me become as I am. In fact, the empty room between Heaven and Earth 15 a motherly bellows, vacuous, inexhaustible, continually letting forth [things ].' Furthermore,

let us consider the other side of self-nihilation:

how my self-nihilation in the other founds me. Chuang Tzu's "selflosing" (2/1-3) and "self-forgetting" (12/45) help us understand how. I become truly myself as I lose myself in that on which I am intent. Selfnihilation as open arms and receptive heart entails "being lost in" the other and in the situation. A girl is absorbed in her playful gaze at her pet; a musician forgets herself in her music-making. (See Appendix 24.) As I lose myself--my self-consciousness--in a hearty conversation with you, I come home to myself. In un-selfconscious self-dissolution in the other I fulfill myself. Now both above relations--the other's self-nihilation that wombs me forth, my self-nihilation in the other that founds me (and the other)-amount to two sides of our mutual self-nihilation interlocked into an ' Ibid., 8. 2 Ibid., 16. ? Ibid., 28. + Analects 1:1 5; cf. 7:8. > Analects 7 :22, cf. 4:17. ० Analects 2:7, 4:18.

! Tao Te Ching, 5. 8 Cf. 4/42, 14/10,

19/62-64. See my Butterfly as Companion, Albany: State University of New

York Press, 1990, p. 505, et passim.

6. HIDDEN

TI

IN INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS

14]

ontological becoming. I am an active actualizing relation to the other, which may be a person or a situation. A situation touches me from inside, and a poem, a painting, a novel, is born, and I am fulfilled.

Two

persons are in touch--both touch and are touched--and they become husband and wife, parents and children, friends. Personal self-nihilation allows, accommodates, and lets create, all through mutual touch.

6.4. Inner Touch. Self-nihilation intimately touches me to make me a void that enables a touch from inside. Human touch has two features:

First, to touch

is to be touched,

to influence

you

is to be

influenced by your being influenced by me, more than balls colliding into an external impact.' Then, to touch is to be touched inside; personal touch seeps, pervades. A baby's touch moves his mother to tears, and the mother's touch eases the baby, now being at home, into himself?

The inner personal touch fills the void in me and in you, making

us one.

Yet we remain two, for two-ness enables touch.

We

are thus

two in one, and one in two, thanks to our personal void and touch inside.

! "Touch" has been considered by Lucretius (in his On Nature), Hume (billiards balls), and Russell ("external relation" in his logical atomism). They all concern external touch. See my Butterfly as Companion, pp. 251-54. Cf. Stanley Rosen's "Thought and Touch: A Note on Aristotle's De Anima," in Palle Yourgrau, ed., Demonstratives, N. Y.: Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 185-94. 2 A simple distinction between the inner and the outer can be understood this way. Carrying water, one feels its weight, which disappears after drinking it, although the total weight of the water plus the person stays the same throughout. Weight-disappearance indicates the existence of water inside. (Similarly with carrying vs. wearing shoes, clothing.) Love burns before marriage; wedded love ceases to burn. For wedded love is intimate, inner mutual touch. ? Love, especially mutual love (more than one-sided one) even in casual sex, which is impossible without casual love etc. It would be difficult to even imagine sex with someone casualness, after all, implies externality; casual sex would be

entails inner touch. This point holds such as curiosity, fun, casual interest, one hates or feels nauseous about. But an external touch.

Casual external touch does sometimes result in childbirth. And the "love-child" is now housed in a "broken family," where he will grow up stunted, a perfect symbol for stunted broken love between his parents. Love aborted can result in abortion (though all abortions do not connote aborted love). In personal-physical touch there exists an intimate involvement between its physical side and its love-side. The physical side of sex can clinch love; love can result in beautiful sex. Although love without sex as well as sex without love do exist, both are truncated relations. The former is more worthy of respect than the latter, however. Does this fact signify that love is more basic to sex than sex is to love? In any case, these rambling thoughts show that the complex bodily touch in human reciprocity is far beyond facile systematization.

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PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING

All this describes mutual fulfillment. Personal void generates love-inner touch--that mothers us to grow into ourselves. How? Let us consider how a person begins to be. When you and I are in intimate touch--in innermost love--your egg and my seed touch from inside; your egg rooms my seed, my seed loses itself in it to let it fructify, and our mutual entrance wombs forth a new growth. This is the primal structure of internal touch--an intimacy called parenting. You-and-I-as-parents comes into being as our child comes to be. All three of us are fulfilled as ourselves, thanks to each of us touching the other from inside. And as parents are one in two, so their child both is and is not his parents. And the process continues, in growth. The parents are a cradle (chamber-void) wherein the baby, completely helpless (self-void), comes to be a person. "I abide in you, and you in me." This is home; this is family. All intimacies, whether friendly, educative, political, extend such a familial home-relation, that mutual, intimate touch.

6.5. Confucianism. The genius of Confucianism is here. The Great Learning has the development of world concord in eight stages, from establishing--wombing forth--oneself, through home harmony, on to government, and finally to world concord. The progression 1s ontological, an ontological growth. The family wombing relationship lets me become human, then initiates, develops, and judges the ideal sociality,

in educative

development

of persons,

political welfare,

and

finally, cosmic concord. First, Confucius says "Filiality, brotherliness--are[n't they not the] root of being-human?" I become myself only within family interdependence. To go back home un-selfconsciously to my relationships with my parents and with my brothers-sisters, is to go back

home nourishing and becoming myself--and others.

Furthermore, this wombing-family relationship continues in education. The compact mode of concrete argumentation by metaphor previously cited in 2.2. (see examples of Analects 1:1 and 1:15 there) concerns educative mutuality. At the cost of repetition let us consider again Analects, 1:15: "Tzu-kung said, 'Poor and no fawning, rich and no boasting-what about [it]? The-Master said, '[It] will-do. [It is] not-yet like those poor and happy, rich and fond-of /i- decorum.' Tzu! The Analects

1:2.

6. HIDDEN "T" IN INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS

kung said, 'Odes polished." Is this With [you I] can what-is-gone and

143

has-it-saying, "As cut, as filed, as ground, as referring-to such?’ The-Master said, Ὁ, Tz'u! begin-to talk [about] odes now. Told about [you] know what comes."

This seemingly unpretentious conversation is packed with an intense fourfold inter-involvement of character-education in joy: conversational, respectful, the conversation as itself educative, wherein joy, beauty, effort, and nature are unity. Here two series of progress on human excellence parallel. The first series concerns what is talked about, the best poor and the best rich: the second series exhibits how the student actually grows. And these two series are really two sides of the same conversation. Talking about the best humans is to undergo the experience of growing better and better into the best human. They dialogically admired the best humans-progressively from a negative prudential maxim, through a positive spontaneous joy, to the crowning Odes that chants this joy. And their admiration seeped into them--progressively from a sincere negative proposal, through a turn-around for the positive, joy and respect, to a novel application of the beloved Odes to all this. These two series thus involve each other, converging to and constituting one educative Joy in Respect (11). Here is the unity of sincere conversation (the what) and life growth (the how); the one involves and constitutes the other. Here is education--drawing-forth of personhood--at its best, constituting proposals in acceptance, growing into oneself by intimately touching, provoking each other. Education is a duplication of wombing-family relationship. Furthermore, such familial and educative acceptance should be expanded into an ideal government. How? I first "age' my aged folks," that is, I let my old folks be as they are in comfort and integrity. Then I "extend" my respect "toward others's old folks." Similarly, I "young! my young folks," /etting my young folks be as they are in their growing integrity, and then "extend" my enablement "toward others' young folks." Thus my wombing family expands toward many others, familyizing the community. This is Mencius's ideal government of human(e) rightness, spreading to cosmic concord.' The Great Learning clinches the whole progression by saying that the ideal ruler rules with the ! 1A7.

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PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING

mother's anxious solicitous care of her infant.' All this describes how we mutually fulfill our personal selves in our accommodating selfnihilation. Thus Confucianism grades development of personhood from self-becoming, through the family, the state, to the world concord, with the one thread running through all--the inner personal touch. Taoism is more direct. It says that our inner touch is cosmic touch, with one important condition: it must be spontaneous. It should be as uncontrived, free and natural as breathing, for it is as necessary and inevitable. But since spontaneity cannot be commanded, the whole injunction amounts to telling us to forget the injunction. We must go into ourselves in our natural inner self-touch where we forget ourselves, and the world obtains all by itself in which we find ourselves intact, together, darting back and forth with minnows in the brook and the lake of the world.* That's the inner touch that quickens us together, and brings back ourselves, together with the world, to ourselves. 6.6. Negative Nihilation--Hell. Sadly, nihilation can turn destructive. For instance, losing oneself in imposing oneself on the other amounts to a rage that violates both oneself and the other. I then become hell to the other who in turn becomes my hell. Hostility is a failure of self-voiding, of other-acceptance, of being at home in the other. When you reject me, I suffer, and I have to do something about it. I can either accept your rejection with courage and resolution. My acceptance invites you to accept me. Your new acceptance requires that you reject your rejection and turn around toward me, effecting the so-called metanoia, a turnover of mind.

Or else, I have to reject you, kicking you out of myself, putting you out of my mind. You are no longer in me; you are no longer my home. I now leave you, leave the pain of losing my home with/in you, to find someone else, a new "you," for my new "home."

After all, I need

home to be myself. But if I cannot leave you (as in a traditional marriage where divorce is socially unacceptable, or in a small community where broken friendship reverberates inconvenience), then hostility takes on a destructive mutuality, as Sartre penetratingly described. Our mutuality ! Section 10.

? Chuang Tzu, 17/88; 6/23, 73; 14/60.

6. HIDDEN “I” IN INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS

145

of need and hostility renders inevitable such an intolerable situation. An extreme form of this situation is "war," where I am locked in a

desperate effort at destroying the other, "you" my hell, my enemy, my death. No wonder Sartre often used enmity in combat to describe nihilation as annihilation. 6.7. Humanity. Strangely, it is our humanity which enables enmity to manifests itself; enmity obtains only between the human I and the personal you, and has nothing to do with Martin Buber's I-It relation, which has no room for personal hostility. I face a dangerous animal, environment, enemy, in you. I hate you and reject you-as-a-person, and in hateful nihilation the "I" is vitiated, victimized, a person annihilated. It must be noted, furthermore, that the poignancy of Sartre's negative function of nihilation in personal relation (enmity) is derived from positive nihilation as a person's birth and growth. For a person must be established, as a person, to be hated and annihilated, but the reverse does not hold. Your hatred and devastation of me-as-a-person cannot establish me as a person. Destruction of a person is instead predicated upon our intimate personal interdependence--mutual wombing-forth. Thus the hell makes itself and makes sense, on the strength of the human home-relationship, yet how home could have turned into hell is a mystery. One thing is clear, however. Our life is a story of the interweaving of these two: the other as home, the other as hell. 6.8. Life Drama. We must resist a metaphysical temptation to facilely systematize how my home-relation to you is related to my hellrelation with you. The systemization (not systematization) of this dialectic is a life drama; it is acted out in history. Our principle of living, the "biological principle" (Nietzsche), consists in our biography. One thing is certain: my nisus of life both begins with the other as home and tends towards home in the other. One thing is mysterious: a working out of my life thrust often actualizes its opposite possibility, "the other is my hell." My biography, the history of my society, and that of my civilization, all consist in the drama of the interactions of these two modes of being-with-others: the other is my hell, the other ıs my home. (See Appendix 25.) Although mysterious, history as the home-hell dialectic of the | It is mysterious that home actually turns hell; it is understandable that it can. "Understandable mystery" is itself a mystery. Confucianism is silent about this mysterious mystery; Taoism keeps saying that the hell comes from trying. In any case, how the hell erupts when it does will be explored soon via examination of both the future and the free gift of oneself as a difficult task.

146 other

PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING can

be

understood

in terms

of my

inevitable

metaphorical

extension; the other is my future, uncertain, but not unfamiliar, thanks to

my metaphorical reach-out in time. What is new belongs to what is to be, the future. The future is both what is going to be and what is coming to be. The future is then a unity of a going and a coming. Going moves from here to there; coming moves from there to here. "Here" is what I am and do; "there" is what is not of me. Going, then, is my growing and coming, my destiny. And so the future is what I grow to be what comes to me, where what I become becomes my destiny. My new free achievement turns out to be something inevitable, necessary, a matter of course. Novelty that comes to me, and what surprises me, turns out to be what I understand. The

future

comes

to

me,

from

me.

This

is also

the

structure

of

metaphor, ferrying me from the familiar here to the surprising there, which is in turn turned into something new that is familiar. Metaphor is thus the logic of my future that comes and becomes. Metaphor is the logic of time, and I cannot spatially check and survey it. For metaphor changes me into the future. Why does the future come? Because the result arrives here always with an element of surprise. What is exciting about the empirical event is that no matter how much I plan and with how much care I execute my plan, I am always confronted with its unsuspected results. The outcome comes to me, staring me in the face. Why is the future my growing? Because no matter how surprising the outcome 13, it is my growing; I am part of the outcome. Without me the result would not have come out this way rather than that. No matter how surprising the outcome is, it is somehow expected, a part of me. The mystery of the future lies precisely in this unity of unexpected expectedness (it comes) and expected unexpectedness (it grows). The future is literally "what is to come" from beyond (hence, the other), to become a new "me." In the "coming" we have a tension of the (be)coming of the other to me. The new, when assimilated, enriches me as my fresh addition, my new familiar. This is why everyone loves something fresh, effecting the growth of the self. The fresh other is then my home wherein to grow. But when the new that (be)comes is too novel to assimilate, it amounts to coming from beyond (the other) to destroy me. I try to turn aside, exercising my freedom toward an alternative.' But what comes to me here is my future; I cannot avoid it. ! Simone

de Beauvoir advocated such a freedom

in her The Ethics of Ambiguity, N. Y.: The

6. HIDDEN “Τ᾽ IN INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS

147

And the other as hell comes about. Thus the unexpectedness of the new in my future harbors the Janus-like uncertainty of home-hell dialectic; which way the other as my future turns no one, by definition, knows.

We simply do not know how

the unity of the future other comes to be or what its contradictory rationality and structure is. But one thing is clear; we cannot escape it. For we are this point of unity--the co-happening, the co-incidence, of opposites--of the future; we are the center of its mystery which is nonetheless beyond us. The we here 15 the "I" and the "Thou," the home and

the

hell,

the

historical

dialectic

11

which

we

live

metaphorically. Let us approach the same point by another route.

and

move,

We do not

know how the dialectic of future comes; but we do know how it can turn

into home or into hell.

"Freely given, freely give."

I am freely given

home where I can be, thereby become, as I am; in gratitude I should give

home where you can be, thereby comes to be, as you are. The free gift must, in love and gratitude, be matched by a free giving. The gift 15 home; the giving is home as task. Love freely gives me home to grow, as surprising a gift as my very living itself, and so my love thus grown must give itself freely. To give such is the task of love; to sustain such provision is the power of love. Unfortunately, nothing is easier than to be accepted as I am, unconditionally, yet nothing harder than to accept you as you are, unconditionally. To sustain this tension requires sustained thoughtful love.

Free thoughtful love is, however, a very difficult task indeed; it

Love

once

tends to run out quickly. Lack of love turns free gift-receiving into the hell of ruthless taking from others,’ for lovelessness is ruthlessness, both in etymology and in life. While I am growing, I am yet without love, and so I ruthlessly’ receive what I need to grow, the other as home offered in love. gone,

home

turns

hell; my

plunder others' lives in desperation.

life-need

for home

makes

me

The other person I freely receive as

Philosophical Library, 1949. ' This is a free quotation from Matthews 10:8.

“To prevent such a ruthless harm due to lack of love is the business of the law. > That is, without sentimentality ("I love you!"), matter-of-factly, silently, naturally; cf. Tao Te Ching, Chapter 5.

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PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING

my home, and to whom I should also freely give myself as his home, turns into another thing I must just consume as I desire. "Freely given, I should freely give" is now "Not given, I must ruthlessly take." Hell breaks out, for instance, in Jeffrey Dahmer the compulsive serial killer.’

! We shall soon have an occasion (in Section 7.3.) to have a close look at Jeffrey Dahmer.

7. HOW HOME-HELL RELATIONS ARE POSSIBLE

149

7. How Home-Hell Relations are Possible. How are the shifts from the other as home to the other as hell, and back, possible? In order to answer it, a basic question must be raised. How are our logical moves--evocative, metaphoric, compact, ironic--possible in concrete thinking? That is, how can the enclosed body, a concrete particular, expand thinkingly into generality? Merleau-Ponty has a beautiful transition from our body to the world via "motility." Motility is organically internal to the body. The body, not representative consciousness, understands human motion as a response to the call of things. Each instant of the movement is a mobile referential totality of an absolute awareness of the here-now, dovetailed, inter-enveloped, with motor-memories (pasts) and the impending position (future). Then this body-motion expands its horizons via "praktognosia," i.e., "habit," that dilates our being in the world--the blind man's stick, the automobile, the typewriter, the organ. In fact, "habit," "habituate," "habitat," and "inhabit," are related

in etymology because they are in our bodily living. Thus as the blind man habituates himself in his stick he comes to inhabit it. This is why and how, in Merleau-Ponty's apt example, the organist settles in his organ as he does in his house, his habitat. The result is this. Our body is now an organ that plays "the musical significance of an action" through "organ space," our habitat the world. All this is said in a matter-of-fact manner by Chuang Tzu:' "To love parents with respect is easy; to love parents with love is hard. To [do so] is easy; to be intimate with parents with forgetfulness is hard. To [do so] is easy; to let the intimates' forget me is hard. To [do so] is easy; also to forget the world is hard. To [do so] is easy; also to let the world forget me is hard." Again,’ "[In] forgetting feet 15 the fit of shoes; [in] forgetting waist is the

fit of a belt.

[In] knowing how to forget the Yes-No is the fit of

Chuang Tzu, 14/10-11. ° "Intimates" are those with whom we are intimate, usually taken as our parents.

+ Chuang Tzu, 19/62-64.

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PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING the heartmind. [In having] no inner change, no outward following, is the fitting in of events. [In] beginning with the fit and never without the fit [since], is the fit of forgetting the fit."

All this leads to the generality of our concrete world. MerleauPonty means by the concrete "general" in our intending of things and the world something like these: concrete particulars form a system in which all possible objects find their places; these things originate from all bodily subjects including myself;' they (things and bodily subjects) dovetail into a universal style called "the world." And the world is open, constantly shifting, growing. In fact, to integrate various elements

into one organic whole,

such as a person, a bodily subject, is already to envisage, and initiate, the above generalization process. For the mind-body interactive intermingling is a model for reaching out toward things. This mode of our reach-out constitutes the style of all our dealings with things. And my style of dealings with things blends with the styles of all other humans to constitute the world, the concrete general.’ And to recognize a pattern in things is already to form a generality of the world, in the sense that a pattern is meaningful only against the background of the general world, and so to recognize a pattern is itself to acknowledge the world, and that the pattern of recognizing a pattern is the world in the making, as described in the above paragraph. But since to recognize a pattern 1s to know, knowing anything at all is itself our act of making the world. Thus to know a thing is to make the world; to know a particular is to initiate the process of constituting a general. And mind you, our body is the initiative point of our worldgeneralization process. Our body is the origin of all other expressive spaces, which our body the expressive movement penetrates and unifies into the world.” Thus our habit-expansion leads to our environinghabitat; body-habituation brings world-habitation. It is not clear how human sociality fits in this bodily process of IM. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, N. Y.: Humanities Press, 1962. pp. 440. ? Cf. M. Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, Evaston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1955, 1964, etc., pp. 4-6. ? Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, tr. by C. Smith, N. Y.: Humanities Press, 1962, pp. 137-47.

7. HOW HOME-HELL RELATIONS ARE POSSIBLE

151

world-habituation in Merleau-Ponty, however.’ From our body to our world, this beautiful expansion betrays a strange lack of human intersubjectivity; human reciprocity has no essential relation to his bodyworld linkage. Bodily motion as a response to the call of things is at most patterned after the artist's response to the subject-matter of his artwork. Yet clearly aesthetic response itself is patterned after human response; it is human response which teaches us beauty as reciprocal affinity.’ Sadly Merleau-Ponty failed to explore this basic level in this connection; he has no natural expansion from eur human body through social body politic to things in the world, then to the world itself. This failure indicates that Merleau-Ponty was unable to overcome the Aristotelian hiatus between metaphysics (and epistemology) and ethics (and politics), between theoretical knowledge and practical prudence, ! Another misgiving about Merleau-Ponty is a methodological one. Merleau-Ponty has divided consciousness into representative one and motility. Where does his own explanation belong, to representative consciousness or to motility? The answer is difficult because of his lack of the ironic mode of thinking explained in this essay. ^ And not the other way around. Merleau-Ponty is more moving when he describes aesthetic resonance than when he describes human intersubjectivity, as if to say that the latter derives from the former. "We must therefore rediscover, after the natural world, the social dimension of existence: I may well turn away from it, but not cease to be situated relatively to it." (Phenomenology of Perception, p. 362) This sentence begins the conclusion of the Section on "Other Selves." We understand the social world "after" understanding perception of the natural world, though I do "not cease to be situated relatively to it." Mikel Dufrenne came closer to personal reciprocity when he patterns human-Nature reciprocity on "language." He mused, "Everything can be language . . . Things can. . . make signs to us like an interlocutor. . . . Thus... the words of a language have an affinity . . . for the things themselves ..." (Mikel Dufrenne, Language and Philosophy, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963, N. Y.: Greenwood Press, 1968, pp. 17-18) But, we must respond, language bespeaks human-Nature reciprocity because the former originates in the latter, and human-Nature reciprocity is patterned after human reciprocity, not the other way around. Else, how could reciprocity, of whatever kind, even get started? Dufrenne also bypassed all this. The same holds for Heidegger for whom language is that in which being both discloses itself and conceals itself, for whom language is the abode of being. But we must ask wherefrom of this conceptual frame, "disclosure-concealment"; doesn't it originate in human reciprocity? Beingmetaphysics must derive itself from human-meta-somatics. + Aristotle's explicit intention to connect ethics and politics, as expressed in the concluding sentence of Nicomachaean Ethics, precisely betrays his uneasiness about ethics-politics hiatus. The hiatus was completed in the Realpolitik of Hobbes and Machiavelli.

152

PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING

between bodily perception and social perceptiveness. In contrast, the spread of our knowledge in China comes from our af-firming, confirmative personal-response to things out there--we remember how "It is hard" is a confirmation of our response to the "it" that is "hard" to our touch (in 1.2.). A simple affirmative statement is already a result, confirmation, and promise in the future, of our reciprocity with what is out there, in this case, the "it" which is confirmed as "hard." Our bodily continuity with the outside world is reciprocal in nature. To understand this personal-ontological reciprocity in nature, let us consider how the experience of "Eureka!" (I have found it) happens. It can happen (a) after my search with a definite question and conditions in mind, or (b) without search or definite question. ' (a) "Eureka!" can happen after some systematic exhaustive search with definite questions and conditions (I know what I want to find), as in methodical scientific research, or it can "just happen," a happenstance (as with Archimedes), albeit with a definite question and conditions in mind. (b) "Eureka!" can also happen without knowing what it is to find. I want my "better half," but I do not know what name, what qualities, that person has. I just "bump" into that person, and "feel" that that person is the one. The same situation holds in "finding" my "idol" in music or sports, or hitting upon a happy phrase, my composition, my artwork, my occupation. In "I have found it," "it" just comes and hits me with a sympathetic cord at the "heart" of my being, and the reverberation spreads throughout beyond me. There a hearty reciprocity Is aroused; an ontological evocation happens. I meet you; it happens as my historical event. An I-Thou event is a miracle (Buber). Going over these (a) and (b), we realize that there is little doubt that the (b)-experience clinches my search in the (a)-world, evoking from me a shout, "Eureka!." Here I say "It is/goes just right"; "it" can be a phrase, an argument, a theory, a dinner, a speech, a dress, a party, a therapy, whatever. Here, "just right" is undoubtedly an experience that tunes everything "just rightly," a bodily experience. Here is an unspeakable convincing reciprocity between "it" and myself, my somatic ! That we have two possible ways of finding something goes contrary to the entire dialogue of Theaetetus where Socrates' search for knowledge is entirely predicated on the assumption that one cannot find anything if one does not know what it is to find in the first place. Socrates' lack of the second way betrays his lack of body knowledge, body thinking, that includes and certifies mind knowledge, mind thinking.

7. HOW HOME-HELL RELATIONS ARE POSSIBLE

153

self. This bodily experience 15 the heart of, what constitutes, the Eurekaexperience. And this is the case even for the notion of "validity" which is after all a crucial component of all "just right"-experience. It is always to a specific judge that a move from one step to the next in an argument is convincingly "valid," since between any two logical steps one can always insert at least one more explanatory, if not argumentative, step. When enough is enough depends on a specific judge with a specific "feel" for the final validity, and that often at a specific moment.! This "feel" is an experiential assent (a feel-toward), a somatic consent (a feeltogether), and a hearty "nod" to the way these rational steps go; my assertion, "This argument is valid," expresses my bodily reciprocity with the way it goes "just right." It is thus that our somatico-ontological reciprocity with things constitutes our bodily continuity with the outside world. Now, what 15 at stake here 15 how to understand this continuity; on surface, "reciprocity" seems more co-responsive than continuous. The rest of this section is devoted to considering this theme. Five points are raised in the following: (7.1) the "I" as transpositively mobile, (7.2) the "I" and the fluidity of the Ch'i, (7.3) the fluidity of Chinese thinking expressed in its grammar and literature, (7.4) how the inter-flow of personal relation originates in evocation, (7.5) how all above describes "nature." 7.1.

The

Mobile

"I".

The

basic

demonstrative,

"L"

is

essentially mobile, not only spatiotemporally but transpositively. It is fascinating to see how all this happens. I move around spatially, I grow and change in time; the "I" changes in content every time someone different says it, that is, the "I" is relative to the subject, transitive according to who says it. It is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere. Furthermore, the "I" is mobile in the sense that it is a widening as well as moving circle; the "I" is the mobile root and initiation of all thinking, dynamically fluid, constituting one of the crucial centers of the expanding ch'i.” How this fluid center of the bodily I move and widen is described in sociality. The bodily, cognitive motility of the "I" is ! I considered this point in a different context in 7he Butterfly as Companion, pp. 260-61. “In fact Confucius says that it is the human who/which expands-exalts (hung) Tao (the Way things [should] go), and not the other way around (Analects, 15/29). This is in line with the traditional Three Geniuses of the cosmos--the Heaven, the Human, and the Earth.

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PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING

basically social. The phenomenon of the nature of things can be understood best in terms of human reciprocity in breath-energy (ch'i). Chinese body thinking connects itself to the world through family and political body, and ch'i pervades throughout this connection. The basic nature of things is ch'i, its basic phenomenon is fluidity.' Things have "water-nature" (shui_hsing’). Things must be regarded in terms of ch'i, the flowing dynamics of water-breath; body-"thinking" (ssu) is a mode of its flow. Perhaps thinking as ch'i-flow (ch'i liu), as the spirit freelygoing-through (shen t'ung), can be understood this way. Thinking is not information but an activity of managing and processing it. If information 15 a thing, then thinking is an act of managing it; thinking 13 not "it" but its treatment. This is due to the vital conatus of our consciousness; our consciousness is always conscious of something. This is an activity of ch'i that pervades everything and vitalizes every specificity of it as it is, letting everything become as it is. Mencius said of chih and i, an intentional thrust that manifests ch'i which is both mine and cosmic.^ Hsün Tzu spoke of life's ch'i that is led and controlled by chih (knowing activity) in discrimination (fen) of what-is-right (1) so as to flourish and prosper all lives under Heaven (li sheng) in a timely fashion? Thus ch'i pervades to bring out the specificity of things, and is the universal vitality of particularity of things.? In ch'i, as in the Neo-Confucian ¢ (principle), particularity and universality of all things are manifested and unified. Fluidity applies to both gas and liquid. Ch'i is fluid because it is "steam out of cooking rice," gas of "water nature." Thus Thales sees eye to eye with the Chinese mind when he said "411 is water." On technical details of Ch'i see Onozawa, Seiichi, et al., eds., Ki no Shiso: Shijenkan to Ningenkan no Tenkai (On ideas on Ch'i: developments of views of nature and man in China), Tokyo Daigaku Publishers, 1978, etc. Cf. also Ishida, Hidemi, Ki Nagareru Shintai (The Ch'iflowing Body), Tokyo: Heiga Publishers, 1987, etc. ? Cf. Mencius's "flood-like ch'i" in 2A2; "Shui Ti" chapter in the Kuan Tzu. + This is a favorite theme tirelessly harped on by phenomenologists and psychologists. 4 Mencius, 242.

> Hsün Tzu, 9/69-82. ° For historical and documentary details on ch'i see Onozawa Seiichi, Fukunaga Mitsuji, Yamanoi Yü, eds., Ki no Shiso: Chugoku ni Okeru Shijenkan to Ningenan no Tenkai (The Idea of Ch'i: Development of the Views of Nature and of Man in China), The University of Tokyo Press, 1978, 1980, etc.

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How human subjects with bodily particularity enter reciprocity is understood in China by this basic phenomenon of ch'i. And its expansive flow is termed shen, usually translated as "spirit." Evocation made much of in this essay is a call from the situation to draw us metaphorically to it. This is a situational ch'i drawing our ch'i-flow, to spread (shen') to it. The mutuality of evocative call and metaphorical draw is culminated in our reciprocal sociality, and results in the cosmic spread (shen) of ch'i-flow. But the spreading dynamism of the spirit (shen?) and οὐ are both a thing and an act. On the one hand, neither Shen nor Ch'i can be pinned down as a thing, an It. They are pure movement, going-through and changing things. To this extent they are in the same category as thinking, an activity, a not-thing. As a not-thing, they are (the essence of) things, what makes things things. On the other hand, Shen and Ch'i are things, for they can be named and confronted as they are, recognized as different from, say, a stone. The image of water fits this description. Water is both a notthing (ungraspable, dynamic) and a thing (tangible, resistible). What 13 fluid (say, a river) can be looked at and located as such on a map. But we cannot clasp a river as we would a stone. For the river is constantly flowing; we cannot, proverbially, put our feet into the same river twice. The river is a thing that refuses to be a thing. Our body is a homeostatic river of Ch'i and Shen, the balanced flow of many sorts. Since thinking is a flow of activity, "body thinking" is as natural, if not tautological, as "Shen Ch'i," "river water," and "flowing water" are.

From this angle, we can understand "style," "experience," and "meaning." "Meaning" is both an act of meaning something and what is thus meant, a "texture" (li) that weaves itself into a tapestry (wen) of meaning. The body is a relation that relates everything to itself and 15 itself a relation, a relation related to relating activity.’ This is the logic (counting, accounting) of the real, the system (stand-together) and | Shen-spirit is a cognate of shen-stretch.

See my Butterfly, p. 482 (Index) on "shen."

° "Shen" is an active noun--spreading dynamism.

See my The Butterfly, ibid., pp.

319-21.

ὁ Cf. ibid., pp. 426-27. * Soren Kierkegaard's description of the self as a self-relating and other-relating relation as he begins Sickness Unto Death is similar to Jean-Paul Sartre's description of the For-Itself in Being and Nothingness, seeing that both adopted Hegelian terminology. These self-relation and otherrelation were explored in sections 5 and 6 above.

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cohesion (concrescence) of "elements" (See Appendix 26.) which are both things and motion or powers, the is and the change, the is-ing. This fluidity is a unity of being (as oneself) and managing-acting (consciously patterning oneself after one's ideal), being oneself and becoming oneself, the is and the ought. Existence is existing, being is be-ing. 7.2. Ch'i. As water goes into a vessel of any shape and takes on that shape, so Ch'i goes into any entity and becomes its vitality. Spinoza's conatus that makes an entity the particular entity that it is describes Ch'i well. But whereas conatus is so odd in Spinoza's geometrical system of all things, that conatus is usually awkwardly relegated to his psychology,' Ch'i as the supple ontological power that shapes as it is shaped by a particular entity has been centrally developed by the Chinese thinking in all fields, medical, military, aesthetic, culinary, ethical, political, geomantic, astronomic, religious and cosmic.’ Chinese (ΠῚ functions in three ways in all things: First, somewhat like water, Ch'i freely flows into anything and takes up its natural abode there as its home. Then, Ch'i thereby “11211265 that thing as it is ideally, essentially, authentically. Ch'i is a special "water" that flows into a vessel, changes its "wall" into its essential manifestation. Finally, Ch'i, having thus fulfilled a thing's ontological nisus (conatus) to be as it is, endows it with an ontological intentionality to flow out and communicate with other things. Communication here can go as far as a radical ontological exchange, as in that famous seesawing equilibrium of Chuang Tzu's dream to be a butterfly with the butterfly's dream to be Chuang Tzu.’ It is Ch'i that enables such reciprocal parity of ontological exchange and interflows. ! See, e.g., descriptions of "conatus" within Spinoza's psychology in W. L. Reese, Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion, Atlantic Highlands, N. J.: Humanities Press, 1980, p. 546; Paul Edwards,

ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy,

N. Y.: Macmillan,

1967,

1972, 7:8, 538-39; Tokyo:

Heibonsha, ed., Tetzugaku Jiten, 1972, p. 1b (and p. 1309b on Hobbes' "conatus" in his psychology). Despite Spinoza, "conatus" was never regarded as more than a matter of psychology. Cf. "intentionality" in consciousness in philosophical psychology and phenomenology. "Consciousness" and "intentionality" are also matters only of human psychology. ? On varied manifestations of Ch'i in Chinese writings, Onozawa Seiichi, Fukunaga Mitsuji, Yamanoi Yu, Shijenkan to Ningenkan no Tenkai (Studies on Ch'i-- The Man in China), Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppansha, treatment of Ch'i in Butterfly, Index, p. 472.

see an encyclopedic collection eds., Ki no Shiso--Chugoku ni Development of Views of Nature 1078, 1980, etc. Cf. also my

on it in Okeru and of various

? This is the graphic conclusion to Chuang Tzu's philosophical parody in his Second Chapter. Butterfly is shaped by this dream. Cf. 2.3. above.

My

7. HOW HOME-HELL RELATIONS ARE POSSIBLE

157

It is in this threefold sense that we said that things are by nature the flow of Ch'i-current. Mencius calls it the cosmos-flooding Ch'i (^ao Jen chih ch'i).! Now, we must (7.2.1.) see how particularities of things flow into each other, and (7.2.2.) see how this inter-flow spells creativity of life. 7.2.1. What we are interested in now is the aspect of ontological inter-flow, the conative particularities of things that mutually flow one into another. Imagine yourself (stretch yourself, that is, your awareness) in a slow stream of water. You float, you go under, and go with the flow, imperceptible, irresistible. You are carried along and you feel alive in it. Then imagine yourself (stretch yourself) being that body of water. That water is inside you. You are not just surrounded, not just in it; you are pushed from inside, turned inside out, flowing. And the flows join-inside and out.^ It ebbs and flows, ebbs and flows, again and again. Ch'i is this inner-outer flow of the fluid power that throbs in our heartbeat. It is vast water power in the nature of things. "All is water," said Thales.’ Ch'i and Liu (flow) are synonymous; it comes and it goes, and comes again. Music

is such a water flow.

You

are in music,

lost in it and

refreshed--as yourself. Music is the flow of sonic water that comes and goes, again and again. Rhythm is literally the flow that is viscerally felt as orderly, often cyclically orderly. And "cycle" is an image--to be imagined, stretched oneself into--of perfection. And so we enjoy repetition (or variation, a subtle repetition) in music as the ebb and flow of sonic water in which we come alive. Repetition is an exhibition of the flow forever welcomed as eternal renewals of life. We undergo repeated renewals of life, not obviously but naturally essentially. For in music we do not stress the obvious which leads to boredom. We stress instead the essential, the natural. Since the essential 1s the life of music, which 15 alive, one is refreshed in it, for life

is made

of unexpected

(not obvious) yet inevitable (essential) turns

Mencius, 2A2. 2 This is why one is best naked when doing T'ai Chi Ch'üan, in which every pore of the skin breathes with the surrounding and becomes a channel for flowing body-cosmic Ch'i. Clothed, one feels confined and blocked. This also explains the naturalness of "clothes off, legs apart" which describes the "true painter" (Chuang Tzu, 21/46). > The writer(s) of Kuan Chapter.

Tzu also mentioned the cosmic water in the Water and Earth (shui ti)

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(cycles), as music that is alive is. When things are in the music of their flow they fit together into a living whole, a composite unity, a "composition"; when such an ontological music flows it is never dull but forever surprises and refreshes. That is music well played, in oneself. History is like a music of life. In music, one must weave meaning between the expected and the unexpected, neither to bore (as Perlman does) nor to manipulate (as Heifetz did) the listener. Or rather, the great performer produces the expected in the unexpected (not leaning on the expected, as Perlman does), and the unexpected in the expected (not leaning on the unexpected, as Heifetz did). Such a performance is rightly called "inspired," breathed-in with the divine breath of life, the performance that is alive. This is not to contrive through difficulties but merely to follow nature. For so is nature. Nature the expected pattern of growth (patterns and) "natures" our growth unexpectedly--the season follows the expected pattern, while everyday is different. To be alive is to be both different in the same

and same

in differences--in short, to be natural.

Necessity in nature is incalculable, weaving out a logic of surprises, if one but has eyes to see its ever novel pattern, and ears to hear its ever fresh rhythm. Historical reason is natural; it is synthetic (not analytically boring) and apriori (not haphazard and arbitrary). Thus both the actual and the necessary form a complex, an interfold, a chiasm, in the body-performance of our life. This is because the body is both what is thought about, an empirical thing among things, and what thinks about things and discerns an intelligible order in them. The body performs that behavioral arc that makes sense through time, and performs that thinking--about things and about itself--that is valid for all time. The body is the fold-line in the inter-fold between necessity of thinking and contingency of the thought-about, the inter-fold that is the world. Thus we can even say that thinking--its logic and pattern-changes with the trend of time. This does not mean that modus ponens, say, changes, but that the way, the logic and pattern, in which we use modus ponens shifts with the shifts of the situation, depending on who uses modus ponens where, when, and how. This is how the logic of the revolutionary clashes with that of the powers that be. Everyone is right, backed by one's own system of ideology, one's "philosophy of life," one's "way of looking at things" from where one is situated. "History" is a rhythmic wave formed by conflicting performances of various logicalbodily thinkings that join issue, thereby co-create wave after wave of

7. HOW HOME-HELL RELATIONS ARE POSSIBLE

159

situations through a series of conflicts. What saves us from relativistic confusion is our common sharing of human bodiness, which situates itself in perceptual interactions with the world, modeling itself to the world, turning on the world to designate, and to signify it, to find meaning in it--in a word, to symbolize (be thrown-together-in) it. All these bodily activities form a communicative system--calling, responding--with others, a human unity. The same human bodiliness, the same human community. This 13 why anthropology, archeology, sociology, psychology, and political sciences, in fact, all sciences, are possible. For sciences are a network of intersubjective inter-bodily communication--calling, understanding, responding. As a tree falling in the forest emits sound, were someone to be there to hear it, and as a thing is a sum of indefinite series of the subject's perspectival views, were there to be a subject at all, so "I+1=2" is true if someone is here to operate its calculation. 1+1=2 1s as synthetically operational ("synthetic a priori")' as "sound" is perceptual and a "thing" is grasped in perceptual synthesis. Both perception and operation linger to make up history. And since the passage of time 13 both perceptually-operationally experienced and situated at the base of the universality of apodictic thinking ("true of all worlds"), even the universality of thinking is historical. Thus we see change in sameness--same modus ponens, different modes of using it. And we see sameness in change--same bodiness, different situations mutually interacting; same systems of highway, different destinations; same love, different families.

sameness-in-differences

and

"communities,"

mutually

unexpectedness,

make

All these different

differences-in-sameness

interfusing,

mutually

form

communicating;

this

communal per-formance (that is, the interpersonal performance that forms a community) is as inevitable as it is unexpected, constituting the "historical necessity" of life. Inevitability is the natural necessity of life. Unexpectedness is the evocative growth of life, never to be taken for granted and manipulated. These two elements combined, inevitability and up the logic of life, which

is not deductive

or

inductive but metaphorical--with a theme (the integrity of an individual)

and its variations, with stresses on the essential that is not the obvious. ' On this point see my History, Academia Sinica, 1991, pp. 15-19.

Thinking,

and

Literature

in Chinese

Philosophy,

Taipei:

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PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING

Music is an embodiment of life-metaphor at work, a performative expression of the life pulse. This pulse, this growth, this turn, they are flowing rhythm, throbbing along the river of time and life. Music is the flow of life-fluid called (11 that pervades, flood-like, the Heaven

and

earth. Rhythm, repetition, and variation naturally punctuate itself in the beat (chieh tsou), in the steps-forward (pro-gress), of the sonic flow. This is the flow of cosmic life. 7.2.2. The word "renewal" appeared spontaneously above in relation to musical repetition. Flow is change, and change is renewal, in the wide sense (See Appendix 27.) of something new coming along, different from before. Renewal comes to us, in the inner-outer flow of our life. We step forward into what-is-to-come, the future, the novel. Such is life. Each day, constantly going on to tomorrow, differs from yesterday. Novelty and creativity are synonymous. So are imagination and the future, life and progress. Life is by nature creative, or it dies. Creativity is to realize this, that 1s, to become aware of this and thereby real-ize this. What 15 the criterion of the excellence of creativity? The sort of creativity that fits the above description. Any creativity that comes to destroy the future is "bad," an anti-creativity. Anti-creativity creates something which destroys the flow of life. It 15 "violence." Creativity 15 the flow, which is innovation (going forward) within tradition (from what has come forward). Creativity is inherent in us, then, that spontaneity of life flow. It has its own criterion of excellence, natural and enhancing. One who captures the beat, the "joints" in musical performance of the life flow (chieh tsou) and joins in the opportune time to flow fittingly with the flow, that one 1s the creator, the poet-musician of life. That one is a performative paradigmatic individual, a world individual, the Cosmic One. In the One the world and the individual are one, as Mencius, Chuang Tzu, and Josiah Royce noted.

But how is it possible for novelty to destroy itself? Not all novelties profit themselves. There are some novelties that threaten to destroy all novelties, past and future. For one can go under the maelstrom. Feeling dizzy and depressed, it is up to one to grasp the hidden potentials in the dark sinister flow and brave the tides for the future flow. We call it "going through and attaining life" (ta sheng'). One goes through "the gulf at Goblet Deeps"’; "the water falls--hanging ' This is the title of Chapter Nineteen in the Chuang Tzu. ? Chuang Tzu 19/22; Watson's translation.

7. HOW HOME-HELL RELATIONS ARE POSSIBLE

161

[there] (hsiian shui), flowing, frothing," and one comes out through it all, "walking, humming." Now, the above meditations on the flow, the creativity, and the violence of life can be universalized. We have here two implications, the danger and the hope. Our life flow is constantly surrounded by the torrential fall ("hanging water," [hsiian shui]); Chuang Tzu calls our fall into it, significantly, "hsüan chieh," "hanging untied." My body--my unique focal here-now that moves and flows in and with the cosmic flow (Ch'i)--will finally face a sudden disappearance. And the suddenness often manifests itself (to the bystander) as violence; death is often taken as a cruel snatching away of our integrity, falling off the cliff with the waterfall. This is our ultimate danger. But, then, we can go over the fall, go through it, and "goingaway humming, swimming-sporting (yu) under the bank," with the flow. Our here-now is now universalized. This is what happens to all creative people. Significance and meaning results from managing understanding by managing torrential waves of the situation, and such situational-cognitive managing is an existential consensus between the situation and the situated knower, and a social consensus among knowers with history, thinking patterns, language. (See Appendix 28.) Consensus is a socio-existential act of making sense of each other by making sense of each other's communications; "consensus" 13 "con-sensus," "making sense of each other," where "making sense (sentire)," is to feel for the sense of the situation, a perceptive performance of body thinking. Body thinking as an act of existential consensus is a con-sensus, co-sensing, co-feeling, co-making of the sense of the world, a social dynamics of bodily-cosmic ΟΠ. We hauntingly hear echoes of Mozart, and we are surrounded by all sorts of Mozarts. "Abel died, but through faith [creativity] he is still speaking," says the Bible? It continues, "We have those many [Mozarts and Abels] around us; their lives tell us what [creativity] means. So we should be like them. We too should run [with the flow]." At the same

! Ibid., 19/51. ? Ibid., 19/51. 3 Hebrews 11:4. * This is a paraphraase of Hebrews 12:1.

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time, we are bold enough to say, "Those people could be made perfect... . only together with us."' This is cognitive-situational creativity at work. All of us--Mozart, Abel, and us--are one flow, together "entering with

swirls, emerging with waves." We are all cosmic individuals flowing with cosmic Ch'i. We turn being-engulfed [in non-being] into "as-if [thus] engulfed," letting the bystander ("Confucius") "take [us] for [someone] in-trouble and desires death." This is creativity shown in con-sensus. This is creativity and its criterion, to become one beat (chieh) among many in the rhythm (chieh tsou) of the grand Flow. This "beat" is one ("my") round of ebb and flow in the Flow. 7.3. Fluidity. The fluidity ("water-nature") of Ch'i explains the proverbial "lack of grammar" in Chinese language. Not only does every grammatical category so flow into one another that every category is every other. Every category is a dynamic flow of movement, a verb. Nouns and adjectives (which are literally thrown-out of nouns) describe be-ing; verbs and adverbs (which are literally thrown-out of verbs) describe moving. A "thing" is a state of be-ing. "Clothes untied, legs apart" describes the true painter; "This is he who truly paints." A concrete object is a specific current of the flow of Ch'i (in the river of be-ing‘), and constitutes a story. "Concrete" describes a compacted (concresced) story of the be-ing and the moving of a situation. This is why each thing is a compact story, and why stories dominate in Chinese writings. A story flows; it ebbs and flows. Thus we understand, for instance, what is usually translated as "therefore," "shih ku," is literally "this [is] what-has-been," or simply "ku," "what-was-the-case," a tie-up, sometimes even a replacement, of what has been said ("here" or ! Hebrews 11:40. 2 Chuang Tzu, 19/52. 3 Ibid., 19/23. I am aware that this is an unconventional interpretation. I risk it in view of Confucius' amazement in 19/50, as to be described in the next phrase in this essay.

* Ibid., 19/50. ° Ibid., 21/47. ° Both Confucius (Analects, 9/17) and Mencius (4B18) were deeply moved at the river. The river surges, pervades, then goes; it surges again, then goes again. Every surging-and-going is a "thing."

7. HOW HOME-HELL RELATIONS ARE POSSIBLE

163

"elsewhere") "in other words." "Shih ku" is a (conclusive or initiative) "ebb" to prepare us for another "flow." Perhaps we can take it as "thus," "by the same token," and the like? This is why Lin Yutang can say’, "The Chinese have not developed logic because they dislike it by instinct. . . [T]hey like to see a thing in the round, the totality of its aspects. . . When you read ancient Chinese philosophy, you will find that every other 'therefore' is a non sequitur. And there you get at the bottom of the Chinese mind: cause and effect are simultaneous aspects ofthe same thing. It would be quite often correct to translate the Chinese word for 'therefore,' shih-ku, as ‘in the meanwhile' or in other words.'

If

one translate the word into English as 'therefore,' it would be quite impossible to see the logical connection."

In general, Chinese thinking is less a visual pattern of deductive argumentation,

much

less a volcanic

eruption of haphazard

novelties,

than an imperceptible "tidal shift" of perspective-reflection. Chinese cogitation incessantly flows in ch'i-perspectives, called "thinking" (ssu). Such a thinking reflects the Yin-Yang contrastive interflows of contraries, such as the mutuality of "good" and "bad." There are no contradictions but only contraries ready to turn themselves one into another: This phenomenon can be explained only by the water-nature

! To miss this (manner of thinking and) usage of "therefore" proved an annoyance, to Victor H. Mair, at the "arbitrary" occurrences of the term in the Tao Te Ching and provided the ground for his reshuffling of the ‘existent text. See his Tao Te Ching: The Classic Book of Integrity and the Way--Based on the Recently Discovered Ma-Wang-Tui Manuscripts, NY: Bantam Books, pp. 12324. 2 Ku_or shih ku might be taken as not as novel a beginning as fu, but not as strong a tie with the preceding as "therefore." Taken this way, many occurrences of ku in the 7ao Te Ching (chapters 1, 2, 7, 8, 11-15, 19, 22-25, 27, 28, 34, 39, 41, 42, 44, 46, 50, 51, 54, 56, 57, 60-69, 73, 76) become intelligible.

? Lin Yutang, The Pleasures of a Nonconformist, Cleveland: The World Publishing Co., 1962, p.

55.

* Cf. Chapter Four, "The Philosophy of Yin-Yang and the Problem of Evil," in ibid., pp. 52-66. > Cf. my "Chinese Aesthetics" in Robert E. Allinson, ed., Understanding the Chinese Mind: Philosophical Roots, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 236-93.

The

164

PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING

of things. All 1s indeed water, as both Thales and Kuan Tzu' suspected. This brings out the following points. Through the flow of things, (7.3.1.) we can understand how concrete bodily thinking can be both necessary and universal, (7.3.2.) how the I and the things can each obtain in the flow, (7.3.3.) how such ontological births obtain in the flow, and (7.3.4.) how,

without the flow of life,

a dead

human

body

hangs between the I and the It. And we get (7.3.5.) a summary comment to all this. 7.3.1. We can see now how thinking can be both necessary and universal. For thinking 1s an act which implies an actor. And the actor is bodily, here and now; "I am a body" means "I am here and now." "I," "body," and "here and now" are thus synonymous and co-implicative. But all this is by nature as fluid as water, and water by nature (necessarily) flows and spreads (universally). Therefore, body thinking as the flow of Ch'i can be both necessary and universal. We see now then that body thinking fulfills the twin characteristics of logical thinking, necessity and universality, without violating the specificity of the body and the self. The here and the now are after all demonstratives, whose meanings are universally understandable as definitions, yet change with and within specific situations to which they refer. So is the body, which means "here and now." So is the self, which means the body. So is thinking, which means an act of the bodily self, an act that characterizes the bodily self as person. Necessity and universality are characteristics of concrete body thinking which Chinese thinking typifies. Universality and necessity provides context for both objectivity and room for mistakes, both of which come easy in formal theoretical thinking. Objectivity comes from universality, and is the mainstay against the wind of arbitrary subjectivism and relativism. Mistakes are made in the context and teeth of necessity. Theoretical thinking provides the objectivity of universal form derived from its being empty of actual contents. Here formal theoretical "justice is blind" to considerations of special circumstances. Formal thinking can also allow the possibility of mistakes within the empty firmament of the AllInclusive (Platonic realm of Forms, Royce's and Jaspers' "the Encompassing"). Can Chinese concrete thinking give room for objectivity and mistakes? Concrete thinking in its own manner does have objectivity and ! Kuan Tzu, Chapters 38, 39, cf. 49. We also remember that Chuang Tzu begins with Northern Ocean-Darkness and the enormous primal K'un-Fish.

7. HOW HOME-HELL RELATIONS ARE POSSIBLE

165

treatment of mistakes within the actual network that spreads throughout all "under Heaven," throughout the "Heaven and earth." This cosmic network gives us the context in which to move, chart, and have our being, hence the objectivity as natural and irresistible as our surrounding Nature. And since this cosmic network begins with the bodily self and goes through human communities (family, state), the objectivity that explains our mistakes takes on a moral tinge. The inevitability of the cosmic network renders my mistake made thereto as serious as the destruction of myself, and I have nothing with which to placate the Heaven. Confucius,

Mencius,

and

other

Confucians

had

the

sole

passionate mission of providing the cosmological context for exhortation against mistakes. And the actuality of mistakes is irritatingly taken for granted;

it is

futile,

in

fact,

immoral,

to

argue

for

the

theoretical

possibility of mistakes when the entire world is exigently awash in violence and inhumanity. 7.3.2. We can also see the flow of ontological communication between the self and things. Buber says that the "I" is by nature a relation-word in the I-It and the I- Thou: "The

attitude of man

is twofold

in accordance

with the two

basic words he can speak. . . . One basic word 15 the word pair I-You. The other basic word is the word pair I-It . . . Thus the I of man is also twofold. For the I of the basic word I-You 13 different from that in the basic word I-It."

Buber could have gone on to say that the thing 15 also a relationword, that is, a "thing" is an It or a Thou as related to the I. This is obviously implied in the I-It and the I-Thou. Without the I there is no It or Thou in the same manner and sense in which without It or Thou there is no I. This is what it means to have "relation-word" or "word pair." But then, this means that things (and the self) are ! Mencius was insistent on this point.

See, among others, 2A, 2B, 4A, etc.

2 So said Confucius in The Analects 3/13. Chuang Tzu admits the inescapability of the "fate" (ming) of Nature and naturalness, and went on to propose our appropriate way of life therein. In (the inevitability of) Nature we must live naturally (as we are). That is the gist of the entire Chuang Tzu (cf. e.g., Chapters Four and Six, among many others). > Martin

Buber, tr. Walter Kaufmann, I and Thou,

NY:

Charles Scribner's Sons, 1970, p. 53.

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intercommunicative, forth. The I depends depend on the I to authenticity, thanks "wombing," wherein

BODY THINKING

radically reciprocal, ontologically going back and on the It and the Thou to exist; the It and the Thou exist. The Thou lives and has its being, its to the I's letting-be; this is a mutuality of I am Thou's "home."

At the same time, I the home of Thou incarnates that Thou. And this I-Thou relation expands to I-It in aesthetics, that is, in organic,

ontological feeling relation. No I, no things (It or Thou); no things (It or Thou), no I. "Seeing-looking" (chien) is appearing (Asien), which is appearing in each other (t'i Asien), "I in you, you in me," and both of us are transparently self-aware in the mutuality. When I looks at things (It or Thou), I also by I's very looking lets things look at I. Or rather, when I looks at things, things look back at I; these two lookings imply each other. This is what "looking" means. "How do I look?" means both how I look at things and how I appear to things as they look at me; "look" here has a self-reflexive transitive force. Thus "How do I look?" shapes "me." This question shapes "me" by requesting assistance from "you," my friendly other. similarly, speaking, meaning, feeling, and acting are at once subjective and objective in connotation? In these activities both the subject and the object appear together and appear apart, thereby come to themselves by their interaction and reciprocal influence, speaking-ly, meaning-ly, feeling-fully, and acting-ly. We have four ontological moments in this dynamic interpersonal mutuality among things: Thou-It appears (Asien Asien) as Thou-It

in I.

Then,

thanks

to I, I bodies-forth. (t'i hsien)

Thou-It's

integrity in I; I am in turn enriched, thanks to Thou-It. Thereby, thirdly, Thou-It who is I's correlate and I who am Thou-It's correlate are both one in two, a reciprocally enriching unity. Finally, throughout all these beings-in, both are eminently at once self-aware and other-aware, nothing tacit at all. To apply this dynamism to aesthetics is easy--the tree in me, I become the tree, and both of us become one in an artwork

and both are enriched. This is a peculiarly Chinese "seeing" as mutuality that eliminates Michael Polanyi's tacit dimension. For Polanyi, no matter ' The same Chinese character has these two

pronunciations

and two meanings.

7 Ricoeur noted "speaking" and "meaning" to be subjective-objective (Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning, Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976). Ian Ramsey noted "feeling" and "acting" to be subjective-objective (Christian Empiricism, Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1974).

7. HOW HOME-HELL RELATIONS ARE POSSIBLE

167

how hard I try, looking at things from as many angles as possible, my look cannot look at myself looking. This is also Gilbert Ryle's "systematic elusiveness of the I" which is an extrapolation from David Hume's self-observation'. There is always a tacit darkness to my consciousness when I am conscious (of something else). I cannot be conscious of my being conscious. Or to change an example, when a figure appears against its background my look is at the figure, not the background. But it is the objective look that carries with it such tacit dimension.

This is the world of I-It relation, where

consciousness

is

defined as I the subject objectively manages and manipulates It the object. Since the operation is an objective one, it cannot explain the subject, although it needs the subject to occur. Hence the tacit dimension. We cannot be conscious (defined as It-objective operation) of our (subjective) consciousness, because we can be conscious only of an object, and our consciousness belongs to the subject. That the subject can "never be worked in 'objective' terms," the perceptual, observational, objectifying language, is much stressed by Ian Ramsey, by noting various logical difficulties encountered by various thinkers who tried to describe the subject in object-language, such as Hume, Broad, Ryle, Ayer?

Once we switch the interpretive model from I-It to I- Thou, we can see how one can be conscious both of the object (of which one is conscious) and of (the subject who is) being conscious. In this context, the mother is aware both that she is caring for her baby and aware of the baby she cares for. When I myself am the background for the other (Thou or It), I am fully aware of myself being involved in wombing forth the other, in my parenting, in my befriending. Caring, in being Compare Ian Ramsey's observation on this point in his "The Systematic Elusiveness his Christian Empiricism, Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1974, pp. 17-31.

of Tl," in

? Jan Ramsey also points out (ibid.) that Ryle's systematic nature of the elusiveness of destroys the subject-object distinction and misses the very subjecthood of I the subject.

he I

? [an Ramsey, Christian Empiricism, ed. Jerry H. Gill, Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1974, pp. 17-20, 32-39, et passim. Ramsey went on to say that the subject can be disclosed by storytelling (pp. 23-25). Unfortunately, he did not tell us that object-language is all we have, and the subject can be evoked only by using our object language. In other words, he stressed the uniqueness and irreducibility of the subject (even noting the peculiar nature of "feeling," "act," as both perceptual-objective and subjective-performative) without developing the "logic" of subject-disclosure by storytelling. Nor did any of the philosophers Ramsey mentioned, Hume, Broad, Ryle, Ayer, map out the logic of the I, much less intelligibly.

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PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING

subjectively one in two, has no tacit dimension. Here to "see One" (chien tu) is to self-appear as One (Asien tuy. In this light, the "object" takes on a new meaning. The artist can be aware, first, of the tree which calls to evoke the artist, then of the

artist's own response to it, and, thirdly, of the canvas wherein both the tree and the artist move and fulfill their beings. The artist here 15 transparently aware of everything, including the artist himself, because the artist switches from the I-It perspective of daily life to an aesthetic sensitivity, an I- Thou reciprocity to things; here "I" lives and grows in Thou, and Thou in "I." The one personally serves the other's background; in "I," Thou grows into Thou. Since it is "I" the subject, qua conscious subject, who serves as Thou's background (womb, home), I am aware of myself thus serving Thou. And it 1s in this mutuality of home-ing and wombing forth, I for Thou, Thou for I, that both I and Thou come to exist as I and as Thou,

respectively; "Primary words [I-Thou] do not describe something that might exist independently of them, but being spoken they bring about existence. Primary words are spoken from the being." Existing (intransitively) is co-existing transitively, "letting-exist people (li jen).": And, extrapolating from Buber, this I-Thou mode of existing in coexisting holds true of "I" and "It" also. said,‘

"that not only may

descriptive

Ian Ramsey, without elaborating,

events

be so ordered

as to

disclose a subject which while it includes them also transcends

them, but that descriptive events may also be ordered so as to disclose an object which in a similar sort of way transcends them objectively and that indeed such a transcendent object is associated with a transcendent subject in the same situation. We become aware of it as we become aware of ourselves. . . . Persons are what is disclosed to each of us when we 'come to ourselves' in recognizing a world that has likewise, in some i Chuang Tzu, 6/41. (hsien).

Here again, the same character covers

? Martin Buber, J and Thou, tr. Ronald Gregor Edition, 1958, p. 3.

Smith,

N.

both "seeing" (chien) and "appearing"

Y.: Charles Scribner's Sons, Second

3 As Confucius said, Analects, 6/30. + Tan Ramsey, Christian Empiricism, Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1974, pp. 43, 44

7. HOW HOME-HELL RELATIONS ARE POSSIBLE

169

way or other, ‘come alive,' 'taken the initiative,’ 'declared itself in a personal sort of way." (emphases original) The disclosure of a fact lets-exist an object as a fact; and this objectdisclosure to me also lets-exist me as myself. 7.3.3. How does this mutuality of co-letting-exist obtain? The image of circle may help. A circle can be a centripetal disclosure; going over many perceptual data, we are evoked to recognize that these qualities refer and belong to one center--the thing, the self. And then the circle can centrifugally expand from the non-metaphorical center of the bodily "I," to metaphorically understand more and more things and finally the entire skies and the fields.’ Thus the circle is a dynamic network of ontological and epistemological relations. The center of this circle is everywhere, for it is disclosed

everywhere

as the

self, the thing;

the

circumference

is

nowhere, for it is a metaphorically expanding horizon, the world. This centripetal-centrifugal dynamism of the self-thing-cosmic circle indicates the ebb and flow of the dynamic conatus (Spinoza), Ch'i (Mencius), that makes I I, makes things things, and thereby makes the world. Confucius was an expert in compact presentation of the centripetal circles of actuality; Mencius was one in metaphorical expansion of the centrifugal circles of the world. Now let us consider how the evocative centripetal circle and the metaphorical centrifugal circle cohere into a mutuality of transitive coexisting. We consider this circle-mutuality first as aesthetic abode, then as sociopolitical utopia. First, as to the circle-mutuality as aesthetic abode of co-existing. The artist's jottings-down of relevant details of a tree, evoked by the tree's call, configure into a space-canvas to invite the viewer's recognition, to evoke a disclosure of the tree-essence. This artist is a painter calling out to the viewer with his configured jottings-down to evoke a centripetal center, the tree. If the artist jots down a configuration of tree-details onto a timecanvas

or word-canvas,

! Oliver Sacks in his depicts a man who sees glove, and a man who recognize them as his things without knowing

he

is a musician

or a novelist,

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a details of a glove without being able to sees and lives (through) daily details life. And there was a woman [apraxic] their detailed "circumferences."

calling

for

Hat, N.Y.: Summit Books, 1985, recognize them as description of a of his life without being able to who recognized the "centers" of

Sacks did not mention that these two inabilities go together; they belong to a disease of lack of the center, both of the other (a glove, a wife) and of oneself.

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BODY THINKING

listeners' or readers' discernment of the tree-essence, say, massive serenity or eternal vitality, as Chuang Tzu presented, to conclude his delightful First Chapter. These configurative jottings form an evocative centripetal circle of storytelling, where the tree ("Thou") comes to be as it is, and the "where" is the abode which 1s the artist ("I"), called forth by the tree's evocative beckoning and becoming. This is the genealogical structure of evocative-centripetal circle. Then, this circle metaphorically expands 171 centrifugal history, and again in the mode of storytelling. The jottings-down of details in Mencius' story, say, of "a baby about to crawl into a well" break in on the listener an awareness of his own "heart of alarmed pity," which points to another story, with another configuration of details, about a ruler (not exactly a good one) who let go of an ox on its struggling way to sacrificial slaughter, because he could not bear the ox's jitters; the second story breaks in on the ruler an awareness of his "heart of not bearing people (suffering)."? These stories disclose the hearts of alarmed pity and of not bearing people (suffering)--as the "budding of human(e)ness," as the "policy of human(e)ness." Then they urge the rulers to expand this budding policy, metaphorically (chi, t'ui, k'uo) from such feelings to "my" elders and tender-aged, toward others's elders and tender-aged, and the "government of not bearing people (suffering)" shall come into being. This new center, "the not-bearing-people-(suffer) government," needs a comparable yet new circumference, that is, concrete details of political implementation of such a governance, to complete the circle, and Mencius again fills them in for the ruler--on how to "share the joys" of sex, wealth, and foods with people, on how not to disturb their living, such as their farming and harvesting times, etc.’ All this amounts to a historico-metaphorical expansion from the past story of details depicting-disclosing the heart of not bearing people l Mencius, 2A6. ° "The-ruler was-pleased, saying, 'The-Classic-of-Poetry says, "Other people have minds, I surmise them." This describes you. For though I did it, coming-back-to-myself I-looked-for my motive in vain. You, sir, described it [and your words] struck a chord in my heart." (Mencius, 1A7) > The ideal "state" in China is a big family extended from the inner "intolerable feeling" toward "people's" suffering to all "within the Four Seas." Here in this state-family, both the individual and the community are intertwined, inter-nascent. In contrast, The state in the West is Hobbes' Leviathan where the individual is a mere part of the social whole, or Locke's contractual community a bloodless contractual gathering intent on preserving individual integrity. Sadly, this Chinese ideal is just that, a mere ideal never realized in the long political history of China.

7. HOW HOME-HELL RELATIONS ARE POSSIBLE

17]

(suffer) to a future story of normative details disclosing-depicting the not-bearing-people-(suffer) governance. Furthermore, most urgently, the ruler's very physical survival goes hand in glove with the ruler's working out of such a governance from his humane heart for popular welfare. If he succeeds, all "under Heaven"

15 a circle that "turns on his

palm" of humaneness, which is now his people's home. If he fails, not even he himself can survive, much less his royal family. The ruler and his people together constitute a symbiotic circle of reciprocal existing. Mencius warned,' "The-ruler sees them as his-hands, feet, then they see him as their-bosoms, hearts; the-ruler sees them as dogs, horses, then

they see him as other-people; the-ruler sees them as grass, dirt, then they see him as enemy."

Thus, existence is a co-existing, and "object"-formation comes about in a personal mutuality, whether in knowing, in arts, or in politics. And, by extrapolation, "objectivity" also takes on a new meaning. My opinion of myself is "objective" to the extent that how I think of myself agrees with how things (and others) "think" of me. And this agreement (correspondence theory of truth) naturally obtains in my awareness. Such a transparent awareness and true objective thinking makes

the artist and the scientist, as well as the Zen

master and the

martial artist. Furthermore, such a transparency of consciousness amounts to a subject-object continuum, and bespeaks the flooding pervasiveness of subject-object (11 all around. Things are not just It or Thou, as if It is entirely different and separate from Thou. Things can be It and Thou, or between It and Thou. In the final analysis, "and" and "between" are synonymous. All this originates in my body which 15 fluid (Ch'i-flowing?) in nature. My body is neither just a person nor just a physical object, but both in one. When I touch you, I touch your body, which is a who, an

| Mencius, 483. Cf. 3A2, 4A28 7 For technical details of the human body as a locus--or concentration--for the flowing Ch'i, see Ki Nagareru Shintai (The Ch'i-flowing Body) by Ishida, Hidemi, Tokyo: Hiragawa Publishers, 1987, 1988. Cf. also Maruyama, Toshiaki, ki (Ch'i), Tokyo Bijutsu Publishers, 1986, etc.

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"alive" person.‘ A person can be touched even from inside as in feeling and in sex, thanks to the person being the body that is fluid. I am my body in my voice, my look, my writings, etc., where all of these my expressions are "thrown-in together" to constitute the personal "symbols"? of myself. These symbols constitute the body-ness of my personhood. And in the end, I am--as my body--a microcosmos that makes sense of the macrocosmos, which is my body expanded. Mencius says, "All myriad things are-provided in me." Similarly, Chuang Tzu says, "Heaven, earth, with myself are-born together, and myriad things with myself make one."? Physiology is psychology, and metaphysics is metamedics. Every physics, every sociology, and every metaphysics starts here and comes home here as its root, destiny, and justification. 7.3.4.

It stands

to reason,

then, that such

a compact

living

integration of It and Thou--physico-psychic and homo-cosmic "symbol"-falls apart in a dead body, which 13 neither pure It nor pure Thou. A corpse 1s something to be respected as a person, as a has-been person. The corpse is between It and Thou, an It pointing to a Thou, a weak symbol. When one has been raised in a violent lonesome family, one's personality can be damaged to the point of being a "corpse." One then becomes insensitive as corpse to things and persons, none of whom 13 perfectly It nor perfectly Thou. Things become fetish for persons; persons are mere props for satisfying one's hunger to be with someone. An extreme form of such hunger is sexual perversion and violence. Take such serial killer as Jeffrey Dahmer.‘ Because of his radically skewed perception of a "normal life" he has viewed everything as an external disconnected "thing". Relationships were violent, or distant and lonesome, his relationship to things and others shows us what we usually do not notice in ours. First, when Dahmer met a person of the same sex (closer to him ! This is what gives materialism the force of plausible truth. Richard Taylor, for instance, is correct when he claims that when I touch you, I touch your body. Unfortunately, he overstates the case, saying that I am "nothing but" (my) body. See Richard Taylor, "How to Bury the MindBody Problem," in 7he American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 2 (April, 1969). * The "symbol"

is what is thrown-together, as suggested by

its etymology, symballein.

> Mencius, 2A2, 7A4. Chuang Tzu, 2/52-53. * As described in Wisconsin State Journal, August 11, 1991, pp. 1A, 6A.

7. HOW HOME-HELL RELATIONS ARE POSSIBLE

173

than persons of the opposite sex) he invited him in and let him enjoy a beer. Dahmer then "didn't want him to leave," but strangled him. Strangling "is a very personal, intimate means" of keeping him so he "wouldn't leave," of feeling him, as Dahmer did, struggling to death in Dahmer's hand, then seeing him remain forever in Dahmer's hand. Here that person is a person ("I want to be with him.") and not a person ("These were sexual props, not people.")--and of course, sex is the most intimate mode of touching inside a person-not-person, of being in an ItThou. Secondly, Dahmer dismembered the victim-friend -companionobject, a Thou-It. He kept those parts as mementos, as "souvenirs to remember them by." A person is not a person but merely something personal

to be

"killed"

and

dismembered;

body

parts

(skulls,

hearts,

bones, etc.) are things infused with personal fondness--fetish for persons. Victims are Thou's in the mode of an It; body parts are It's in the mode of a Thou.

In other words, victims are between Thou and It;

body parts are between It and Thou. And we do often regard persons as clients, employees, in a certain social role, on the one hand, and endow some personal items with "sentimental values," on the other. They are neither pure It nor pure Thou, and they are both; they are between It and Thou. All these considerations make sense if categories are not solid boundaries but fluid characterizations. 7.3.5. Fluidity (the water nature) bespeaks flowing motion, shift and change. Paintings come alive because of this fluidity; to enhance this moving quality there is the montage, the scroll, and the like, which are paintings in peripatetic perspective. A painting is a movie. Likewise, interpersonal relation is a reciprocity of personal interaction and inter-flowing between the It and the Thou. All this constitutes history, the flow of (ΟΠ. This drama of history is also the drama of an interchange between my other as home and my other as hell, as noted in the previous section 6. This interchange is also understandable in terms of the interflow of Ch'i that constitutes history. One thing is certain. History means the flow of events that themselves flow, that 15, change. Our attitude should be that of the proverbial Uncle Saı expecting the unexpected "horses" of events, as cited in 3.3.3. And another point is also certain. The most accurate definition of a "thing" is not its "definition" but a "story" about it. A story can tell most lies, as Sartre shrewdly pointed out,' because it is the । Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, op. cit., pp. 56-59.

Cf. my Butterfly, op. cit., pp. 7-8, 67-69.

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most powerful description we know of things. But this is because a story can tell most truths, deepest ones because, due to its time-ly fluidity, it is the most truthful, effective description we know of things. 7.4. Evocation. Let us look into how all this connects with what we have found so far, by seeing how the inter-flow of relations among things originates in evocation. A house,

for instance,

needs

some

"wasted

space";

too much

architectural contrivance kills breathing space in the house.! "Wasted" space means space that is for nothing and does not make much architectural sense, at least at the moment. Such a space is an architectural vacuum; as "nature abhors vacuum," this space would later

let the residents put a flower pot, a bookshelf, etc. there. In other words, "wasted space" is one that makes no sense on the architect's drawing board. But then the space, as such, makes for a "breathing space" for the residents, the space wherein they can breathe their own creative initiative. The architects "wasted space" is an invitation to the residents to breathe themselves out, to breathe their self-

expression. Tactical situational waste lets the situated self breathe freely. To "let breathe" amounts to the situational call to the bodily subject to breathe as subject, the call that calls forth the smooth flow of Ch'i, the spontaneous life-response. "Calling forth" is "evocation." History is such a tapestry, not so much of Toynbee's "challenge and response" as of situational call and subjective response, that is, evocation and metaphoring, hsing and pi. And "tapestry" is a retrospective (an after-the-fact look-back) affirmation of the flow of mutuality between the situation and the situated subject, and the situated subject is the bodily self, not the abstract self, because only the body-self can be situated. Seen this way, we realize how "evocation" is the basis for all other five modes of inter-flowing relation between the situation and the bodily subject. Let us see how this is so. The basic demonstratives in our thinking are "I," "here," and "now," among others. They have definite meanings throughout the changing situations, yet their referents differ as the situation shifts. They are situation-dependent--the I spoken by me is not the I spoken by you; the now at present is not the now a while ago; the here referred to here is not the here referred to there.

| An architect, Mr. T. J. Harkness in Milwaukee, embraces and practices this principle.

7. HOW HOME-HELL RELATIONS ARE POSSIBLE

175

And they imply one another in a complex manner. For instance, "I am here and now" is always true (though "Here and now is I" is not always the case). For "here and now" is defined by the I, that is, understood as such only through the I situated bodily here and now. Hence, "I am here and now" is tautological, and "I am not here" is situationally odd and existentially contradictory.' Then "here and now" I understand--expand myself metaphorically--to include descriptions of many others similarly situated with the I, such as "This tree is here now."

Hence, "Here and now is I"

is not tautological, because a tree can also be here now.

Furthermore, this "then . . . I understand" in the above statement

constitutes I's response, in the activity of expanding myself metaphorically, to the evocation of the situation ("here" and "now"). This I's response is called "affirmation." When I af-firm (confirm, firm up) the here and the now, with all things relevant to them, affirmatives are born. Here and Now are also directives for I to affirm in a certain definite direction, and not in any other, and negatives are born. Thus the negative is part and parcel of the affirmative, constituting the definite specificity of the affirmative, its definition.’ Now, to understand Here and Now as inclusive of others (things and other I's) is to ferry those I's from the familiar here to the novel there, from the existing now to the no-longer-existing then (in the past) and not-yet-existing then (in the future), making There understandable as another Here, Then as another Now. This ferrying-over of understanding is a "stretching of I's awareness," that is, "imagination."

This ferrying is the flow-forth of events. The ferrying-over (of understanding) is the metaphoric mode of concrete argumentation. To present and exhibit such an evocative situation for us (for I's) to freely ferry ourselves therein is the compact mode of argumentation. Compact presentation is thus a situational-subjective evocation to understanding which goes therein, somewhat similar to an architectural "wasted space" in understanding. But this compact invitation to (evocation of) free floating in the flow of events (presented by the compact story) is not an arbitrary call to an arbitrary movement, like leaves in the random wind, but a call from a definite situation (and ! Section 3.1. showed how much hermeneutical muscle has to be flexed to tease out special situational meanings from the strange sentence, "I am not here." ? We noted in 2.3 2.1.

that to de-fine is to cut off alternatives, thus negative in connotation.

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BODY THINKING

individual) to I's free ferrying, with a definite "to" that negates many other directions of understanding in a consensual direction (sometimes with tacit negatives) in which the conversation or the story unfolds. The conversation is issued from, to, and responded to by individual(s).

And an "I" is a concresced, concrete, situation, a compact

story, a history in the evoking, unfolding, unpacking, thanks to my Thou's prodding. A story is an individual ex-pressed--evoked and explicated, metaphorically and ironically "af-firmed." Individuals are made up of story-situations of I's, Thou's and It's; Thou's and It's are the

I-story unpacked--metaphorically expanded, ironically explicated. All explications are stories. Thus all individuals (and situations) are compact stories told at the inducement of the other, the Thou in the situation. All sciences and arguments are unpacked individuals (and situations). Let us now go in a reverse manner. There is perhaps a linkage here to the principle of parsimony (Ockham's Razor)--the simplest explanation is the one most likely to be true, to depict actuality as it is. This is because theorization links us (our understanding) to concrete actuality, and "concrete" actuality is literally something "concresced" out of hitherto unrelated things related into an organic unity, one concrete particular, which is "simple" to look at. For all theorization is for the sake of linking us to actuality which is concrete. And since concrete actuality is made up of particulars which are simple, all theorization tends toward simplicity. This is perhaps the dynamo that drives Thomas Kuhn's scientific revolution; the paradigm shifts toward simplification of explanations. simplicity makes it easy for us to see the pregnant complexity in concrete actuality. Confucius was an expert in presenting concrete complexity in his compact sayings, and all Chinese notions are packed gnomic phrases. Extrapolating from this, we can even say that gnomic phrases are "concretes,"

and

so are all artworks

and

all counterfactual

ideals

(packed in myths of the past and legends of the future); all of them pull our present actuality toward the ideal future, uniting our present to our utopian future (what is to come). To the extent that we succeed in uniting the now with the better then, we succeed in creating (normative) concrete actuality. Thus all artists are concrete people, unlike men in the street who merely exist from day to day, not-concrete. When negatives are not only tacitly supportive of affirmatives, but packed, compacted, into affirmatives, the not-a affirms and

7. HOW HOME-HELL RELATIONS ARE POSSIBLE

177

constitutes the a, so much so that the affirmative is radicalized into its

own negation, the negative is radicalized into its own affirmation, and both become one. It is an ultimate form of compact argumentation. It is called the ironic mode of. argumentation. Yin-Yang interrelationship (especially in the J Ching, among the Taoists) is a particularly incisive expression of this ironic mode, the fluid mode, of things and situations. We have seen some of our responses to evocation, situational and personal; these responses are metaphoric, compact, ironic, and describe the "relations" that make up the flow of Ch'i of things. The relation is architectural, an architectonic, which belongs as much to the situation as it does to the situated subject, who defines and is defined by the here-now.

This is fluidity, the lived, wasted space that creates its

own space to breathe. This space spaces itself and others. This situation-and-subject defines creativity; this 1s its norm. The space that spaces itself, that is, moving itself to accommodate others, is creativity, and this creativity is Ch'i at its normal-normative flow. But here we know how creativity as the novel beginning 1s also not quite the flow that goes on. In fact, we have gone through a similar mix of metaphor that flows and evocation that jolts, the Thou who is my other ego and Thou in reciprocity that confronts me. Negatives that confirm affirmatives make ironies; metaphor and evocation make up storytelling. The flow of Ch'i is not a smooth one. To this theme of polarity we now turn. 7.5. Polar Continuity. It is the nature of fluid to flow, thereby manifest two characteristics--the flow is continuous and polar. The flow Is continuous, and results in a polar distinction--upstream and downstream. Nature is a flow; it has seasonal and day-night shifts, not jumps. Even a cataract-like change (such as a catastrophe) is not a jump but a dramatization of polarity in the flow; fluid does not jump in nature. The polarity is of two sorts, a soft (mixable) one such as the personal and the public, and a hard (unmixable) one such as the good and the bad. What is amazing in this continuum of polarity is that these two sorts mix into a complex of time flow. Human agency turns it into "history"; history manifests it as "time." Nature as such a complex flow is a polar continuum manifested in all its features, both notional and actual.

From this angle of the flow, the polar continuity, we now understand anew seven themes: (7.5.1.) Our ten notions in four eddies of the flow, (7.5.2.) irresistible dynamism of the flow, (7.5.3:) the i-nien or i-hsiang as the life-nisus, (7.5.4.) "being at home," (7.5.5.) letting-go, self-oblivion, (7.5.6.) bodily death, and (7.5.7.) eternity.

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PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING 7.5.1.

themselves

We have noted 10 notional features in nature, forming

into

four

clusters,

"eddies"

that

flow

into

each

other:

(7.5.1.1.1.) body - demonstratives, (7.5.1.1.2.) evocation -affirmationnegation, (7.5.1.1.3.) compactness-metaphorics-irony, and (7.5.1.1.4.) necessity-universality-storytelling. 7.5.1.1.1. Body-demonstratives: "I am my body" is a primordial fact, a basic actuality. The fact exhibits--implies, continuous with--the situation I find myself "thrown into" (as the phenomenologist loves to say), and the situation is that I am present here now in this world. "I," "body," "here," "now" are co-implicative, that is, make sense in terms of

one another; they are continuous. At the same time, "I am my body" can be objectified into "I have my body," making "I" and "body" a contrastive pair. "I am here" can be objectified into "I am not here," for instance, as a note on my office door may say. "Here" is abstracted from the situation in which I am, projected onto the place where I am expected to be, and is negated into "I am not here." Thus "I" can look at my "body," ponder on my being "here" and "now," taking a cognitive stand over against my bodiness and my situation. "Body" and "here-now" are polar in their continuity. Then,

the

words

"I,"

"here,"

and

"now"

(as

well

as

their

cognates, "this," "that," and the like) are universally intelligible and applicable yet unique and particular in their referents and connotations. This is to say that we can all understand the meanings of those terms, hence their continuity. And yet the terms change their connotations depending on who uses them, and that where and when that person uses them. And they are intelligible only in relation to one another; "I" is intelligible in front of "you,"

and "here" makes

sense in contrast to "there,"

"now" to "then," and the other way around. They continuous. They are called "demonstratives." And so, body, demonstratives--mutually form a cluster of continuum. 7.5.1.1.2. Evocation - affirmation - negation:

"this" to "that,"

are polar and these notions-concrete polar

Demonstratives

are actually the I's body-situation--I, here, now, this--called forth to I's

awareness by the situation. "Calling forth"--evocation--is what the situation does to the I. And the I responds. The I responds by affirming--firming up, confirming--whatever comes into I's awareness । Cf. below, 8.1.1., 8.1.2., 8.2., 8.3.

7. HOW HOME-HELL RELATIONS ARE POSSIBLE

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(here, now, this) as such. And the I responds-affirms by denying-negating--what is not (to be) affirmed. Negation is an emphatic firmingup of affirmation. Thus clearly evoking, affirming, and negating are a continuum of activities the I undergoes to understand (under-stand) the situation. It is also clear that the situation's call (evocation) forms a polar relation with the I's responses--the I's affirming-negating. And affirming is in a polar relation with negating. And the I's responses, in turn, can and often do call forth (new evocation) the situational responses, affirming, negating. This is how human technalogy relates itself to the environment; the philosophical theory of correspondence operates here as the pragmatic rounds of co-responses. All this indicates the polar relations (a) between evocation, on the one hand, and affirmation and negation, on the other, and (b) between affirmation and negation. 7.5.1.1.3. Compactness-metaphorics-irony: Transpose evocation-responses (affirming-negating) onto the realm of understanding, and we get the triad of compactness in a continuous polar relation with its unpacking in metaphorics and irony. For, first, compactness of implications--implications packed compactly in a tight hierarchy--characterizes our presentation of the situation, often in pithy sayings, pregnant stories, pedagogical dialogues. These packed implications await being unpacked in step-by-step metaphorical understanding--understanding "that" in terms of "this." And the "terms" in which "that" is understood can be positive or negative; an understanding of "that" via "this" can come about either in an affirmative manner (metaphorics) or a negative manner (irony). Compactness, metaphorics, and irony form a continuum. Then, this continuum 15 a polar one. Compact stories call to our curiosity, challenging our intelligence to respond by unpacking them metaphorically and ironically. And since affirmation is in a polar contrast with negation, affirmative metaphorics is in a polar relation with negative irony. 7.5.1.1.4. Necessity-universality: The situation carries its own peculiar inevitability; every event, for instance, must have been caused in its own manner. And when a situational inevitability is generalized it becomes intelligible; when inevitability is generalized to being applicable everywhere every time, we call it a "necessity." Now, when we generalize our understandings of particulars to apply to as many things as these understandings allow, we get knowledge. When the farthest generality is combined with necessity, we get "necessity in all

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possible worlds," what we call "universality." It is thus that necessity and universality form a continuum; we call it storytelling. Necessity and universality form a polar relation in this way. Both necessity and universality can be concrete. But necessity can go with particulars, while universality excludes particularity. Thus necessity and universality form a polar continuum. 7.5.2. In all our survey of the polar continuum of the current of the homo-cosmic Ch'i, we should not lose sight of the irresistible dynamism of the flow. There is always a pull from the future "downstream," the pull we call a "call" for a response. The primordial actuality of "I am my body" calls forth "I have my body," expressing (ex-pressing) itself in the statement "I am here," and demonstratives are born--I, here, now. Thus the body inevitably flows into demonstratives. This calling is now christened as "evocation" to induce our affirming-and negating the irrelevant features--of the situation. Thus evocation irresistibly leads to affirmation and its reinforcement in negation. This existential evocative affirmation-negation leads to its transference into objective statements, first in compact stories and conversations, and their compactness urges us to unpacking them in metaphorical and ironic understanding. Thus in the urging, the irresistible leading on, and the inevitable inducing, we see the might current that pushes ahead. The polar continuum of the Ch'i-flow is irresistibly dynamic. Nature as a complex flow has its actual features in a polar continuum in three ontological stages--individuals, sociality, and the universe. In human terms, these are persons, society (family, state), and the Heaven and earth. They flow as they mutually contrast. And the flow is torrential, the cosmic rapids.' The flow originates in the depths of our mindhearts, without premeditation, ineluctably. 7.5.3. How do we understand the inter-flow of relationship that generates the other as my home, and the other as my hell? To answer, we must first see what Hegel did in his dialectical movement and what Kierkegaard's objection to it means. Hegel saw the usual logical move as a synthesis that mediates between universality (thesis) and particularity (antithesis). A syllogism, "All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; Socrates is mortal," for instance,

unites universality (mortality) to particularity (Socrates), which is understood in terms of universality: Who is Socrates? He is a man (a । Cf. Mencius, 6A2.

7. HOW HOME-HELL RELATIONS ARE POSSIBLE

181

universal) and mortal (another universal), because mortality belongs to all-men. Thus Hegel has a "dialectical mediation," a facile movement from universality to particularity and back. Kierkegaard accused him of subjecting the particular under abstract universality, thereby missing the concrete particular. Kierkegaard accused Hegel of false movement. Subjective pathos opposes dispassionate logos; Kierkegaard resolutely stood firm in particularity, opposing the inauthenticity of the crowd with passionate subjectivity. Either become oneself or be lost in the crowd; there is no third term, no mediation. ' And so Hegel dialectically mediated particularity to universality; Kierkegaard held to the paradox of relating the eternal truth to the existing individual. Hegel's logical move skimmed on the surface of things; Kierkegaard held to the inwardness of subjectivity. For Hegel, truth is something objectively out there; for Kierkegaard, truth resides in the individual's relationship to the concern of his infinite passion. For Hegel, coming to know truth is an approximation process; Kierkegaard's truth is where the individual's fate is decisively and infinitely staked on the what "if." And so to Hegel's dispassionate logos Kierkegaard opposed the pathos of truth as a deadly peril, to be decided on at all costs.’ What is interesting to note here, is that Hegel falsely moved and Kierkegaard refused to move; both missed movement. To put it another way, neither understood the actual dynamics of relation. An interesting Chinese character in this context 15 1, usually translated as "will," but really much wider in connotation. It is a word for tendency,

potentiality,

nisus, vector, thrust, and

intentionality that

includes more than human intention and consciousness. Human intentionality is i hsiang, i-tending, inclination, or Asin i, the 1 of the

mindheart,

i.e., ideas, intention.

ssu-i, thought-i.

Compare

also ch'ing-i, feeling-i, and

The thrust and tendency applies to life in general as

well, as in sheng i, life-nisus, vitality, and further to nature, as in ch'iu i,

autumn-tendency, a touch and feel of autumn coming. The fact that the word i applies throughout the universe shows that the nisus goes through

' All this is an impressionistic summary of Soren Kierkegaard's poignant little classic, Fear and Trembling, tr. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941, etc. * All this is a quick summary of Soren Kierkegaard's massive Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trs. by David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press, ‚1941, εἰς.

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PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING

human, vital, and natural realms, reminding us of Spinoza,'

Spinoza's geometrical impersonalism.

but 7 lacks

This has a tremendous moral significance for humanity. We would think that only the conduct that flows out of the innerly felt inducement of virtue is virtuous behavior. On Five Elements put it much stronger: Virtuous behavior is the formation of innerly-felt virtue; when four virtues form themselves into a behavior, it is "good," and when all five are formed into a behavior, it is "virtuous." Behavior is the outward manifestation of virtues' inner formation, without which behavior

remains mere conduct. Thus virtue is this moral vector in mindheart (ihsiang, perhaps) which forms itself outward. This inner-outer vectorial polarity has nothing to do with the introvert-extrovert disjunction all too commonly taken to be, much less with value subjectivism that traps static values (values as quale) eternally inside me. And this has a vast cosmic repercussion, as Chiin-chieh Huang said well in his important essay, "On Five Activities from Ma-wang-tui: The Mind-body Unity and Its Manifold Significance."* Again, this inner autonomy as congruent, even identical, with the universal Li-principle is anything but subjective or merely the matter of a private individual.’ Mencius's contribution is more subtle and complex. He replaced the external heteronomy of heavenly Decree over human destiny with human inner autonomous self-legislation that is organically and dynamically continuous with Heaven. Here human autonomy is

Spinoza could not help but recognize what he called conatus, i.e., conatus in suo esse perseverandi (a drive toward self-preservation). This is the root power of an entity to be what it is, conation (an inherent tendency) to maintain its characteristic unity through changes, a homeostatic postulate. Unfortunately, though a convenient postulate for the individuality of things, conatus is hard to reconcile with Spinoza's own geometrical deterministic system, and had to be used in his psychology. The maintaining power of the individuality of things must be used to interpret the integrity of a person. There is no such tensed hiatus in Chinese concrete thinking. ? Chün-chieh Huang, "On Five Activities from Ma-wang-tui: The Mind-Body Unity and Its Manifold Significance," Proceedings of the National Science Council, Part C: Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 87-100, January, 1991. > This inner autonomy can be instructively contrasted with ancient Greeks, whose tragedies expressed their rebellious individuality against the overwhelming heavenly Moira (fate, decree) with human futile unbending defiance. Mencius's autonomy is a sort of self-legislation without replacing heavenly Decree; I say this in disagreement with D. C. Lau (Liu Tien-chüeh) who said that Mencius's contribution was to replace heavenly Decree with human autonomous selflegislation. See D. C. Lau, "Theories of Human Nature in Mencius and Shyuntzy," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 15(1953), pp. 541-565, esp. p. 551.

7. HOW HOME-HELL RELATIONS ARE POSSIBLE

183

sublimated to sagely reciprocity with heavenly universality of the cosmic, all-pervasive Li-principle. To go inside one's heart of hearts, one's inner mindheart, is to go beyond oneself; to dwell at the heart of oneself is to breathe (ch'i) in the sagely atmosphere of the Beyond. This is what "inner mindheart" really means. This heart-heaven dynamism inevitably flows over into selfsociety dialectic. This is all too natural, in view of the fact that the beyond is also the all-pervasive. As I enter into my inner mindheart I am at one with the beyond, which carries me over to my alter egos, my solidarity with others. Concrete thinking in China is thinking in concrete relation, an actual undergoing of experiencing the other. Otherness stems from personhood; You flows forth from I, and I from You, and You can turn sour. I is the home of You and is at home in You. At the same time, You 13 where "I" suffers, and I can also be hell to You. I nihilates

"myself" for You to come forth; "I" nihilates You to make "your" hell. All such interchanges of home-hell relational dynamics (dialectics), as described in section 6, are possible in the pervasive flow of cosmic (ΠῚ. "I" is I because "I" is son to "my" irreplaceable father; and "I" suffers under "my" unfatherly father. The same home-hell relationship obtains for "I" as son to "my" father. Let us see how such a personal dialectic of inevitable inter-flow obtains in China; let us take Mencius.

Mencius observed that even King Hsüan of Ch'i, who asked about how to be king (and presumably could not care less about anything else), can"not bear" (pu jen) the sight of a silently "trembling" ox being led to sacrificial slaughter; the jitters of an ox irresistibly produced jitters in the King, the feeling of com-passion.' Mencius also noted how our "heartmind" cannot help but feel a "sudden alarm" and "hurt" (ch'u-t'i ts'e-in chih hsin) at the sight of an unwary child about to crawl into a well, again without pretension or calculation? "Whatever has [an ample] root-and-source is like this," Mencius seems to say, and then continues, "[coming] tumbling-down, day and night, going only after [all] hollows are filled, [then] gushing into the Four Seas." How does this irresistible feeling of com-passion--the "waters" l Mencius, 1A7. 2 Mencius, 2A6.

3 Mencius, 4B18, 7A24.

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PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING

of "human[e]ness" (6A18)--spread irresistibly and inundate the world? Very simple, Mencius says, you, my dear King, just let your feeling for your own old folks express itself to your old folks, and then "extend" (chi) it to other people's old folks; and do the same to your, and then to other people's, tender young folks.‘ One's deep personal feelings of unbearable com-passion for other's suffering thus expands toward the social realm. And one's joy will be enhanced, for just think, which is more enjoyable, enjoying oneself alone, or enjoying oneself with many people?” "Whatever you, O King, enjoy, share (t'ung) with your people-be it money or sex--and they will be happy with you." People will come to you, and you cannot stop them, any more than you can "water pouring downward." In the end, your natural self will be as irresistibly vast in Ch'i as the rushing flood.’ The flood of human[e]ness presumably starts at the originating fount of the depths in the heartmind of the king, then it irresistibly flows down to the people, who are the end and the justification of rulership; hence, the benevolent government is the government for the people.‘ The irresistible dynamic continuum of the current of homocosmic Ch'i has been noted. The continuum means that one depends on the other in the tripartite flow--the personal, the social, and the cosmic. A person is person only in the context of social interactions as "father," "friend," "subject," and so on; the social interactions obviously would not happen until social individuals enter their social intercourse. And the continuum of the flow means that the flow expands. Do to your old Mencius, 1A7. 2 Mencius, 1A2, 1B1. 3 Mencius, 1 B4, 5. 4 Mencius, 146, 4410, 642. An amazing fact is that all governments in human history, however tyrannical, whether in the name of the divine right of king or world dominion, seem to have worked "for the sake of the people." Popular governance (government for the people if not of or by them) is a rallying point that has worked for centuries. To lord over people has been an undying human ambition; lordship has been working in the name of the people. This twofold fact indicates an inevitable flow of socio-political dynamics. > Mencius, 2A2.

6 Mencius, 1A6, 4A10, 7B14.

7. HOW HOME-HELL RELATIONS ARE POSSIBLE

185

folks as you feel you should, then extend your deeds to other's old folks; Share your enjoyment with others, and your enjoyment will be enhanced a hundredfold. And a person 15 a social person, a cosmic One, flooded with the vast cosmic Ch'i. 7.5.4. How can the cosmic Ch'i also be my personal Ch'i? Think of being at home. To "be at home" one has to be at home both in oneself and in the world. It sounds simple, and it is, involving something basic. Being at home in oneself means being at one with oneself, wholly returned to oneself, wholeness in oneself, completely in touch with oneself. One is everywhere oneself, totally and transparently oneself. Sleep is an extreme situation of this coming back home to oneself.’ Self-curled, cocoon-like, perfectly happy in oneself. Macbeth's wife murdered her own sleep; the baby is happy because he is happy in sleep. Happiness means self-wholeness. One is not strained, stretched,

oneself.

over-burdened;

one

is there

where

one

is, and

not beside

Being at home in the world means knowing one's way around, being as comfortable as being back to one's home where one was born and

raised.

One

can

be

oneself

in it, unrestricted,

spacious.

The

spaciousness of one's "home" gives one space for breathing freely as oneself. One is snugly fitted in the roominess of the world, not confined, not lost, but freely moving around, growing. One stretches one's hands and heart without losing oneself. And thus, being at home in oneself and in the world, being oneself is being the world.’ But how can being at home in oneself and in the world be combined? Let us look closer at "being at home." Being at home means having ample living space. Ample living space is ample breathing room, physically and mentally, that 1s, bodily--for "body" consists of the physical and the mental. And breathing requires space both inside the body and outside it. Since life entails breathing, and breathing requires inner and outer space, to be at home in life entails the cosmic living space that is both inside and outside. The cosmos is home. And the breath of the cosmos is Ch'i which permeates also the human breathing to make room--home--for life. How? I am daily harassed by small matters. Mencius's imperturbability perhaps implies ! Cf. below, 9.2.4.1. ? Mencius, 7A4, cf. 7A9. Chuang Tzu, 2/52-53.

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PART TWO: CHINESE

BODY THINKING

Chuang Tzu's roaming and soaring; their fulfillment is an absolute desideratum, if I were to live. I need room for breathing and roaming.’ And the Cosmic breath need to pervade my breathing, and become my home for living. All becomes music. But you must play music, not notes. When your attention falls on notes, you strive to play notes to sound just right. And then you miss the music; you play only notes. When you attend to music, your hands follow it, and the notes fall into place. Given human idiosyncrasy and imperfection, some notes may sound awkward, but through them music

comes out and makes sense; you play music. Playing music, not sounding exact notes, parallels the grass style of Chinese calligraphy. The "grass" of my brush and my violin bends (thus "inaccurate," without crossing every "t" of every note) and follows the "wind" of dynamic inspiration of the notes and the characters that compose the thrust, sense and sentiment to be ex-pressed.? This is what happened when Yehudi Menuhin played Sibelius's Violin Concerto’; this is what Artur Schnabel meant when he said that he

might play it better, "but it wouldn't be so good."* For notes are out of place, however "correctly" played, when music is not played. You push notes, and the music is lost.

In my opinion, "off tune" can be of two

sorts: one due to the performer's ineptitude, and one due to the impact of the passage. Of the latter sort of off-tune there can again be of two sorts: l

W

.

.

T"

.

Ve are drawn to modern music perhaps because such an un-Mozartian music gives us rest in

our own dwelling, harrassment.

our own

breathing,

freeing us from the tyranny of melody,

its bewitching

? This is the aesthetic principle that pervades Chinese thinking. See my "Chinese Aesthetics" in Understanding the Chinese Mind: The philosophical Roots, ed. by Robert E. Allinson, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 236-264. Cf. Chang Yee, Chinese Calligraphy: An Introduction to Its Aesthetic and Technique, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. vii-viii, 93132, Amaury de Riencourt, The Soul of China, NY: Harper and Row, 1958,1965, pp. 6-9. + The same holds even for that Paganini-technician, Ruggiero Ricci. His repeated recordings of Paganini's Twenty-Four Caprices for Solo Violin, raw with stumbles, without editorial splicings, ooze radiant inconquerable music. * "When asked to re-make the first side of the Brahms B flat Concerto in the days of 78s he said laconically that he might play it better ‘but it wouldn't be so good.’ Thus he was sceptical about recording, since it stereotyped a spontaneous experience, and when eventually persuaded to record all the Beethoven sonatas he described the project with his usual wit as 'self-destruction through preservation." (Denis Matthews, 1988, in a leaflet to Schubert: Impromptus, D. 899 and D. 935, Allegretto, D. 915, by Artur Schnabel, EMI: References, CDH 7 61021 1)

7. HOW HOME-HELL RELATIONS ARE POSSIBLE

187

one deliberately made, as by Szigeti sometimes, or one spontaneously made, as by Menuhin. Of all these kinds of "off tune" the last is precious, conveying most eloquently the impact of the passage. Such an off-tune playing most closely parallels the grassy style of Chinese calligraphy. This happens most notably in Menuhin's magnificently virile performance of Sibelius's Violin Concerto; Sibelius himself was said to have approved of it. By "music" we mean, then, the integrated feeling, pattern, and

thrust of the composition, that 15, the whole posited-togetherness of things. Here is the so-called "wind pattern" (feng. ke) of things, a style of the gust and breeze of sentiment that infuses the whole place, snugly, typically, essentially, inevitably and, above all, naturally. To play out this wind pattern of the notes of things 15 music; to forget this wind-pattern in clever twists here and there, or in the exactitude of notes and beat, is to play notes. To perform the former makes

a musician; to do the latter makes

a technician.

The musician

takes time dwelling in and feeling forth a world of signification; the technician

contrives

and

handles

pretty

notes.

Music

is,

then,

a

performative utterance of meaning, an integral world of understanding and undergoing, a tonal dwelling-in and going-through. It is an expression, an experience, of life. It comes, occurs and stays. When music comes, notes come alive, flowing into joy "where the melodious winds have birth." The music is the beauty of the pattern of breathing, the beauty of the cosmic Ch'i. Here silence hugs sounds, music melts notes. And music wraps and enraptures, entwined in twigs and tides? And the world is home. Music is everywhere, even while I am writing; writing partakes of calligraphy, a writing music, flowing naturally, essentially. I can breathe again.’ But this expansive breathing continuum is not without its difficulties in polar tensions. The king must serve the needs of the people; the people must be subject to the king. This reciprocity of

! William Blake, "To the Muses." Chuang Tzu began his famous Second Chapter with the magnificent three Pipings, human, earthly, and heavenly, enthralling that great literary essayist, Su Tung-po, of Sung dynasty. Cf. my Butterfly as Companion, Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York, 1990, various places as mentioned in Index on Themes in English, p. 503, and "Musical Hermeneutic" in my Chuang Tzu: World Philosopher at Play, N. Y.: The Crossroad Publishing Company and CÀ: Scholars Press, 1982, pp. 29-60. ? Confucius tasted this musical enthralment; Analects, 7/14. ¬ Isn't this a natural partaking of the cosmic Ch'1?

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PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING

obligations comes from one obligation standing in a polar tension with another, so much so that loyalty can clash with filiality, for instance, into tragedies. My obligations as an individual can clash with my social ones, my social ones with my cosmic ones, my cosmic ones with my individual ones. Many suicides resulted from such clashes are recorded with pathos in Chinese historiography.' And so, the irresistible continuum of the cosmic flow of Ch' is

not without tragedies due to its inner polarity sharpened into conflicts of obligations. The torrential rapids of the cosmic flow have their own dark moments. 7.5.5. And here is the connection, no, the identity, of the self with the world, from the point of view of the self. We see in this context a configuration of notions we have considered so far. Let us start at the self-oblivion of the self. To grow into oneself is to become selfoblivious in the Heaven and earth, and to "become" is to "come to be,"

and to "come" to be is just to "walk [daily and] humbly [obliviously] with your god," that is to "tread [my] body-shape" of daily living with my transparent self-un-awareness, my shen,‘ my ch'i; to nourishcultivate my bodily-life (yang shen) and its "lording" principle (yang sheng chu)’. We must note self-oblivion in all this self-growth. To seek a dog let-go (cA'ien fang . . . ch'iu chih) is fine; but even Mencius admitted that if I were to return and seek "that" (fan erh ch'iu chih) in me--"my heart"--on which I act and live, I will end up not obtaining it (pu te wu hsin). Someone e/se who is sensitive (such as Mencius) has to remind me of it. Remember what Confucius said of the importance of friends, that "[Any] three people walking, there must be my teacher among ! See the last ch apter in my History, Academia Sinica, 1991.

Thinking,

and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei:

? Micah 6:8 is being quoted here to our own purpose. 3 Mencius, 7A38. * Shen is the expanding energy of my integrity, usually pp. 319-21, et passim.

translated as "spirit."

Cf. my Butterfly,

> Ch'i is, as repeated treated above, my breath-energy that is my very life. ° This

is the title of Chuang Tzu's Third Chapter.

7 Mencius, 6A11, 1A7.

Cf. my Butterfly, pp. 302-03, 306-07.

7. HOW HOME-HELL RELATIONS ARE POSSIBLE

189

them."' This is the unobtrusive way of Mencius's "seeking-for heart letο," which can be understood as seeking for the heart that naturally letgo, as natural as our natural appetite for delicacies.’ Such would be Chuang Tzu's interpretation, who has "heavenly let-go" (t'ien fang)‘ and often mentioned unmindfulness (wang),” being oneself unawares is to expand oneself. There one unmindfully blends in with all under Heaven; one's nature and being natural is part of Nature.° "With respect to-be-filial [is] easy; with love to-be-filial [is]

difficult.

With love to-be-filial [is] easy; with unmindfulness

to-be-intimate[-with-parents is] difficult. Being-unmindful-of parents [is] easy; letting parents be-unmindful-of me [is] difficult. Letting parents be-unmindful-of me [is] easy; with-it to-be-unmindful-of all-under-heaven [is] difficult. With-it tobe-unmindful-of all-under-heaven [is] easy; letting all-underheaven to-be-unmindful-of even me [15] difficult." Being unmindful is the most difficult thing in my life, because to try for it is precisely to "help [its] growth" that defeats growth, as Mencius warned us.’ This is the true meaning of Mencius' "elder-ing my elders and with-it extend-to people's elders; being-tender to my tenderaged and with-it extend-to people's tender-aged."* For this is to let the natural feeling, that unbearably exigent feeling for people's suffering, go its own way. What we can and should do is to prevent whatever prevents such a natural self-expansion of natural feeling for people. And this is what ! Analects, 7/22. ? Mencius, 6A11, usually translated as "looking for one's lost heart." ὁ Mencius. 6A7. 4 Chuang Tzu, 9/7.

> Wang is usually translated as "forgetting," but is literally a loss of one's conscious mindheart.

6 Chuang Tzu, 14/10-11; cf. 6/69-70. 1 Mencius, 2A2. 8 Mencius, 1 A7.

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PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING

bodily "self-cultivation" (hsiu shen) and "life nourishment" (yang sheng) is all about. Here one's innate Natural Ch'i shall ineluctably be all over. This 1s to let all under Heaven be hid and stored in all under Heaven, and

nothing gets lost. Everything is let go and my mindheart is at home everywhere. We now understand what Mencius meant by "nourishing my flooding ch'i (yang wu hao jan chih ch'i)." I have to constantly nourish my cosmic ch'i (yang).' Never "one day expose [it] to-care; 10 days abandoned [it] in-cold,"? but put my heartmind constantly where I am, regardless of time or place.” Thus nourished, there is nothing that does not grow; not nourished, there is nothing that does not disappear.* To nourish my cosmic ch'i means neither to "steal and snatch" it, nor to "help it grow," nor yet to "discard and abandon its nourishment." It is to let my self-identity naturally hide from myself, in my natural expansion into Nature. 7.5.6. My natural expansion into Nature is also my natural expansion into historical continuity, through my somatic death.’ Death is in the bodily context a negative ingredient that pushes the daily renewals forward. The self dies so as to "metaphor" forward. In expanding forth to the strange novel, one carries forward the familiar passed (the past); in coming back to enrich the old familiar with the novel one, the past is made alive with new depths of significance. But

the

past,

familiar,

old,

has

to

be

there

to

initiate

this

forward-backward movement of somatic metaphoric push. The child is father to the man. The child eagerly looks forward, seeming to forget the past; this is what growth is. But he grows only by learning from his parents and parental tradition. No one looks forward more to the future than the child, because no one depends more on parents and precedents; he is a "copy cat," and "monkey see, monkey do" is he. And it is thus, in turn, that the child invigorates the forefathers. The child forgets the past by learning from it, growing from the past by forgetting himself in it. । The word "yang" appears seveal times in this passage (Mencius, 2A2). 2 Mencius, 6A9. 3 Conclusion of Mencius, 6A8; my interpretation. 4 Conclusion of Mencius, 6A8. 5 Cf. below, 12.5.

7. HOW HOME-HELL RELATIONS ARE POSSIBLE

19]

The past nourishes the child who embodies it, thereby forgets it, grows out of it. And this is Chuang Tzu's approach. He told us one story after another, the deposit of the past, about how to look forward, growing, by steeping in stories, dialogues-with-the-past- dead--cicada's wings, snake's skin, interchanges with the butterfly.' Confucius also wanted us to go back and "warm-up the-old-dead (ku) and know the-new,"* for we grow by learning, which is no other than learning from the past. He himself kept claiming that "[I] narrate and do-not make-up; [I] amfaithful and love the-ancient,"’ and thereby revolutionized the tradition. His sigh, "How long [since] I did-not again dream seeing the-Duke-of Chou!",* shows two things about him, that he dreamt studying in attendance on the cultural great, the Duke of Chou, then lamenting that he did not do it any more, he must have grown old. This means that he was on his way to becoming a tradition himself. In China we have three imperishables to establish: virtues (integrity), deeds (accomplishments), and words (wisdom)? They do not decay because generations of posterity embody and continue their forefathers' three imperishables. Metaphor and storytelling, the two wings whereby we fly forward into the future, carry the historical weight of the imperishables of the great Dead. The weightier they are with the dead past, the farther they carry us forward.° Chuang Tzu's statement, "the sage not deceased, the big thief do-not cease," perhaps urges a "decease" of self-consciousness' that | They are familiar stories that conclude Companion, Chapter Two.

his famous

Second

Chapter.

See my

Butterfly as

7 Analects, 2/11. 3 Analects, 1/1. 4 Analects, 7/5.

> Tso Chuan, Duke Hsiang, 24th Year. Legge, pp. 505, 507. ° See my History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Part One. 1 Chuang Tzu, 10/16. Chuang Tzu did not urge us to "kill" the sage, as a Zen monk urged us to kill Buddha. Chuang Tzu wants us to let our self[-awareness] die, of itself, to itself, so we naturally grow and become unmindful of ourselves. 8

To be "decent and respectable" requires self-consciousness.

T ad

bd

.

192

PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING

manifests the self. And then all Nature and my nature can be expressed together as the free-flowing, all-flooding Ch'i. Then I can "know words," that is, transparently see, hear, and discern ("know") people's natural self-expressions ("words"), thereby know that on account of which they are "covered, fallen, separated, trapped"; I see how what is born at the heart of their beings comes out to damage their management of affairs. I see "stalks of grain shooting high above the fields." Mencius' cosmos-flooding ch'i (hao jan chih ch'i) is such a naturally grown unity of the unmindful self (wz) and its cosmic pervasiveness (hao). 7.5.7. Related to death is eternity. How does eternity obtain in my body thinking? Eternity is beyond time; eternity is just being present, dwelling in the present, indwelling, being situated--an indwelling situation beyond time. Basking in the warm sun that shines all over the winter

snow,

even

for a moment,

constitutes

an eternal

repose, in which I just am. And my baby trusts himself to me as I hold him. The whole lump of soft integrity is just there, and this "there" is my bosom, an eternity. He relaxes me, relaxing with me. I feel sleepy with him. The world is put asleep. I am in fact not exactly asleep but at ease and in peace, doing nothing, fulfilled. He and I, I and he, we are just here. Just to exist, that is eternal, and "holy." Being in the situation, being situated, an indwelling, that is "eternal," completely irrelevant to clock-

time.

Children do not feel the swift passage of time; "Time flies like an arrow" is not in their repertoire of knowledge. For they are time.’ That is to say, they grow in time, enjoy time, and bounce themselves into time. They make time without knowing it. This is why they do not worry but only fret and irritate themselves that they do not grow faster.’ Adults are amazed at how fast children grow and how fast time goes. Adults are separated from time; they tend toward living in eternity, too, but away from time. When they are completely out of time, we call them "dead."

We have two eternities, then.

The first one

Mencius, 2A2. ? To say "synchronized" here assumes that they have to "time" themselves "with" time; there is already a split between them and time. > Confucius! "not knowing the old age "timeliness of the sage" (Mencius, 581).

approaching"

(Analects,

7/19)

perhaps

describes

his

7. HOW HOME-HELL RELATIONS ARE POSSIBLE

193

is time-ly, the child being absorbed in whatever he is and does now. The second eternity goes out of time, an adult eternity. The first is noweternity; the second is not-now eternity. Thus we always live in eternity, but the character of eternity switches slowly from the first kind to the second. To live in eternity means to be spontaneous, to be ourselves. We have two ways of being ourselves, then. In-time spontaneity belongs to children; amazed-spontaneity belongs to adults. To combine the two makes

us the Great One, who

does "not lose his heart of the

child," as Mencius 5210. The atmosphere of the Great One is evoked in music that combines the in-time enjoyment with stepped-aside amazement.

To live in eternity also means to be in a situation, felt situation (ch'ing ching, i ching), being situated in the world; here one is soaked in it, being it. A boy gazing at his puppy is his puppy. Here time stops. This timelessness indicates being lost in a situation. Being lost signifies lost self-awareness, self-less spontaneity. Timelessness, of course, manifests eternity. Such eternity can last for a moment and is gone the next moment, yet it stays with one for ever. That freshness of the stroll in the morning dew, or that all-too-brief cherry blossoming, lasts forever in one's heart of hearts. This is ch'ing ching, the felt realm of dwelt spontaneity--this is eternity. To capture it is the artist's business; to describe it is the philosopher's; to grow in it is the Great One's. For to live through these various ch'ing ching's, one by one, makes a fulfilled life of the Great One; to fail in this makes an empty wasted life of the small man. How the failure happens 1s a mystery akin to the mystery of evil. Perhaps it happens because ch'ing ching, so far taken as something objective to be entered, is at least partially created by ourselves. No subject, no ch'ing ching. We create our own eternity, and that spontaneously. Ch'ing ching (the felt realm) is part of us; we are part of our eternity. Related to this subject-object conscious-spontaneous unity, is our "activity" (wei, tso).

Wei is to do and to make, two in one, as in

wei jen (how one behaves), as in “making a living." To wei is to be in a performative of strenuous spontaneity. "Feeling" is an example of such an activity of subject-object unity; we feel at heart by feeling around. Since we are free, we can act and feel inappropriately, and we make for l Mencius, 4B12.

194

PART TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING

an empty life. We must foster the sentiment of indwelling, the habit of eternity. How? The dwelt meditative moment is the eternal now. This "now" is here, and in this "now here" is my somatic self, abiding; it is eternal. Then, to swell my indwelling backward in fond remembrance, or forward into a utopian future, is to "historize" eternity. In such a dynamic indwelling of full presence, I am fulfilled. To be in the dynamic moment as this fulfills me; I become eternal. This dynamism of eternity is body meditation, part of body thinking. This is in agreement with Chuang Tuz's unmindful expansion of the self with/to the world, "with the skies and the fields to make springs and autumns," as that roadside skull confessed to Chuang Tzu, and of course that skull is Chuang Tzu.' Chuang Tzu is Mencius radicalized; Mencius alerts and begins, Chuang Tzu extends and completes, my body self in the Heaven and earth. Mencius and Chuang Tzu see eye to eye, nothing against their heartminds; they smile at each other, and be friends one to the other.’ Time then is not the shadow of the eternity of forms, as Plato would have it, but is its abode. Eternity is the dwelt-in, situated moment, the pregnant indwelling; it can linger on in remembrance of history and projection of future.

i Chuang Tzu, 18/22-29. 2 Chuang Tzu, 6/60-62.

See my meditation on this story in Butterfly, pp. 14-22.

PART THREE:

SOME CONCLUDING REMARKS

8. A Summary of Parts One and Two. We here both sum up what has been said and undergird it. We see (8,1,) how closely allied words as ourselves expressed are to reality, (8.2.) thereby manifest its texture, and (8.3.) constitute its summation.

8.1. Our Expressions. For all their insufficiencies and even dangers, words help. They are ourselves coming out, going through, ourselves undergoing a dramatic rehearsal of life. Words are really our "per-formative" utterances, utterances that "form" ourselves "thoroughly." This is where to say is to think, to experience, to undergo, to grow. Here words do not say but show, no, embody and ex-press. Words are our body-expression, body-thinking, developing, embodying themselves into our growing bodily self. This is what writing 15, traced out on written pages. This is where literature and philosophy merge, to per-form the drama of body thinking. This is how Zen and Taoism use words. It is an eternal "morning prayer" no matter how far the day has gone, an ontological liturgical exercise that is forever morning fresh. Words express thinking. Thinking is of two kinds: perspective and performative. Perspective thinking inspects; performative thinking undergoes and accomplishes. Perspective thinking is various in kinds: calculative, contemplative, meditative, dramatic. Calculative thinking is technical and manipulates; contemplative thinking surveys, analyzes, and synthesizes; meditative thinking lets things appear and emerge. Heidegger's "turning" may have been a turning from the contemplative to the meditative.' Dramatic thinking rehearses what goes on;? yet it 15 ' That is, "through phenomenology to thought," as William J. Richardson puts it, when describing Heidegger in a book by that title. (William J. Richardson, S.J., Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963, 1967) "Phenomenology" is that painstaking description of what there is, including our modes of living (as in Being and Time); "thought" is a meditative thinking that allows things to appear and emerge. The early Heidegger is a phenomenologist; the later one is a man of thought. Note, however, that "thought" is perspective while "thinking" is performative. This point is expressed in a different context, American pragmatism, in my "The Spirit of Pragmatism and the Pragmatic Spirit" in a Festschrift to John E. Smith, edited by Robert C. Neville and Thomas P. Kasulis, State University of New York Press, forthcoming. ? Gabriel Marcel is here, untiringly reminding us of "the absolutely intimate and essential relation between [my philosohical work] and my dramatic work" (Paul Arthur Schilpp and Lewis Edwin Hahn, eds., Philosophy The of Gabriel Marcel, The Library of Living Philosophers, Vol. XVII, La

196

PART THREE: TWO CONCLUDING REMARKS

still perspective thinking in that the dramatic rehearsal is a sort of contemplation, watching an object to unfold,’ being spared from the necessity to take side’, yielding aesthetic catharsis.’ ^ And indeed Hegelian synthesis--the rational is the real and the real, the rational--is the preset goal of all dialectical movements of thoughts and analyses. They are all "per-spective" thinking, i.e. thinking "thoroughly inspecting" objects standing opposed to a subject. We have another sort of thinking, a performative one. Here we turn from a contemplative survey and analysis of objects (including what is the case) to acting it out, where "it" is now ourselves. Tao (the way things go) we walk it and is formed; thing we call it "so" and it is "so."* This thinking is peripatetic; "What are you painting?" "How do I know? I have not finished it yet." Performative thinking is peripatetic and ambi-guous, thinking "driving" itself "around"; at each step the scene changes and develops. In perspective thinking, "change" means to modify, define and refine; in performative thinking, "change" means to develop, expand, evolve a scene change, experience a wind shift. Here understanding something is to engage in its genetic understanding, that is, in its historical existential understanding, understanding it through undergoing its development, experiencing its ontological radiation. In fact, performative thinking undergoes more Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1984, p. 58, cf. 486). And indeed, his philosophical writings peripatetic, understandable best by being taken as dramatic rehearsals of his thinking process.

are

For the theater collapses without the theater goer. Drama entails participation, to be sure, whether one is an actor or an audience. But dramatic participation is a contemplative participation, for actor and audience alike. It is participation with a psychic distance; no actor lives his role after the show, nobody renders an emergency assistance to someone hurt in a fight-in-a-drama on stage. Such a contemplative dramatic thinking is evident in Wittgenstein when he observed that meaning is use, that a concept is a thread threading itself fiber upon fiber (Philosophical Investigation, sec. 67), opposing rule-governed thinking (secs. 183ff). For he also contemplated and meditated.

? As we would have to in real life. ? Aristotle is here, a contemplative person in our sense. 4 Chuang Tzu, 2/33. > On peripatetic painting, the walking perspective, the walking scroll, see my "Chinese Aesthetics" in Robert E. Allinson, ed., Understanding the Chinese Mind: The Philosophical Roots, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 236-64, esp. 246-49. δ

Cf. Shokichi

Uto, Constructics:

Constructional Studies on Philosophical

Theories,

Tokyo:

8.

ASUMMARY OF PARTS ONE AND TWO

197

than understands, as life is a living through, an embodying through undergoing. Here non-being takes on an unexpected significance. Let us contrast non-being with being. Thinking being has to be thinking about being, for being is objective, something opposed to a subject; due to impenetrability of objects, two things cannot be in the same place at once. Thinking about being is object-thinking. Thus non-being is nonobjective; thinking non-being 1s thinking something non-objective. Here thinking is an undergoing, a subject-thinking; the word, "non-being (wu)," expresses an undergoing of the subject. Now that we have characterized performative thinking, its description can be brief. The locus of the dynamic peripatetic I (a demonstrative) is evoked by the situation, where the I is situated. And the I begins to tell a story (a coherent description), by con-firming what is the case; this is Chinese affirmation. The I thereby an-nihilates what is opposed to the affirmed, while the I drops an objective attitude. This is Chinese negation. It is thus that thinking goes, experiencing and taking in the unfamiliar that as the new familiar this, and in this taking-as is Chinese metaphor. Metaphor is the moving of the I, expanding, shifting; metaphor is forever an experiencing act, undergoing an intentional sortcrossing. This metaphoric undergoing is made up of two acts--compact description and ironic pointing. Compact description develops into a telling of story, a dramatic rehearsal, a peripatetic painting scroll. Ironic pointing reveals a new scenery by aphorisms, shockers, playful juxtaposition of incompatibles. All this is part and parcel of the body-self that shifts, undergoes, and grows. Growth is required by life that lives on to form itself, a life necessity. This performative thinking "per"-forms, forming oneself by going "through" the act of thinking, "thoroughly." Thus body performance of thinking forms itself through, spreads throughout, and tends toward universality. Expressed in words that is an exercise in thinking, this is the drama of body thinking in China. Let us summarize all this before going on to examining it and its significance in intercultural hermeneutics in section 9. We have explored (in 7.5.1.) what Chinese body thinking is in 11 modes (a. through k.): demonstratives, affirmatives, negatives, metaphorics, compacts, ironics, necessity, universality, embodied thinking, evocation, Hokuju Shuppan, 1984.

198

PART THREE: TWO CONCLUDING REMARKS

and storytelling. They can be gathered under four themes (8.1.1. through 8.1.4.), as follows. Theme 8.1.1. (a-c) brings out the concreteness of Chinese thinking as thinking in and of actuality. Theme 8.1.2. (d-f) considers how concrete thinking connects notions about actuality, that is, "argues" about it. Theme 8.2. (g, h) considers necessity and universality, two hallmarks of thinking, in concrete thinking. Theme 8.3. (i-k) sums up all this. 8.1.1. Concrete thinking is dipped in concrete particulars; we think in and on actuality, starting at our expressing actuality by demonstratives, affirmatives, and negatives in Chinese thinking. a.

Demonstratives:

In the West,

words

such as "I," "here,"

"now," are called "demonstratives," because they pose problems. For instance, the "I" said by me differs in content from that of the "I" said by you, yet what "I" means remains the same throughout, understandable by us all. The Chinese mind would say that such "problems" are due to the fact that saying "I" makes a stand basic to every statement, which implies an "I" who claims it, so that "It is raining but I do not believe it is" is a situational contradiction. All this describes the root of our understanding, the bodily situated I. | b. Affirmatives: The Western affirmation is a mere affirmative proposition, an assertion of what is the case. In China, the I af-firms (firms up, confirms) what is the case in life, as affirming "I promise a" actually promises a. Furthermore, Chinese affirmation "rights" wronged notions (cheng ming, "rectification of names"). The ruler should fulfill the ideal rulership, the father should be fatherly, the son, filial, and to be

human is to become humane. Our statements and definitions thus normatively direct our acts and ways of living. c. Negatives: In the West, the logical function of negation is merely to deny affirmative propositions. In contrast, Chinese negation also reinforces affirmation. Negation indicates a total coverage (e.g., wu ch'iung, "limitless"), and attends to a// areas other than the one negated (e.g., wu chü, "fearless"). And so, a double-negative is an emphatic affirmation (e.g., wu fei, "no less"). These examples are in the West mere rhetorico-literary devices; they are in China examples of a mode of thinking. Then China has a subtle play on distinct nuances of negation. The famous "wu wei" (non-doing), different from "pu wei" (not-doing), has enamored Confucius and Taoists alike. Chinese negation is a ! For Confucius's use of wu wei, see The Analects, 15/5. Te Ching 2, 43, 48; Chuang Tzu 6/29, etc.

For the Taoists's uses of wu wei, see Tao

8.

ASUMMARY OF PARTS ONE AND TWO

199

directive as to where not to go, an emphatically positive directive on how to think and behave. 8.1.2. As we understand and express actualities in demonstratives, affirmatives, negatives, we connect them to bring out meaning. Thinking in this connective sense is called "argumentation." China has three modes of concrete argumentation, metaphoric, compact, and ironic. The metaphoric affirms "that" through "this," the compact packs various implications of an affirmation, and the ironic affirms in negation. Chinese concrete argumentation is thus dipped in actuality. d. The metaphoric mode of concrete argumentation: Metaphor is a problem in the West, more to be investigated than to be used in thinking. In China, metaphor is at the core of thinking. To understand is to undergo a knowing of the unfamiliar "that" in terms of--by stretching-the familiar "this." Even to say "that" is already to point at "that" from "this" here and now. Mencius is an expert arguer by metaphor. He found the "benevolent government" by stretching--growing--our human(e) treatment of one another throughout the community. The ruler must "age' his own aged folks," that is, treat his old folks as they should be treated, and "extend such a treatment to others's old folks,"

and world concord shall come by itself. (1A7) e. The compact mode of concrete argumentation: Except for Nietzsche who loved to enunciate sharp aphorisms, Western philosophers usually prefer detailed analysis and explication to compact statements. In China, seemingly ordinary statements abound, packed with unsuspected implications. What is "simply" said and described is packed with a pithy hierarchy of implications, layer by layer. We must first (a) unpack these situational implications, and then (b) discern their systematic unity. This is an explication (unpacking) of simple affirmative statements. Confucius’ pregnant compact sayings were collected as the Analects which, for all its slender size, shaped the patterns of Chinese thinking and civilization. f. The ironic mode of concrete argumentation: Except for Socrates and some philosophical "oddities" such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche,

irony

is not too much

emphasized

in the straight,

careful

thinking in the West. In China, irony is often employed to drive home a concrete point. This is a negative reinforcement of layers of implications, a "negative affirmation" of concrete understanding. Chinese affirmation is an active af-firming of reality, a righting of our wayward behavior contrary to what we profess; Chinese negation

200

PART THREE: TWO CONCLUDING REMARKS

is an active affirmation with a directive. It is natural, then, that affirmation and negation should come together to form the twin correlative aspects of one concrete thinking, a unity in opposition, "a constitutive of not-a, and vice versa," the ironic mode of thinking. In irony, the two lanes of meaning-traffic both negate and constitute each other. The Chinese mind takes actuality as a unity of contraries that complement one another. This is expressed, among other things, in that famous root reality-paradigm, "the Yin and the Yang," the unity in opposition in our thinking and expression that reflect the concrete situation. In sum, the Chinese people go through a metaphoric stretch from the bodily here and now (noticed, evoked) to the beyond; they pack into a compact conversation and/or phrase(s) numerous interrelated implications; they ironically probe into the systematic co-implications of the a with the not-a. 8.2. The Texture of Reality. As a result, the texture of reality that is both inevitable and valid is manifested. Concrete thinking in China has thus come to have the twin characteristics of thinking, necessity and universality, yet without theoretical abstraction and formalization. g. Necessity in logical analysis has nothing to do with actuality; "2+2=4" is eternally true no matter what. In contrast, "necessity" in concrete thinking is its inevitability in a situation. Situational inevitability--being delighted at the story of Confucius so enthralled by the ceremonial music he attended that he forgot the flavor of meat for three months,' being drawn to Mencius's many enchanting, threatening stories--1s beyond an abstract logic. This is an existential necessity--one is sad at the death of a good friend, one happily tells a happy story, one so believes in what one says that for one to deny it is a "situational oddity," which is not (yet) logical contradiction. Logical necessity is part of situational inevitability, which in turn is part of situational appropriateness. h. How about universality? In the West, "universality" is logical validity that is indifferent to situations, valid in a// possible worlds. In China, universality is an inevitable spread of our concrete understanding. With memory and imagination we can "dwell in other places" (she shen ch'u ti). Our understanding thereby goes beyond our specific situation, gets outside our time and our space, changes the ! Analects, 7/14.

8.

ASUMMARY OF PARTS ONE AND TWO

201

present in the light of the passed (past) and the yet-to-be (future), and participates in other people's experiences. We are evoked by the situation to discern things's inherent (necessary) meanings, which inevitably (necessarily) spread to universal validity. How? By our metaphorical self-stretch. The stretch starts at our memory of the familiar, in terms of which we imaginatively reach toward the unknown. This metaphorical stretch ultimately brings about a universal network of understanding that applies to the future unknown, which in turn enriches and modifies our network. We call this network the "universality" of our thinking. Thus "necessity" in thinking expresses concrete inevitability, and "universality" is an all-inclusive validity of such inevitability. My unbearable feeling of alarm at seeing others suffer shall spread from my family to my community to make for benevolent people-rooted governance, which in turn spreads to cosmic concord throughout the Four Seas.! My mindheart 15 not perturbed in all life's ups and downs, for my body is "flooded" with the cosmic Breath-energy.” This is the Chinese cosmological universality that is concretely inevitable. Thus in the above eight points (point a. through h.) Chinese thinking exhibits a concrete thinking, both actuality-based and argumentative, both concrete and conforming to the canons of thinking. The Chinese thinking is situated between philosophical analysis, and popular customs and mores. But how does it get started? At my body, by evocation. How does it go on? By storytelling. This brings us to the following heading (with three more points). 8.3. Summation. All this amounts to the following. The situation touches us in our body (i.) to evoke (j.) our discerning of its meaning, which inevitably (necessarily) stretches--in a story form (k.)-to universal validity. i. Embodied thinking: All activities of concrete thinking say that our thinking is embodied. For I am my body, and it is I who think. Such a bodily thinking activity radiates from the standpoint my body occupies, "the familiar" here and now, to spread (metaphorically) inevitably (necessarily) to everything (universal), and "everything" in turn modifies and enriches the familiar and, ultimately speaking, my body thinking and my body itself. | Mencius, 1A7, 246; the Doctrine of the Mean; the Great Learning. 2 Mencius, 2A2, 7A4; the Doctrine of the Mean.

202

PART THREE: TWO CONCLUDING REMARKS

It is noteworthy that only recently phenomenologists laboriously argue about the "problem of embodiment," while the Chinese thinking starts with the body-self (shen). It urges us to return to the body-self with "authenticity" (ch'eng) that spreads politically (benevolent government) and cosmically (world concord, harmony of Nature).' Here the polity and the cosmos are both bodily, understandable through my body-self, reverberating therein. j. Evocation: The above insight occurs in this manner. Noticing a particular situation, "this situation," provokes us to realize that new

point. New insights are occasioned--called forth, e-voked--by our noting concrete particulars. This is an evocative logic of discovery. Mencius discovered our deep seated budding of human(e)ness as he observed our spontaneous jitters on seeing a baby about to crawl into a well (2A6). And as we watch an originally lush mountain denuded by axes and grazings, he points us to the moral imperative, urging us to carefully nurture our original buddings of human nature within the environing This is in contrast to the Western abstract thinking, Nature (6A8). characterized by Whitehead as an airplane-like flight from, then toward, the situation; thinking here is as detached ("abstract"ed) from actuality as the airplane is from the ground. k. Storytelling. Things are eternally astir with their own inherent (necessary) meanings. These meanings inevitably (necessarily) and metaphorically stretch toward a universal validity running through relevant concrete particulars. This "running through" is expressed in our stories; we tell a story to define a particular situation, thereby to make a universally valid point. Mencius always argued in stories. His famous "government by intolerance of people's suffering" ("benevolent government") came from his story of King Hsüan's unbearable jitters at the sight of a trembling ox being led to sacrificial slaughter^; his "mindheart of alarm" (as the "bud of benevolence") came from his story of our spontaneous alarm at the sight of an unwary baby about to crawl into a well Such a Chinese argumentation by story differs from the Western argumentation by citing examples; pull out the story, and the Chinese argument collapses, but not the Western one. Thus we have 11 modes (a through k) that make up the Chinese ! The Doctrine of the Mean; the Mencius, 4A13, 20, 7A4, 7B32. 2 Mencius, 1A7. 3 Mencius, 246.

8.

ASUMMARY OF PARTS ONE AND TWO

203

“concrete thinking"--demonstratives, affirmatives, negatives; metaphoric, compact, ironic modes of arguing; necessity and universality of concrete meanings; bodily, evocative beginning of argumentation, and its continuation in a story form. (See Appendix 29.) In sum, the Chinese argumentation 15 not an implicit hinting at thinking as popular mores but an explicit thinking as in the West. Yet Chinese thinking is not an abstract analysis as in Western philosophy, either. Instead, Chinese thinking is evoked by situational exigencies; Mencius exclaimed, "How could I help it?"’ The Chinese mind makes a point by following actuality--through oneself (demonstratives), in a situation (by metaphor, by stories, compact or ironic). The thinking has an inevitable (necessary) spread into situational universality. Take away these concrete contents, and the entire "argument" collapses; it is argumentation (like theoretical thinking) dipped in actuality (like popular mores). Chinese concrete thinking is a unity of mores and analysis.

| Mencius, 3B9.

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PART THREE: TWO CONCLUDING REMARKS

9. Cultural Mutuality. The Community of Cultural Differences consists in mutuality (9.1.) of comparative hermeneutics (9.2.) needed for our survival (9.3.). 9.1. Mutual Benefiting. A critical question must be raised: How did we come to find all the above?! For, after all, all this is supposed to be hidden. The answer is that we find this tacit self-cosmic dimension of knowing-acting-relating, through learning from both the Chinese concrete thinking and the Western theoretical thinking. Thus the question points to an important sine qua non of all our human thinking that is bodily--the human community of differences. Two points can be raised: First (9.1.1.), theoretical thinking is infused with concrete thinking; second (9.1.2.), concrete thinking relies on theoretical thinking for self-clarification. 9.1.1. First, theoretical thinking is infused with concrete thinking. Let us first think about the concrete, actual roots of thinking. By the imperative of concreteness of these roots we do not mean the absurd idea that every printer, for instance, should know about whatever thinking there is on the printed page, or that every writer should be familiar with printing techniques. Instead we mean that every printing technique to its minutest details has its practical wisdom, the wisdom of the hand, of "circumspection" to deal with tools and equipments,’ that Aristotelian "practical knowledge." Furthermore, we say two things about this practical scientific knowledge. First, it is the ultimate referral and intention of formal knowledge; every technical skill is an arrival of an Einstein, a Heisenberg, a cosmological purpose. Secondly, it 15 the ultimate milieu, background, presupposition, anchorage, and justification, of all theoretical speculations.’ To elaborate on this twofold relation is the task of philosophy, of "concrete thinking." ' More basically, why do we have to raise this question? Doesn't it belong to the periphery of body thinking proper? On the contrary, self-reflection is part and parcel of self-reflexivity of the living organism, a part of what I used to call life's self-involved consistency and inconsistency in The Butterfly as Companion, pp. 105-07, 262-63. This last section belongs to an essential characteristic of our body thinking activity. 2 "Circumspection" is Martin Heidegger's term. See his Being and Time, trs. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, London: SCM Press, 1962, pp. 95-107. + All this is what Husserl meant by his Lebenswelt. See Aron Gurwitsch, Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966, pp. 418-21. Sadly, Husserl or anyone else has been too theoretical to really elaborate on the interlocking of the two, the concrete roots of the two.

9. CULTURAL MUTUALITY

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But we mean more than the above. We mean by concrete thinking that any speculation is basically concrete through and through, that theoretico-practical knowledge is at bottom concrete thinking which 15 body thinking. How is this so? We saw above (in 1.1.) how Russell said that all our thinking about facts and facts themselves flow out of "this." We also repeatedly saw that all these flows are supported by the "I." And "this" and "I" involve "here" and "now," all of which are "actuals."

And "that" makes

sense in the network of "I" and "this" and "here" and "now." For "that" means something pointed to--"this" metaphorically extended--by the Ihere-now. And "that" can also represent "there" and "then." | Besides, as Lakoff and Johnson pointed out,' we live, think, and

understand by metaphors. And metaphor is our ("I") movement from the familiar this to the unfamiliar that. Chinese negatives are an emphatic form of Chinese affirmation, which is our living out of affirmations,

"actually."

-L"

the

"I"

af-firming

affırmatives

"here"

and

"now,"

All this goes to showing that the so-called "demonstratives"-

"now,"

"here,"

"this,"

and

the

like--join

together

into

a

configuration of a situational matrix for our thinking and our saying. For instance, "this" 15 an existential complex of affirmation--"I pointing at this"--compacted? into that single word, "this." "This" depends for its meaning on "I" and "pointing to"; "this" implies Ipointing as part of itself. By the same token, "that" is a compacted existential complex of metaphor--I here pointing at that there, by expanding on this-here If in "this" both the I and the this are contained,

then in "that" the I, the here, the this, and the that are included--as its

situational elements. If "this" begins Confucius's compact argumentation and rectification of names, then "that" capsules Mencius's metaphoric evocation and ethico-political exhortation. And so, "this" is "I-pointing-at-this pointing to that." And this and that and that, and so on, pointed to by the "I," added together, constitute the "world" of life, the Lebenswelt. Demonstratives are performatives dipped in cosmic "actuality," and are the favorites of Chinese philosophers.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: Press, 1980. 2 This explains and justifies the Confucian compact

The University of Chicago

argumentation explained above.

This explains and justifies Mencian metaphorical argumentation explained above.

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PART THREE: TWO CONCLUDING REMARKS

In short, demonstratives are situation-dependent, and form the logical-experiential base! of all statements which compose thinking, including theoretical thinking. They are the primitives of concrete thinking. Therefore theoretical thinking is based on concrete thinking. 9.1.2. Furthermore, concrete thinking relies on theoretical thinking for self-clarification. All points said above is noted by theoretical thinking about concrete thinking. At the same time, this noting reminds theoretical thinking of its own situational basis, which may eventually dissolve many traditional problems of Western philosophy--mind-body relation, personal identity, time, universals, otherness, and so on.

Each particular thing and event is "concrete." The concrete here means that the unfamiliar is concresced-into-familiar, thereby the familiar is compacted-into-new-actuality, inviting-evoking me to its unpacking according to my need and perspective. Each part[icular] is a whole, reflecting the whole; the whole is in each part[icular]. The concrete is a Chinese box, a box (system) within a box within a box, as in our scientific unpacking of the "atom," initially thought to be an individual. The structure of the concrete, time-wise, space-wise, justifies or

explains why all concrete thinking is as it is--compact, metaphoric, ironic, historical-storytelling, and the necessity of our thinking to tend toward universal application. Concrete thinking is compact because the concrete consists of compacted manifolds. Concrete thinking is metaphorical because, on the strength of the concrete as a compact manifold, the thinking goes from here-now to there-then. The thinking is ironic because in such a concrete manifold negation is included in the affirmation and the positive in the negative. The thinking goes by historical storytelling, metaphorically projecting itself from then to now to what is coming. And this explains how my concrete thinking necessarily tends toward universal ap-plication; ap-plication is an "ad-plicare" action, a manifold expanding, fold (system) after fold after fold. And the paradigm, the "root metaphor," of all this is my body, with a corporal "postural schema" (Merleau-Ponty), applied to and accompanied by tools or equipments, "things ready-to-hand" | As was said above, "It is raining" situationally entails "I believe that it is raining," so much so that "It is raining but I do not believe it is" is a situational-logical contradiction (not a simple logical-analytical one because there is no straight "p and not-p").

9. CULTURAL MUTUALITY .

207

(Heidegger), then on to perspectival horizons, finally resulting in the Lebenswelt. Each "my" body is thus a microcosm, a center everywhere with circumference nowhere, for "each" is everywhere and nowhere. This is why there is no tight systematic treatise of analytical sort in China. Here each saying is a system, presenting a concrete situation (where my body is situated), which links itself to another in an open historical manner. Chinese writings are like the Bible. Each biblical verse (in each of our moments) is alive with the whole, and there is no whole without the detailed verses. As in Chuang Tzu, every portion of the Bible is coherent in itself. Each verse is a summary of the whole Bible. Thus the bible of Chinese writings constitutes a systematic nonsystem. It is a library with a single thread running through it, yet the thread cannot be extracted, nor can we systematize the systematic jumble of spontaneous collection of words and events. For it is our life lived through in faithfulness to ourselves. Our life is not scattered and randomly thrown about. But we cannot systematize it, either. Our life is a system of no system, a sy-stem, a coherent (living) organism, a living organon, that can be undergone to understand. But we cannot know it objectively. And here is the danger. Arthur Wright says that the Chinese people do not have philosophy but only "thoughts" that lie between theoretical analysis and common sense. One can easily retort that Wright begs the question; his saying so already pre-defines philosophy as theoretical analysis and nothing else. But one can take his words positively, taking them to be a challenge to define the peculiarity of Chinese philosophy. One can even go further and see Wright's words as containing an answer to his own challenge. For if Chinese thinking is "between" theoretical analysis and common sense, it has the advantage of combining facts and their ! Cf. Preface to my The Butterfly as Companion, Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1990, p. xiii. ? Confucius' inscrutable "single thread" in Analects

4:15

has been discussed in 4.3.2.

’ Cf. above, Preliminary Remark to Division One above. Wright says so in H. G. Creel, ed., Chinese Civilization in Liberal Education, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959, p. 141; David S. Nivison also agrees to the view (p. 144). * | did so and accepted the challenge in Chapter V. of my History, Chinese Philosophy, Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991.

Thinking, and Literature in

208

PART THREE: TWO CONCLUDING REMARKS

analysis; such a combination has been the envy of Western philosophy since Plato unwittingly separated thought from actuality. Steeped in history and literature, Chinese philosophy gently shows and urges Western philosophy to anchor and imbue itself in history and literature, that is, to think historically and in a literary manner. We now see how all this concretely works in two examples, (9.1.2.1.) Dilthey and (9.1.2.2.) Mencius and Chuang Tzu, and see (9.1.2.3.) how Thinking in the West and in China should come together to benefit each other. 9.1.2.1. Let us take an example, historical thinking. Concrete thinking makes for "the science of particulars," a contradiction in terms from a viewpoint of theoretical Platonism in the West, and yet the aim of empirical sciences is precisely to produce the knowledge of concrete particulars. Dilthey, for instance, worried about how to understand the unique historical event. Dilthey followed Kant's view on rational knowledge. For Kant, timeless formal laws of thought justify scientific knowledge because they are its ultimate conditions. Taken thus, scientific thought cannot deal with the unique historical particulars in all their chancy trends and vicissitudes. Despite being the subject and matrix of all thinking, as well as other human activities, the unique

historical existence of human individual is in Kant's purview irrelevant

to rational thought, if not something irrational, and has no place in his metaphysics. Yet Dilthey courageously tried to integrate history into knowledge as defined by Kant. For "historical knowledge," innocuous as it may sound, would be an incompatibility if "knowledge" is formal and "history," factual. Dilthey asked, "How can the understanding of the unique be made objective?" or "How 15 historical knowledge possible?" That 13, what are the necessary conditions, a priori postulates, for the possibility of historical knowledge? Put this way, Dilthey cannot escape the dilemma of empirical science. For sciences aim at explaining all contingent facts with immutable natural "laws"; everything would be ex hypothesi under the law, nothing is accidental, i.e., outside the ken of knowledge.

But, then,

such a rational explanation excludes a priori the accidental, the unique, that is, the historical. Compromise is struck by taking natural laws as a descriptive statistical average of observed happenings, an inductive ! See my

1991.

History,

Thinking,

and Literature

in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei: Academia

Sinica,

9. CULTURAL MUTUALITY

209

summary of some past happenings, with an added "indeterminacy principle" of one sort or another, etc., to serve as a probable projection of future occurrences. And then the rigor of scientific knowledge 13 compromised; the a priori laws and forms of knowledge no longer really justify scientific knowledge. And henceforth the philosophy of science gets complicated, a sign that something went awry. A similar rift is seen in Dilthey when, while courageously recognizing that "what is usually separated into physical and mental is vitally linked in mankind," that is, their experiences, Dilthey thought that those experiences "occur in a context which, in the midst of change, remains the same throughout life." This "context" is the structure of the relations of ideas, valuations, purposes; it is by means of this fixed context that we can understand historical experiences. And we are back to where we started; the historical unique is explained by being placed in this immutable "structure of experience" abstracted from the patterns of human life, "abstracted from the fact--man.'" All depends crucially on what "abstracted" means here. Is it a Platonic-Kantian abstraction to obtain a priori forms? Fortunately Dilthey says that this abstracted "structure" is a fundamental interconnection of life, forms of meaning mind-constructed out of experiences of life, extending itself in stable configuration. But here is an ambiguity. If, on the one hand, life experiences externalize themselves into stable configurations of fact-interconnections, they cannot be mind-constructed a priori forms, and then they are not apodictically rational. If, on the other hand, the structures of these configurations are to be fully rational in Kant's sense, they cannot be empirical externalization of life experiences. As long as Dilthey works within the Kantian framework of empirical-rational dichotomy, the dilemma is. unavoidable. The same problem accrues to the notion of "understanding." Understanding can be a re-/iving, reproducing, of the original mental process of another person, or a process of giving expression to sense to gain knowledge of mental life. The former meaning of understanding is an experience; the latter is its rational treatment at a critical distance, an objectification of the historical, a process of "methodological | Dilthey: Selected Writings, ed. H. P. Rickman, Cambridge University Press, 1976, p. 170.

? Ibid. ? Ibid., p. 171.

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PART THREE: TWO CONCLUDING REMARKS

alienation," to borrow Gadamer's phrase. Dilthey switches from one sense to the other as the occasion requires. All these dilemmas stem from Dilthey's basic Kantian stance of theoretical formalism, standing aside history to interpret history.’ Historical understanding is not standing aside in theoretical survey, however, but under-standing a unique series of experiences that have been undergone. Understanding of history 1s historical understanding, an experiential understanding that operates in and as historical process of living. It is crucial to remember that this historical living-through is thoroughly evocative and metaphorical. Our lived understanding is "evocative" in that in this understanding we respond to the call of the events; such a historical knowledge is "metaphorical," expanding our understanding that-then by this now, and re-thinking this-now by the understood that-then. Thus is dialogical hermeneutics established between the I and the other, letting the other be the other I, my dialogal partner, and the I be the other to myself in the light of the other "I." And such a metaphorical-reciprocal expansion is historical. And so, far from constituting problem for understanding, historical uniqueness is its key, initiation, and essence.

Understanding

is historical?

This

is an

inevitable outcome if we take ourselves and our knowledge seriously. And such is the message of Chinese body thinking to the West. 9.1.2.2. Let us see how this dialogical hermeneutics works, and how important it is. Mencius' three stories graphically tell us that IThou reciprocity pervades throughout the human, the animal, and the inanimate realms. Our visceral reaction of alarmed pity on seeing a baby about to crawl into a well’ tells of reciprocity between I and human

Dilthey's objectivism continues to Paul Ricoeur, who is after the fixed autonomy of meaning in written text, an objectification of meaning. See his Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning, Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, ed. R. Czerny, K. McLaughlin, J. Costello, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982. Paralleling Dilthey's ambiguity on "understanding," Ricoeur's "meaning" oscillates between (a) objective meaning decodable from written text, and (b) creative interpretation by the reader confronted with the text. Decoded or interpreted, however, the resultant meaning is universally fixed. Both Ricoeur and Dilthey seek an objective universal context in which, in terms of which, understanding of history validly takes place. And this approach is anti-historical. As there is no universal (end to) history, so there is no objective universal vantage point on history; we--and our understanding--are history. ? | have elucidated this point in my History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Part One. 3 Mencius, 2A6.

9. CULTURAL MUTUALITY

211

Thou. King Hsiian's visceral reaction of not bearing the sight of an ox in jitters being led to sacrificial slaughter! tells of personal reciprocity between I and animal Thou. Both stories are captioned with "the-heart of not bearing people [suffer]." And the originally lush Ox Mount now desolate (6A8) tells of personal reciprocity between I and inanimate Thou; the origin[ally lush] mount (shan chih hsing) 15 compared, with deep sad nostalgia, to the "heart of humane justice," on a par with the

"heart of not bearing people [suffer]." In all these

Confronted

with

the

cases

other,

the

structure

human,

of the events

animal,

or

is the

inanimate,

same. the

I's

constrained heart of humane compassion is called forth (evoked) by virtue of being alarmed at the other's situation, then, transposing (metaphor) the I in the other, becomes home-and-womb to the other, letting the other be as the Thou-self. For Mencius the evil in this context lies in the failure, after evocation, to carry the metaphor-process through. There is another evil noted by Chuang Tzu, resulted from Mencian evil. It is an impersonal application of de-selfed mindset, the "machine mind" (chi hsin), to everything to produce "machine affairs" (chi shih)? Although superficially similar to metaphor, such indiscriminate "application" has no evocation, no metaphoring; no personal confrontation, personal wombing-forth, or personal transposition. Metaphor is the process of ferrying the I over to the other as the alter ego; application is a simple folding-forth of de-selfed technical mindset, one-dimensionally imposing it onto every situation. Here is streamlined systematic rigor and efficiency, a perfect calculability, manipulability, and predictability; here is self-discarding and "mount"-devastating. 9.1.2.3. If Western philosophy has the danger of flying up in a Whiteheadian aeroplane of "thin air" devoid of factuality, and landing in impersonal application to devastation of the self and the Mount of universe, then Chinese philosophy has the danger of being grounded in an enumeration of facts, subjective (as in literature) and objective (as in history). In other words, Chinese philosophy tends to cease to think, and | Mencius, 1A7. 2 Chuang Tzu, 12/56. 3 Cf. 1 4.4.5. and the first note there.

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PART THREE: TWO CONCLUDING REMARKS

merely stay on the immediate level of informative account; then its literature turns philology and studies of documents, its history turns chronicles and textual criticism.

An account is an enumeration of fact, a

mere counting up of items of information. To think at all, we must see ideas within facts and discern an intelligible connection (relation) among these ideas. Thinking is counting and connecting, and connecting happens with activities of analysis and synthesis. It is here that Western philosophy, as counting and connecting, as analysis and synthesis, can help. A second related danger to concrete body thinking in China 13 this. Its way of metaphorical extension from the somatic familiar to the strange novel is a painful crescendo of enrichment. It succeeds only after the difficult reverse move is accomplished; having "warmed up the old toward understanding the new" (Confucius), we must let the strangeturned-familiar renovate the old familiar into a new one, to effect the

"day-to-day renovation" of the old, again and again (Jih jih hsin).' It is only by accomplishing the reverse move can our metaphorical extension be completed. This is the only way to continually reborn, grow, and mature (sheng sheng pu hsi); otherwise, we will be ossified in stuffy self-corrupting conservativism. It is a sad irony of conservativism that such a vibrant forward-looking phrase as "renewing, day [after] day, again [and again]" (jih jih hsin), as quoted above,

was

carved

on a royal bathtub

and, despite the insight of the

writer of the Great Learning, is now enshrined, filed away, in the moldy archive of the Classic of Four Books. Growth requires no less than a resolute willingness to renovate the old by (learning from) the new; the teacher must learn from the student, the father from the son, the ruler from the subject’; assimilation (t'ung huay should lead to renovation, i.e., revolution-of-the-old (ke

hsin).

Sadly, it is all too threatening to revolutionize ancient stories-our roots, our identity--with foreign implications hitherto unknown. ! The phrase inscriptions.

occurs

in

7a

Hsüeh

(The

Great

Learning),

Chapter

3, quoting

from

2 Only Chuang Tzu and, to a less extent, Mencius proposed such a radical move, Confucius also vaguely and occasionally advocated it (as in 7/22).

ancient

although

+ One is reminded of Han Yü's proud statement, "Those, [having] entered China, [we should] then China them" ("Yiian Tao" [An Inquiry into] the Original Tao).

9. CULTURAL MUTUALITY

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After all, as in Chinese jargon, a story 1s literally an "ancient matter" (ku shih), hard to change. Trying to understand the new by the old, our "ancient steps" of understanding tend to "seal themselves" therein (ku pu tzu feng). Thus the Chinese people tend to understand the foreign only with the familiar, interpret the cosmopolitan future only in terms of the clannish past, and their rich tradition turns bigoted traditionalism. A closed society of ethnocentrism is born. Here again, the Western theoretical abstract thinking can help. Since the abstract theory is devoid of concrete contents, it is all too willing to adjust itself to its empirical instantiation, so as to validate itself. Abstract thinking 1s "open-minded," open to future instantiation, forever adjusting and accommodating to new facts. And when data prove too recalcitrant, beyond mere adjustment of the proposed theoretical paradigm, the paradigm explodes into something different; “paradigm shift" takes place. This is Thomas Kuhn's "structure of scientific revolution." Such a revolution 15 possible (though still difficult) because of the flexibility of the abstract, i.e., the vacuous. Theory is factually vacuous, allowing change, while metaphor is not. An empty room is easier to change--even to change itself, to accommodate things (here everything that comes in is new)--than a room full of old things. Thus the Western theoretical thinking can help unfreeze, relativize, and render

flexible the concrete metaphorical thinking in China; the former can freely reinterpret the latter from various possible angles, thus helping the latter renovate itself by the assimilated new, thereby to see through things and discern their internal systematic connections. It is time to take stock. To present concrete systematicity of the facts, with all attending dangers, 15 Chinese body thinking; to appreciate it as it ought to be is the task of Western analysis and careful connection which ultimately derives itself from concrete, compact, metaphorical thinking. Thus all the above explications of concrete thinking are words of chastened theoretical thinking. They are words of theoretical thinking because explication requires stepping back from the ongoing of thinking and stating, surveying them, and then organizing them into a coherent explanation. Be it noted, however, that this stepping-back 1s chastened in the light of the concrete. Whitehead's aeroplane flight? of theoretical thinking is over the ! Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution, University of Chicago Press, 1960, etc. ? Mentioned at the beginning of this essay.

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PART THREE: TWO CONCLUDING REMARKS

terrain, for the sake of the terrain, and under the constraint of the atmosphere of the terrain; this sort of "flight," that is, theoretical thinking, is a chastened one, less justificatory than descriptive, less on why's than on how's, less metaphysical than phenomenological. This character of theoretical thinking, be it noted, results from its being "cured," "cooked," and reshaped by concrete thinking. It is now a kind of theoretical thinking in terms of concrete thinking, theoretical thinking concretized--a theoretical concrete thinking. All this amounts to saying that theoretical thinking and concrete thinking are members of the same family of "thinking," and they do well to work together and influence each other, to the benefit--wholeness--of both of them and of all of us. 9.2. Five Points on Comparative Hermeneutics.’ To propose a symbiosis of theoretical thinking and concrete one is easy; how we should go about doing so 13, however, another matter altogether. This brings us to a general topic of comparative hermeneutics. Five simple heuristic principles can be given: (9.2.1.) We must avoid imposing the Western framework; (9.2.2.) we must go through the baptism of Western fire of theoretical thinking; (9.2.3.) we must avoid being too Westernized; (9.2.4.) mutual appreciation is a very difficult yet much needed imperative; (9.2.5.) we must also watch out for "description." 9.2.1. To begin with, we must steadfastly and vigilantly refrain from imposing (applying simpliciter) the Western framework onto Chinese thinking. We would be trimming the Chinese toes to fit the Western shoes (to apply a Chinese cliché, hsiieh chih shih là), making the Western thinking a Procrustean bed (to use a Western cliché). This is to effectively beg the question and kill the matter under investigation. For instance, "body" differs as much in implications from its Chinese equivalent, "shen," as "thinking" does from "ssu," and "concrete" from

"chü t'i." We must be sensitive to cultural nuances in those words when thinking in those words. 9.2.2. Yet we must go through the baptism of fire of Western theoretical abstract thinking, before we can sharpen our logical sensitivity to appreciate the depths, riches, and subtlety of Chinese concrete body thinking. For instance, the word, "wu" ("nothing") is a word, a something that exists; yet it refers to a no-existence.

the word

"wu"

is a unity of opposites that says as much

! Cf. 14.4.5. and the first note there.

Therefore,

about no-

9. CULTURAL MUTUALITY

215

existence as about our expression. Again, "hsiu shen" ("selfcultivation") is one (it is one's solitary job) in two ("Asiu" is a transitive verb, requiring two persons--a cultivator and a cultivated--to obtain). To stress the oneness, as Taoism does, amounts to describing spontaneity; to stress twoness, as Confucianism does, amounts to describing strenuosity. And they fight as they mutually complement, as between the Yin and the Yang. None of these appears in Chinese philosophy, much less in Western. 9.2.3. Yet we must beware lest our appreciation itself become too Westernized. Appreciation should do justice to the Chineseness of the Chinese thinking. We must carefully balance their difference (note the cultural uniquenesses) and their affinities (after all, we are all human on the same planet), as we go about appreciating Chinese thinking (as well as Western). 9.2.4. For appreciation is a tricky business. To "appreciate" is a transitive verb that transpires in the interaction between the appreciator and the appreciated. Interaction indicates that the interacting two are outside of each other; appreciation itself inevitably differs from the appreciated. The difference should not destroy but accommodate and enhance, through their very differences, the uniqueness of the appreciated. This requires a logical sensitivity that approaches aesthetic appreciation. We do so by noting (9.2.4.1.) adjective-thinking and nounthinking, then (9.2.4.2[.) how Chinese thinking can help Western thinking, (9.2.4.3. how Western thinking helps Chinese thinking, (9.2.4.4.) and then realize that "metaphor" is the principle of life. 9.2.4.1. Let us ponder on nouns and adjectives, by way of illustration. Being (and thinking) in the mode of adjective differs from being and thinking in the manner of noun. This statement has a "flop" (noisy) side and a flip (silent) side. First, as to its flop side. Being emotional is to be wrapped in delirium, devoid of reasoning and self-consciousness; yet emotion can be looked into as to its structure and causal inevitability, as psychologists and phenomenologists have been doing since Freud. Being rational is to be analytical, devoid of "dross" of emotionality (adjective turned noun), as formal as Kant and Husserl aspired to; yet reason is human, and is as "hearted" as the reasonable person is. Pascal should have said that heart has a reason which, being human, we should discern, and reason has a heart which, being human, we must feel.

Thus being creative cannot be analyzed; creation can and should be, as Robert C. Neville has been doing. For novelty in creation can be

216

PART THREE: TWO CONCLUDING REMARKS

analyzed but being fresh in being creative cannot. Having a system may allow extra-systematic "aberrations," but being systematic cannot. By the same token, adjectives represent how we behave and are, while nouns describe what we are and act out. In adjectives we live; in nouns we look. In adjectives we are "in it"; in nouns we discern. Adjectives are performatives; nouns are descriptions. Sartre said that we must choose, "live or tell," for we always tell a lie. We arrange things too much as we tell; things are too much fitted together, make too much

sense. But then in telling we shape things, the shape of which things themselves are unaware but merely exhibit. To capture such an exhibition we look and tell. We call it "discerning." But now let's flip ourselves to the flip side of actuality; we cannot flip this "coin," because actuality just is. "Being [adjective]" is being "in it"; "looking into [noun]" is being "out of it." For a looking-in is a looking-afterward, a retrospective survey. Only then is it possible to lay out what is surveyed and recount it--tell it. Sartre is correct after all, when he said that to tell is to "catch time by its tail." But this retrospective recounting goes against the grain of time to go forward; the recounting is by nature "out of it," and then what is described, identified, is no longer what it really 13. | An adjective indicates a way of being; identifying "it," we get a noun, and we lose it. The Tao tao-ed is no longer the Tao. Thus we cannot give to a thing its shape, which is indescribable, as Wittgenstein pointed out.’ Perhaps this explains why Taoists are furious about the Confucians' cavalier exhortation to behaving humanely. Being humane cannot be urged without destroying itself. Being spontaneous is indescribable as sleeping is to the spontaneous sleeper. One must be spontaneous to sleep; sleep is an apt "description" of spontaneity.‘ But blind spontaneity borders on being emotional, rejecting reason.

Hence

the

paradox,

the

predicament,

of

being

sane

and

! See his Nausea, tr. by Lloyd Alexander, N. Y.: New Directions, 1964, pp. 56-59.

2 Ibid. 3

Ludwig Wittgenstein, 7ractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trs. D. F. Pears and B. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1961, pp. 144-51.

F McGuinness,

* Cf. 7.5.4. above, and my "A Philosophy of Sleep--A Taoist Ideal," Chung-kuo Jen tih Chia-chih Kuan Kuo-chi Yen-chiu Hui Lun-wen Chi (proceedings of essays for the international conference on Chinese view on values), ed. by Han-hsüeh Yen-chiu Chung-hsin (Center for Chinese Studies), June, 1992, pp. 317-34.

9. CULTURAL MUTUALITY

217

human(e). He (a Taoist? a Mencius?) says, "You be (i.e., return to) yourself, then you are human, and your being humane shall come of itself." All this is fine as a practical advice to being human. But we want to understand what all this is about. He shouts back, "All this is about' misses ‘all this'!" But how can we help it? He replies, "There! In not being able to help it, the 'it comes (ab)out." Here Mencius's "unbearable feeling (of com-passion) for people (suffering)" (pu jen jen chih hsin)' joins with Chuang Tzu's "not able [to] help [it]" (pu te i)? Now, in the course of our shouting match above, the rationality, the reasonableness, of things natural is exhibited. For here the noun and the adjective are joined--"rationality," "reasonableness." Or is all this my mere flip-flop of rhetorical cheat? The implication is clear, however. Chinese philosophy tends to adjectival thinking, while Western philosophy to noun-thinking. Somehow--and this is the difficulty--they must get together. 9.2.4.2. And so comparative hermeneutics amounts to appreciation-of-differences that enhances uniqueness. But how does appreciative difference enhance appreciation? In the following way. As above said, appreciation consists of the appreciator appreciating the appreciated. Therefore appreciation differs inevitably from both the appreciator and the appreciated. The danger and the potential is that this difference may change both, which change may either enhance or destroy both. For instance, Chinese body thinking can help dissolve a typical Western problem in philosophy. George Berkeley's perceptual subjectivism

led us to a difficult conundrum.

He

was,

say,

distinguish a real stone from an imaginary one by the former's and necessity that the latter lacks. But how would he perceptual necessity and coherence from mathematical ones? The difficulty stems from Berkeley's perspective perceptual; it quickly turned into a mere psychic-subjective move provoked a counter-emphasis on the purely logical

able to

coherence distinguish

as merely one. This necessity.

| Mencius, 1A7, 2A6, 441, 7B31. ? Chuang Tzu, 4/30, 43, 53; 6/15, 18; 11/13; 15/11; 23/79, etc. + See 14.2. below. From a different angle (e.g., self-contradictory notions "exist" in some sense) Meinong, and to a less degree Bradley, needlessly populated the world with subsistences beside existences. Russell reacted with brutal "atomic facts." These shouting matches are uncalled for, stemming as they are from illicit dichotomy and wrong emphasis, to be described in the next paragraph.

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PART THREE: TWO CONCLUDING REMARKS

Hence the dichotomy of the psychological versus the logical, and Mill's view of logic as psychologically based was attacked as a fallacy of psychologism and Husserl was haunted by its shadow. Such an attack indicates a misplaced emphasis on the priority of the purely logical. The "fallacy of psychologism" is itself a fallacy of misplaced emphasis. One must realize that the onerous overtone in "psychologism" originates in a stringent dichotomy between the psychic and the logical, the mental-subjective and the physical-objective. The word "psychological" ought to be expanded into "body-ological," where thinking and being are of one body. Kant's phrase, "all rational beings," points in this direction though, sadly, Kant emphasized logical "all" over human "beings." "Beings" is in the concrete plural; "beings" cannot help but be human and bodily. Dichotomy, whether the logical versus the psychological, the mind versus the body, or the subjective versus the objective--and they all point to the same thing--implies independence of each item from the other. The independence led to an emphasis on the logical over the psychological, the mind over the body, and idealism emphasized the subjective, while realism (empiricism) did the objective. Such is the fallacy of misplaced emphasis; all these "items" ought to have been regarded as aspects of body thinking. Being rid of wrong dichotomy and wrong emphasis, we can see some positive implications of Berkeley's insight, "to be is to be perceived," as follows.

For us humans at least, to be is to be alive, and

to be alive is to perceive; no one alive cannot fail to perceive, and the dead cannot perceive.

Thus, for us, to be is to perceive.

Furthermore,

for us, to perceive is to think. Our attention has been focussed, wrongly, just on the fact that to think depends on perceiving. The crux of the matter is that to think depends on perceiving, and perceiving leads to thinking. First, thinking depends on perceiving, and to perceive depends on perspective. Even in the West, to think is to see,’ that is, to survey ' The comic story of Balaam has an interesting passage. King Balak, eager to have Balaam curse the Israelites, said to Balaam, "Come with me to another place, from which you may see them; you shall see only the nearest of them, and shall not see them all; then curse them for me from there" (Numbers 23:13). To see is to think; to see things from a certain perspective is to think of them in a certain way. And of course the ass Balaam was riding saw "the angel of the Lord" with a drawn sword and turned aside; Balaam did not see him and wanted to go ahead. When Balaam also saw him, he also stopped going ahead (numbers 22:23-31). To see a new situation is to change one's mind. ? Aristotle begins his Metaphysics (980a-b) by saying, somewhat dramatically, that of-all our

9. CULTURAL MUTUALITY

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and analyze things objectively from a detached perspective. To see then depends on the perspective, which shifts according to where we stand. This is why Plato by his Myth of the Cave urges us to crawl out of our body-bound "cave," to obtain a objective and better perspective. This Platonic injunction proves too effective, for Whitehead now describes thinking as riding on an aeroplane. Being up in the sky gives us an illusion (false perspective) of being everywhere, looking at things from nowhere. But to see and look must join with hearing and listening and even overhearing, which is to be present and bodily, receptively,

actively,

resonate

with

what

comes

to me,

the

thinker,

undergoing the experience. Seeing without hearing (as in the West) is as crippled a body thinking as hearing without seeing (as in China). How crippled seeing without hearing is is indicated in Thomas Nagel's The View from Nowhere.' He states at the outset that the "book is about a single problem: how to combine the perspective of a particular person inside the world with an objective view of that same world . . . to transcend its particular point of view and to conceive of the world as a whole." This overall statement about (the approach of) the book bespeaks three points: that (a) we thinkers strive for "objective view"; (b) objectivity is equivalent to "transcend[ing]" the particular concrete, that is, leaving the "particular person [who is myself!] inside the world"; (c) only in this way can we "conceive of the world as a whole." These three assumptions are typical and pivotal ones in Western philosophy. Our present essay has been in quest for answers to another sort of questions: How do we attain a universal view of the world that includes us the subject and our viewpoint, with a specific perspective of ours in the here-now? How can we, without discarding a particular point of view of ours, conceive the world as a whole?

And we realize that,

after all, this is how we attain a universal standpoint. We attain objectivity via subjectivity metaphorically extended. An objective standpoint is the subject's, who grows and matures. To think universally is to expand the subject's perceiving.

senses sight is the most sacred. Cf. W.D. Ross's comments on the passage in his Aristotle's Metaphysics, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1953, 1958, etc., Vol I, p. 115. Plato said that sight is the highest of senses (Republic, 508b) in connection with the "Idea" (what is seen) of Good. ! Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere, N. Y.: Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 3.

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PART THREE: TWO CONCLUDING REMARKS

Secondly, if to think depends on perceiving as above described, then the reverse is true also; perceiving leads to thinking. For to think amounts to being perceptive of the situation, that is, to understand what, how and why things are as they are. To be perceptive in this manner is to be worldly wise, and to acquire such a wisdom we must live through the ups and downs of life; such a wisdom also counsels us never to leave the perspective of the situation. The situation means where we are situated.

As such the situation does not exist without us; nor do we exist

without our situation. Thus the world of actuality 15 all that we in fact perceive, and all that we can perceive. To be 15 to perceive (ourselves) and to be perceived (the world); existence is composed of perception. Now, to realize such points as above amounts to a beneficial impact of Chinese body thinking on Western philosophy; the former helps dissolve the latter's "insoluble" problem produced by wrong emphases in thinking. Western philosophy only begins to realize the problem and has just initiated its solution. Trying to express the nagging suspicion that logic is based on something empirical, Husserl could not dispel the shadow of psychologism. Wittgenstein did not make too much ontological mileage out of meaning as use. Merleau-Ponty only hinted at a perceptual hermeneutics of logical necessity by tackling a geometrical one. Rorty opted out for communal persuasion; deconstructionists retreated to the quicksand of endless interpretations. Grabau's correct intuition that universals derive from experience remains just that, intuition without justification, and remains unappreciated in the West. Only from the viewpoint of Chinese body thinking can we provide justification to Grabau, and clearly see the direction thinking should go when caught in the rut of the "fallacy of psychologism." 9.2.4.3. Let us go in an opposite direction, and see how Western thinking helps Chinese thinking, and thereby the latter fine-tunes the former. This essay uses Western logical sensitivity to appreciate the unique Chinese concrete body thinking. This appreciation. sounds Western; "concrete," "body," "thinking" are taken in Western senses. Appreciation in this essay uses these Western terms to characterize the Chinese modes of thinking. And characterization is a bringing out of what is hitherto hidden. This operation may or may not make Chinese "thinkers" comfortable. ! Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, N. Y.: The Humanities Press, 1962, pp. 385-6.

9. CULTURAL MUTUALITY

221

At the same time, such a characterization of Chinese concrete

body thinking lacks the usual Western mode of thinking. It lacks theoreticity, that abstract rigor. It lacks, above all, critical normativity, a justification, a norm and critique to tell us when such a thinking goes right. Without justification (or substantiation and "argumentation") thinking is no thinking, at least not in the Western tradition. Take our Chinese "argumentation": compact, metaphoric, ironic. First as to the compact mode of argumentation. To understand compact mode of thinking, we can see two clusters of notions: compact, story and life on the one hand, and machine, manual, formal, theoretical on the other.

The machine, seemingly complex, is simple and predictable in implication and application. This is because it is designed, manufactured, and used under abstract formal principles. It has no story of organic explication but only a flow chart of controlled replications. Life, seemingly simple, 1s complex and surprising in implication and application. This is because it grows in morphological yet unexpected layers of implication; it grows a life-story. It grows in being adept at adapting and adjusting to the changing situation, growing in surprising applications. The identity of a life grows, uniquely, richly, and surprisingly; the unity of a machine is derived from replications of the same operations controlled under the same formal theoretical principles. Life has a story that displays and develops layers of hidden implications; machine has a manual that specifies what it has and does, and no more. The story is simple in all its complexity; the manual informs us of a complicated uniformity of operations. Life uses machinery, and has mechanical aspects to it; machine can be used by life to control life. Life is "compact" in its implications; machine is uniform in its operations. 9.2.4.4. Why is life a story that grows, whereas the machine has a manual that does not? Because life grows with an internal principle ("integrity") that grows and changes. Such a change is a metaphorical one. Metaphor is a surprising growth in hermeneutics, taking the notthis as the new this; this growth is an organic one, seemingly outrageous yet seen as inevitable once completed. "Surprising" here means that our interpretation is always "wrong," breaking our frame of expectation-how could the not-this be the this, albeit a new one? This wrongness is highlighted in the ironic mode of thinking that -uses the negative to highlight the affirmative. This contrasts with the machine which has an

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PART THREE: TWO CONCLUDING REMARKS

external principle of operation that is pre-fixed, pre-arranged under the abstract principle. The internal evinces the organic concreteness; the external is a cipher for formal abstraction. The basic structure of this growing process is metaphor, if metaphor is taken as a description of our cognition (thinking, understanding) that naturally flows with the Ch'i-current of things. The metaphoric performance is a controversial one in the West. There is no way of checking on its rightness since the very purpose of metaphoric move is to move out of the familiar ("this") toward the novel ("that"), understanding the that in terms of the this, which is thereby changed and enriched. There is here nothing to hang on to as a norm. This is why metaphor is always wrong, whether in terms of the this or the that. It is hoped that the situation is illuminated and our understanding furthered. But "furthering" and "illuminating" cannot be "checked" without defeating themselves. "Checking" is checking from the point of view of the norm-we-already-know, and such a checking checks the furthering and the illuminating of the novel, which is the outrageous, the out-ofthe-ordinary. But that outrageously new that smashes the familiar norm-with which we check the new--is the very aim of metaphor to reach; hence, the unverifiability of metaphor. In China, however, metaphor (pi, lei, fang, yü) has never been talked about as such (as above); it is only used as a specific operation in thinking. Metaphor as a general description of the mode of Chinese thinking is something unheard of, except, of course, as a rhetorical device in literature. Here we owe our operation to the Western thinking

and sensitivity.

Yet here the chilly thin air of the mount of high

abstraction may kill the sprouts of Chinese concrete thinking. Metaphor as a method of thinking is itself a metaphorical stretch of usual Chinese metaphor. Whether Chinese thinking can survive such an extension remains to be seen; it may well do, because Li, Tao, Yin Yang,

Five

Elementary ways, are actually some such descriptive extensions. This reminds us of the importance of "description," to which we now turn. 9.2.5.' We can note two points about describing: First (9.2.5.1.), Beware of description, then (9.2.5.2.), be careful in finding description that does not distort. 9.2.5.1. First, beware of putting something down in writing. Description is just this, a "writing (it) down." There has to be an "it" to write down; the situation must be turned into an object before writing ! Cf. 23.1. above.

9. CULTURAL MUTUALITY

223

happens. Description, then, objectifies, thereby falsifies as much as a Polaroid picture of a scene; the picture is disappointing. Ludwig Wittgenstein said that "It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists. . . . Feeling the world as a limited whole--it is this that is mystical." In other words, that the world is cannot be said; only how things are can. Jean-Paul Sartre went further:? "While you live, nothing happens. . . . 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 might as well try to catch time by the tail." In other words, even how things are cannot be said without distortion. Gabriel Marcel worried aloud about Martin Buber's saying of I and Thou: "[I]t is of the essence of language to effect this transformation. When I speak of you [toi], even when I expressly declare that you are not a thing, that you are the opposite of a thing, I reduce you in spite of myself to the condition of a thing. The Du becomes an Es. . . . [O]ne can scarcely keep . . . from expressing . . . the objectification . . ." 9.2.5.2.

Secondly,

one

can

of course

retort

that,

after

all,

Wittgenstein did say something "in a lump sum" after having said one should not, Sartre did describe despite labeling storytelling as lying, and Marcel did turn Thou into an It as he mentioned Thou, while stressing the unspeakability of the Thou. Have they not committed an existential contradiction of a sort? But what else can they do? The retort amounts to an impossible | Tractatus, 6.44, 6.45.

? Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, tr. by Lloyd Alexander, N. Y.: New Directions, 1964, pp. 56-59. Cf. Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, 2 vols., tr. by G. S. Fraser, Chicago: Regnery/Gateway, 1960, I: 192-94. ? Paul Arthur Schilpp and Maurice Friedman, eds., The Philosophy of Martin Buber, La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1967, pp. 44-45.

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PART THREE: TWO CONCLUDING REMARKS

imperative: what you say (describe) should not be a description of a plain, objective sort. But then where can we find the description that does not distort? Buber replies to Marcel that we constantly use "I" and "Thou" in daily conversation; "when I say 'I' to myself" I don't "mean by it a thing." But this is precisely the point: how do we use our language in the daily flow of conversation? His,

Mark well how Buber described, for, after all, he described. however, is not a description but a meditative invitation, an

evocative presentation, a going-through--all with a description.

"Don't

say it, show it," says our beloved, our actuality, and Buber shows it, pre-

sents it, exhibits it, evokes it. We call such an operation "poetry." didn't

Buber

describe

it after

all?

Yes,

but

beware:

To

But

describe

something is one thing, to use description as a means of presenting something is quite another. "My love is a red rose" is a false description and an effective presentation. Hence our threefold use of language--evocation, metaphorics, and irony. In evocation (as when I say "I") I take a stand, and the listener notices what is going on. In metaphor, we (and our language) become part of the situation and move with the situation, thereby help the situation take (an expressive) shape. And when we say something and forthwith negate what is said, this is a most accurate saying called "irony." Lao Tzu prefaced his Tao Te Ching with a pungent irony--warning--"The Tao tao-able is not the usual Tao," then went ahead and "tao-ed" whatever is about Tao; he negated his own sayings. Chuang Tzu said, "walking-acting and no traces; event-happening and no handing-(it-)down,"^ and his words were handed down to us, perhaps also as an ironic warning. Heidegger in his later years wrote "Being" and crossed it off in print; Chinese people display upside down, characters such as "fu" (happiness) or "ch'un" (spring), meaning those good things has "come (fao), homonymous with "upside down (fao)" in Chinese. One can call it an indirection, a literary way of ex-pressing things, having nothing to do with description. Wittgenstein's, Sartre's, and Marcel's sayings above perhaps belong to a metaphorical way, not a descriptive one. Perhaps this is why existentialists and existential phenomenologists often resort to the ! Ibid., p. 706. I omit Buber's other point, that expressions such as "the Thou" and "the I" are "alien to natural speech."

? Chuang Tzu, 12/82-83.

9. CULTURAL MUTUALITY

225

literary means of exposition. Nietzsche wrote in aphorisms, Buber wrote in philosophical poetry, Sartre and Marcel wrote dramatic works. All Chinese writings are literary and often poetic. In any case, this essay is an attempt at such a cultural hermeneutics as above. The essay hopefully alerts both the Western thinker and the Chinese thinker to rethink their own modes of thinking. At the same time, the author is prepared to listen to their complaints, always sensitive to where the essay goes awry, and to how to characterize such a going. In this cultural, meta-cognitive area, sensitivity and fidelity to what 13 encountered is an absolute must. Here even "going," "awry," "logical," "sensitive," and the like, have no clearcut description. It is not that these words have no meanings; it is that these meanings are so much part of what is encountered in the concrete which is yet to be "described" in the first place, that to describe them in advance amounts to begging the question and committing the risk of Procrustean bed. And to say all this is already to invite complaints (not critiques) from both camps--as too imprecise in the West, as too methodologically Western in the world of Chinese sentiment. And the debate(?) goes on. On this meta-level of hermeneutical methodology the snake always bites its own tail. One must go back to the actual performance of hermeneutics to elucidate (bring to light) oneself. Hermeneutics is always a performative. 9.3. Comparative Hermeneutics for Our Survival.' One last point. Why do we bother to do all this? Because appreciation of others (a "that")--inevitably in terms of our own accustomed frame (a "this"), a metaphoric move in a wide context--is not just something nice to do, nor is it even because it is implied in the legal requirement of the equality of all races and cultures. It 13 vital to our own survival. Why 15 it the case? We must note that cultural difference lies in differences in modes of handling and thinking. The China-West difference is not in what they have but in how they handle what they have. For instance, all of us require about the same amount of nutrients to stay healthy, yet the Chinese cuisine, Chinese table manners, and Chinese view of "dinner," differ from the Western counterparts. Thus our manner of managing nutrition ("dinner") manifests our cultural difference. And our manner of thinking directs our manner of management. Hence the importance of looking into the peculiar ways of Chinese thinking. As we think ' Cf. 14.4.5. and the first note there.

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PART THREE: TWO CONCLUDING REMARKS

differently, so we manage differently, and different managements manifest different cultures. And this is the importance of such cultural differences. A thing is known by its contrast. And so a certain cultural manner of management can evaluate and improve upon another one.’ Cultural diversity that entails our appreciation of others enriches our own growth. Without growth life withers away. In our process of living, we either grow together in appreciation of others, or else die alone. And so appreciation is an inherent imperative of our life itself. Metaphorical appreciation of cultural diversity in symbiosis, or our isolated deaths--between these two poles we move, and we have no third alternative. And this is by the nature of the case. Life is nascent concretion from a solitary to a "solidary" particular. And concreteness is a comingtogether of contrastive complementary Yin-Yang reciprocity of ironic metaphoric compactness, conflicting in comprising, comprising in conflicting. The concrete living particular matures by metaphorically reaching out for differences and ironically coming back toward a selfidentity of enriched compactness. Such a nascent concretion by nature cannot help (vital necessity) but grows (nascent universalization) from a solitary bodily self to a "solidary" community of cultural diversities. Again I say: We either thrive together or die in isolation; we have no third alternative.

C£

A Preliminary Remark to Division One above.

DIVISION TWO: CHINESE BODY THINKING: A CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING

A PRELIMINARY REMARK In Division One we looked into Chinese body thinking; in this Division Two we shall look at it as a whole. We shall synthesize in this Division insights both in the West and in China to see what "body thinking" really is. Part Four explains body thinking in general; Part Five looks at it "linearly"; Part Six looks at it "circularly," as we compare Chinese body thinking with a Western view of body thinking.

PART FOUR: ON BODY THINKING Part of living moving activity of human life (10.1.) is Body thinking (10.2.). Body thinking movements (11.1., 11.3.) can be understood from one of their pointing (11.2.). Section 11 is then brought together by answering an objection (11.4.). 10. Two Themes: Movement, Comparison. To live is to move, including thinking. Movement obviously requires the living body. Thus body thinking becomes obvious once moving and living are linked (10.1.). The problem is how we look at this body thinking (10.2.). 10.1. From Self-Movement to Self-Transportation. We do not need Aristotle to tell us that one of the signs of life is selfmovement.’ Our living body is no exception. A living body moves itself both physically and mentally. Physical movement 15 locomotion or displacement, described as being both in a specific place and not in that place, both is and is not in a place. How this is also true of mental movement will be seen in the following pages. Consciousness describes our mind's life-movement. As both Brentano and Husserl claimed, to be conscious is to be conscious of something other than the self. But to be conscious of something 15 to intend it, and to intend is to extend oneself outside, to stretch forth one's

awareness from the familiar to the unaccustomed, to image forth the familiar toward the novel, thereby to expand--through imagination-one's fund of knowledge. This is to understand something new in terms of what is known already, that is, to undergo the movement, of the extension of the realm of the familiar.

pro-cess,

the

This is to assimilate the other with the help of its newly found "similarity" with the familiar, and amounts to a metaphorical movement,

a self-movement

from the self to the not-self.

Here, therefore, is the

mind's movement, which also is and is-not in one place.

Now let us consider what has just been traversed (moved).

We

saw how we moved from the here (familiar, known) through (in terms of) the here-like (similarity to what is familiar) to the there (unfamiliar, hitherto unknown). Where were we when we said so? We were in both ! See Aristotle, Physics, 9, 265b34-266a4, cf. 254b15-31.

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PART FOUR:

ON BODY THINKING

the here and the there--after all, this is what it means to move, as Zeno and Aristotle acknowledged. "[M]etaphorical statements . . . always contain the whisper, ‘it is and it is not." Let us note an important point. To move in this case is not to move things but to move ourselves--from a familiar here to a strange there. To move ourselves is to metaphor. Or rather, to metaphor is one of our performances of moving ourselves around in the world. To move ourselves is a peculiar mode of moving--called thinking of a philosophical sort. Philosophical self-moving is a vital sign of our humanness. How do we characterize our philosophical self-

transportation?

Take P. F. Strawson, for example. The title of his little classic, Individuals? carries with it an explanation, "An essay in Descriptive Metaphysics." He said in Introduction that there are descriptive metaphysics and revisionary metaphysics, and that he is doing the former. One can quibble that except for the first descriptive metaphysician, perhaps Aristotle, all ensuing descriptive metaphysicians are also revisionary, in that the later versions are proposed to revision (re-vision) the previous ones. But what is to be noted here is something more elementary, that is, this quibble amounts to pointing to a self-movement in the twofold announcement implied in the pronouncement, "an essay in descriptive metaphysics": (a) there are two versions of metaphysics, descriptive and non-descriptive, and (b) the essay concerns the former. Strawson divided, then entered into one of the two divisions.

Similarly, J. N. Mohanty talked about two kinds of philosophy, a Kantian legitimizing transcendentalism and a phenomenological explanatory enterprise, and entered the latter.* This is in line with Kant | This is Sallie McFague's statement in her slightly redundant Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982, Chapter 1. She denies to symbol and analogy, metaphor's power to shock and move our understanding beyond the familiar. Analogy is now a prefabricated logical move from major premise through minor premise to conclusion, hardly distinguishable from usual deductive argument. ? London: Methuen and Co., 3

1959, 1964.

.

Ibid., p. 17.

* J. N. Mohanty, 1985, p. 214.

The Possibilitity of Transcendental Philosophy, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,

10. TWO THEMES:

MOVEMENT, COMPARISON

231

who divided reasoning and its critique, and entered the latter, calling it "The Critique of Pure Reason." Similarly, Richard Rorty made distinctions between mirroring and non-mirroring epistemologies, normal discourse and abnormal discourse (cf. Kuhn's "revolutionary" science), and others,' then promoted the latter kinds. Robert Nozick also distinguished a coercive teleological argumentative tower that totters, on the one hand, and a non-coercive,

non-etc., Parthenon that merely explains, does not totter, and arrives nowhere--and entered the Parthenon.? Gabriel Marcel admired the Hegelian system and went into non-systematic journal-making; so did Paul Weiss in his many volumes of Philosophy in Process. And so on. All this is in the philosophical tradition of Platonic division and dialectic. Plato's Myth of Divided Lines and Myth of the Cave also divides (opinion vs. knowledge, prisoners in the cave vs. the unchained who turned around and went up to the Light), and entered the latter. Socrates started all this by distinguishing pretension to knowledge from knowledge of ignorance, promoting the latter. Skepticism (Hume's or Derrida's) starts to divide (differentiate) and go out of the accustomed world, without knowing whereto.

Lao Tzu 15 ironic; he said, "The Tao

that can be /ao-ed is not the constant Tao," and went ahead to tao many words; he £ao-ed in the realm of no-Tao.

In all these we see a shared pattern of self-transportation from one realm of discourse to another. Here Plato's Third Man Argument (You divided all into two; where does your division itself belong?) does not work, because we are moving; we do not belong anywhere. Such a moving is a shifting of the mode of thinking, en-visioning, and perhaps re-visioning. In fact every envisioning (entering one mode of seeing) is a revisioning (a look-again at, thereby moving out of, a previous mode of seeing). An instructive example of human understanding of movement is music. Music is more than mere nonessential artwork spewed forth playfully out of human creative energies. Or rather, music is all this playful outburst of creativity essential to humanness; music is our "essential luxury" (Menuhin). For music is a human presentation of movement, the sense of which 15 thereby made manifest; it is a rhythmic,

! Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton: 1980, pp. 320-22, 386-89, etc.

Princeton University Press,

? Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981, 1983, pp. 2-10, etc.

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and so systematic, under-standing of movement. Music 1s always in a form that is sensible and alive. The form comprises change, fresh surprises, and a familiar frame, such as melody, motif, mode, and sometimes the frame itself is subtle and fleeting. The change is inspired and recognized by its frequent-overlapping, contrasting--references to the frame. The patterns of change and reference are varied--fugue, cycle, variation, repetition, reprise,

round,

harmony,

etc.

And

at the

same

time,

the

frame

is

deepened and rendered alive by being referred to--embodied--in various manners. In fact, such sonic patterns of reference are music. Music is our lived philosophy of movement. The point raised in this essay is that this sort of self-transportation 15 also a body movement; we call it "body thinking." 10.2. Western vs. Chinese Thinking on Body Thinking.’ Three points must be raised before going on to quote from Western and Chinese philosophers, and to weave their views together into a coherent explanation of "body thinking." First, we must say that body thinking has not been at the center of the Western thinking. Although Husserl did touch on the importance of the body for thinking, he did not develop it. As Richard M. Zaner said,

"While Husserl was . . . quite cognizant of the central place of the animate organism [Leib], he did not himself devote much space in his published writings to the analysis of it; and, what has subsequently appeared of his unpublished manuscripts contains little more than highly suggestive clues toward the development of such an analysis." Perhaps the most important modern philosophers who paid close attention to the philosophical significance of the body are, as Zaner correctly pointed out, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, among others. Unfortunately, they are not full-fledged philosophers on the body.

! Cf. 14.4.5. and the first note there. * Richard M. Zaner, The Problem of Embodiment: Some Contributions to Body, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964, p. viii.

a Phenomenology of the

10. TWO THEMES:

MOVEMENT, COMPARISON

233

Marcel with his penetrating observations on the body is intent therewith on meditating on what the human self, the "I," means; my body is important only in relation to the "I am myself," "the metaphysical conditions of personal existence," a "philosophical anthropology." Although "Sartre gives an excellent analysis of the body-as-lived," and that "quite accurate" in itself at that, it 1s "irreconcilable with [his] ontological doctrines." Merleau-Ponty, on his part, pays his central attention to "perception." Zaner said,’ "Thus, . . . the theory of sense perception presupposes a theory of sensuousness, which is itself an implicit theory of the body. . , . [T]he theory of the body, he contends, is already a theory of sensuous perception." Thus he had phenomenology of perception, not body thinking.‘ No wonder Zaner had to extrapolate from these three thinkers to contribute toward a phenomenology of the body. His book is on the "problem of embodiment," not thinking in the body; the book comprises "some contributions to a phenomenology of the body," not body thinking. The notion of "experience" has indeed been in vogue since at least Hegel,

and has been used extensively by Kant, pragmatists,

and

phenomenologists. But "experience" has always been a generic term for them, always understood in the context of its significance for thinking and for human life in general. "Feeling" is another important bodily notion made much of by A. N. Whitehead and S. K. Langer’; its cognate,

' Cf. ibid., p. 3. Cf. further, Paul A. Schilpp and Lewis E. Harn, eds., The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1984, pp. 123-58, 498-524. 2 Zaner, op. cit., p. 116.

? Ibid., p. 150. 4 Although cf. 14.4. below, where his phenomenology of the body is critically appreciated. Perhaps Zaner means to say that he was less a systematic than an intuitive thinker on the body. > Whitehead used "feeling" as synonymous with "prehension," one of the crucial key terms in his philosophical cosmology, and Langer chose "feeling" as the term around which she wrote a threevolume magnum opus, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967 (Vol. 1), 1972 (Vol. 2), 1982 (Vol. 3).

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"emotion," was noted by G. A. Schrader, E. T. Gendlin, G. Marcel! as well as M. Heidegger. But none of them came quite close to our "body" as the focal unifying principle for all our thinking. Susanne K. Langer said, "Ihe study of feeling . . . leads one down into biological structure and process . . . and upward to the purely human sphere known as 'culture.' . . . The same concept that raises problems of science takes one just as surely into humanistic ones. .. Feeling includes the sensibility of very low animals and the whole realm of human awareness and thought, the sense of absurdity, the sense of justice, the perception of meaning, as well as emotion and sensation." I wish that Langer had changed "feeling" into "body." Thus body thinking has not been at the center of the Western thinking. Secondly, in contrast to the above, we can always understand the Chinese thinkers best in terms of "body thinking," and judge them accordingly. They make sense in the light of our body, and all their systematic developments can be seen as those of body thinking, both microcosmically

(medically, morally,

socially), and cosmically--in the

vital cosmic breath (hao jan chih ch'i), in the cosmic heaven-man-earth trinity (116, ti, jen). These thinkers become inane and scholastic whenever they leave this central somatic principle--trivially cosmogonic, fussily exegetical, tediously physiognomic, in their astrology, statecraft, geomancy, medical gibberish, etc. (See Appendix 31.) Sadly, however, Chinese thinkers keep on seeing various connections among various elements of the world according the principle of body thinking, and scarcely ponder with care on their interinvolvement as one which makes sense only through our body and body thinking, much less ponder on this body thinking itself. ! James M. Edie, ed., An Invitation to Phenomenology: Studies in the Philosophy of Experience, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, Inc., 1965, pp. 240-65; Gabriel Marcel, Metaphysical Journal, tr. Bernard Wall, London: Salisbury Square, 1952, pp. 304-11, etc. 2 Stimmung, Gestimmtheit in e.g., his Being and Time, trs. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, N. Y.: Harper & Row, 1962, Index on p. 551. + Susanne K. Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Vol. 1,Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1965, book cover, p. 55.

10. TWO THEMES:

MOVEMENT, COMPARISON

235

Thus, thirdly, the Chinese thinkers dwell in body thinking--think bodily--without explicating and elaborating on it. Western thinkers, in contrast, develop various notions that are the ingredients of body thinking without putting them in the context of body thinking. This essay attempts to utilize the Western mode of thinking, and Western elaborations on notions related to the body, and incorporate them into the Chinese thinking that is centered on body thinking.

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11. Thinking, Pointings, Body Thinking. Thinking is a pointing, and pointing needs a body to do. Thus (11.1, 11.3.) thinking, the body, and (11.2.) pointing, they become synonymous. 11.1. All Thinking Is Body Thinking. The human "body" is much more than a thing among things, an indifferent collection of sensations as seen biologically. My body is not just a physiological substance (Korper) but my limbed life--Leib (Husserl)--and my bodyproper, corps propre (Merleau-Ponty). My body (shen) is myself; it 13 my live unity, my sensed self, my unique manifestation of the vital subject as subject. Thus the human body is the subject's "behavioral arc" (MerleauPonty), that is, the overall "shape" (manner) of the (historical) track of intentional activities--their lived synthesis--that constitutes the "subject," the sinuous monogram of the subject, the flexuous way of the subject's daily undergoings. And so, as the lively Way of human subject, the body is the subject's being-in-the-world and to-the-world. It is inaccurate to say, as those phenomenologists wont to, that I insert myself in the world (Merleau-Ponty) or that I am thrown into the world (Heidegger, Sartre). For these phrases are really expressions of my surprise when I find myself already somewhere ("here") in the world. After all, to "insert" and "be thrown" into the world I have to be (there) already, and about my being-there-already I can do nothing; every thinking and every theme for thinking begins here, including my "inserting" and my being "thrown" into the world. And this my beingthere-already is my body, my living-my-body. There is no "bond," no "opening," no "availability," that unites me to my body; I am my body, not the body you see but the body I feel. For my body is always present in my experience, giving me a point of view, so as to experience things. I do not see myself seeing or walking or dressing. I am the lived act of seeing; all things seen are gathered and organized by the center of global reference, my body. My body is the system of all systems of perspectives; I am this system unfolding itself. My eye is my possibility of reading the book; my teeth are my possibility of chewing my food. My body is my possibility forever going out toward something (out) there, in my acts, one continuing on to another, and my body is this situation which develops itself. "I am my body" means, then, "I am" by and in perceiving, experiencing and acting out the world. I perceive, therefore I am; or

11. THINKING, POINTINGS, BODY THINKING

237

rather, for me to perceive is to exist as myself. I am my perception. "I am" in "I act." My body is this systematic experiential totality of constituting the world. This my active ontological inter-involvement with the world is what is really meant by "intentionality" that is my consciousness that, in turn, is my body. How does my somatic world-constituting act proceed? I am here, not there; I perceive something in this perspective ("here") and then in that (another "here"), always in a particular perspective (not "there"). This is the law of my bodily factic being. And as bodily facticity has its order and necessity, so the logic of thinking has its somatic performance. Universality is a synthetic totality of all thought experiments preveniently surveyed; necessity is an inevitability felt throughout these operations. All this is what "I am my body" means. Moreover, there is a reciprocity in this perception. On the one hand, I am the blue I perceive; I am my sensation. On the other hand, I do not see myself in the mirror (as a spectator sees me) the way I feel myself alive. How are this subjective feeling and this objective seeing united? I can see through the others's eyes only on the basis of my felt embodiment; my body is the condition for my objectivity. In any case, all this vividly indicates that I am in my active experience. I experience in my body, therefore I am my body. Furthermore,

as

such,

the

human

body

is what

holds

things

together. It lets things appear as things, the vibrant locus of expression of myself and of things. It is my dynamic vehicle of knowledge, making possible various empirical definitions of things. We often know something by its definition, which comes by way of experience. For we define something by three routes: metaphorically in terms of the old and known (as in dictionary definitions), ostensively by directly pointing at something new and giving it a name (as in botanical taxonomy), and stipulatively by giving a name to a list of characteristics and situations (as in a geometrical definition of triangle). And these are routes of experience. A metaphorical definition brings us to the novel via our previous experience. An ostensive definition defines something by an experience of pointing at it. A stipulative definition rounds up a certain group of experiences and gives the group a boundary and name. i My description here hopefully renders intelligible Richard M. Zaner's interesting but disconnected enumeration of what Merleau-Ponty means by "body." See Richard M. Zaner, The Problem of Embodiment: Some Contributions to a Phenomenology of the Body, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964, p. 152.

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11.2. Pointings. These definitions are all pointings: metaphorical pointing with the familiar, ostensive pointing at the novel, and stipulative pointing at a range. But pointing requires a "here" to gobeyond ("point") to a "there," and the here, the there, and their linking require our body, situated "here," to obtain. Definition is a bodily pointing experience. All understanding, whether inferential or immediate, begins at ostensive definition. For our understanding expresses itself in, and enriched by, knowledge by description, and descriptive knowledge is based on knowledge by acquaintance, to: which ostensive definition points. An ostensive definition points to something, "this," and says, "This is a chair," or "This is adulthood." The definition thereby points to an appropriate experience of that thing, "this"--in two senses. First, I can follow the direction of the definition, "this," and simply look at the "chair." Secondly, I can follow the direction, "this,"

and (a) look at an adult, be with him, experience how he differs from me (who am not, let us suppose), and then (b) experience personally what it means

to

be an

adult

when

I become

so.

Now,

the

first

sort

of

experience is an abridgement of the second, for the first experience has the same experiential structure--(a) a look, and (b) a touch and a sittingon, a personal experience.

All this goes to showing that our understanding (including that by ostensive definition) is experiential. To understand what a chair means is to go through the process of looking at it, touching it, sitting on it, and discern that all this experience is connected with the notion of "chair." To understand what adulthood means is to look at an adult, go through the process of maturing into an adult, and discern that all this experience is connected with the notion of "adulthood." Similarly, to understand a mathematical or philosophical truth is to go through the process of demonstration and discern the point. And all this is anticipated by Edmund Husserl. Enzo Paci explains Husserl's notion of the lived body, Leib, as follows: "Thus, the Leib is both a physical thing--first and original thing (Ursache), and therefore in a 'causal' circumstantiated place--and also the field of sensible organization, the modality of feeling, and the ! Ibid., pp. 151-52. Enzo Paci, 7he Function of the Sciences and the Meaning of Man,, trs., Paul Piccone and James E. Hansen, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1972, pp. 162-64.

11. THINKING, POINTINGS, BODY THINKING

239

organic center of all sensations and perceptions." ". . Hence it contains the constitution of things, the ontological level of material' things among which the Leib moves, feels, and feels itself moving." "It is the meeting point of the physical and the psychic, the identity of the 'external' and the 'internal.' There, the perception of activity is also the apperception of the property." "It is a point of transformation and reciprocal insertion (Umschlagspunkt) of the internal and the external, the passive and the active, and the perceptive and the apperceptive."’ "Although it is a thing among causal things, it is a willing organ and the 'carrier' of autonomous movements." 11.3. Body Thinking as Embodied, as Body-Wise. What is "body thinking"? We understand what it is by considering body language as compared with bodily language. "Bodily language" is language using body (throat or entire body, not, e.g., computer language) as its organ; "body language" is the body as language (not, say, flower language), the language-ing body, the body itself talking. This is what legitimizes the often-mentioned "performative utterance," in the sense of utterance as performance, not utterance performed. But utterance as performed by the body is possible only if body itself thinks. Body language consists in words of somatic power, charged with performative efficacy of no less than the totality of life itself. Body thinking expresses itself in body language in this sense. And so, thinking related to the body can be of two sorts.

First,

we have "bodily thinking" which is thinking using body (brain or entire body) as its organ. In contrast, "body thinking" is body as itself thinking, thinking body in action (not body thought about, not even thought-infused body), body-thinking (not mind-thinking). In fact, as language stems from body language, so thinking is body thinking. Both l E. Husserl, [deen III (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1952), pp. 9, 111-21; ? Ideen III, p. 120.

+ Jdden II, p. 161.

also see Jdeen IL, p. 153.

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language and thinking belong to somatic gesture, to meaningful performance. From the latter body-perspective, mind-thinking is unthinkable, body-thinking is tautological. By "body thinking" is meant thinking embodied (situated in the body) and thinking body-wise (from our body). Embodied thinking is thinking incarnate, thinking in and through the body, situated in the body; here thinking exists the body, and the body exists thinking. Embodied thinking is bodied thinking. It is opposed to thinking from nowhere, the disembodied logico-mathematical thinking of spaceless, history-less universality. Thinking body-wise is thinking by the body, thinking according to and with reference to the body, thinking in the perspective, terms, and manner of the body. Thinking body-wise is body-animated thinking. It 1s opposed to the theoretical thinking of an ideal observer. Thus body thinking is thinking embodied and body-wise, and these two characteristics are so tightly interfused to constitute the integral unity of the body and its thinking, that we cannot see when the thinking 1s embodied and when it is body-wise. Body thinking is thinking anchored in our body, thinking with our bodily center of gravity. Body thinking is opposed to abstract disembodied thinking which takes the body as its inert unthinking object. Since we are, that is, we exist, by being naturally endowed with the body, we cannot and do not exist without our body; or rather, we

exist our body, our body being our existence. This is so obvious that perhaps it is incredible for anyone to doubt it. But suppose doubt did arise. What then? Well, what is it to doubt? To doubt means to think that a proposition P may not be true. And to think so is to entertain "P is true," then entertain "P may not be true," then to move between these two entertainings. To entertain and to move between them means to perform moving and entertaining, and we have to have a body to perform. Performance is bodily or nothing. To doubt if we are bodily is to perform body thinking about being bodily. And we must remember that performance 15 itself bodily. All this is a rehash of the Cartesian performance of the Cogito. Descartes came out otherwise, because his performance stopped at one level, "Doubting is thinking," and was not aware that thinking is performing, and performing is bodily; no body, no performance. "I think, therefore, 1 am" because "I think" is "I perform," and I find that I exist my body while I perform. Someone may detect a fallacy of undistributed middle term in

11. THINKING, POINTINGS, BODY THINKING

241

the word "perform": I moved (so he may claim) illicitly between mental performance of entertaining and moving and a completely different physical performance of laughter and locomotion. My reply is that this "moving" is actually how we think and understand. We think by metaphorical extrapolation from something bodily and familiar further on to something we did not suspected before. In this case, we move between physical and mental performances; we would not have understood mental performance unless we understand beforehand-immediately, bodily--physical performance. In fact, I claim that these "two" performances, mental and physical, are actually one. They are both bodily. As we perform physically, so we perform mentally. Or rather, we perform both mentally and physically; they are two modes of one bodily performance. For instance, the word "detect" above, usually for exposing criminality, is there used in exposing a fallacy. We are hard put to see any cleavage between the two uses. We can replace "detect" with "see," "intuit (=see)," or "smell," and obtain the same result. Furthermore, as in the mental and the physical, so in the mental

and the emotional. Emotion moves an argument in a certain direction rather than another, when an argument can go either way and when neither way is totally convincing. In fact, convincingness depends much on a certain predilection which controls what presupposition to assume to adjudicate between arguments, and when an argument is conclusive. ' For instance, it is equally possible and rational both to take a necessitarian view of the world and to take a more open view of it, to regard human tears both in physiological terms and in psychological ones, to confront nature both scientifically and aesthetically, to view history both naturalistically and theistically. Experience can confirm both views. Of course, this experiential ambiguity carries with it the risk of error, either of subjective delusion or of missing something relevant and valuable. But it is important to see that both the rationality of both views of experience and their attendant risks are possible only on the basis of experience, and that experience is incorrigibly bodily. In fact, the body is the basis,

locus, focus, and performance

of our experience.

If our

experience is of threefold significance, logical, psychological, and physiological, then our body 15 the a priori, the unity and the unified arc of this threefold experience. ! Cf. 12.2. below.

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And, indeed, feeling has such a wide range of connotations in our life that Susanne K. Langer "show[s] the intimate relatedness of thought, emotion and symbolic expression as more or less differentiated mental acts making up the partial individuation of 'mind' within the human organism" in her three volumes of magnum opus, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. Departure from animal intelligence to human intellect is a "vast and special evolution of feeling," "the complex advances of life . . [in] every aspect of our existence . . . that is typified by language, culture, morality, and consciousness of life and death." She continues,! "The fact that expressive form is always organic or 'living' form made the biological foundation of feeling probable. In the artists projection, feeling is a heightened form of life; so any work expressing felt tensions, rhythms and activities express their unfelt substructure of vital processes, which is the whole of life. If vitality and feeling are conceived in this way there is no sharp break, let alone metaphysical gap, between physical and mental realities..." Feeling is so pervasive (language, voice, physiognomy and gesture express it) that "[flor most practical purposes, the nature of feeling does not need to be known conceptually," i.e., defined.

She continues,’

"But for the study of mind such conceptual knowledge is needed, because the dynamic forms of felt experiences are a major exhibit of the rhythms and integrations, and ultimately the sources, of mental activity. Feeling is the constant, systematic, but private display of what 13 going on in our own system, the index of much that goes on below the limen of sentience, and ultimately of the whole organic process, or life,

that feeds and uses the sensory and cerebral system." Thus

we

understand

operations

why

Whitehead

of all entities whatever.

has "feeling" that pervades For Langer,

! Susanne K. Langer, Mind: An Essay on Human Hopkins Press, 1967, pp. 130n., xvii, xviii.

? Ibid., p. 58.

mind

Feeling, Volume

all

is a feeling, a

I, Baltimore:

The

Johns

11. THINKING, POINTINGS, BODY THINKING

"natural wonder."'

243

She continues.’

"Feeling includes the sensibility of very low animals and the whole realm of human awareness and thought, the sense of absurdity, the sense of justice, the perception of meaning, as well as emotion and sensation. . . . All those developments from simpler forms of feeling which become so specialized that they are no longer called by that word compose the mentality of man, the material of psychology." Again, "[W]e view the mental phenomenon not as a product of neural

impulses, but as an aspect of their occurrence." °

Here logic is "a form of reasonableness . . . a form that contain[s] its sense as a being contains its life." Then she said,’ "What. makes this 'sense of rightness' and the correlative 'sense of wrongness' interesting for theory of mind is that these feelings are really the ultimate criteria whereby we judge the validity of logical relations. Once we see that a given ! Ibid., p. xxii. 2

Ibid., p. 55.

.

3

Ibid., ρ. 30. .

+ Ed. Karl H. Pribram, Brain and Perception: Holonomy and Structure in Figural Processing, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publisher, 1991, pp. 25-32. The concept of brain function as process in the Holoscape. Cf. The work of physicists David Bohm and Basil Hiley, The Undivided Universe: An ontological interpretation of quantum theory, Routledge, 1993, sec. 15.12 , pp.38188, on the implicate order and consciousness. ("The essential features of the implicate order are, ... that the whole universe is in some way enfolded in everything and that each thing is enfolded in the whole.") Ed. "Objects are not fleeting and fugitive appearances [images] because they are not only groups of sensations, but groups cemented by a constant bond. It is this bond, alone, which is the object in itself, and this bond is a relation." -Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis. (Reprinted 1952) New York: Dover Publications.

° Ibid., p. 77.

7 Ibid., pp. 147-48, 149, 151, 152.

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ON BODY THINKING

proposition, A, implies another proposition, B, it is impossible to deny the validity of 'A horseshoe Β'; the sense of its rightness is absolute. . . . Logical conviction is such a pinpointed feeling that it has . . . none of the widespread and involved character of emotion . . . all sorts of highly cathected ideas may gather around it, and make it a tiny firm center in a maelstrom of fantasies. This intensive and exclusive focus on a distinct, discursively rendered concept, such as a proposition, is a structural characteristic of the feeling known as ‘logical conviction'; it makes that feeling easy to isolate from the matrix of sense and emotion in which most of our mental acts are deeply embedded. And . . . it leads to the peculiar social circumstance that it is relatively easy to confront different individuals with the same challenge to feeling, unimpaired by the usual modifications due to personal context. This makes for a unanimity in logical convictions that has few . . . parallels in... human feeling, and gives to logical perception an air of 'objectivity,' i.e., of coming as impact upon us, not because we receive it with our peripheral sense organs, but because it is the same for all normally constituted people. . . [Thus] intellect is a high form of feeling--a specialized, intensive feeling about intuitions. [They are] one vast phenomenon of 'felt life,' stretching from the elementary tonus of vital existence to the furthest reaches of mind. . . . [T]he emotional patterns of man and even his perceptions . . . are shot through and through with conceptual elements, . . . human experience is a dialectic of symbolic objectification . . . and interpretive subjectification. . ον [M]ind is... . living form' in a symbolic transformation." Langer's observation is borne out by Hobbes when' "[h]is friend John Aubrey in his Brief Lives tells how the intellectual great awakening of Hobbes occurred ‘in a gentleman's library' when he chanced upon the theorem of Pythagoras in Euclid. This at once 'made him in love with geometry, sweeping him away by its irresistible deductive power and compulsive certainty." i Antony Flew, ed., 4 Dictionary of Philosophy, N. Y.: St. Martin's Press, 1979, under "Hobbes p. 139.

11. THINKING, POINTINGS, BODY THINKING

245

Feeling then is a sensing of thinking itself. But how does body thinking abstract and conceptualize? Despite Kant's and Husserl's aversion to giving pictorial examples in philosophical exposition, abstraction is just a bodily act of extracting (abstracting) and grasping (conceptualizing) a typical focal event as an example of a meaning. This is constantly practiced in advertisement, our way of communicating to the public naturally developed over the years. Thus innocence is expressed in a picture of a (any) boy's face, fruit in that of an apple, desolation in that of a desert, and so on. To these scenes our feeling is appropriately focussed; they are respectively concentrated into notions (understandings) and concepts (graspings). But there are pictures and there are pictures. Kafka's "abstract fantasy" in his novel, The Trial, perhaps captures more accurately the essence of contemporary bureaucracy than much of sociological statistics. Cezanne said that "Pure drawing is an abstraction." There is a debate about "lines" in drawings because "there is none--that line, indeed, is an abstract element," according to Erle Loran.” Loran devotes a section to "Realism and Abstraction" in his analysis of Cezanne.’ In any case, it 15 clear that the most accurate and penetrating picture requires insight, and discernment into the really real, to obtain. This insight is gained by an experience of the core, the core experience, of life. This is what philosophy (with aesthetic perception) aims at in its Socratic search for the "definition" of a concept. In order to get there, we may have to go through the preliminaries of suffering, of grueling philosophical experience, to effect a painful perspectival revolution as portrayed in Plato's Myth of the Cave. Then we will embody that discernment, we become it, and as we express it, it spreads out in logical arguments and perceptive coherence, one after another. This is the true meaning of "essence," abstract concept (definition) of a thing. 11.4.

Objection, Response.

Someone may say that to base

| As quoted by John Rewald, Paul Cezanne. Correspondence, Paris: Grasset,

1937, p. 399.

* Erle Loran, Cezanne's Compositon: Analysis of His Form with Diagrams and Photographs of

His Motifs, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1944, p. 14.

* Ibid., pp. 112-18.

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thinking this way on empirical bodily affairs is like basing thinking on eating; our thinking is now tied to every contingent happening, and logical generality and validity are lost. Two responses are in order. First, our cognitive freedom is like a pilot flying an airplane. The pilot flies only by becoming one with the wings and the wind} as the wind blows, so the pilot soars in the wings in the wind. "[G]reat wings . . increase the weight but also the flight." The heavier the wings are, and the harder the wind blows, the higher the plane-and-pilot flies.’ Likewise, our freedom of thinking soars high in the natural elements of the body and its environment, becoming one with them. Thinking is free, powerful and relevant to the extent that it becomes one with the body and nature (in) which the body is and moves. Secondly, dependence of our thinking on the elements, in the above sense of becoming one with them, does not mean that it is at the mercy of every whimsical change of the wind. Meteorological conditions shift from moment to moment, yet the cyclical pattern of seasons is constant, always going from spring through summer and autumn to winter and back to spring. There is likewise a general bodybehavior correlation, yet there is no one-to-one correspondence between every twitch of the muscle and every logical move. Thus generality does obtain in nature to manifest a regularity for the scientist to explore. To have a somatic base in thinking does imply having the base of nature on which the body 15 itself based. And the body and the nature, by exhibiting a general order, patterns thinking. This is less to psychologize and physiologize thinking than to discern order in bodily psyche, and to realize that the very discernment is itself bodily. Thus the table is turned. Instead of explaining logic in terms of empirical contingency, as in Mill's and Spencer's psychologizing of logic, we now somatically discern logic to be of the body whose

performance is orderly, rational, and real.

This is the logic of life, the

reason of reality. To insist on the bodily base of thinking is to bring out this logico-empirical unity. But how do we deal with "fallacy" and "falsehood" that we detect now? Well, these words mean that we have yet to see a correct metaphorical connection, that what we see as "false" today is an evocation,

an

occasion,

a clue,

to a more

inclusive

! P. T. Forsyth, The Soul of Prayer, London: Independent Press, 1966, p. 13. ? This is especially the case in glider-flying.

truth tomorrow.

11. THINKING, POINTINGS, BODY THINKING

247

Today's trash can be, and should be, tomorrow's treasure. Metaphor and analogy is the logic of novel discovery, which thrives on provocation by--evocative call of--metaphorical "category mistakes" we now see. It is, then, unnatural to take our mind as the disembodied "form"

beyond the "matter" of unthinking body; our body is really the visible form of our thinking. In fact, invisible thinking is as unthinkable as visible thinking is tautological. Body thinking is body in thinking action, the action of thinking in and by our body. It is thinking embodied and thinking body-wise, that is, in terms of our body. Such a body thinking is actuality-thinking--thinking in and of the concrete. Such a thinking is all too spontaneous, inevitable, and familiar a mode of thinking. The body is not a mere concomitant condition of thinking, but is essential to it.’ In fact, we do not understand why we can even imagine disembodied thinking, abstract seeing and thinking, from nowhere at all. But this sort of thinking is what we usually practice. This is the kind of thinking Kant observed (in his Critique of Pure Reason) when he said that we put questions (our whole transcendental apparatuses of forms and categories) to nature to answer us. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty noted (in his "Eye and Mind") idealistic abstraction in natural sciences. The sciences have an abstract model, net, apparatus, construction--an operation, artificialism, abstract indices--with which to look on from above at object-in-general. Already philosophers warn against mistaking such abstract thoughts for actuality itself. G. E. Moore says’ that "light-vibrations" that we talk about in sciences are "themselves not what we mean by yellow"; they are "not what we perceive," not visual experience itself. A. N. Whitehead's celebrated Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness’ warns ! This approach requires a reconsideration of the traditional dichotomy between the empirical and the logically necessary. Whether eating is a mere contingent concomitant to thinking or an essential part of thinking is an interesting question. It will be asserted in the following that the necessary-contingent distinction is not a mutually exclusive dichotomy. Cf. Max Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values, trs. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973, pp. 402-03. Scheler's ensuing debates with his then current views seem unduly complicated, curiously out of touch with the actual, the world of spontaneous bodily expansion toward the unfamiliar, however. We will instead approach the matter from a commonsense angle, and assert that the necessary-contingent distinction is that of polar contrast in a continuum of comprehensive truth. ? In his Principia Ethica, Cambridge University Press, 1903, p. 10. 3 In his Process and Reality, pp. 7,18,93,94.

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against illicitly taking (mis-taking) abstraction as concrete entity. All these expose the situation of disembodied thinking; it is hermetically sealed off, in abstraction, from actuality. Mysteriously, however, we are accustomed to taking thinking as abstract and theoretical, taking our body as an object of such a disembodied thinking-as matter (Plato), res extensa (Descartes), the inert In-Itself (Sartre). And so body thinking came to sound odd, if not contradictory, in the Western philosophical world.'

! Maurice Merleau-Ponty also wondered aloud about the same "question" in The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968, p. 152. He did not answer the question there, however.

PART FIVE: LINEAR LOGICALITY From a usual Cartesian point of view, mind-thinking is tautological and body-thinking is contradictory; mind by definition thinks, body is by definition something thought-about. From the point of view of body thinking, however, the reverse is the case. Disembodied mind-thinking is as unthinkable as disembodied existence. And yet, although "mysterious" from the point of view of our being naturally endowed with the body, it is not without reason that we came to think in a disembodied manner. The word "natural" here 1s the crux of the matter; it cuts both ways. First, when we accuse disembodied thinking of being unnatural those who espouse disembodied thinking would say that unnaturalness 1s precisely its glory; we shed the contingent fragility of our empirical body, and now think in a (1) necessary and (2) universal manner. We have an intellection of logical, theoretical, philosophical sort. At the same time, the disembodied thinking with these twin theoretical traits, having come out of its natural corporeal shell, is shut off from the natural and the actual. And thinking is futile if it has nothing to do with actuality out there naturally. Merleau-Ponty has effected for us, in his "Eye and Mind," an elucidation of this natural transition from our bodily activity--painterly seeing--to things out there, via the strange bodily system of exchanges between vision and the visible, that is, the body seeing itself seeing, and seeing in what 15 seen. For the body is at once a thing among things and what holds things as its own prolongation.’ ' The Primacy of Perception, pp. 162-64, 168-69. He has an interesting "ontology of the visible" [The Visible and the Invisible, p. 140] in which our seeing body extends ("transitivity," "propagation," "dehiscence") into Visibility in general [ibid., pp. 143, 146] through the reversibility of seeing and seen within the same body, then redounding to other bodily selves. [ibid., pp. 13744] Folliott S. Pierpoint sang, For the joy of ear and eye, For the heart and mind's delight, For the mystic harmony Linking sense to sound and sight, Lord of all to Thee we raise This our hymn of grateful praise. [1864] Pierpoint may not have known that this "linking" is itself our body, called by that extraordinary notion of "chiasm" or "intertwining" (or, less spectacularly, "circle," "reflexivity," "the coiling

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We say laws of nature constitute an intelligible pattern of nature.

We say nature is thus intelligible to us, and that such an intelligibility is

not an illusion.

Where is the guarantee?

The answer is, the body.

Our

body is both a part of nature and what thinks about nature, both

something empirical that is intelligible and something intelligible that is empirical. This bodily dynamism that goes through the intelligible and the empirical is called ch'i in China; ch'i is mental-and-material energy that floods throughout the Heaven and earth. Man has this ch'i to an eminent degree. But all this is another way of expressing that all thinking 15 body thinking. In the final analysis, this body that thinks is what legitimizes Husserl's Lebenswelt as the base of all thinking and living, and validates Wittgenstein's project to "look and see" "family resemblances" at the base of our understanding and our demonstration. Thus three traditional theories of truth, coherence, correspondence, revealment, are now seen in a new light. For my body is the seen-seeing, the locus where the ontological reversibility and reciprocity of seeing and being seen is manifested. This fact leads us to realize that the object and the subject are mutually and internally reflexive. Such a general unity makes coherence its truth, correspondence its reflexive intertwining, and revealment its parochial manifestation. Truth as coherence makes body thinking as thinking (section 12), correspondence as reflexive intertwining makes thinking as bodily (section 13), and both amount to revealing thinking as a thinking performance of our body (section 14).

over," "pact," "fold," "mirror," "joints," "hinge," "pivot") ibid., pp. 130, 138, 142, 144, 146, 148. Merleau-Ponty also explains this "intertwining" in the context of painting in his "Eye and Mind" [The Primacy of Perception, pp. 162-65]. Here we treat the same theme in a less self-reflective, more commonsense, manner.

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12. Body Thinking as Thinking. (12.1.) Universality, necessity, (12.4.) self-kenosis, and (12.5.) bodily death are some themes treated here. (12.3.) The point of all these is that body thinking is as respectful a thinking as usual "thinking." 12.1. Universality and Necessity in Body Thinking Do we have to come out of our corporeal shell to think in a necessary and universal manner? Merleau-Ponty did expand the seeing-seen reversibility (the Intertwining) to "intercorporeity," with a rhetorical question:! "If my left hand can touch my right hand while it palpates the tangibles, can touch it touching, can turn its palpation back upon it, why, when touching the hand of another, would I not touch in.it the same power to espouse the things that I have touched in my own?" Yet a mere naturalness of body thinking seems insufficient to fulfill the twin seemingly extra-corporeal conditions, necessity and universality, to be "thinking proper," that is, philosophical thinking.’ The following pages show that the naturalness of body thinking not only fulfills these twin demands of theoreticity, and that in a novel and inevitable manner, but also, by so fulfilling them, this body thinking solves the chronic inherent problem, since Plato and Descartes, of disembodied theoretical thinking, that 1s, its irrelevance to actuality, its

creation of the "ugly ditch" (G. E. Lessing, 1729-81) between empirical contingency and rational necessity. We now see that, in MerleauPonty's words,’ "in the flesh of contingency, a structure of the event and a ' The Visible, p. 141.

? "Necessity and universality" are regarded by some as too stringent and impossible an ideal to attain; philosophers such as Gadamer and Habermas settled for a fusion of horizons of (historical) communities or a critical consensus among conscientious experts as a sign of objective validity of

thinking proper.

But this essay sticks to the "old fashioned"

definition of thinking

in a

philosophical sense, to see how body thinking still makes sense and does some good even at this level.

! The Primacy of Perception, p.

179. Cf. the Cartesian predicament of dis-envisioned thinking,

thinking modeled after the blind man's sense of external touch, in ibid., pp. 169-78, 186.

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virtue peculiar to the scenario. . . . They make the event into a durable theme of historical life and have a right to philosophical status." But how? Body thinking fulfills "universality" in three ways, in a novel natural manner: It connects the thinking subject to others--to things, to other embodied persons, to history. Body thinking reveals to us the natural-inevitable "chiasm" (Merleau-Ponty) in a spatial, intersubjective, timely and time-ly manner. Moreover, body thinking fulfills "necessity" in two ways. It satisfies the logico-philosophical necessity of connectedness among terms of logical progression--in mathematics, in geometry and, by extrapolation, in logical demonstration--and that in a novel natural manner.’ It also shows that such connection is necessary in the sense of being vitally required. We (and our thinking) perish without this bodily connection; it is the very condition for the possibility of our thinking, ourselves, our history, and our world. All

in

all,

none

of us

in the

cosmos

can,

necessarily

and

universally, exist without our body; we think bodily--naturally, inevitably, comprehensively. What body thinking does is thus briefly elucidated. 12.2. Six Characteristics of Body Thinking. Such a body thinking has at least the following six characteristics. To begin with, the body is always situated, perspectival, contextual, limited, open-ended, and horizonally related, that is, within a Incidentally, identification of debate over this world of Form is

someone may say that mathematics is synthetic and logic is analytical, and the the two is a recent affair, such as among Russell, Boole, and Gódel. We may point, saying that Zeno used mathematical series to disprove motion, and Plato's cast in a geometrical mold.

But suppose, for the sake of argument, we agree that logic is analytical. What then? Logic is constituted by demonstration, demonstration by operational synthesis, which is (not simple physical locomotion but) conscious "bodily" performance; the body here is the subject's manner of being, especially the "I think" manifested in practical operation. Therefore logic is essentially bodily. Besides, logic as a mere unpacking of "A is A" is an exercise in triviality unless we find in logical steps unsuspected novelties. The value and purpose of analytical argumentation is to gain such a truth experience inherent in the very process of analytical unpacking itself. These new discoveries within analytical unpacking are then "synthetic," although a priori; they are acted out add-ons to the argument (hence, synthetic) in which, however, they are inherent (hence, a priori).

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horizon which is related to a further horizon. And so thinking bodywise, in the manner of the body, is also an embodied one, limited in each instant to a profile (Abschattung) which expands by relating one profile (perspective) to another. Thinking is in an -ing form, an action. Action moves, and motion takes something that moves. Therefore thinking requires our body to operate. Thinking must be embodied, then. This is most apparent in our understanding of an object through perspectival variation--a walking around the object, a turning of the object, a pragmatic perceptual synthesis (Merleau-Ponty). Thinking is an embodied interaction with the object, thereby shapes and is shaped by the environment. This interactive network constitutes the world. Furthermore, body thinking is embodied in the sense that it is situational. Emotion has its own reasoning. Anxiety influences the way we think.

History, culture, grammar (language), weather,' hobbies, age,

and other such situational factors give a specific ambience, emphasis, and character to thinking. As beauty is in the eye of a beholder, so logical validity is in the mind of a thinker. How much rigor is needed to satisfy the requirement of validity depends on who it is who requires it, for between every two steps in a demonstration it is always possible to insert a further step to make the logical transition more rigorous, until the move is seen as "self-evident." How much rigor is required to obtain "self-evidence" depends on the mind of an observer.” Plato's Republic begins with an old man Cephalus who talks to Socrates in a pietistic meditative manner of being in the autumn of life; this manner of thinking does not suit the Socratic inquiry, which is eagerly taken up by Thrasymachus the militant young. The weak old body gives out thinking that is meditative, mystical, harmonious. The young energetic body gives out thinking that is inquisitive, aggressive, strenuous, performance-oriented (ethical or Machiavellian). Ihirdly, in body thinking the bodily aspects of life are given a central importance. Merleau-Ponty gives the body the pivotal place in Watsuji, Tetsuro, wrote a book titled Fudo Gaku (philosophical climatology), Tokyo: Iwanami Bunko, 1979, 1988. ? Cf. 11.3. above. On logical validity and personal insight, see my Butterfly as Companion, Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York Press, 1990, pp. 260-66.

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all his writings. Mencius builds up his political and cosmological exhortations on the basis of the body--such as the Four Beginnings of Humanness. Chuang Tzu starts and ends his thinking about the universe with the wu-self doing the losing of the wo-self, a sophisticated treatment of the bodily perspective with which we think at all.’ Fourthly, in Chinese terminology, the bodily and the mental are always implied together. Hsin is heartmind; shen is the bodily course of one's life; ch'i is the élan vital that is both material and mental.

Fifthly, body thinking always moves and expands from the bodily center to the Heaven and earth, co-responding therewith. There is an expanding reciprocity and co-resonance between the bodily and the universe. And

so, sixthly, in order to be clear, balanced, comprehensive,

and penetratingly pervasive in thinking, one must train oneself, that is, calm and cleanse one's bodily life as a whole, thereby expand oneself. Thus Mencius wants us to return to the Four Beginnings of humanness; Chuang Tzu wants us to empty our body’ and forget our "self." 12.3. Western vs. Chinese Thinking on Body Thinking (2). Both Merleau-Ponty and Chinese philosophers are aware of the importance of bodily concreteness for thinking. But Merleau-Ponty starts with, if not puts an emphasis on, how we know through our body; Mencius and Chuang Tzu are preoccupied with how we behave in and to the world, starting with the world of the self and of men. Significantly, to balance off the Western tendency to abstract universality and necessity, Merleau-Ponty called our attention to the situatedness of bodily argumentation, while Chinese philosophy, anchored as it is in bodily concreteness, strives almost instinctively toward the universality and validity of such a bodily argumentation. In the West it is customary to think and know from nowhere in order to think from everywhere, yet thinking is inevitably thinking from somewhere, requiring a body that thinks. As a result thinking from nowhere is coagulated in our days, in the "body" of a calculating machine (perhaps to represent the "ideal observer") that is indifferently ! Cf. ibid., pp. 183-87. ? On emptying the body, see 12.4. below. 3 Cf. 14.4.5.

and the first note there.

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identical everywhere. Calculation that is valid everywhere is a dominant mode of Western thinking; calculating machine that operates identically and indifferently is a dominant "body" of Western thinking. But such a mechanical body (perhaps of an ideal observer) is a "no body," since it is not situated at all as one ordinary human body situated somewhere specific that differs from another body somewhere else--and thinks accordingly. Mechanical body is a nobody. It is no accident that in order to think about justice that 1s "blind" to individual

situations, John Rawls has to invent a "veil of ignorance" that ignores

specific concrete situations. It is all too natural, then, that MerleauPonty in the West stressed the situatedness of the body as a necessary ingredient of thinking. And he characteristically treated this theme logically and systematically.

But Chinese philosophers have never thought of thinking from nowhere indifferently. They think by expressing in literature their felt experience, and by jotting down in historiography the historicity of thinking. The situatedness of thinking 15 a given assumption for them. From this given reference point there inevitably arises the problem of how to render the situated concrete thinking universally valid, how to universalize concrete thinking from embodied behavior in the situation. The problem consists in how we can both root our thinking firmly in our body and expand our thinking universally into inevitable validity. This is the challenge Chinese philosophers intuitively tackled. Let us see (12.3.1.) body thinking in the West, then (12.3.2.) that in China. 12.3.1. Let us first consider body thinking in the West. Merleau-Ponty went through the route of the unity of seeing-seen in our bodily vision. For him, "extension . . . [and] thought . . . are the obverse and the reverse of one another"' in the same sense as "the body sensed and the body sentient are as the obverse and the reverse."* He? "will not admit ! The Visible, p. 152. 2 Ibid., 138. [bid., p. 157.

a preconstituted world,

a logic, except

for

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having seen them arise from our experience of brute being, which Js as it were the umbilical cord of our knowledge and the source of meaning for us." It is through this epistemological examination of vision that there comes to be "the body's logic." In the "flesh" as the "element" which is the unity of matter and thinking, we see the unity of the individual and the universal.? Chinese philosophy universalizes concrete body thinking, not by examining vision closely as the inauguration of our knowledge, but in the following manner. Our body is eminently dynamic and flexible; its flexible dynamism produces what can be called the phenomenon of "pan-bodiness." Pan-bodiness manifests itself in self-expansion and self-emptying. Thanks to bodily expansion, the bodily perspective can change and expand; thanks to self-emptying, body thinking can let things in, let them "argue for and justify themselves"--without discrimination, that is, universally. What does it mean for a body-perspective to "expand"? The body has the following characteristics: The body is always specific--if not here, then there,

if not meditative, then dynamic--now.

And

the

body can move--in location, in temper. It changes, if not now then soon. Finally the body can retain and modify ("grow") what it has (experienced a while ago). It can also purposely wipe out what it has gone through. These bodily traits enable the body to reject, retract, revise, and replenish its various previous stages of experience, which is forever from a perspective upon another perspective, and then upon another one. The capability of the "bodily self to dwell in other places" (she Shen ch'u ti) is twofold: spatially through imagination, time-wise through memory. Memory is bodily ek-stase towards the future and towards the past; it is historical. Imagination is bodily ek-stase towards the other, personal and otherwise; it is social and spatial. Let us consider "memory" first. J. Glenn Gray, a Heidegger scholar, saw that "mind" and "memory" share a common etymology, and "reflection" has a lot to do ! Ibid., p. 185. ? Ibid., 139, 147.

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with "recollection" as "the collecting of ourselves, the gathering of what we have been and still are as well as what we expect to become"; and of course what we expect to become extrapolates from what we recall to have been. For, as Gray says,’ "This collecting in memory and of memory can transmute everything so that a seemingly trivial new experience changes the whole of one's perspective on one's past. More dramatically, the recollection of a forgotten incident in childhood may alter radically one's present and future relations to oneself and one's fellows. . . The intensity of memory bears frequently little relation to the duration or importance of what it recollects. Normal connections of cause and effect seem curiously out of balance here, indeed hard to discover at all in many instances." Causal efficacy is less upset, I would say, than that its significance is radically changed by our recollections. In any case, it is important to note how our "reflection" is inherently related to our "memory," that our "recollection" is our radical self-collection, and that such our selfbecoming through memory amounts to no less than a revolutionary transmutation of our life perspectives on things. Our stretching back into the past in memory remakes and enriches our bodily life; our recollection re-collects our life.’ Similarly, our imagination stretches our selves forward in space and into the future. Imagination is our power to self-stretch to the realm of the possible, to the hitherto unknown. As Shakespeare said, "And as imagination bodies forth/ The forms of things unknown . .," the self bodies forth in imagination what has never been before. This power to self-stretch into the unknown grows the self in dreams and ideals. This is "much more decisive than the accident of his biological first nature, for it allows him the possibility of giving in his turn a local habitation and name to what would otherwise remain a chilling and lonely expanse of world." ' J. Glenn Gray, On Understanding Torchbooks, TB 1521, 1970, p. 5.

Violence Philosophically and Other Essays, N. Y.: Harper

? On how memory constitutes the human integrity of the self, see my History, Thinking, Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taiwan, ROC: Academia Sinica, 1991, Chapter One.

+ Ibid., p. 7.

and

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Both memory and imagination are our powers to ekstasis (Plato), to go beyond our specific situation, to get outside our self in time and space, to participate in the transformation of the present through the past and the yet-to-be, to participate in others's experiences. This is the "capacity of self-surpassing," of "ecstatic union of the possible and the actual,"' and the capacity of bodily expansion through self-recursive transformation in perspectival subversion and paradigm shift.’ Memory and Imagination are the body's two inherent powers which make possible the metaphoric functioning of our understanding; we understand something hitherto unknown in terms of the known and familiar. Understanding is none other than our metaphorical selfstretch--starting at our memory of the familiar, in terms of which we make an imaginative outreach toward the strange. This is our bodily ekstasis to "metaphor" (ferrying the self over) toward the unknown. What is claimed here on metaphor, that it is our essential primal ferry to a discovery of new understanding, is hardly controversial. Most thinkers in On Metaphor,’ such as Cohen, Ricoeur, Davidson, Quine, Swanson, and Harries, stressed this point. Davidson particularly claims that (1) metaphor intimates, evokes, nudges, makes us see--(2) but does not mean a ready-made meaning. We arrive, not metaphor, at the destination of novel meaning we care to arrive with the evocative ferrying of a metaphor. This means that being ferried is not a passive activity, but an active discovery with creative imagination. Thus Davidson begins his essay, "What Metaphors Mean," by the following provocative statements:*

' Ibid, p. 7. ? Edward S. Casey has two books of detailed analyses on memory and imagination. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Imagining: A Phenomenological Study, same press, 1976. See especially his emphasis importance of the body in memory (Remembering, pp. 146-215, on "body memory"), imagination (Imagining, pp. 125-74, and under "perception" in Index, p. 238, on the between imagination and perception).

See his 1987; on the and in relation

3 Sheldon Sack, ed., On Metaphor, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978, 1979. + Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984, p. 245; Mark Johnson, ed., Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981, p. 200; Sheldon Sacks, ed., On Metaphor, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, 1979, p. 29.

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"Metaphor is the dreamwork of language and, like all dreamwork, its interpretation reflects as much on the interpreter as on the originator. The interpretation of dreams requires collaboration between a dreamer and a waker, even if they be the same person; and the act of interpretation is itself a work of the imagination. So too understanding a metaphor is as much a creative endeavour as making a metaphor, and as little guided by rules. . . . [A]ll communication by speech assumes the interplay of inventive construction and inventive construal. What metaphor adds to the ordinary is an achievement that uses no semantic resources beyond the resources on which the ordinary depends." And so, metaphor is a performative evoking new meaning.

that performs

a special act of

Pertaining to the second point, Davidson complains that many thinkers on metaphor mistakenly say that it has two meanings, literal one and another one--literary critics like Richards, Empson, Winters, philosophers from Aristotle to Max Black, psychologists from Freud and earlier to Skinner and later, and linguists from Plato to Uriel Weinreich and George Lakoff.' That is to say, those thinkers interpret metaphor in terms of what 1s found, a cognitive interpretation. As for Davidson's second contention, that metaphor does not mean a ready-made second meaning besides the literal one it has, I wish he left unsaid. Does metaphor have one or two senses? Old or new sense(s)? These questions are tiresomely unanswerable, because metaphor overarches (ferries) between the familiar sense and the novel one. Davidson's claim provoked discussions by Karsten Harries and Max Black, to little avail. Harries's modification that some metaphors also mean something amounts not more than to saying that the metaphoric ferrying-over to new sense can sometimes contain the sense to which we are ferried over.” The fact that Black labors so much on this point shows that Black is stuck firmly on his cognitive view of ! Davidson, p. 246, Johnson, p. 201, Sacks, p. 30. ? Sacks, pp. 168-70. ? Sacks, pp. 181-92.

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metaphor that metaphor means, not viewing metaphor as performance that evokes (new meaning). 12.3.2. Now let us consider Chinese body thinking. Thanks to this capability of ecstatic additions and transmutations in our body thinking, Mencius was able to admonish us, first, to return to our natal Four Beginnings of Humanness, and then expand on that primordial unbearable compassion at the root of our being, concentrically from the familial near up to no less than the entire Heaven and earth. "Eldering" one's own elderly expands into eldering others' elderly, resulting in a pan-eldering of every elder. By the same token, we feel in the depths of our body a sense of alarm at an ox about to be led to slaughter,’ and at a child unwittingly crawling into a well.” Paneldering, and our bodily alarm of compassion, realize that connatural state, to which we intuitively give our heartfelt consent as what we ought to be, and which we should widen into the cosmic concord of all with

all. Such is pan-bodiness obtained by an expansion from the root of individual bodily feelings toward itself and toward others.’ But why going into Mencius (and Chuang Tzu) when talking about body thinking? Because by doing so, we can note (1) the universally recognized fact, that Mencius's and Chuang Tzu's arguments by metaphor (or "by analogy," as they are usually called)* are the central and typical mode of argumentation in China; whether or not China has other modes of thinking is irrelevant here; (2) that this argument by metaphor starts with evocation from the situation and strives for evocative communication to others; (3) that all this can be seen as "body thinking" working itself out, which (4) is as valid as abstract mathematical thinking, because body thinking also has the twin traits of l Mencius, 1A7. 2 Mencius, 246. + For a detailed documentation of Mencius's concrete metaphorical argumentation, see Huang, Chün-chieh's "Meng-tzu Ssu-wei Fang-fa tih T'e-cheng (Mencius' Concrete Thinking)," in Mengtzu Ssu-hsiang Shih-lun (On the History of Mencius Studies), Tai-ei: Tung-ta T'u-shu Kung-ssu, 1991, Chapter One. He also has an essay, "On the Five Elements ftom Ma-wang-tui: the MindBody Unity and Its Manifold Significance," in Proceedings of National Science Council, Part C, Vol. 1, No. 1, January 1991, pp. 87-100, which explains well how the Confucian bodily expansion works. Assuming those essays's material, this essay goes into the validity and significance of such a thinking. * Cf. D. C. Lau, "On Mencius' Use of the Method of Analogy in Argument," Mencius, Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1979, 1984.

in D. C. Lau, tr.,

12.

BODY THINKING AS THINKING

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"thinking"--necessity and universality; and perhaps that (5) body thinking is important because it is the be-all, through-all, and end-all of logico-mathematical thinking. How does the Chinese body thinking proceed? Confucius said, "Lifting one [corner, I expect my students to] return [with] three [corners]." This is an enterprise of extrapolation, or explication. It can mean two activities of expansion. First, this is an enterprise of seeing, say, in a compressed story powerful implications that expand in various relevant directions, and ruthlessly following them through. These follow-throughs have two possible dimensions. It can mean pushing them inductively and deductively to find general middle terms and overarching principles among these implications. It can also mean pushing them toward other relevant concrete instances. The former route requires fertile logical perception, such as in Socrates; the latter requires exigent penetration, moral or otherwise, such as in Mencius.

Secondly, the enterprise of explicative expansion can be: seeing in somewhat bland nouns ("flower," "love") and adjectives ("pretty," "just" many apt mini-stories and concrete instances, and ruthlessly pursuing them and organizing them into concrete orderliness, such as stories and novels--Aesop's Fables, The Monkey (Hsi yu chi), The Brothers Karamazov. This route requires deep understanding of life and rich literary imagination. And so explication can go--logically and morally--from the concrete to their logical principles, or to their moral applications, or from abstract generals to literary universals. We can call such an explicatory operation evocative metaphoring, or analogical extrapolation. The pregnant word of Confucius, "return (with three corners)," intimates that this sort of explication is a coherent expansion of implications, not a dissipation in random directions. Explication is an exhibition of conceptual concentration, an enhancement of meaning coherence, from the center of reference for all our concrete reflections--

the here and now, the body, confronted with nouns, adjectives, stories, or situations. Thus these explications and expansions--pan-bodiness-describe body thinking. | Furthermore, pan-bodiness manifests itself in a self-emptying. Chuang Tzu finds that the body can empty itself of itself into "withered wood and dead ashes" (2/2), so as to become an "empty room" (4/32) to ! Analects 7/8, cf. 4/15, 5/9.

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allow things in, or the "calm waters" (13/3, 4) to mirror things that come (5/10)--as they are, without discrimination, that is, universally.’ 12.4. Self-Emptying, Self-Forgetting. We consider (12.4.1.) what self-emptying is, (12.4.2.) how it differs from "rage,"and (12.4.3.) how it works in thinking and judging. 12.4.1. One must be careful here. Self-emptying is a selfemptying of itself, not a purposive throwing-out of oneself (tzu ch'i) of which Mencius warned us.” Such a throwing-oneself-out is literally a self-conscious pro-jection of the self; the self here is an "object," a "thrown-beside" the subject, confronting the subject. ^ Similarly, knowledge is a knowledge about something, of which one is conscious-a separative relation of the known from the knower. In contrast, self-emptying is self-aware. Awareness is wonderfully self-unitive. In awareness one transparently dwells in oneself. Being self-aware, one self-forgets; here is a spontaneous selfloss, naturally letting-go of the object-self (sang wo.’ The identifiable. self (wo) emerges to be self-forgetfully lost (sang), and the self (wu) obtains-of-itself (tzu te), a serene limpid self. This self-emptying self-obtainment happens in this manner. As a human being, we are "nothing" at birth. We must try to learn, to add something cultural on to our basic existence, a "nothing." We call this process "growth," "education," becoming "civilized." Unfortunately, as we grow up and keep adding on something artificial, we feel we are false,

uneasy,

unsettled,

unnatural,

in a word,

self-alienated,

strayed

from the original self. And so we want to come back home to our self. This return to the self is a turn-around (metanoia), a selfemptying. And so we seem to go back to the primal state of the babyexistence that is a "nothing." But there is a difference. Our trek of selfreturn gives us a thin invisible film, as it were, that lets our previous education diffuse and "osmose" throughout the self, and that without our noticing it. James Agee said, Perhaps bodiness.

the present essay

follows this path of self-emptying

to describe thinking

in pan-

? Mencius, 4All. 3 Chuang Tzu, 2/3. + James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Co., 1960, p. 11. Incidentally, the phrase, "the effort to perceive simply" give us a pause; effort contradicts simple perception. Richard Zaner takes the phrase to mean "the shift of attention" or "shift of consciousness" in his The Way of Phenomenology: Criticism as a Philosophical Discipline, N. Y.:

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"For in the immediate world, everything is to be discerned, for him who can discern it, and centrally and simply, without either dissection into science, or digestion into art, but with the whole

of consciousness, seeking to perceive it as it stands: so that the aspect of a street in sunlight can roar in the heart of itself as a symphony, perhaps as no symphony can: and all of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is. . . . It 15. . . to let all these things, each in its place, and all in their relationships and in their full substances,

upon your consciousness, one center...

"

be, at once, driven

Agee's rejection of art belies his artistry; isn't this depiction precisely a splendid poetry? Art as artificial contrivance cannot be contrived away; it can only dissipate itself in spontaneity. Artless art, true spontaneity, is the true art, which rejects conscious "digestion into art." To "perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is" is to let what there is come out, come what may, through this invisible osmotic film, the film of bodily selfless self. This film is called "uncarved block" (p'u), "spontaneity" (t'ien fang), what the artist treasures as the "artless art." This is that famous wu wei, a non-doing, a "trying without trying." It is at this final stage that we understand the saying, "Merely to exist is holy," or "Enjoying nature is to be oneself." Walker Evans said of James Agee that

Western Publishing Company, 1970, p. 81. Zaner took it to be of central importance, so much so that he used this quotation as the motto for his entire book on phenomenology. This move unwittingly reveals a weakness--almost a self-contradiction--in Western phenomenology. For attention or consciousness cannot itself be consciously shifted without changing the very character of attention or consciousness, as in an intrusion of subjective observation into the so-called "objective" scientific investigation of natural phenomena. Art as artificial contrivance cannot be contrived away; it can only dissipate itself in spontaneity. To try to be objective is strictly speaking an impossibility; phenomenology as a "strict science" (Husserl) in the end defeats itself. ! On "Wu wei" as "trying without trying," see my Chuang Tzu: World Philosopher at Play, N. Y.: The Crossroad Co. and Ithaca, NY: Scholars Press, 1982, pp. 91-114. ? James Agee and Walker Evans, Three Tenant Families: Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1939, etc., 1960, p. ix.

Let Us Now

Praise Famous

Men,

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"His clothes were deliberately cheap, not only because he was poor but because he wanted to be able to forget them. He would work a suit into fitting him perfectly by the simple method of not taking it off much. In due time the cloth would mold itself to his frame. Cleaning and pressing would have undone this beautiful process." Chuang Tzu said,’ "To forget the foot is the fitting [comfort] of the forget the yes and the no is the fitting [comfort] mind; "no change inside, no following outside" [comfort] of events-meeting; starting at the fit without the fit [and comfort] is the fit [and forgetting the fit."

shoe; . . . to of the heart15 the fitting and never comfort] of

The shoe pinches and makes its existence felt, when the shoe does not fit. The shoe's fit in the foot makes both the shoe and the foot disappear in a self-forgetful comfort of the integrity of both the shoe and the foot, the object and the subject and, in the end, the world and the self. Similarly, when self-aware, one comes back home to oneself. Here one is at one with oneself; one self-obtains (tzu te), and one has no consciousness of the self. In such a spontaneous self-identification 15 the integrity of the self, where the self is forgotten and "lost" (wang chi, sang wo); this differs from a complete let-go called "sleep," although sleep is for Chuang Tzu an apt metaphor for the ultimate of selfforgetting (22/21-28). The healthy man 15 free from obsession with his body; the self-fulfilled man is selfless--and bodiless. It 15 thus that a clearing, a vacancy, an "empty room" (hsi shih, 4/32), obtains in a translucent tranquility of the self. And things come to dwell therein. Walker Evans said that with "a faint rubbing of Harvard and Exeter," James Agee "didn't look much like a poet, an intellectual, an artist, . . . each of which he was." Digestion, through education, of artistic sensibility enabled Agee to reject "digestion" of the immediate world "into art." He had "a naked, root emotion"; his "ingrained, . . .

! 19/62-64. 2 Agee and Evans, op. cit., p. ix.

12. BODY THINKING AS THINKING

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uncourtly courtesy" emanated from him.' He soaked himself in, in his own words, "an independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity." It was "an effort in human actuality."’ He continues,‘ "[T]hrough this effort to suspend or destroy imagination, there opens before

consciousness,

and

within

it, a universe

luminous,

spacious,

incalculably rich and wonderful . . . as natural to the human swimmer . . as his breathing [cA'i]J. . . [H]is true meaning is much huger [than novel]. It is that he exists, in actual being... His great weight, mystery, and dignity are in this fact. . . . [There is an] immediacy, . . . [a] meaning,’ ... [and] imagination . . . can at best only faintly imitate the least of it." And so,° "Calling . . . everything except art Nature, I would insist that everything in Nature, every most casual thing, has an inevitability and perfection which art as such can only approach, and shares in fact, not as art, but as the part of Nature that it is; . . . a contour map is . . as... an image of absolute 'beauty' as the counterpoints of Bach which it happens to resemble. . . . [I]t would do human beings, including artists, no harm to recognize this fact, and to bear it in mind in their seining of experience, and to come as closely as they may be ' Ibid., p. xii. ? Ibid., p. XIV.

? Ibid., p. xvi. + Ibid., pp. 11-12. ? We remember that, for Sartre, "immediacy" is not "meaning" but "nausea"; when "properties" are stripped of a tree, it is left as "soft, monstrous lumps, in disorder," absurdly, gratuitously overflowing "gelatinous slither," "flowing larva," "sticky filth." (Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, tr. Lloyd Alexander, N.Y.: New Directions, 1949, pp. 170-82.) And what a magnificent malignancy and revulsion Sartre has made out of this common chestnut tree. There is a strange union of bodily sanity abandoned and bodily sensitivity heightened. In Nausea nonsense comes through to us and it makes sense--as nausea. Thus Sartre's vision, far from being an objection, confirms our (Agee's and my) claim that the immediacy of the real I meet is the mysterious depths of the meaning (even as "nausea") that exists. Sartre unwittingly buttressed Kant's categoreal sanity as our inalienable integrity of bodily cognition.

° Ibid., pp. 233-34.

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able, to recording and reproducing it for its own, not for art's sake." In fact, Agee's job was precisely to present to noticed of the society, the commonest folks in the "daily living and environment of an average white farmers." The presentation is so compelling that it when we listen to music with the totality of our being:

the world the least middle south, the family of tenant hurts, as much as So he said,”

"Concentrate everything you can into your hearing and into your body. You won't hear it nicely. If it hurts you, be glad of it. . . . [Y]ou are inside music; not only inside it, you are it; your body is no longer your shape and substance, it is the shape and substance of music." The objectively identifiable self thus disappears in the non-selfconscious immediate self, non-shaping itself in the music of existence. It was thus that Agee's poignantly beautiful phrases were tossed out to us, one after another, performing the casual beauty of that infinite moment of an ordinary living, of an ordinary night when everyone was

sleeping, when "on the porch," in the woods, in "the Coffee Shoppe," "in

the silence."

You can read Agee's book from anywhere and it makes sense. When you enter the world of existence, any existence, that existence becomes the world, sensed as sensible, as making sense. You are the words of the world; the world speaks, and you are its words. For the world makes sense, and that sense, that meaning, is presented to you,

your total bodily being. This is perhaps what it means to be Man as one of the Cosmic Trinity in China, with the Heaven and the Earth. And so, not only do we perform the most abstract of our speculation (mathematics, and so on) with and according to our body; our body bodies forth for us (and for the universe) the rationality of the universe, the Heaven and the Earth.

our speaking,

! Ibid., p. xiii. ? Ibid., pp. 15-16.

seeing, undergoing,

The rhythm of music, the music of

portend the rhythm

of the world,

12. BODY THINKING AS THINKING

267

portray it; and present it. Agee sighed,' "It was good to be doing the work we had come to do and to be seeing the things we cared most to see . . ., and to know those things not as a book looked into, . . . but as a fact as large as the air [ch'i]; something absolute and true we were a part of and drew with every breath [ch'i], and added to with every glance of the eye." It was in this state that Agee discovered that? "There is no need to personify a river: it is much too literally alive in its own way, and like air [ch'i] and earth [the world] themselves is a creature much more powerful, much more basic, than any living thing the earth has borne. It is one of those few, huge, casual and aloof creatures by the mercy of whose existence our own existence was made possible... " And on and on went the beautiful and powerful depiction of the life of the river. And it goes without saying that all this earthly, earthy sense and sensibility, this reason of the soil and the surrounding, would have been lost were it not seined and seen through our bodily sensibility. It is William Blake's bodily sense that led him’ "To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour." 12.4.2. Rage swells the self, having no place for things; things dwell in the self that is obtained self-forgetfully. One is as placid as "withered wood and dead ashes," and as translucently alive to the ! Ibid., p. 253. ? Ibid., p. 252. > William Blake, Auguries of Innocence, |, 1.

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"pipings" (themselves empty lettings-through of the wind) of men, earth, heaven.' Here the self is where what there is ex-presses itself, thereby the self ex-presses what there is. Merleau-Ponty said,” "The landscape thinks itself in me,' he [Cezanne] said, ‘and I am

its consciousness.

. . . Art

is not

imitation,

nor

is it

something manufactured according to the wishes of instinct or good taste. It is a process of expressing. . . . The painter recaptures and converts into visible objects what would, without him, remain walled up in the separate life of each consciousness: the vibration of appearances which is the cradle of things. Only one emotion is possible for this painter--the feeling of strangeness--and only one lyricism--that of the continual rebirth of existence. . . "

This differs from thinking from mechanical body. The mechanical body is a body that is no (situated) body, a contradiction, or a no-body that we pretend to be a body, a locus for bad faith. The selfemptied body in contrast is a specific (situated) clearing that accepts everything without discrimination, a body thinking toward universality. This is thinking in pan-bodiness obtained by self-emptying. Few of us note how crucial it is to combine self-stretch with self-disappearing immersion in the situation. For as Gray warns us, rage is also an ekstasis, but in an evil sense.’

Gray did not realize, however,

that the evil of this sort of ecstasy is due to the self merely stretching to impose itself on to the other, disregarding the other. This is selfexpansion without self-emptying immersion. Such an insane self-stretch characterizes "rage" bent on sheer destruction of the other--a blind violence, a violent chasm separating the self from the other. This chasm of raging ecstasis differs from the other ecstases toward a natural chiasm of all in all, where the self so much dwells in

the other (shen ch'u ch'i ching) that the self simply disappears in the other. This is the sublime immersion of the self-emptying self in the situation--aesthetically, ethically. | Chuang Tzu, 2/1-4. ? Sense and Non-Sense, pp. 17-18. ! On Understanding Violence Philosophically, pp. 16-17.

12. BODY THINKING AS THINKING

269

The composer, the performer, and the audience lose themselves

in music; the painter and the viewer Merleau-Ponty said,'

lose themselves

in the scene.

". , . The meaning Cezanne gave to objects and faces in his paintings presented itself to him in the world as it appeared to him. Cezanne simply released this meaning: it was the objects and the faces themselves as he saw them which demanded to be painted, and Cezanne simply expressed what they wanted to say." ", .. [T]he vision we acquire of them [things] seems to us to come from them . . ." This 1s a situational immersion of the self in aesthetic ecstasy. And Mencius calls our attention to our unbearable com-passion with the other's suffering (even with an ox tremblingly led to sacrificial slaughter), to our sense of alarm (self-forgetfully arising) at seeing a child about to crawl into a well,’ to the spontaneous sharing of our love of sex,

delicacies,

food

and

shelter with

others,*

and

to the

natural

extension of our loving respect toward our elders and tender-aged to others's elders and tender-aged? All these examples express a situational immersion of the self in ethical ecstasy. Rage stretches the self on to the other whom the self disregards, being full only of the selfs own hatred and passion. Ethical and aesthetic imagination self-stretches toward the other, in whom it dwells bodily. Thus what distinguishes ethical and aesthetic self-expansions from ecstatic rage is a natural imaginative self-immersion, selfdisappearance, and self-emptying indwelling, in the other and the situation. The combination of ecstasy with indwelling, self-expansion ! The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968, p. 131.; Sense and Non-Sense, p. 21. 2 Mencius, 1A7. 3 Mencius, 2A6.

* Mencius, 181, 2, 4, 5. > Mencius, 1A7.

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with self-emptying, is crucial in the makeup of an authentic bodily growth of the self. Without the combination the self heads for an insane self-destruction, perhaps in an insane hostility toward others. 12.4.3.

Furthermore,

it is through these two combined routes,

self-expansion, self-emptying, that bodily notions are at once notions meaningful in a bodily context and meaningful in general. Some such notions can be cited. For instance, "enjoyment," whether sensual, intellectual, emotional, or historical, can be understood everywhere

to

obtain correlatively between the enjoying bodily subject and its correlated, enjoyed, object. And in the human world, enjoyment is both subjective and objective in the same bodily person as she or he faces the other. Each of us enjoys the other, enjoys the other's enjoyment, and enjoys being enjoyed by the other. Thus enjoyment becomes a universal notion. And these enjoyments are obtained through the body, through its intersubjective expansion in co-resonance. Chuang Tzu's "ultimate enjoyments" (Chapter Eighteen) is rich in such implications. "Judgment" is another such bodily correlative notion. "This is white" means that I am now situated bodily at "this," and I see "this" as white. "White" is a color that I see through my body, now. "This is true" means that I am

situated at "this" and I see "this" as true, here,

through my body, now. And to say so assumes that I expect someone to be listening, or that I am ready for someone else--anyone (a universal)-to be listening. Chuang Tzu's denial of arguing against one another (2/84-90) ultimately rests on this realization. We do not need to go far. "This"

1s a concrete

universal,

Let us consider "this" in the above.

"concrete"

because

"this"

indicates

a

specific individual, a not-that; "universal" because all this applies to every entity, every specific individual, every not-that. In "this," both specificity and every-ness blend to form a concrete universal. Since "this" represents any common noun, we can say that all common nouns are "this"s, concrete universals. This is what Chuang Tzu meant by "equalization of things and theories," the title of his celebrated Second Chapter.

But who are "we" that say so?

"We" is a someone who (1)

has/is a body that moves from this this to that this, and who (2) is oblivious to himself. — Self-oblivion (2) of embodiedness (1) is bodilessness, which differs from disembodiedness that denies point (1), embodiedness.

12. BODY THINKING AS THINKING

211

"I," "now," "this," and the like are called demonstratives, constituting a point of contact between thinking and actuality.' As long as we cannot even begin to think or speak at all without demonstratives (cf. our consideration in section 11.2. on ostensive definition, which is at the basis of our thinking), our thinking is based on this point of contact. In fact, we may almost say that all our thinking elaborates on this point of contact (if not this point of contact at work) which is (a) both thinking and being, and (b) both my body and the world. raised’

We

can reach the same

point by another route.

John Hick

"the question of whether or not we deny God's omnipotence if we admit that he is unable to create persons who are free from the risks inherent in personal freedom. The answer . . is that to create such beings is logically impossible. It is no limitation upon God's power that he cannot accomplish the logically impossible, since there is nothing here to accomplish, but only a meaningless conjunction of words--in this case ‘person who is not a person." If "God" is replaced with things' power to exist, we see how inherent in things the law of identity is. To exist means to fulfill "A is A"; "A is not-A" cannot obtain in existence. The logical impossibility of "A is not-A" means an existential impossibility. But our problem is how it is possible for us to say and think something impossible at all, that is, what it is that makes possible for a being to say and think not-being--for we just said that "A is not-A" cannot exist; here what is said cannot exist, yet it exists as what 15 said. The answer must be that this being ("we") self-empties into beingbodiless here, to fulfill the existential requirement of "A (bodiless) is A (not-being)," to let "not-being" appear in its thinking and saying. Becoming bodiless must mean becoming a non-being, a bodily existence that is now bodiless. But as long as the thinker has to exist--bodily--to ! Cf. Palle Yourgrau, ed., Demonstratives, Oxford University Press, 1990. 2 John Hick, Philosophy of Religion, Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1983, p. 44.

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think and say (however bodiless she is), she is not disembodied. All in all, we can say that (1) being "disembodied" means, not literally being without a body, but denying what cannot be denied, namely, denying being bodily when one cannot exist without one's body, and that (2) disembodied thinking is thinking that denies being bodily by treating the body as an object, instead of taking being bodily as being in our indispensable perspective for thinking. Disembodied thinking is thinking in bad faith. In general, all judgments are bodily judgments, and that often in a bodiless mode. And so, bodiless judgments make sense, while disembodied judgments do not, because bodiless thinking is body thinking in a specific mode of bodilessness, whereas disembodied thinking denies body thinking. This amounts to saying that all sensible thinking (thinking that makes sense and is meaningful) is sensible (thinking that involves our senses) This last statement a seeming tautology ("sensible" repeated) that is not devoid of meaning ("sensible" is used twice, each time differently, in a mutually implicative manner). 12.5. Bodily Death. Before we end this section on selfemptying and being bodiless, let us think about the ending of the human body. Upon hearing of the death of Leonard Bernstein, I confessed to a friend of mine that the only reason I am still drawing breath is that I do not deserve to die yet, for the dead are great. He replied that there are many great dead, and there are many not so great dead. I answered that they become great by dying. He laughed and left. I could have continued that the reason why death and greatness coalesce 15 this: since merely to exist (as human) is itself holy (else whence the inalienable rights of a person?), to die a human death is to complete this holy existence, and the completion bespeaks greatness. Now all this meditative conversation makes less of logical sense than a heartfelt confession. This confession is instinctively expressed when we take our hats off, offer flowers, and bow a silent bow in front

of the dead. No one is inclined to accuse a dead person, whose debts are forgiven. The going away of the human body leaves us with an immortal greatness; the solemnity of the dead lasts timelessly. It is not without reason that there 1s no culture which does not honor the dead,

nor is there a religion that does not venerate death.’ ! Cf. 7.5.6. above.

? For a convenient anthology of philosophical literature on death, see Scott Kramer and Kuang-

12. BODY THINKING AS THINKING

273

The awesome seriousness of death is indicated in a negative manner. Humanity has not always been reverent toward the dead, to be sure. And our gut-level horror and revulsion to such abrutality constitutes a definition of the worst of atrocity of which humanity is capable. The Nuremberg Trials and Amnesty International vividly testify to this atrocity and to our horror; it is this horror that makes for the poignant persuasiveness of Mencius who cited our reaction to a casual treatment of the dead parents as proof of the existence of our inherent moralness:' "In great antiquity there were some who . . . [, w]hen their parents died, . . . threw them into a ditch. Later when they ... saw foxes and wild cats . . . and flies and gnats eating them, their perspiration started out upon their foreheads, they looked askance and could not bear to look straight. Now the perspiration was not for the sake of other people. It was something at the bottom of their hearts that showed in their expressions. They immediately went home and returned with baskets and spades and covered the bodies. If it was indeed right to cover them, then there must be certain moral principles which made filial sons and men of humanity inter their parents." To someone who thinks that this merely concerns one's own parents, Faulkner's vision of the "triumphant" look of the black victim hunted to castrated death, quoted by Sartre, may be in order:? "For a long moment he looked up at them with peaceful and unfathomable and unbearable eyes. Then his face, body, all, seemed to collapse, to fall in upon itself and from out the slashed garments about his hips and loins the pent black blood seemed to rush like a released breath. It seemed to rush out of his pale body like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket; upon that black blast the man seemed to rise ming Wu, eds., Thinking Publishing Co., 1988.

Through

Death,

two

! Mencius, 3AS; Wing-tsit Chan's translation Princeton University Press, 1963, p. 71.

volumes,

Malabar,

in his 4 Source

Book

Flo.:

Robert

in Chinese

E.

Krieger

Philosophy,

ˆ Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Hazel Barnes, tr., N. Y.: Philosophical Library, 1956, pp. 405-06.

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soaring into their memories forever and ever. They are not to lose it, . . . It will be there, musing, quiet, steadfast, not fading and not particularly threatful, but of itself alone serene, of itself alone triumphant."

Furthermore, it is against this background that we are deeply moved at Chuang Tzu's ultimate joy of the roadside skull--the ultimate humiliation to which any person can go--dried up, mutilated corpse, devoid of proper burial, casually tossed aside on the road. Chuang Tzu supposedly had a dream conversation with such a skull at the roadside. Not believing in its confession about its self-enjoyment, he asked if it wanted him to ask the Arbiter of Fate to restore its former life with its body, family, and friends.’ "The skull frowned severely, wrinkling up its brow. “Why would I throw away more happiness than that of a king on a throne and take on the troubles of a human being again” It said." Thus positively and negatively, we see the deathless greatness of death. But then, what does all this timeless greatness of death have to do with somatic perishability? Two points can be raised. First, we must remember that death is death of the body, and makes sense only in this somatic context. No body, no death; the so-called "spiritual death" is both a metaphorical extension of bodily death, and an indication of bodily relevance of the spirit and spiritual implication of the body. Secondly, we realize that the greatness of death is felt at the gutlevel of our being (our body), and the timelessness of its greatness is obtained by a continuous overlapping of such a gut-level feeling from one generation to another. This is what constitutes social and cultural solidarity, and what identifies us as members of a human community. As we face a common logical and empirical objectivity together in an overlapping of our experiences of argumentation and perception, so we inherit immortal greatness together in an overlapping of our gut-level feelings toward mortality. The human body 15 the font of significance

| Chuang Tzu, 18/22-29, Burton Watson's translation in his The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, N. Y.: Columbia University Press, 1968, pp. 193-94. See also my meditations on the story in Kuang-ming Wu, The Butterfly as Companion, Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York Press, 1990, pp. 14-22.

12. BODY THINKING AS THINKING

275

both when it is alive and performing and when it is dying and feeling it (itself or others) passing away.

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13. Thinking as Bodily. We now consider the bodily aspects of thinking: (13.1.) contingency, (13.2.) performance, (13.3.) structure, and (13.4.) validity as bodily. 13.1. Contingent Conditions, Logical Operations. To connect body with thinking somehow offends our philosophical common sense. But it is tiresomely trite to insist that contingent conditions for logical operations are not logically necessary for the validity of logical operations. Such a distinction makes us feel unsettled. How do we relate these two separated elements--contingent conditions, logical operations? Where are they to be related? For we can feel the following truth that 1s more comprehensive than the platitude above. All natural bodily operations, activities, and performances have their inevitable rhythms and sequences that constitute what they are. And this inevitability has as its part logical necessity, and its rhythms and set sequences have as their constituent parts logical progression, steps of argumentation. For instance, one way to understand what logical necessity 13 is for the inevitability of Mozart's music to compel us to understand that inevitability, through which we understand logical necessity. Given this melody and this note, that note must follow; given 7 and 5,

their sum must be 12; given p implying q, and p being true, g must be true also. These three sequences are all necessary. They form a family cluster, an analogical, metaphorical relation. They belong together--in our bodily performance. They satisfy some requirements, fulfill some aspirations, make some sense--in an inevitable necessary manner. One sort of necessity illuminates and renders intelligible other sorts. Logical necessity may be the bone structure of the mathematical and the musical. Musical inevitability may be a matrix of the other two. And all may live in the environment of bodily sensible structure of performance, behavioral pattern.

We must now see how body-wise this embodied thinking 15 by looking, body-wise, into the generality of judgment. The generality of bodily judgment is obtained in at least six ways. First, the generality is obtained by varying our bodily perspective, either actually, in imagination, or in an intellectual goingthrough. Calculation is this intellectual going-through which Kant says 15 "synthetic a priori"--"a priori" because it is intellectual, "synthetic" because it is a going-through.

13. THINKING AS BODILY

277

Secondly, listening to, say, a violin concerto, one feels in one's body that the violin leads the orchestral music, then melts into it, pervading it with the violin's "soul." Such a violinistic nucleus constitutes all the symphonic melodies of that concerto, in one form or another. Similarly, a bodily nucleus also leads the orchestral thinking (societal, cosmic) and then melts into it. Melody--violinistic-bodily nucleus--is one; its spreads and enchantments are various. Thirdly, to continue our musical metaphor, Mozart's music is tender, warm,

innocent.

But its innocent tenderness comes only while

each note is played out and heard (though not consciously listened to), bodily constituting a total flow. Similarly, universal validity comes only while each notion is entertained, each judgment made in a bodily situation to comprise their total curve, overall flow, of knowledge that is

synthetic (Kant) and historical (Hegel) This synthesis and history contains contrasts and continuities, surprises as well as inevitabilities. Fourthly, Mozart's music excites us, makes us tap our toes and fingers, carrying us to another realm. Similarly, bodily argument (say, from the bodily sense of compassion to universal concord, as in Mencius) carries us away from our accustomed realm, and convinces itself in us as "valid for all."^ Mencius' compassionate alarm is an invitation like Mozart's music; both knock at our Asin, our mind-heart.

Here to incidents, in the periods, or citing Mencius' point as

argue against Mencius by tabulating psychological similar situations, of many cultures and historical similar attractions of shady emotions,! as much misses arguing against Mozart's music by actually tabulating

the number of those who like Mozart, or the number of those who like

"vulgar" sort of music. For it is our heartfelt consent that counts, intuitively telling what is noble from what is not. Moreover, it belongs to our nature that we do distinguish "high" from "low" emotions. If we feel alarmed and attracted to "lower" and "shady" spectacles, we will feel (judge) them "low" and "shady," for we feel ourselves dry and worthless, at least later. To say that this is due to social conditioning merely pushes back our inquiry, for there must have been something primordial which has pushed social conditioning in that direction in the first place. Twist as we may, we cannot escape our own felt judgment--judgment from the deepest level of our nature--that some ! As in the Hsün Tzu, Chapter 23.

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gut-level alarms are rightly compassionate, somehow replenish and sublimate us, and so are worthy of cultivation, while some other kinds of alarms or attractions somehow dry and degrade us, and can only be judged shady and low in our natal scale of value. By the same token, to appeal to statistical survey of how many of us and how much we feel this way (alarm at the baby about to crawl into the well) is to rival our inner convictional evidence, to check on our inner assent, with an external observation. This rivalry already assumes a distrust toward our inner assent, a refusal to accord our inner assent a

basic weight. This begs the entire question. By appealing to statistical survey we are asserting our refusal to judge by our own inner assent, by the basic "limiting situation." And then the result of such findings become irrelevant to the point at stake here. If the findings disagreed with the argument from the limiting situation, we have a choice--either believe in the statistics or in the situational argument. Believing in the latter renders the former superfluous; why did we do statistics in the first place? Believing in statistics proves only that we believe in statistics, not the invalidity of the situational argument which goes by the completely different, inner logic of our heartfelt situation. And even if we nod to the situational argument because the statistical findings agreed with it, our assenting to the former is based on,

derived

from,

our

belief in the

latter;

we

have

believed

in the

external statistical argument all along. In short, internal argument from the limiting situation is out of the question, once we start dabbling in statistics to prove an argument from the typical situation. Fifthly, the same note can be played differently, in different senses, in different pieces of music, and even the same music can be

played slowly or fast, resulting in different sentiments, different affective world. Similarly, the same incident can be judged differently by different bodily perspectives, each with a different general validity. Sixthly, in this context, "general validity" is equivalent to somewhere we--all who are touched--can live together, that common vision, that common ideal and realm. And besides appealing to our depth dimensions (compassionate alarm, self-emptying) Chinese philosophy also appeals to typical historical myths (provoked by our heartfelt dissatisfaction with the status quo) of ancient Utopia, where the all "Under Heaven" is Made Public (t'ien-hsia wei kung), where there is

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the Village of Ultimate Virtues (chih-te chih shih) which are so spontaneously "good" that the Village itself is forgotten. This is where all bodily arguments live and move and have their beings.

where

General

everything

contradictions,

validity

only

turned into contrasts.

is in

is togetherness,

its right

contrasts;

or

natal

rather,

concretion,

place, all

13.2. Four Levels of Performance performance of thinking can be of four levels:

where

concreteness,

there

contradictions

are

are

of Thinking.

no

here

Our

(1) We can strenuously deduce, infer, induce, and extrapolate from one point to another; (2) We can trace out layers of what makes possible whatever there is, and find out implications and explications of things, including our thinking; (3) We can dwell within and flow with the order of things, walk out and walk with the Way things go, and live in it, musically, ecologically. The third level is the criterion that judges the viability of the other two. Logical validity should be livable; viability is the ultimate of validity. This is what gives pragmatism its intuitive persuasiveness; this is the be-all and end-all of all thinking, metaphysical and practical. For instance, technological calculative thinking can become livable in one sense, and not livable in another. It turns livable when it produces modern conveniences and raising the standard of living; it turns unlivable by spreading impersonal control and ecological disasters. And this brings us to the fourth level. (4) Performance in/of thinking has the climactic task of converting thinking that is not livable to one that is. This is strenuous yet a worthwhile thinking, one that includes, and puts teeth and significance to, all the above levels. Here metaphysics and ethics, poetry and pragmatics, logic, axiology and technology, all join together in one performance of bodily thinking. The body en-thinks order, constructively. It is in this active manner that life is to

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enjoy, enlighten, and enliven order all around. Such an ordering and orderly life can be called beauty, harmony, cosmos. And here, every argument is fulfilled, melted into that beauty, that harmony, that happiness, as surely as grammar is dissolved in poetry, and biology in love. This is what Chuang Tzu called "soaring and roaming" (hsiao yao yu), a freely moving, changing, living happiness. Each argument is here a coherent bodily rationality that moves and grows. In this sense every bodily argument is as fresh as the breakfast, and as nourishing and persuasive. The above view about the unity of nature and thinking, physical reality and metaphysical speculation, is not at all new. Liu Hsieh (c. 465-522) declared this far-reaching unity in the striking chapter, "The Source,

the Tao

(yiian

tao),"

that begins

his celebrated

masterpiece,

Wen-hsin Tiao-lung.' Then followed two further chapters, "Evidence from the Sage (cheng-sheng)" and "Following the Classics (tsungching)," to stress that he declared as he did under the authority of the classical tradition, which links literature--our thinking--to Nature as a whole. This "link" is an interweaving of our heartfelt expression and moral integrity, with empirical truths--into a cosmic pattern-tapestry (wen). Ultimately, the pattern (wen) of our writing (heartfelt expression) stems from the pattern of the Way things go (tao chih wen). Wen sums up the unity of patterns enveloping every aspect of the universe (chaos is a futuristic pattern), patterns of our heartfelt expression (affectation is a faked pattern), and patterns of writing (redundance is a false pattern). For as long as everything in nature has form (hsing), it has pattern (wen). Things stir our feelings; deeply moved, we sing forth our sentiment in words (6.18), then in writing (1.19). Thus the Way of things (t'ien tao) commands the way of our inner responses (jen tao); our human way in turn shapes the way we express ourselves, the way of writings (wen tao). Conversely, the heart of literature (wen hsin) manifests the hearts of man (jen hsin) which reflects the heart of Heaven-and-earth (f'ien hsin). The way nature goes, the way the human life goes, and the way the writing-expression goes-! See 18.2. below.

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they are reciprocal and continuous, if not identical. This traffic, back and forth, carves forth (tiao) the Dragon (lung) of the heart (hsin) of lively-literary movement (wen) in the cosmos. "Literary" (wen) here means the structure that is the tapestry of interwoven beauty. "Dragon" (Jung) here means that subtle ubiquitous transformation, that lively power of change (hua) everywhere. Hence, the brilliant title, "wen hsin tiao lung." Wen 13 the crisscrossing of the literary tapestry and the texture interwoven that is the actual; hsin is the heart of literary expression and the heart of the matter thus expressed; fiao is the carving that is the work of nature as spearheaded by the human work, both manual and mental; /ung is that mysterious movement of the dragon power of the universe as embodied in the subtle movement of literary expression. Put together, these four key terms constitute the title of Liu Hsieh's book that summarizes and expands on the classical tradition insisting on the unity of our body thinking with the cosmos. First, we read the title intuitively as the wen hsin that tiao lung, that is, the heart that carves out cosmic patterns that are alive as dragons. Alternatively, to wen hsin can be taken as itself to tiao lung; to "marinate" (as it were) hsin in wen, to wen-ize hsin is to tiao lung, that is, to carve out the

movement of life into a vigorous mysterious dragon power of reality. Finally, to make a long story short, to enter Asin in all its intricacies (wen) is to find the lung already carved out (tiao). This is the mission of our body thinking, body argumentation. 13.3. Structure of Body Thinking. How is such a body thinking (argumentation) structured? Think of that baby in Mencius's story who is about to crawl into a well--how powerful that is. Think of that butcher in Chuang Tzu's story (in Chapter Three) who teaches his lord on the principle of nourishing life. This is the argument that poetizes, in the literal sense of making our feet tap and hands clap, as the Great Preface to the Classic of Poetry says. Our body is the locus where what we attend (thanks to the calling of the situation) becomes what we think, and what we think becomes what we say and are, and what we say calls forth to appeal to other bodily subjects to think, live, and rebuild the world likewise. Our body is the locus of evocation. This is what Merleau-Ponty meant when he said,' "Communication in literature is not the simple appeal on the ! The Primacy of Perception, pp. 8-9.

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part of the writer to meanings which would be part of an a priori

of

the

mind;

rather,

communication

arouses

these

meanings in the mind through enticement and a kind of oblique action. The writer's thought does not control his language from without; the writer is himself [1n his body] a kind of new 1diom, constructing itself, inventing ways of expression [expressive gestures], and. diversifying itself according to its own meaning."

And we add, "its own meaning" here is aroused-evoked by the unique situation we were in. And "being in a situation" is impossible without our body. Thus all this amounts to the "bodily" argument, moving ourselves, body and soul. This is what I would call "evocative argument," argument that amounts to a calling from the situation to the audience--Mencius calling our attention to the situation calling our attention. This evocative bodily argument is at the same time an argument from metaphor--from the bodily here (now) to the bodily there (soon), that is, from the situation to Mencius, from Mencius to his audience, from the now to the soon later, all absolutely concrete through and through. Metaphor composes the argumentative steps in bodily argument. And the metaphoric argument always starts with an evocative call of the situation there-now to our bodily here-a-bit-later. Our bodily response to the call of the wild constitutes evocation (hsing). This is the "premise" of the bodily argument, metaphor, which does not lose its general validity as long as it keeps evoking many of us continually, as the classics does. And falsity and contradiction are two of the means of valid argument from the body, as long as they are used as means of looking further on, squarely and solidly at the situation. They can be used to move our whole life--feeling and thinking--toward the situation. Then our understanding of something new comes by evocation and metaphor. Evocation is a call from the other, the novel, and the self responds to it. Why is it possible to be called and to respond? Because the self is bodily and the body is both (1) a part of the world, out there, surrounding, and inside, and (2) an awareness of this situation. (1) Being a part of what is, the world, the body is susceptible to-receptive of--the call from the not-body, the novel. The novel and the known are thus somehow kin to each other, so when the novel calls the

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knower notices; the knower can feel the novel as a call of the wild.

The

wild is never a brute blank but somehow meaningful, meaningful as strange, alien, even as alarming, exigent, as something vertiginous for Sartre to write about its ontological Nausea. This is evocation, an awakening to the call of the world out there, the call of the wild. (2) Being a part of the world, the body is also aware of what 15. To be aware is of twofold significance. First, the fact that the body is awakened to the call shows that the body takes the novel as somewhat worthy of notice. In this sense evocation is already an awareness at its primal stage; to notice the call is already to accept the novel, as novel. Then, secondly, the body is aware of this something novel--in understanding. To understand something new 15 to digest the novel in terms of the known, in terms of what already belongs to the bodily. This process is metaphor. Metaphor is a double movement--being drawn to the novel by its contrast (negative affinity) with the known, thereby drawing in the novel in terms of the known (positive affinity). A story is born. But we must be careful here. To understand the novel in terms of the known--to metaphor--is not like The Story-Shaped World of Brian Wicker,' where the "world" is our preset metaphysical map commanding the story-making on what and how to shape the world out there. This 15 a set closed circuit. Instead, metaphor is the way the body-self understands new things. The self understands by going to the novel in terms of the known and familiar, and the novel is understood as something newly known. And then, by accepting the novel into the circle of the known, the circle of

the

known

13

itself

changed

in

structure,

Gestalt,

flavor,

and

atmosphere. It is a marriage between the self and the novel where both are respectively changed by reaching out and embracing the other. Thus the process of evocation-metaphor, is more of the logic of discovery than of description, more of the logic of experience than of expression. Or rather, evocative metaphor is the bodily way of discovery described, of novel experience expressed. This is an experience of growth--accepting the novel, digesting it into the known, and thereby being changed and enriched by the novel now turned into a new known. ! Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975, pp. 1-32.

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Metaphor is a logic of discovery and assimilation of the new in this sense. Wilson O. Weldon once said, "Everybody likes something fresh, although not everyone wants to experience something new." The fresh and the new are synonymous, yet they give us mutually opposing effects. Why? What 15 it in the fresh that we all like? What is it in the new that makes some of us cringe? Perhaps when we experience the fresh, we ourselves become fresh. Far from getting stale in security, we are invigorated to start living afresh. Perhaps, in contrast, the new threatens us with its difference from our accustomed way of life; we dislike difference. We are not part of the new, we are left out.

Even if we are made new, our

hearts are still with the comfortable old where everything is familiar, where even imperfections are the environment in which we are at home. And so we like the fresh and dislike the new. What enables us to break through the threats of the new and step into the fresh is to enter the new through the familiar, to start a new life in the security of the old. And this is precisely what metaphor brings us. In metaphor we feel at heart that we are renewed in a fresh understanding and fresh world view. We call the process of such a metaphorical renewal "growth," which 15 life itself. Since metaphor facilitates growth, metaphor facilitates life itself. That invalidity, falsehood, and contradiction are useful, "interesting" provocations toward growth, enrichment and strengthening of thinking and life orientation is foreign to usual formal logic. This is because formal logic has no elasticity in time-dimension, though logical progression occurs in time. Formal logic examines and judges; it is always retrospective, a postmortem pathological examination of an argument (though we can use such a retrospective formal logic as a guide toward our future argumentation). This examination obtains by virtue of a mapping, a surveying from above in a timeless manner, although survey itself takes times. In contrast, our capability to take invalidity, falsehood, and contradiction seriously comes from our bodily capability to undergo rejuvenation in response to untoward circumstances. To accept the challenge of falsehood, etc., is the historical capability of our body. When

Whitehead the mathematician

said, "Precision

is a fake,"

"Seek

13. THINKING AS BODILY

285

precision and distrust it," "Falsehood is interesting," he said so from the standpoint of process philosophy, which 15 in turn (without his quite noting it) a philosophizing about our bodily historical life-process. Novelty usually fits ill with our accepted thinking. When things judged do not fit well with the category with which we judge, we call those things "false" or "senseless." When we nonetheless stretch our category to include those things false or senseless, we call the stretch a "category mistake" (Ryle). And this time the "mistake" is not on things judged (as false or senseless), but on the side of the category with which we judge things. What happens next, if we knowingly persist in it, 1s a "paradigm shift" (Kuhn), that is, a transformation of our categories (world view, framework), a deconstruction of our universe of discourse, a scientific (in a wide sense) revolution, a revolutionary expansion of how we think. This is not negatively to rescue philosophers from category mistakes, as Ryle would have us do, but to become aware of, then positively to promote category mistakes and restructure categories through noticing falsehoods and oddities (evocation) and ferry ourselves beyond our accustomed categories (metaphor). The metaphoric way is often called analogy. One of the most trenchant arguments for analogy I have encountered is that by A. C. Graham.’ Graham starts off by declaring boldly:? "It is not that on the borders of logic there is a loose form called argument from analogy, but that all thinking starts from a spontaneous discrimination of the like and the unlike, and tendency to group the similar in categories and expect similar consequences from similar conditions." We need to be shown, beyond Graham, that all this is due to the

nature of our thinking that goes from the known

and familiar to the

! The first two statements are Whitehead's last statements in his own two essays in Paul Arthur

Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, N. Y.: Tudor Publishing Co., 1941.

last statement is from his Process and Reality.

The

? Another one is Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark, Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. ? A. C. Graham, Reason and Spontaneity, London and Dublin: Curzon Press Ltd & Totowa, N. J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1985, p. 52.

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novel unknown. This going is a coming to know the hitherto unknown in terms of--by an analogical stretch from, by a metaphorical transformative extrapolation from--the known and the familiar. This going amounts to a growing. Growth means not taking in a new element and fitting it into the preset and fixed framework--an eternal "metaphysical world view." Rather, growth means noting and acknowledging the call of the novel (evocation), and then responding to the call by adjusting the novel into the milieu of the familiar and adjusting the milieu to the novel experience (metaphor). This is to turn the unknown into a new known in terms of the known, thereby turn the known familiar into a new enriched one. In other words, turning a novel element into one of the familiar involves turning the familiar framework for knowing into a novel one. And in bringing the novel into the self (evocation) by bringing the self to the new experience (metaphor), one becomes a changed enriched self. Thus evocation and metaphor comprise a mutuality of novel experience. It is this mutuality of adjustments, turnings, and bringings that is called the process of assimilation, digestion, growth. And all this evocative metaphor 1s not haphazard but eminently possible, and is not illusory but reliable and valid, because this 1s the way of the body-self growing by reaching itself out in the world of which it is a part.

As I stretch my familiar self to accommodate what is different therefrom, I myself become different from before. My becoming aecommodatingly different expands myself. This mutual transformative accommodation is what it means to grow. This is the logic of life growth.‘ This expansive understanding amounts to a revolutionary poetizing (creation) of the world; the poetry of the world is effected thereby. Poets do it all the time. Scientists have to do it often to expand their theory-applications. The history of philosophy is a story of such a revolutionary development (growth) in thinking. And such a growth is a bodily movement--whether inductive, deductive, or perceptual. For the body is our chiasma of the world. It is in this body, our primordial point of contact with the world, that the ! On "the logic of life" see my The Butterfly as Companion, Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York Press, 1990, pp. 256-64.

13. THINKING AS BODILY

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notion of the familiar makes sense, and thereby the notion of the world makes sense. 13.4. General Bodily Validity. What is the structure of this total, general validity of the cosmic-historical outreach which 1s evocative-metaphoric thinking? With this question we plunge into the relationship between thinking from an individual body and the total fulfilling togetherness. A person as an individual, pure and simple, is an abstraction, a nothing. Merleau-Ponty said often that the body is our "point of view on the world"; it is "on the world" that the body becomes a "point of view," something of importance. And we should take the "is" seriously--I am my body, and my body is my point of view on the world. An individual "I" truly manifests myself only in the social context, in my own natal society, my family, as a family member. I am born as a person into a family, then into a school, then into an occupation. And so I alone am a nonentity. I am truly myself only when I am a child to my parents, a civil servant in a society, in my own manner. Confucianism is a universal democracy based on a family metaphysics that expands throughout all in all. Chuang Tzu challenges only the Confucian exhortation to our artificial strivings toward its fulfillment; Chuang Tzu's point is that all this is so natural a matter of course that we must forget ourselves in it for it to obtain itself. These bodily situations come ones,

situationally,

severally,

and

at us, like good

together;

they

come

stories, likely as

a bodily

argument, as good music, to compel and move us. It is in this sense that the bodily argument is as ethically imperative as it is poetically historical. And so general bodily validity amounts to this. As the situation evokes us, that is, as we perceive an exciting significance in the situation, we metaphorically expand on this new insight into something general and communicable to others. This is what "expression" does, as in telling a moving story. And as we go through this evocativemetaphorical expansion of perceived significance to express it, we superimpose on the particular situation a new symbolized world. Our pointing finger from here to there, as bodily signification, superimposes a cultural space upon actual space. My language is my system of expressive gestures pointing to, symbolizing, my world to someone else,

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as something immediately relevant to him as well as to myself. My situation here thus symbolizes with my bodily coordinates my own sort of the world, even signifies in my own manner your world symbolized with your bodily coordinates over there. And the music of the world appears as a "universal style shared by all perceptual beings" (Merleau-Ponty).' "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." It is in this bodily manner that we together "sing the world," in all the earthly, human, and heavenly Pipings.” "For ye shall go out...: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.'^ All this constitutes the "poetry of the world": "Just as all literary works . . . are only particular cases of the possible permutations of the sounds which make up the language of their literal signs, so qualities or sensations represent the elements from which the great poetry of our world (Umwelt) is made up." As poetry has its own inevitability, so the world has its own situational necessity. Situational inevitability of a bodily sort-inevitable arousal of alarm on seeing the baby crawling into a well-cannot be handled by a disembodied logic. And so logic gives to such a dog an ill name, "contingent psychological coincidence," and hangs him ! Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, N. J.: The Humanities Press, 1962, p. 187. ? As Chuang Tzu so beautifully and convincingly put it in 2/1-14; Su Shih could not help but write an essay praising it.

3 Isaiah 55:12. * M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 320-21. These words are a direct quotation from Max Scheler's Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik, pp. 1495].

13. THINKING AS BODILY

289

to philosophical irrelevance. But obviously this bodily inevitability belongs to what can be called existential necessity--one is sad at the death of a good friend, one happily tells a happy story, one believes in what one says--so much so that denying it constitutes "situational oddity" or existential contradiction, which is not (quite yet) logical contradiction. MerleauPonty also noted the necessity of idea (meaning) crying out of the depths of a situation to our body thinking, so much so that, say, the violinist "must 'dash on his bow' to follow it."

He continued,’

"There is a strict ideality in experience that are experiences of the flesh: the moments of the sonata, the fragments of the luminous field, adhere

to one another with a cohesion without concept, which is of the same type as the cohesion of the parts of my body, or the cohesion of my body with the world. Is my body a thing, is it an idea? It is neither, being the measurant of the things. We will therefore have to recognize an ideality that is not alien to the flesh, that gives it ifs axes, its depth, its dimensions." "Ideality" and "cohesion" are repeatedly mentioned; he meant that systematic exigency of the situational meaning that invades a thing to make it as it is, giving it its "axes, its depth, its dimensions." And so he said that’ "the whole landscape is overrun with words as with an invasion, it is henceforth but a variant of speech before our eyes, and to speak of its 'style' is in our view to form a metaphor. In a sense the whole of philosophy, as Husserl says, consists in restoring a power to signify, a birth of meaning, or a wild meaning, an expression of experience by experience, which in particular clarifies the special domain of language." This meaning in the wild is inherent in the wild, this language of the wild is what keeps it as it is, an existential necessity, which philosophy is to bring forth. How? Through our body: The flesh is not contingency ! The Visible, p. 151. 2

.

Ibid., p. 152.

¬ Ibid., p. 155.

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but a texture that returns to itself and conforms to itself.’ "Texture" is the internal cohesion and structure, that is, the carnal logic of the real; it is in this sense that my body is the explanation of the world.” This texture and logic and cohesion of the real is the necessity and the validity of the real. In general, "necessity" is situational, and necessity for all situations, "for all possible worlds," is usually called logical necessity. How body thinking understands logical necessity constitutes a challenge to body thinking; all labors in Chinese philosophy since Confucius and Lao Tzu can be said to have been expended on responding to this challenge. But whatever maneuver body thinking may require to consider logical necessity, the overall principle is clear: logical necessity Is a subspecies of situational inevitability, and is to be treated as such. Chuang Tzu called this what "cannot be helped?" "what one cannot help but be*" (both pu te i), what "one could do nothing about,"” or even what one's life is "destined." Neither situational inevitability nor logical necessity can be otherwise without violating exigent situational appropriateness, which includes logical consistency.

! Ibid., p. 146.

? Ibid., p. 147, 152. ! Chuang Tzu, 4/43. * Cf. Chuang Tzu, 12/95-102. > pu k'e nai ho, 4/43. 6 ming, 5/10, 6/97.

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29]

14. The Thinking Body. The thinking aspects of our body are impressive: (14.1.) universals in human existence, (14.2. the unsuspected aspects of Berkeley, (14.3.) the a priori as bodily and (14.4.) as the body itself. 14.1. Universals in Human Existence. 775-12 (Kant's example) 1s logically necessary and universally valid for all possible worlds. Is there something universally valid, similar to "75-12," in human existence? Heidegger said yes, and called such human universals existential a prioris, such as death, anxiety, etc., though he did not say

why. I propose that human existence is necessarily and universally bodily and social. Bodily sociality is the origin, the process, and the end of human bodily existence, the existential a priori of personhood. Four points describe this situation. First of all, "I was born" is the idiom (not only of English but of all languages) of human existence. The birth. of a human person is always in a passive voice, or a being-born by others called parents. Besides, the "parents" are always in the plural; they are always social, two in the natural birth, a team of medical personnel for the test-tube baby. "Parents" (or parental medical personnel) are my past (my "having been born") lived through now, the (past) origin of my existence at present; they are my lived history. Thus history is part of myself, and is social. In short, human existence originates and persists as such in somatic sociality. Besides,

| am human to the extent that I am sexed, existentially

as well as biologically. By existential sexuality I mean the bipolar complementarity of being bodily human. My "better half" is not only my wife; my "better half"s surround me, enabling me to exist as myself, at every juncture in my social intercourse. Human existence 15 constituted sexually, that is, bodily-socially. It 1s small wonder that Merleau-Ponty saw sexuality as one of the human existentials.' Then I grow by "being raised" in a society as a nurturing educative environment, which can include home, school, neighborhood.’

And I live by interacting with others, playing various roles in society. Human existence lives through its life in sociality. ' In his Phenomenology of Perception. ? We remember this was a crucial step, in the dialogue of Crito, in Socrates' argument for his death; the Athenian society being his "parents" that had legitimated his birth and raised him up, he could not now disobey them by breaking their laws for his illegal survival.

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Fourthly, as an ideal of life we are enjoined to strive for social concord; we call it an ethical imperative for being human(e). To be human is to be humane with others in the (Chinese) Five Ethical Relationships--father-son, brethren, teacher-student, husband-wife, and friends. What is to be avoided, evil deed, is also social, a social disharmony; without other persons no evil can be committed. Thus human existence has its ideal in sociality. But how about "loneliness" or "solitude"? Such notions make sense only in terms of sociality. A recluse is a person who is withdrawn from the society. We feel pain or sublimity in being alone and dying alone, because being and dying alone stand out for our attention against our existential background of sociality. Thus sociality is the be-all, through-all, and end-all of humanness; somatic sociality is an a priori of human existence.’ Why 15 our sociality somatic? Because our body stands as a necessary condition for sociality. Our body is the locus which defines a person's identity against others; I am myself and not you, thanks to my body that shows so. Our body is the locus which defines my identity vis-a-vis others, the locus where all social intercourses (sexuality included) take place; I am myself by being-interacting with you, through my body. Bodily sociality is an existential a priori of humanness; being human necessarily and universally means being both bodily and social. Human existence is unthinkable without bodily sociality more than in the sense in which human existence is unthinkable with fiveleggedness. A five legged person, though odd, perhaps can remain oddly human, personal; a disembodied, de-socialized person, if there be

such, is no longer a "person." So much for general validity in the light of body thinking. 14.2. On "To Be Is To Be Perceived".^ Our being bodily can be seen from another angle, perception as constitutive of being, including ours. One could say that Berkeley hit upon an important truth (without fully realizing 1t) when he declared that to be is to be perceived, that is, to exist means (is to be defined as) to be perceived. He should have said that for a thing to be means to be perceived, whereas for a ! Rubin Gotesky substantially agrees with the above explanation in his "Aloneness, Loneliness, Isolation, Solitude," in James M. Edie, ed., An Invitation to Phenomenology, Chicago: Quandrangle Books, 1965, pp. 211-39. ? Cf. 9.2.4.2. above.

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293

person to be means both to perceive and to be perceived. One can say, then, that an actual tree fallen

in a faraway

mountain had emitted actual sounds because, were someone to be there,

he would have perceived the tree falling and heard the sounds. Sadly, Berkeley seems to have merely followed the conventional understanding of perception as something subjective, and fell into idealism. Husserl's fight with psychologism was a struggle with this danger. "To

be," then,

should

be taken

as existence

in a wide

sense,

including both things like apples and feelings, which can be experienced by exercising our bodily undergoing, and "things" like argumentation and numbers, which can also be performed and experienced. Thus actuality is something experienceable; number "3" actually exists in the sense that whenever "3" is mentioned, it 1s invariably experienced as "3," never as something else; since "Whenever" here is in time, number

"3" is also in time. Number "3" is peculiar not because it is timeless or not actual but because it is invariably experienceable as such, not like an apple, say, which soon corrupts and changes into something else. "To be is to perceive and to be perceived" can mean a radical discovery of our familiar truth, if perception is taken as our inherent bodily chiasm

with the world,

as that from

which,

on which,

and

in

which the subject-object polarity 13. To know, then, is to perceive, and to reason is also to perceive. "To know 15 to perceive" is richly investigated by MerleauPonty. "To reason is to perceive" means: Reasoning proceeds through bodily operation such as perception; the structure of reasoning is bodily, that 1s, the same as that of bodily operation. Reasoning is structured in the style of our bodily operation; we live, move, and have our being in

the style of our body, and we reason likewise. "In the style of the body" means "shaped body-wise." Fritz Kreisler's composition "in the style of Couperin" means "shaped Couperin-wise." Brahms's "Variations on the Theme of Haydn" means "variations" in the style of Brahms--shaped in the manner of Brahms, structured by Brahms as only Brahms could have done. Various sets of "variations" on the theme of Paganini are different, depending on who did the variations--Liszt, Rachmaninoff, or any other. Likewise, we reason in the style of our body. Our body is not just an empirical concomitant of reasoning; necessary reasoning is in the mold of (or structured according to) our bodily operation. For we cannot help but move bodily; as one of our bodily movements we inevitably

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cognize, ratiocinate, and follow out a train of arguments. Thus our reasoning cannot help but be bodily. And all this inevitability is describable and understandable, that is, reasonable. As our bodily operation is recognizably reasonable, so we reason in the same style of our body, in the same human physiognomy; the sameness constitutes rational necessity. 14.3. The Bodily Performative A Priori. That the so-called the "a priori," one of the basic features of abstract thinking, really bodily and performative is shown in this section, under seven sub-headings: First, we see how (14.3.1.) all thinking is metaphorically anchored in bodily experience, even (14.3.2.) in arithmetic, (14.3.3.) in geometry. We then see how (14.3.5.) somatically related necessary truths and contingent factuality are, how (14.3.6.) the necessary and the empirical form a bodily continuum, how (14.3.7.) fact and value are united to facilitate personal bodily growth.. 14.3.1. According to A. C. Graham, definition serves in vain to delimit the likes from the unlikes, because of Wittgenstein's "family resemblances" among terms. Thanks to such lingering resemblances, perception (scientific observation) goes on by our inclination toward analogizing from past experience of familiar sets of happenings together. Induction is, for Graham, "a logical fiction to justify generalizations . . . from spontaneous analogization . . . a formalized argument from analogy . . . [and] deduction... is... a roundabout argument from analogy." Creativity is born of the chaos of spontaneous analogizing "to break into the ordered but closed realm of analytic thinking," and? "the displacement of a concept by analogizing not only initiates new thoughts but also, by changing the concept itself, forces one to rethink the old." Scientific language is as riddled with metaphors as poetic language, and our literal conceptual terms are cast in terms either of ! A. C. Graham, Reason and Spontaneity, p. 53.

2 Ibid., p. 54.

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vision (insight, intuition, lucid, showing, enlighten, distinct, clear) or of touch (conceive, comprehend, grasp, get the point, palpably true); it is conspicuously so in Descartes who attempted most to break away from the preconceptions of common experience. Paying attention to such a mold of analogization in our thinking helps shift the way we think to dissolve previously insoluble problems; this is proposed by Ryle and Kuhn, and revealed by our comparison of Western thinking with thinking in other culture such as Chinese.’ Graham showed us well the ubiquitous presence of analogy and metaphor in words, induction, and the mold in which thinking proceeds.

And this is equivalent to saying that thinking about matters of fact is experiential. On a different front, Kant also, albeit haltingly, noted the experiential character of our factual thinking; it was Mikel Dufrenne that forcibly brought forth this aspect of Kant. Kant said that the formal a priori grounds experience in general and makes possible the objectivity of the object. Kant said that this a priori is "formal" in that it founds experience, and "a priori" in that it 13 anterior, yet necessarily related, to experience. Dufrenne pushed further and said that "related to" here means that the a priori is not only necessary for experience but itself presupposes experience; "if the a priori grounds the a posteriori, it aims at or intends (vise) the latter." For experience cannot be engendered, but must be given. This parallels the fact that experience in general both precedes and presupposes particular experiences. To refer to possible experience, as the notion of the transcendental demands, is necessarily to invoke a given: possible experience implies real experience. Kant also said that "the conditions of the possibility of experience in general are likewise conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience." If the a priori is anterior to experience because the former is only valid in relation to the latter, then we can say that the former is discerned in the latter. Two points follow from all this. First, it is a short step from the experiential base of the a priori to conclude that therefore the a priori 1s

! Ibid., pp. 55-60. ? Mikel Dufrenne, The Notion of the A Priori, tr. Edward S. Casey, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966, p. 7. 3 Ciritique of Pure Reason, A 158.

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bodily, since experience is perceptual.' Secondly, this bodily a priori is none other than the event of an accord, familiarity, and consubstantiality, of man and world, their meaning and reciprocal openness.” And this event of reciprocity is what we call metaphor and analogy. In any case, Dufrenne strongly argues that the transcendental a priori that founds experience in general is itself grounded in actual experience, in the sense that "experience in general" is legitimized in, and derives its meaning from, actual experience. If it is the a priori that makes possible experience in general, then it is in actual experience that makes possible the apriori in the first place. Here "making experience possible" means to "confer meaning" on experience as experience. But to confer meaning here means that a manifold given according to the structure of sensibility must be unified into the objectivity of the object, unified by the "I think," "the necessary unity of consciousness, and therefore also of the synthesis of the manifold." (Kant) And this synthesis is carried over in the notion of the synthetic a priori in the supposedly pure intellection of arithmetic (such as 7+5=12) or geometrical proof. To this we now turn. How are the staple necessary truths ("7+5=12," geometrical proofs) to be understood by body thinking? Here as usual our body manifests itself as the through-all of our activities, of which thinking is one. 14.3.2. Let us consider arithmetic first. Kant unwittingly hit upon the bodily character of "75-12" in the notion of "synthetic a priori." Kant may not have realized that going from the addition (+) of two numbers (7, 5) to their sum (=, 12) is necessary, that the "synthetic" process of this "going" is itself necessary. The process constitutes the logical necessity of "7+5=12"; denying the synthetic nature of "75-12" denies the very possibility of the process. This is shown in the fact that (as Kant correctly pointed out) the sum, 12, is analytically contained in none of the terms, 5, +, 7, or =; we simply must go-through (hence, "synthetic") the steps of addition before we can reach the sum. ! Dufrenne, op. cit., pp. 85-103, 137-53.

? Ibid., pp. 45-46. 3 Critique of Pure Reason, A 109. 4 Critique of Pure Reason, B15-17.

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And this going-through is impossible without our body. "The Tao--[we] go-through it and [it] is-made," said Chuang Tzu (2/33). We add that the going-through 13 made by our body. In other words, arithmetic is a thought experiment, a performance--adding (+) 7 and 5 to obtain (=) 12. Now experiment is an experience, which is bodily; "experiment" is bodily. "Thought experiment" is a bodily experiential undergoing extended (analogically, metaphorically) to thinking. This experiment stretches us to something hitherto unknown,

experiment.

which

would

have

remained

unknown

without our

This experiential stretch, this metaphorical extension, to the novel (otherwise unobtainable) is dubbed by Kant "synthetic." But this synthetic extension belongs to thinking, and so Kant called it "a priori." Thus "synthetic a priori" operation is equivalent to thought experiment, bodily performance of a thinking sort. "4 priori" here is perhaps a misnomer--meaning "before experience." We know now that such "a priori" is every bit experimental, experiential, performative as any manual operation.' Let us take another example. John Hick reacted to the principle of verifiability and falsifiability, which determines the meaningfulness of a statement, by citing a mathematical example.’ "Consider, for example, the proposition that 'there are three successive sevens in the decimal determination of Pi. So far as the value of Pi has been worked out, it does not contain a series of three sevens; but since the operation can proceed ad infinitum it will always be true that a triple seven may occur at a point not yet reached in anyone's calculations. Accordingly, the proposition may one day be verified if it is true but can never be falsified if it 1s false." Some statements then are meaningful which are verifiable if true but unfalsifiable if false. Mind you, moreover, that "verifiable" is an operational term, and so 15 "falsifiable." ' [ developed on the same theme from a slightly different angle in my History, Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Chapter Four. ? John Hick, Philosophy of Religion, (fourth edition), Englewood 1990, p. 104.

Thinking, and

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What 15 significant here, for our purpose, is not Hick's ingenuity of maneuvering religious language (some ultimate propositions) out of the dual criteria of propositional meaningfulness, but this: Verifiability and falsifiability which gauge the meaningfulness of a statement are both logical criteria and empirical directives for some concrete performance to find something, specified by the criteria, with which to judge a statement as to whether it is meaningful or not. The falsifiability principle is itself a performative one.’ This is because such a performance is both empirical and logical. For we can affirm both that the operation is a process of empirically finding something, such as consecutive sevens, and that we can logically tell that these sevens are verifiable if true but unfalsifiable if false, because of the interminableness of pai-decimals generated by the mathematical (that is, logical) definition of a "circle." Thus the statement,

"The

statement,

'pai

has

three

consecutive

sevens,

is

unfalsifiable if false," is both logical and empirical. All this indicates two points: (1) logical demonstration is a performance, and (2) has a lot to do with bodily experience (experience both of empirically finding good evidence and of going through a logical operation). 14.3.3. Someone may object that this is a psychologizing irrelevant to formal demonstration. This objection betrays (14.3.2.1.) an illicit phobia of subjectivity resulting in (14.3.2.2.) an obsession with the bodiless will-o'-the-wisp of cognitive objectivism. 14.3.3.1.

As G. E. Moore

said, "self-interest" can mean either

unethical selfishness, an exclusive interest for the self, or an allegedly trivial "self as interested." Yet that the latter is anything but trivial is indicated by an important distinction between being subject-ive, that is, subject-initiated, subject-involved, subject-based (what Kierkegaard meant by "Truth is Subjectivity"), on the one hand, and being merely subjective, being obsessed with subjectivism, a psychologizing of truth, on the other. To look into "7+5=12" as synthetic underscores an obvious important truth that our reasoning is subject-involved and bodyconstituted. One may persist, saying, the psychological process of demonstration (the process of being convinced of the correctness of the proof) is historical and bodily; the validity of demonstration is timeless, ! Cf. 1.1. and 1.2. above, on the relation among Chinese af-firmation, rectificaiton of names, and verification.

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disembodied. But the process of being convinced is not the process of demonstration. What has been claimed is our common sense, that truth is always ready with its demonstration; demonstration is inherently processive--even Zeno had to move (his logical steps) against movement; going through logical steps is a process; process is historical; history is a bodily process.'

Therefore, truth, its very apodictic-ness, is

inherently historical. This is not at all to deny the apodictic character of truths; this is instead to elucidate its historicity. History is the sine qua non of apodictic-ness. All historical facts are not logically necessary; all necessity is historical. Logical necessity is a speclal case of situational inevitability.” 14.3.3.2. Overreacting against the danger of psychologism and subjectivity, we are caught in an obsession with being "objective." But the same sort of distinction on subjectivity applies to objectivity. Being objective, letting things be as they are, is worlds apart from being objectivistic--taking things (the knowing self included) to be only externally and individually related, resulting in shaving off the "subject" altogether.’ | Mencius, for instance, stresses the historicity of our strenuous growth in value assimilation. See "Transvaluation of Moral Values in Ancient China," by Chün-chieh Huang and myself, at International Symposium on Norms and Applications in China, Leiden University (the Netherlands), July, 1991. Cf. also "Homo-Cosmic Continuum: Normativity and Its Difficulties in Ancient China" (with Huang Chün-chieh), in Norms and the State in China, eds. Chün-chieh Huang and Erik Zürcher, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993, Chapter 1. See also its Introduction. 2 That logical process is historical may give us pause. After all, isn't the logical process a necessary one, while the historical one is not? But, we reply, can't the logical process be described thus: "Were anyone to go through this way anytime, one can only get this result"? Logical process is a presumed highway for our mental automobiles to go anytime. As the geographical highway is changeable only according to the geography of the region, so the logical highway can only be modified in the light of, and incorporated into, a more comprehensive logical highway system which is bodily. > The recent trend of operational empiricism (such as Donald Davidson's), insisting that the subject-self is unnecessary in explaining acts, performance, behavior, etc., is understandable from this emphasis on "objectivity." See Donald Davidson, Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. One of his important arguments 15 to appeal to our language usage and scientific common sense to reduce human behavior to explainability by causation, which all other events also share; therefore, human behavior is same as all other events. This assumes that if A and B can be explained in a same manner, A and B are variations on the same ontological kind. Ona critique of this sort of reducing two levels of beings by explaining a higher level of beings with explanation in a low level is criticized by M. Polanyi's The Study of Man, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1959. Cf. Paul Ricoeur's critique of it from another perspective in OneselfAs Another, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992, pp. 56-112.

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Deconstructionism (itself perhaps as bad a cure as the disease) is meant to explode the latter dangerous obsession that desperately tries, in order to be "objective," to be disembodied and have nothing to do with the subject. But this objectivism is doomed to failure; how can the self succeed in getting rid of the self? The very success of the self's act confirms the self; self-negation establishes the self. The "ideal observer" who sees from nowhere and so from everywhere indicates a self-deception; "seeing" involves a specific set of eyes to see and a specific viewpoint of the bodily subject. We must always bear in mind this basic fact, that to clearly recognize truth as inter-involved with bodily subjectivity, the subject as always involved and interested in letting things be, is the true spirit of "objectivity," which is synonymous with rigor and finality of demonstration. And "formalization" is always retrospective, always assessed after the fact, and its completion is always only apparent. "Rigor" is a historical stage, and our presumed ideal, in our experiential process of truth by our bodily crystallization in concrete particulars. Furthermore, Merleau-Ponty said that to start a demonstration is to settle on a hypothesis, to settle on it is to hold it true, and to hold it true is to experience de facto truth. "A hypothesis is what is presumed to be true, so that hypothetical thinking presupposes some experience of de facto truth."' We add that "hypothesis" must mean here a prospective frame (designed or discovered) for sensible experience, whether of empirical fact or of necessary truth, and that taking "hypothesis' as 'de facto truth" must mean that when we entertain the hypothesis (in this case, an axiom in arithmetics) of "1+1=2," we undergo the experience of

the necessity of going to "2" as we go through "1+1." From this bodily perspective, we can say that demonstration is a hypothesis-thinking which involves an experience of logical necessity hitherto unrealized, and such an experience of novel truth amounts to an understanding of the novel in terms of the familiar. As my hypothesis of "1+1=2," so this de facto truth--of "11-2"; as I have bodily gone through the experience of 141-2, so I will go through 745-12. And so on. Similarly in syllogism, modus ponens, and so on. Demonstration is bodily and metaphorical, then. 14.3.4. Let us now look at geometric demonstration. It is important to note that construction of a triangle is tied to the relational

words like "on," "by," "apex," and "extend," all meaningful by virtue of i Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 385.

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my working on a triangle situated on my perceptual field, my bodily grip on the world. Thus the "triangle" 13 less a definition than a directive for my bodily configurative construction. This configurative operation is "necessary" in the sense that the operation is not the child's arbitrary drawing but a gestural expression, a meaningful experience, of "I consider a triangle." "I consider an angle" means "I place myself at a point, to tend to another point, in a triangular system (field) of possible movements [emphasis added]." The concrete essence of the triangle is the formula of my bodily stance and attitude, my modality of structural hold on the world. The argument of triangle-structure is my triangular-structuring, committing the first structure of a triangle to the second one with a parallel line drawn through the apex. This act of demonstrative committal is my causing a new possibility to emerge from the triangular structure bursting with indefinite structural possibilities; this my act expresses my symbolic power of a hold on things, an act of the intellectual imagination, not an eternal ideation of the triangle. Such is what Merleau-Ponty envisioned on the body thinking on a geometrical demonstration concerning the triangle.’ Thus body thinking does not deny necessity in the "necessary truths" such as "7+5=12" or a geometrical proof on the triangle; body thinking denies only that "necessity" 1s something disembodied. Body thinking enables us to note that there 15 a hitherto unnoticed factor--call it subject, body, perception--in this "necessity." This new element not only (1) does not disturb necessity but also (2) is constitutive of necessity. For thesis (1) we need only to give a new definition of what necessity and demonstration is. We do not need to be disembodied (ahistorical) to obtain logical necessity. And this is what is done in this sub-section, 14.3.2. For thesis (2) we need to show that disembodiedness is self-contradictory, that denying our body in thinking leads to cul-de-sacs. This we will consider in 14.4.2. But before considering it, we have three more themes to explicate, all fallouts from the bodily performative character of logical necessity: (14.3.5.) how the necessary and the contingent form a continuum in our bodily experience, (14.3.6.) how somatic this continuum 13, and (14.3.7.) how related fact and value are. 14.3.5. In this newly discovered daily world of bodily necessity, necessity and contingency are not opposed but mutually involved. Thus, Phenomenology of Perception, pp.

384-86.

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body thinking concerns two sorts of truths, necessary and contingent. All necessary truths are contingently and bodily mediated. Not all contingent truths are necessary, to be sure, although many of them threaten to become necessary on appropriate occasions. 14.3.5.1. For instance, two-leggedness is usually taken to be a contingent trait of humanness; one-legged person is still a person, though handicapped. However, as the word "handicapped" implies, this person is blemished, slightly less than a "person." But the need for food is a necessary trait of humanness; a person in no need of food cannot be called a "person," any more than a "husband" can logically stay unmarried. Nor, similarly, can a bodiless person be a "person," any more than an unextended weightless body is a physical "body" (Kant). Those "contingent" situations--feet, food, body--thus uncomfortably encroach on the logical definitional realm. By the same token, the body is by nature social. "It is not good that the man should be alone," and so the human becomes a plural, ^. . . he... made them male and female, . . . For this cause shall a man leave

father and mother [social origin], and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh [new sociality]." The body is always from the social to the social. The body as the social is what makes possible Edmund Husserl's Lebenswelt and Alfred Schutz's "social world." That a person is necessarily (by definition) bodily means that human thinking is bodily. Since human existence and activities are inter-somatic,

that

is,

"social,"

thinking

is

manifested

as

social,

appealing to other persons via thoughtful gestural expressions in the communal situation. Necessity-contingency distinction is then less a clear-cut dichotomy than two correlative poles in an experiential continuum of comprehensive truth. Necessary truth is experientially understandable, as Locke intuited when he consigned necessary truth to an arrangement of our ideas; empirical contingency is also experientially understandable,

as Hume

felt when he attributed causal connection to

subjective habit and convention which originate in experience.

! From this strict point of view, since no one is humanly perfect (e. g., in perfect health, perfectly humane), everyone is more or less "handicapped," less than truly human, and the one truly human is called a "sage" in China. ? Genesis 2:18. 3 Matthews 19:4-5.

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Furthermore, the continuum of comprehensive truth is itself experiential. It is the body which undergoes--in historical imagination ("historical narrative"), in theoretical imagination ("thought experiment"), in actual undergoing--the present-to-future sequence and judges it to be contingent or necessary. As necessary truth is experiential, so empirical contingency is understandable. Abstract truth comprises an experience of its "necessity"; the "contingency" of facts has some sense that can be sensed as somehow inevitable. Pure randomness promoted in the existential literature of absurdity is then understood as absurdity, described in literature that is read and understood. Sartre, one of the staunch champions of nauseous absurdity in brute reality, said in the very novel of Nausea,’ "... [A] man is always a teller of stories, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, 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. Days add on to days without rhyme or reason, an interminable and monotonous addition." Here Sartre captures absurdity in his novel ("story"), and thereby makes absurdity into something understandable. He then continued,’ "But when you tell about a life, everything changes; . . events take place in one direction, and we tell about them in the opposite direction. ... The story is going on backwards: moments... are caught up by the end of the story which draws them on and each one of them in turn the previous moment... [T]he moments of my life . . . order themselves like those of a life remembered. I might as well try to catch time by the tail." 14.3.5.2. To further demonstrate that contingent happenings are not at all to be logically "mocked," let us take Aristotle's explanation of "contingency," and oppose it. ! Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, tr. Lloyd Alexander, N. Y.: New Directions, 1964, pp. 56-59.

? Ibid.

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We are reminded that denying a necessary proposition ("The bachelor is married") makes a self-contradiction ("The bachelor is not married"). In contrast, Aristotle said,' "... [I]t is not of necessity that everything is or takes place; but in some instances there are real alternatives, in which case the

affirmation is no more true and no more false than the denial . . Let me illustrate. A sea-fight must either take place tomorrow or not, but it is not necessary that it should take place . „ neither is it necessary that it should not take place .. . [I]t is not necessary that of an affirmation and a denial [in regard to that which is not always existent] one should not be true and the other false." This amounts to saying that both a factual proposition and its denial make sense: both "A sea-fight is won" and "A sea-fight is lost" make sense. Aristotle says this is because the non-necessity of existence is a potentiality as undecidable as the future is. Aristotle took the indeterminacy of future occurrence to be typical of empirical contingency. We must note, however, that future indeterminacy is not something intrinsic but something "about to be" (as "future" means) determined in causal situational matrix. Empirical contingency has a lot to do with situational determination. And the factual determination is a bodily one, either through the body's actual participation or vicariously in its metaphoric extension, its imaginative understanding. And so, as in the future, so in the past; "A sea-fight was won" can be as true as "A sea-fight was lost." And this is because a set of causal factors (C) responsible for a fact (described by an empirical statement, P) differs from another set (C') for its denial (not-P); if P with C is true, not-P with C' (not-C) can be true also.

We can say, then, that

if P is true with C, not-P with C (which supports P) cannot be true--

without straining our understanding, our sense, of truth. with C is true, and not-P with C cannot be true.

If P is true, P

Thus, to repeat, "P with C" cannot go with "not-P with C." Nor can "P" go with "P with not-C," for "P" taken as "P with C" renders "P with not-C" self-contradictory. "P (is true)" implies "P with C (is true)," and so "P with not-C" is equivalent to "P with C with not-C," which is Aristotle, On Interpretation,

19a17-bl.

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senselessly self-contradictory. For instance, "It is raining, but I do not believe it" is "situationally odd" (P. Nowell-Smith), or rather, situationally self-

contradictory. This is because P ("It is raining") implies its causal matrix, C--"I believe it." P means P coupled with C; "It is raining"

means "It is raining; I believe it." But to couple P with not-C (the denial of P's situational matrix) is to couple "It is raining; I believe it" with "I do not believe it," resulting in "It is raining; I believe it, and I do not

believe it." And this is a contradiction. In general, if an empirical proposition, P, is true, P with its (P's) situational matrix, C, is true, and not-P with C cannot be true, nor can P with not-C make sense. This is to say that the "responsibility" of a specific set of causes (situational matrix) for a specific historical sequence cannot be mocked. This is how we understand the past as history; this 1s also why even a fiction has an inevitable sequence. This situational inevitability is the "heavenly net that is sparsemeshed yet leaks nothing" (Lao Tzu)? To deny it constitutes a situational contradiction. The order of causal responsibility, the "heavenly

net,"

is what

the

scientists

pursue

as

laws

of nature,

in

whatever terms what "law" here may be interpreted to mean. All this amounts to saying that in contingency of facts there is an intelligible order that cannot be "mocked"

or contradicted,

and that the order is

experientially understandable, that is, intelligible in a bodily manner.

This orderliness, under-standable in bodily experience, is what

constitutes the empirical contingent pole in the continuum of comprehensive truth; necessary truth is experientially understandable (as "necessary") as contingent truth is experientially understandable (as "contingent"). Their dichotomy is dissolved in the continuum of bodily understanding. 14.3.6. How 15 the necessary truth continuous with the empirical one? In a bodily manner. How so? As stated above, an empirical statement, "A sea-fight was won," implies its situational matrix, its own set of causal factors such that the set cannot support the denial of the statement. In other words, an empirical statement can be denied without contradiction only when its implied (yet not clearly stated in the statement itself) situational matrix is ignored. ! See P. Nowell-Smith, Ethics, Baltimore, M. D.: Penguin Books, 1954, pp. 79-87.

? Tao Te Ching, Chapter 73.

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In contrast, a necessary statement, "The bachelor is not married" cannot be denied without contradiction because its situational matrix is packed in (the definition of) its component; "bachelor" is one who is not married. This makes the denial of the original statement ("The bachelor is married") a self-contradiction--"The bachelor who is not married is married." Similarly, the statement, "A is A," includes in itself a situational definition of its component--"A" is itself, A. The statement is really "A, that is A (a situational component), is A," and so its denial "A

is not A" is a contradiction, "A that is A is not A," or "A thing, that is

itself, is not itself."

We can say, then, that all propositions have their specific situational matrixes. Necessary propositions have them packed within themselves as "definitions"; empirical propositions imply them as "causal" matrixes. Denying these situational matrixes (definitional, causal) leads to contradictions--logical (in necessary propositions) or situational (in empirical statements). Furthermore, and here 1s the crunch, situational matrix means a

bodily situated, bodily experienced, matrix. Therefore, the body is a necessary constitutive component in all propositions, necessary and empirical alike. Thus, the necessary 13 no longer dichotomous with the contingent; they are now continuous. And the necessary-contingent continuum of truth is a bodily continuum. 14.3.7. Once the traditional dichotomy (Lessing's "ugly ditch") between necessary truths and contingent facts is done away with, the traditional relationship of value with fact is seen to be that of mutual distinction without separation. For every fact is value-charged, charged at least with the value of "fact" worthy of being attended to as such. The fact that I promised a obligates me to a. This is John R. Searle's famous "commissive speech acts" that commits the speaker to a certain course of action. Perhaps it is not irrelevant to discuss here how related John Searle's view is to body thinking. Searle in his doctrine of "speech act" takes speech as act, thereby overcomes the dichotomy between speaking and acting; this is an extension of John L. Austin's "doing (something) by saying (it)." Austin's doctrine enables Searle to bridge the gap between is and ought; to factually promise is to be obligated to act as having promised. But Searle subjected speech acts to analysis under the abstract principle of logic, and did not probe into the reason why speech is act. Searle therefore did not realize that the speech-act unity comes from the

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fact that the body (1) both talks and acts, and (2) both talk-acts and thinks. He did not realize that the body is the origin, the ambience, the condition, the raison d'étre, and so the principle, of saying, doing, and thinking, all of which are interrelated in the matrix of the body. John Austin, on his part, bases both saying and acting on common sense and social convention. He took saying to be same as doing. The way of doing is not recorded but that of saying 1s, conveniently in the Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, which catalogues the history and the actual manner of saying. Therefore Austin took OED as the guide, if not the principle, of both saying and doing. | This amounts to understanding saying and doing in terms of what is commonly practiced. Austin did not realize that, again, sociohistorical convention arises out of the manner in which persons live and move, our bodily way of being. The body is both one among many empirical things, and what subsumes them under body-thinking. This somatic unity of empirical fact and theoretical value is what makes possible Austin and Searle to take saying as doing, and take is as continuous with ought. Merleau-Ponty did touch on this value-fact unity. But he remained somewhat self-conscious, treating the experience argumentatively. Chinese philosophy in contrast naively and intuitively starts with and remains in our bodily experience in all its metaphysical and normative speculations. Fact and value are two aspects of the same evocative-metaphoric dynamics of human growth in life-understanding with historico-cosmic significance. In other words, fact is loaded with the value of human growth. We do not merely notice the evocative call of new happenings and understand them in terms of our familiar frame. By so understanding and assimilating the unfamiliar, our familiar frame 15 itself strained and stretched in a metaphorical metamorphosis. One must remember that this growth in understanding 15 at the same time a concentric growth in personhood--from an individual to social personhood, the person as inherently social, and from thence to participating in the Mighty Stream of the vital Thrust of the Heaven and ' such as in the experiential values of "color" (and "sound") in Phenomenology, pp. 227-28, The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 131-32, human significance of "time" as historical throughout Phenomenology, and The Visible.

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earth (Mencius 7A13).

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Merleau-Ponty also saw it in the unity of time:'

"[T]here is time as . . . there is a fountain: the water changes while the fountain remains because its form is preserved; . . . because each successive wave takes over . . . its successor: from being the thrusting wave in relation to the one in front... , it becomes, . . . in relation to another, the wave that is pushed; and this is attributable to the fact that, from the source to the

fountain jet, the waves are not separate; there is only one thrust, Hence the justification for the metaphor of the river, not in so far as the river flows, but in so far as it is one with itself. . .. [T]ime is someone, . . . temporal dimensions . . . perpetually overlap, . . . making explicit what is implied in each, being collectively expressive of that one single explosion or thrust which is subjectivity itself." This one "thrusting wave" of Time Stream is a personal growth, a "history" of someone, through evocative metaphor--interpretive, personal, social, and cosmic.’ This is growth in ontological understanding that has nothing to do with interpretation of all things in the forever fixed metaphysical world view, a grand scholasticism. Yet sadly the former all too easily turned into the latter, because the latter involves none of the former's

painful jarring of interpretive frame--"shaking of the foundation"--and cosmic transformation of the self. Thus the vibrant growth of existential-socio-cosmic understanding in the Classic of Changes, Mencius, and Chuang Tzu, came to be ossified in the ready metaphysics of the Classic of Changes that stunted the freedom of daily activities, in Tung Chung-shu's cosmological scheme that came to support dynastic autocracy, and in Huang-Lao Taoism that is full of religious mumbo jumbo. And then the bodily development from an individual person to wider and wider circles of new facts and values is replaced by a disembodied metaphysical scheme pontificating from above a set interpretation on all matters. Here nothing under the sun is new; everything turns trite, desiccated, predetermined. The only viable Phenomenology of Perception, pp.421-22. 2 For a fuller treatment of this theme see "Transvaluation of Moral Values in Ancient China" by Chün-chieh Huang and myself. Unpublished.

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understanding of the lived person is a bodily one, ever expanding and self-transforming in evocation and in metaphor. 14.4. The Body As the A Priori. We have considered how the a priori of thinking is a bodily one; we can now say that the body is itself this a priori. Suppose "a priori" is taken as (a) the principle that governs our thinking, that after which our thinking is (to be) patterned, and as (b) the base on which our thinking is built, the condition for the very possibility of our thinking. Then we see how novel yet natural Merleau-Ponty is, when he discovered that our body is this a priori.

This is to say that our body is that after which our thinking is (to be)

patterned, because our body is what makes our thinking possible in the first place. "The soul thinks with reference to the body, not with reference to itself," says Merleau-Ponty.' Our body is the natal matrix of our mind, since our thinking is bodily, that is, embodied.

We will proceed thus. (14.4.1.) We see that abstract thinking 15 patterned after body thinking; (14.4.2. disembodied thinking is embodied thinking in self-deception; (14.4.3.) historical thinking is part of body thinking; (14.4.4.) body thinking operates by indirection; (14.4.5.) Western thinkers, such as Merleau-Ponty, must be warned.

14.4.1. Even the most abstract thinking is really patterned after the principle of the body. This may be one implication of Cezanne's "Nature is on the inside," and Chuang Tzu's "Heaven is on the inside" (17/50). It belongs to our hybris--our prejudice (pre-formed mindheart?), our "ego" (wo)--to conduct our thinking in total disregard of its bodily base; such a disembodied thinking lands us in various bogus problems and irrelevancies. And this may be one implication of Chuang Tzu's "The man is on the outside" (17/50); it is not without reason that Chuang Tzu nudged us, paradoxically as it may sound, to "lose the ego," the self-conscious, artificial, and contrived under a disembodied principle. Merleau-Ponty's project is the same, to urge us to return to our bodily matrix of spontaneous thinking.‘ ! Cf. 10.2. above.

The Primacy of Perception, p. 176.

? ch eng hsin, Chuang Tzu, 2/21-22. 3 sang wo, 2/3. 4 Cf. 12.4. above.

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14.4.2. Here an important question immediately emerges. If we are bodily, and cannot think without thinking from and through the body, whence disembodied thinking?

Why do we have to say, and what

do we mean by saying, "our body is that after which our thinking is (to be) patterned"? If it is (already) patterned, why "to be patterned"? These questions are similar to an objection raised to Aristotle and Chuang Tzu, that if we are natural, there should be no room for an imperative to become natural. "Become what you are" is unintelligible if not contradictory. For the imperative makes sense only if we can become unnatural, but if we are by nature natural, how could we have

ever become unnatural?’ The answer obviously is that it belongs to human nature to go beyond nature. Merleau-Ponty mentioned it as he began "An Unpublished Text of Maurice Merleau-Ponty: A Prospectus of His Work":? "We never cease living in the world of perception, but we go beyond it in critical thought--almost to the point of forgetting the contribution of perception to our idea of truth. . . . My works in preparation aim to show how communication with others, and thought, take up and go beyond the realm of perception which initiated us to the truth." This is our self-transcendence effected, say, in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason; he noted especially in its opening remarks, that reason can fix its

own

limit,

looking

back

on

itself.

Unfortunately,

he

did

not

specifically treat this curious phenomenon of human nature to go beyond nature. Nor did Kant, Aristotle or Merleau-Ponty consider with care the distinction between a natural going-beyond and an unnatural one.

We notice that our self-transcendence can go awry: we can go beyond nature naturally, and we can go beyond human nature by unnaturally "forgetting the contribution of perception to the idea of truth." Aristotle went beyond nature unnaturally; it took Merleau-Ponty ! I have tried my hand in answering this question concerning Chuang Tzu in my "Chuang Tzu te Tzu-hsiang Mao-tun (Self-contradictions in Chuang Tzu)," (in Chinese), in Cheh-hsüeh Lun-p'ing (Philosophical Review), National Taiwan University, No. 12, January, 1989, pp. 313-24. 2 The Primacy of Perception, p. 3.

14. THE THINKING BODY

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to go beyond Aristotle naturally. But even Merleau-Ponty did not detail what constitutes natural self-transcendence. Merleau-Ponty merely showed the natural root--our perceptual body--of all our speculative selftranscendence, and warned us against forgetting that root.' Unnatural self-transcendence manifests itself in disembodied thinking; natural self-transcendence is effected in body thinking. Body thinking transcends itself naturally in three ways: situational, historical,

and speculative. Situational body thinking is a metaphorical one, ferrying us over from one specific situation to another perhaps more wide-ranged situation--from "eldering" one's elders to "eldering" others's, from being alarmed at a baby crawling into well to unbearable compassion for people's suffering, from the human piping through the earthly one to the heavenly one. This differs from purely theoretical deduction of ethical injunctions from the universal Categorical Imperative, unless this Imperative is an inherent part of the bodily self at which the Imperative functions spontaneously. Situational self-transcendence (of a natural sort) works in another, painterly manner. As the body loses its object-like resistance to subjectivity and becomes the subject itself, I lose my subjectivity which opposes a tree that I see; this is what Chuang Tzu's mind-fasting (4/2632), that self-losing-self (2/3), means. Nishida Kitaro has an interesting elucidation of this situation, echoed later by Merleau-Ponty.” Shorn of influences from Buddhism and Bergson, Nishida's view goes as follows. I am now-here (that is, in my body) the selfless-self-with-thetree; my heartmind becomes one with the tree and meets the heartmind of the tree. My body is the locus (ba-sho) where the call of the tree and the response of my symbolizing self are one, where the intending understanding self is at one with the responding revealing tree. My body is where the tree spontaneously moves my painterly brush; the canvas 15 only the objectivation of this bodily locus. My body is where the self is "thing-ed and meets the thing itself";

here

"where,"

"thing-ed,"

and

"thing

itself"

need

explication.

"Where" is the locus-self (basho-teki jiko), the self in the nothing-locus ! Cf. The Visible, pp. 153-54.

2 Nishida Kitaro Zenshu (The collected works of Nishida Kitaro), Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 4: 234, 245; 5: 8; 8: 277, 283, 324-26, 328, Nishida, Kitaro, Zen no Kenkyo (A study of the good), Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, pp. 69, 47-48. Cf. also Yuasa Yasuo, Shin-tai (The body), Tokyo: Sobunsha, 1978, 1986, pp. 72-84. On Merleau-Ponty, see his "Eye and Mind" in The Primacy of Perception, pp. 159-92, Sense and Non-Sense, pp. 9-59, The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 105-62.

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(mu no basho), my body as self-lost, as selfless self (ware naki ware). "Thing-ed" refers to my body be-com-ing the tree as my self is un-selfed. "The thing itself" describes how the tree is un-object-ed as it is embodied in me. And all this describes, not a mystical absorption of identities, but the natural movement of my painterly brush, whether the

brush is in my hand or is my body, myself. History is the process of the self disappearing into pan-correlations of all with all. History 15 the selfarticulation (self-particularization) of the expressive world (hyogen teki sekai no jiko gentei). This brings us to the historical dimension of body thinking. 14.4.3. Historical body thinking extends backwards from the future (coming present) to the past (passed presents). The future present is always coming from the time-ly yonder to go through the present (ourselves) into the passed presents. Historical thinking goes along with this trend by constantly stretching beyond itself--from the present (ourselves) to the future, then from the future to the past, recording the

pasts, structuring past events in terms of our route of self-stretch. Then we realize that the present-self-locus from which we have stretched ourselves has been understood, meaningful,

all.

in terms of the past, after

To record the past events into a structured meaningful narration is finally to remind us that we must go along with what we have been through, and do not fail to learn from history, and thereby go back to naturalness (on pain of becoming unnatural-unhistorical), that is, behave

according to our inherent humanness.

In other words, historical judgments emerge when we shuttle back and forth in history. Now that humanity have been through it, we can discern, from: a retrospective distance, that a Solomon is more "historical" than a Hitler; we now see that the former deepened humanity! while the latter destroyed it. History gives us an imperative to natural self-transcendence. And such a historico-normative activity is itself a natural self-transcendence.^ Both types go from the concrete 1 Kings 3:25-26. ? Cf my "Counterfactuals, Universals, and Studies, New Series XIX, No. 2, December, thinking--thinking from the future to the past, "Chinese Universals" in my History, Thinking,

Chinese Thinking," Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese 1989, pp. 1-43, esp. pp. 8-9. Both types of body from the past to the future--are internally related. Cf. and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, pp. 175-210.

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313

through the bodily to the concrete. They never leave the situation. Speculative body thinking, in contrast, does superficially leave the bodily, by engaging in logically necessary demonstration which is supposed to be universally valid, valid irrespective of any specific situation. Speculative self-transcendence seems to leave the bodily; here the danger of unnatural self-transcendence is greatest. Merleau-Ponty's life-task was to issue this warning. It takes some "archaeological digging" to remind ourselves of the bodily nature of mathematics and geometry, and of the inherent bodiliness of logical necessity and universality.^ The human body is our perspective on the world, the locus where a valid step-by-step extension of understanding, analogical, or rather,

metaphorical,

understanding,

can

be made

without

sacrificing

concreteness. For the body is both a thing among others, and a vantage point at which understanding can take in all things within its reach. At the same time, this bodily principle does not dispense with concrete realms; the familiar realm to "take off from," the novel one to understand, and the familiar-novel two-way transition, back and forth,

constitute body thinking. Thus body thinking supplies the mediating principle of the body for analogical-metaphorical reasoning, thereby restores its rigor. By the same token, body thinking retains thereby the indispensable concreteness and novelty of the knowing process. It should be repeated, then, that body thinking is no more reducible to disembodied one than concreteness is dispensable in thinking.’ 14.4.4. But how does concrete body thinking operate? What is its method of thinking? Here we meet a dilemma: We can neither answer the question nor refuse to answer it. A refusal to answer betrays a method-less thinking, which is no thinking; answering it amounts to abstracting a theoretical methodology from the actual operation of body thinking, amounting to engaging in abstract thinking. Taoism has a way out, which Chinese philosophers practiced.* ' See 14.3.2. and 14.3.3. above. ? See 12.1 ., 13.1.,

14.1., among others, above.

ὁ See 16.3., below, on lei-pi t'ui-li usually translated as "argument by analogy" and its relation with logical necessity. ^ The seemingly identical exposition here with that in 2.3.1. above is intentional. There we had a straight explication of the ironic mode of argumentation; here we produce it in the context of explaining the indirect methodology of concrete thinking.

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Lao Tzu said (tao-ed), "The Tao tao-able is not the constant Tao." By admission of the saying (tao-ing) itself, this saying is "not the constant Tao," then. Then why say it? Lao Tzu did say it out, did produce the not-Tao,

thereby

bore

forth,

by

contrast,

what

1s Un-tao-able

(the

ineffable Tao), which 13 not said at all. What is inexpressible is then expressed after all. How? By calling attention to the saying's character of being not-tao, these no-tao's non-expressed the inexpressible.

All Lao Tzu's 5,000 odd characters are these no-tao's, and so are

all Chuang Tzu's, those 33 extant chapters in all. All between the "Heaven and earth are one finger," says Chuang Tzu (2/33), pointing to Something unsayable. For "The Great Tao cannot be called [so]" (2/59); even "tao" is a sobriquet, the way-things-go which alludes to that from which the way proceeds. And all other Chinese thinkers (historians, poets, "philosophers") followed suit. They "lifted one [corner of a square-of-things, for us] to return (fan) [to the other] three"; they talked and wrote by metaphoric implication, not by exhaustive explication. Why the way of implication, implicit logic? The structure of a living thing, the pattern of life activities, is the bones that betray their presences only within the activities themselves. When the bone appears, it must be medically put back in. Philosophy is a Socratic therapy, and body thinking is such a medical practice to put the bones back to where they belong, inside concrete actuality. What is said 15 manifest only as a pointer to what is there, unsayable. That is the structure of the concrete. Hence, the indirection of pointing. The "hiddenness" of the structure of the concrete can be "pointed" to through the hiddenness of the body in thinking, as follows. Merleau-Ponty, Kung-sun Lung, and Chuang Tzu’ have all mentioned finger-pointing. Let us consider this act. Usually pointing has the following two traits: (a) Pace Merleau-Ponty, when pointing at

something, we do not even notice the finger that points, nor do we note

the "virtual space" that Merleau-Ponty said the pointing finger imposes on "actual space." Then the finger becomes the intended-pointed; chih (with the "hand"-radical) is chih (without the "hand"-radical). And we now note only the thing pointed at; the "fish" is what we (want to) see,

! The Analects, 7/8. “In The Primacy of Perception, p. 7.

3 In 2/31-33, 3/19, 19/62, 22/47, 25/60, 33/76.

14. THE THINKING BODY

315

not the "fish-trap."' And yet (b) the fish is captured only by/in the fish-trap. The intended-pointed is effected (conveyed, communicated effectively) only through the pointer; without the pointer we would not have noted the pointed meaning. The meaning is pointer-filled, pointer-concrete, though without our noting the pointer. This sort of communication is a thinking process the concrete effect of whose pointer, though hidden, is felt throughout; pace Whitehead, there is no takeoff from the ground of

the concrete as in Western airplane-like abstractive thinking. The concrete is the hidden sine qua non in thinking; body thinking is a tacit hidden thinking.

14.4.5. The Western concept ([comrtcapere] a take-in) 15 grasped out (abstracted [ab+trahere] drawn-out) of actuality. The Chinese notion 15 a concrete story-pointer (metaphor) toward the grain in the jade-and-wood of things (li-principle). (Western) deductive demonstration proceeds via explicit premises made of abstract concepts. (Chinese) analogico-metaphorical reasoning proceeds via premises of concrete notions, story-pointers to the grain in actuality. In deduction, the major premise is an abstracted principle that mediates between the minor premise and the conclusion. In analogization, such a mediating premise is a discerned similarity hidden among concrete particulars. Chinese body thinking thus rests, half hidden, in the concrete, to metaphor (bring) us to the bone-structure ingrained in actuality. A warning, then, is due to Merleau-Ponty? who said that the purpose of his Phenomenology of Perception (and his philosophy) 15 to "define a method of getting closer to present and living reality." For this "present and living reality" is a union of the pointing finger and the pointed meaning; its structure is indivisibly concrete, forever implicit. "This level of experience" is called "primordial." Something primordial is literally the "primal beginning," our womb, an ineffable darkness from which we came. Our explication is by nature an act directed (pointing) ! Chuang Tzu, 26/48, cf. 13/64-74. ? This portion of our explication of body thinking register our disagreement with Merleau-Ponty, with whom we have agreed otherwise. See also Introduction, 9.1.2.3., 9.2., 9.3., 10.2., 12.3., 15.4., 16.3.2., and 17.2. Cf. our dialogues with Tillich (Appendix 4), Wittgenstein (Appendix 12), Wordsworth (Appendix 14), Grabau (Appendix 23), and Epicureanism and Stoicism (Appendix 30). Also see Appendixes 11 and 28 for a China-West comparison on specific topics. 3 Primacy, p.25.

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to something; an explicating act cannot be directed to that from-which the act came. Yet Merleau-Ponty said, this "fundamental experience . . . they [forms of knowledge] must render more determinate and explicit." He must be warned, then, that this is precisely what cannot and should not

be done. If we stop at every word in a conversation and ask about the word's correct usage, its word origin, its part of speech, etc., we stop the conversation. To examine--make explicit--the word, stops its flow; "The tao tao-able is not the constant[ly flowing, natural] tao." We will miss the fish if we pay attention to the trap. But perhaps Merleau-Ponty meant by rendering "more determinate and explicit" noting what Cezanne noted,” "that when the over-all composition of the picture is seen globally, perspectival distortions are no longer visible in their own right but rather contribute, as they do in natural vision, to the impression of an emerging order, of an object in the act of appearing, organizing itself before our eyes."

It is in this way that "The landscape thinks itself in me," Cezanne, who is hidden. For "Cezanne returns to just that primordial experience . . . Forgetting the viscous, equivocal appearances, we go through them straight to the things they present." Perhaps it is this "returning" that Merleau-Ponty meant by "making explicit." Thus going the route of rendering things's appearances explicit lands us in the hiddenness of the concrete.

But how about the thinking itself? When challenged that returning to the unreflective perception renounces reflection, MerleauPonty replied that the return itself is a reflection by which the unreflected is "understood and conquered . . . . Left to itself, perception forgets itself and . . . would probably dissipate itself in ignorance of itself or in chaos." When challenged that the pure reflection of the ! [bid., p. 34. ? Sense and Non-Sense, p. 14.

? Ibid., p.17. + Ibid., pp. 16, 17. ) Primacy of Perception, p. 19.

14. THE THINKING BODY

317

Cartesian Cogito is without bodily traces, Merleau-Ponty admitted that the Cogito as a psychic fact of my thinking experience "does not account for our idea of truth."' Are we sure of all this? For Merleau-Ponty, the process of returning to the pre-reflective perception is itself a reflection. We must be on the alert here. This "reflection" is not merely and purely reflective, but reflection led, covered, and supported by the unreflective naturalness of bodily perception--that "I think." And this cover, support, of naturalness hides this reflection in the mode of naturalness, hidden from lucid analytical reflection. In other words, the very "act" of Cogito-reflection (of which

Merleau-Ponty made much? as at the core of his philosophy) is an

unreflective fact-of-Cogito (with which Merleau-Ponty would have nothing to do, as quoted above’). Again, pure thinking must be covered and supported by the hidden naturalness of body thinking. To return here is to return to our body where all this happens. The body is the "pivot of the tao [the Way-things-go],"^ the zero point in the axis of all these proceedings; to notice this Unnoticeable (pivot, Tao) as unnoticeable, and to live accordingly, partakes of the freedom of the Logos of things. All this is that to which and in which body thinking is; this is body thinking, all too naturally.

' [bid., p. 21. 24-

Ibid., p. 22.

3

.

Ibid., p. 21.

4 Chuang Tzu, 2/30-31.

PART SIX: CIRCULAR CONFIGURATION Body thinking can now be considered self-reflexively, as a circular configuration. Section 15 says it is the characteristic of the concrete. Section 16 says that from this angle--configurative, concrete-we can now do justice to the sociality, historicity, analogical character, and perceptual truths of the human, our bodily existence. Section 17 says that beauty in logic and in life, as well as comparison of the West with China, can now be seen in a fuller manner, doing justice to the factual reality of the matter. Finally, Section 18 says that all this amounts to showing how our body thinking goes from the part to the whole in an analogical, historical and processive manner.

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15. The Configurative as the Concrete. The part-whole configurative thinking (15.1.) typifies our concrete body thinking that uses concrete concepts and arguments (15.2.). Its contrast with abstract theoretical thinking is nowhere more sharply manifested than in subsequent two comparisons cited (15.3., 15.4.). 15.1. Part-Whole Configurative Argumentation. So far it has been shown (in Part Five) that body thinking fulfills the twin conditions of thinking--necessity and universality--without disembodied abstraction, and by doing so supplies solutions to problems generated by disembodied abstraction. But body thinking has an operation other than linear argumentation in a necessary and universal manner. Body thinking typically engages in part-whole configuration, whose archetype is the constitution of the body. Configurative thinking appears in argumentation and in intersubjectivity, for the situation has meaning that Is configurative. How did T'ao Ch'ien live among men without hearing their noise? He just showed chrysanthemums, east fence, South Hill, flying birds, soft mountain dusk--all con-figuring a situation that is meaning, which so pervades that he "forgets words." He can do so because he was bodily situated there, apperceiving it. The reader-situation configuration makes for a reading of situational meaning. And configurative meaning of the situation is presented only configuratively, in words, among men. What is configurative argumentation? It appears in a mutual referrings among supportive clusters of notions, each defining and supplementing the other, neither one alone being definitionally complete, self-standing. Dictionary definitions among synonyms tend to be in this manner. Configuration manifests itself in mutuality. Chinese argumentation in general tends to be in such circular mutual configuration. For instance, notions in Chinese medicine, the J Ching, and divination mutually define one another.” As one enters this world ! The poem will be soon quoted. ? On configurative logic of Chinese medicine, see my review of Ted J. Kaptchuk's The Web That Has No Weaver: Understanding Chinese Medicine, in Philosophy East and West, Vol. XXXVI. No. 1, January, 1986, pp. 67-68. On configurative interrelatedness among literature, music, dance. painting, medicine, cooking, martial art, and politics, see my "Chinese Aesthetics" in

15. THE CONFIGURATIVE CONCRETE

321

and lives in it, one gets the feel of what is going on, and gradually acquires a knack and inner understanding of the convincing validity of such a thinking. It is this sort of configurative reading that Burton Watson was unconsciously referring to when he said, ' "In the end, the best way to approach Chuang Tzu, I believe, 15 not to attempt to subject his thought to rational systematic analysis, but to 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." | "Intuitive sense" here is the sense of configurative support in meaning. "The world in which it moves" is the "world" of movement of configurative mutuality; "it" is not just Chuang Tzu's thought but all Chinese thinking. 15.2. Concrete Concepts, Concrete Arguments. But how about theoretical "concepts" and "notions" used in thinking and argumentation? Do they have sensible bodily concretion? Yes, indeed. Merleau-Ponty gives us the situational impacts of color-words and sound-words that impinge on our body, and the word "hot" raises our body temperature in anticipation of heat-situation.^ Words are ministories, as vividly portrayed in Mencius' story after story about our innate, unbearable feelings of compassion for others (in suffering), about our tender concerns towards the tender-aged and the elderly. In China, generality connotes mutuality. My solicitous concern about this particular elder of mine, once mentioned, calls forth its generalizing into our respective, then common, concern about our elders, then the kindly concern in general for the elderly in general. Thus is the general

attitude to life, mutual heartfelt concern, that is evoked

forth.

Understanding the Chinese Mind: the Philosophical Roots, ed., Robert E. Allinson, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 236-64. ! Burton Watson,

The Complete

Works of the Chuang

Tzu, N. Y.: Columbia University Press,

1968, p. 7. Cf. also Vincent Shih's understanding of Chinese classics quoted in 18.2., toward the

end of this essay.

2 Phenomenology, pp. 227-30, et passim; cf. the motor-affective significance of depth, line, light, color, space, and the like, in vision and painting, in "Eye and Mind," The Primacy of Perception, pp. 179-86.

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Mencius went from there, this overall life-perspective, to its inevitable outcome, a governance of world concord under the wide sky. Such, then, is a cogent "argument" from the concrete particular to the universally configuratively concrete. An argument from stories 13 argument with gut-level mini-storied notions and concepts. To borrow from Merleau-Ponty, arguments from the concrete form a "poetry of the world"! which "sings the world.'" T'ao Ch'ien (372-427 A.D.) wrote this famous poem, . . . Plucking chrysanthemums under the east fence; Gazing long [at] the Southern Hills; The flying birds, paired, homing, The soft mount mist, dusk--

Herein is true meaning [that I intended]; Desiring-to argue [for it], Already words [are] forgotten. The poem

used mini-stories--chrysanthemum-picking,

hill-gazing, the

homing birds, the dusk mountain mist--as situational notions,to build up

an argument for a conclusion beyond any particular situation: An absorption in the here-now so much so that one forgets oneself right there, in the very point in which one lives--beyond any specificity. This is the concrete universal beyond words. Here "argument" is this poetic progression, this natural inevitable interwoven progression, from one concrete instance to another. This is a play of our situated mind (our minded-body) on situations, effecting a metaphoric argumentation from one situation to another beyond it. "Behind every abstract expression there is the boldest of metaphors, and every metaphor is a play upon words." Kung-sun Lung said, "White horse is not a horse."; the Western

philosopher would have said "Attribute is no substance." "Returning [homecoming] is a moving of the Way [things go]," says Lao Tzu‘; the | Phenomenology, p. 321. 2

.

Ibid., p. 187.

3 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens, Boston: Beacon Press, 1955, p. 4.

4 Tao Te Ching, Chapter 40.

15. THE CONFIGURATIVE CONCRETE

323

Western philosopher would have said, "Reversal is a function (energeia?) of the metaphysical principle of the cosmos." "The weak is a use of the Way," continued Lao Tzu,' but the Western philosopher would have had to scratch his head and concoct a dissertation on what it means. While Western philosophers pile sorites upon sorites for an abstract conclusion, Chinese thinkers weave a collage of stories (or story bits, such as "coming home [/an]," "the way things go" [tao]) for an evocation of indefinite number of concrete significant implications, which have been cohering, compact-ing, configuring themselves into one story-notion after another.” 15.3. Analytical Goldinger, Concrete Cua. An interesting example, analytical Goldinger criticizing Chinese Cua, shows how different the Western way of thinking is from the Chinese. Antonio Cua is a contemporary thinker who persists in mapping the difference between the Western ethical thinking and the Chinese. In pre-1980 days Cua proposed "ideal themes" and "paradigmatic individuals" as our inspiration for moral action. An ideal theme gives unity and meaning to our life without providing a life plan or norm; the theme inspires us without concrete guidance, "a sketch for which blueprints or ways of life may be developed," but not the blueprints themselves. Paradigmatic individuals are those who "paradigmatically embodied the theme in their lives . . . as a 'standard of inspiration' rather than as an action-guiding principle." Milton Goldinger insisted that Cua is vague and vacillating. First, having been inspired by ideal themes, a moral agent can adopt any conflicting ideal norms--utilitarian and/or deontological, for instance. He continued,

"If treating men as they deserve regardless of the consequences as the Kantian position requires and treating men in a manner that maximizes the goodness of the consequences as the utilitarian position requires can ! [bid., Chapter 40. ? What has been said about compact storytelling is this configurative clustering concretion. sections 2.2., 4.3.1., 7.3., 12.3.2., and Appendixes 5, 8, 11, 19, 20, 29, etc.

See

? A. S. Cua, "A Reply to Munitz," Philosophy East and West, XXV, July, 1975, p. 354. Cf. A. S. Cua, "Toward an Ethics of Moral Agents," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, xxviii, December, 1967, 163-74.

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both satisfy those who hold jen as an ideal theme, then the concepts of jen must be considered meaningless, . . . empty of content or without any criteria of applicability." Secondly,

if Cua

embodies the ideal theme

replies

that the

"paradigmatic

individual"

for us to emulate, and so relieves the ideal

theme of its ambiguity, such an individual is useless for Goldinger, for dictators and fanatic religious leaders can also be appealing idols and forceful models of many people. "Thus, before someone can be... paradigmatic, standards must be accepted which can be used to judge his conduct. . . [But, then] a paradigmatic individual as a model would be unnecessary . . " One can easily imagine Cua asking wherefrom Goldinger would get his "standards" if not through being inspired by the paradigmatic individual. And the argument becomes circular. And so, my reaction to the above controversy is ninefold. First, and most importantly, perhaps Cua's "ideal theme" embodied in the "paradigmatic individual" 15 an "inspiration" for "prospective" discovery of hitherto unnoticed (though embedded in our nature) goal of action.’ That such a project of discovery involves much vagueness ("compatible with mutually opposing principles") and risk ("following Hitler") goes without saying; vagueness and risk are the necessary price for novel "discovery." Only after the discovery of right action and its successful performance, or having watched someone who has succeeded in right action (paradigmatic individual), can one (or one's spectator) review it and realize that the success was due to (a) one's implied belief or assumption about human nature and (b) one's ideal norms, principles and rules based thereon. Second, trying to justify the ideal theme or paradigmatic individual by (a) and (b) above (as Goldinger insists we must) parallels trying to justify "A is A," on which logical argumentation is based, by logical argumentation. To try and justify that on which justification is ! Milton Goldinger, "Cua's Philosophy, 1980, p.46. 2

Analysis

of the

Chinese

Moral

Vision,"

Journal

of Chinese

.

Ibid., 0. 48.

> Cua did have "prospective morality" but it was taken in the sense that moral principles must be flexibly, not mechanically, applied. Goldinger replied that traditional utlitarians would rather gather more factual information "until it became apparent what the prinicple required." (Ibid.. p. 49.) One can retort that "to become apparent" requires more of our prospective discernment than retrospective basing on preset principles.

15. THE CONFIGURATIVE CONCRETE

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based is to put the cart before the horse, an impossible enterprise, as Aristotle also pointed out.’ Third, it may be necessary, after having followed the paradigmatic individual and realized that it was correct to do so, to formulate and clarify reasons why it was correct to do so. But these later endeavors only clarify and help; they cannot infallibly guide (legislate) our application of moral rules to concrete situations. In fact, these principles need always to refer themselves back to the fount of their inspiration for their corrections, adjustments, and appropriate applications to specific cases. Their correctness cannot be exhaustibly formulated into exceptionless rules of thumb, any more than a practical skill can be reduced to a foolproof scheme, recipe, blueprint. Perhaps this is one reason why debates over moral rules and principles never cease. Fourth, but how do we (realize and) find the paradigmatic individual even before having a norm to go look? We have here two points. (1) The final court of appeal must be in that original encounter where there is a somatic primal reverberation between us and the paradigmatic individual, as when people encountered Mencius and became his disciples. (2) And this somatic reverberation is the bodily empathy of the sort Mencius made much of, such as the sense of alarm at seeing a baby about to crawl into the well.’ Both points indicate the bodily feeling of rightness when we actually meet and see the way of life of paradigmatic individual as "paradigmatic"; in the end, thanks to this existential encounter, we come to notice that the paradigmatic individual (point 1) is in us when we are confronted with a novel exigent situation (point 2). This is what Mencius meant by the First Awakened sage awakening the Later Awakened followers.’ Fifth, one can imagine Cua, turning the table on Goldinger, retorting that rules and principles are inconclusive until they are seen embodied--applied--in actual personal life, and that once embodied and practiced in actual living, rules and principles are not needed. For, strictly speaking, to say that principle is incarnated in a paradigmatic individual is inaccurate. It is the paradigmatic individual, ! Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk IV, Ch. 3-4, 1005b6-1006b35. 2 Mencius, 2A6.

3 Mencius, SAT, 5Bl.

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not abstract principle, that originally confronts and compels us. It is only later that we discern "paradigm" in this paradigmatic individual; paradigm is a mere pale reflection of paradigmatic individual. Thus "principle" is a derivative, an abstract shorthand summary, of our original encounter that stirs and awakens moral practice. Furthermore, this pale replica of paradigmatic individual, called "principle," is incomplete until it finds its anchor, its reincarnation, in the practical living of those who are thus awakened later, and its successful implementation in subsequent novel situations. Thus personification (embodiment) is the origin and the destination, the very raison d'étre, of principles and rules. We should go to the paradigmatic individual, not the paradigm and principle extracted therefrom, for primal paradigmatic inspiration and its implementation. In any case, we can see here some difference in emphasis between thinking in the West and that in China. The former sees no truth in a person until the person's practice is tested by principles a priori; the latter cannot trust any principle until it is seen embodied in paradigmatic individuals, that is, tried out and practiced in personal life. Sixth, for principled application cannot itself have guidance by principles. Practical application of principles must be guided by a personal living-out of principles, which is after all a concentrate, a compact expression, a shorthand story, of this "living-out." Here in the ethical sphere’ we need as much personal apprenticeship as we do in music, carpentry, plumbing, engineering, and medicine. This is not to deny (as Cua seems to) the necessity of principles and rules, which are to be seen, not as blueprints to be "deductively" (mechanically) applied (as both Cua and Goldinger seem to), but rather, as Confucius said, as so

many "raisings [of] one [corner for us to] revert [to the other] three [in the "square" of rightness of things and acts],"* that is, as so many evocative initiatives for our project of (ethical) living. Such principles come alive to us only by being personally shown and applied. The FirstAwakened gives us this personal evocative initiation. Mill "lifted" a utilitarian "corner"; Kant did a deontological one; Confucius tried it with ! Paul Ricoeur says that narrative constitutes personal identity, and provokes the narrative identity to "decide," therefore narrative identity is something ethical. I take that this sort of ethics is not "Choose theory A," but "Choose!," an existential ethics. See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, The University of Chicago Press, 1988, 3:246, 249. For our purpose, paradigmatic individual can be said to consist in "narrative identity" projected onto the screen of ideals, to induce our ethical decision. 2 Analects, 7/8.

15. THE CONFIGURATIVE CONCRETE

327

his personal growth of jen, human(e)ness. Seventh, we are then awakened to that vision, and to press ahead

thereto creatively, in our own lives in our own manner. Even after capturing that vision to try its application--following the personal examples of the First-Awakened, the paradigmatic individuals--we still need our own creative flexibility to live it out. Everyday begins with a fresh morning and a new challenge. Every person is awakened by the First-Awakened to new discovery and new application, each in her/his own way, silently, somatically. Here words fail. Chuang Tzu has to "shout" it out in a story:! "Duke Huan was-reading a book . . . ; Pien the wheelwright waschiseling a wheel. . . Letting-go-of the mallet and chisel . . . [he] asked, αν [I] ask what words [are] they that [my] lord is-reading?' "The words of sages.' 'Are the sages around [yet]? ‘Already dead.' 'So then what [my] lord is-reading is mere dregs of men [of] old.' '[While] I am reading, how dare a wheelwright comment; [if you] have an explanation, then all right; [if you] have-no explanation, then [you] die.' Wheelwright Pien said, '[Speaking for myself your] servant, [your servant] looks-at it from [your] servant's work. [In] chiseling a wheel, [going] slow slides [the chisel] which does-not stay, [going] fast catches [it] which does-not enter. Not slow, not fast, [I] get it in hand and respond in heart. Unsayable [from the] mouth, the knack? is there in its midst. . . . [Your] servant's son cannot receive it from [your] servant... . Men of old [are] now dead with their unconveyables. So then what [my] lord 15 reading is mere dregs of men [of] old." This story Awakened, we are way in every new processes what is forever inventive,

vividly tells us that, awakened as we are by the Firstawakened only to be trailblazers, each in her/his own situation. A robot has nothing new; it mechanically programmed in advance. A person, in contrast, is perceiving situational cues, flexing the principle,

' The story which ends Chuang Tzu, Chapter 13; my translation. 2 Shu, "knack" (Graham, Watson), also means "number" or "to count" And so, unlike its homonym shu (pure skill, method, device), this "knack" is a dexterity that is calculable, that is, rational, yet logically indescribable, because it is incorrigibly somatic. "Shu" is the reason of life (Ortega), the practical reason (Kant) in the truest sense of the word and, pace Kant, too practical to be expressible.

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engineering daily living, to try out, if not carry out, whatever vision-utilitarian, deontological, utopian--has awakened and aroused him/her. Thus ethical life is the life of engineering ever fresh trials at each dawning of new situation--"getting it in hand, responding in heart," totally, personally, somatically. Having been inspired by paradigmatic individuals,

we

come

to

become

anew

such

individuals

constantly finding new knacks in the midst of daily ongoings.

ourselves,

Eighth, incidentally, Cua seems later to have dropped his emphasis on "ideal theme" and "paradigmatic individual." These two notions no longer appear in his Ethical Argumentation of 1985. Chinese thinking seems not to stick to a constant use of technical terms, or their consistent use. One remembers such celebrated terms as "Tao," the "Heaven and earth," "Five Elements," "Ch'i," and the like. They are

more convenient tools of expression than fixed foci for constant thinking orientation. If one insists that Chinese thinking does have fixed foci, we must note that they are our body and its cosmic bearings, and that they are tacitly assumed in all the above debates. Finally, all the above amounts to this. The ideal themes, the paradigmatic individuals, prospective discovery of rightness in each new situation, the commerce between the "early discerners" or "firstawakened" (Asien chüeh) and the "later" ones (hou chüehy and the historicity of such body thinking, all come to form a configurative circle in which we live and have our beings as human. 15.4. Merleau-Ponty and Chinese Body Thinking. This brings us to some subtle differences, three for now, between MerleauPonty and Chinese thinking, although both recognize the importance of body thinking, and remain in it. First of all, Merleau-Ponty is solidly in the tradition of Western philosophy, arguing with both empiricism and idealism to establish his phenomenology of bodily perception. He explicitly states that "Phenomenology could never have come about before all the other philosophical efforts of the rationalist tradition, nor prior to the ! Antonio S. Cua, Ethical Argumentation: A Study in Hsün Tzu's Moral Epistemology, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985.

? Mencius, 5A7, 581. 3 Cf. 14.4.5. and the first note there.

15. THE CONFIGURATIVE CONCRETE

construction

of

science.

experience and this science."

It

measures

the

distance

329

between

our

And, insisting as he did on the simultaneous emergence (at the moment of perception) of the perceiver and its correlated perceived object, Merleau-Ponty has to say that "man perceives objects," and so he "must speak of man and objects separately." There results a "contradiction . . of immanence and transcendence," as Brehier pointed out.” In other words, Merleau-Ponty argued, and that in a traditional Western fashion, in the traditional Western frame of reference--subject, object, intersubjectivity, epistemology, and the philosophical program from perception through knowledge, language, history, culture, to Logos. Secondly, after "modeling itself on the natural aspects of the world" through its senses, the body "turns back on the world to signify 1t It is at this crucial level that body thinking turns situational particularity into universal meaning. And it 15 at this expressive, signifying level of body thinking that Merleau-Ponty and Chinese philosophers part company. For Merleau-Ponty, meaning is obtained by transmuting random events into the rational? by transforming our perceptual life? This is how we "extract meaning" to perform algorithm.° It is thus that our bodily gesture, our gesticulation varies according to meaning. | In contrast, in the Chinese world meaning stays with the situation; meaning is a compacted situation. A ready example is Chuang Tzu's following story:' "Lord Yüan of Sung wanted a picture painted. All the scribes arrived, were given tablets and stood in line licking their Primacy of Perception, p. 29.

* Ibid. ? Ibid., p. 7. 4 Phenomenology, p. xix. ? Primacy, p. 8.

? Ibid. ! Chuang Tzu, 21/45-47.

、

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brushes and mixing their inks; as many again were waiting outside. There was one scribe who was last to arrive, sauntered in as though he had all the time in the world, took a tablet but did not join the line, then went off to his quarters. When the Duke sent someone to have a look at him, he had taken his clothes off and was sitting there naked with his knees out. 'He'll do,' said the Duke. ‘He is the true painter." This story was later compressed into four vivid characters, "clothes off, knees out" (chieh i pan po), to be an often "mouthed phrase" (K'ou-t'ou ch'an) a "technical term" floating among the artists. Yü K'un, for instance, explains the phrase as the true painter's attitude,’ "with one's 'lordly' mind, with the whole

‘Creation ({sao-hua,

change-made)' in bosom, not bound by the 'worldly common (shih su, i.e., customs),' 'hit-[and]-break (ta p'o) (monastic) rules and regulations [literally, 'clean-square, vow-regulations']. This is how the immortal ('incorruptible') work comes about."

For all these vivid descriptions the West would have used "autonomy," a rather faint echo. In China, a cliché, a technical term, is an often"mouthed phrase (literally, 'mouthed Zen,' k'ou-t'ou ch'an)."

Another interpretation of the phrase, "clothes off, knees apart," is offered by Ts'ai Yung who said that the phrase means to be "scattered

(san),"

that

is,

"let-scatter

one's

bosom-embrace

(hsiung

huai,

1.e.,

cherished ideas), let-go-of feelings, bearing, character." Yün Nan-tien has "as-if no one around" (p'ang jo wu jen) to characterize the phrase.’ Again, for all these vivid phrases the West would have substituted "unrestrained freedom," a rather colorless abstraction.

All the above have been cited to show that, in China, every concept is literally a compact story, a caption-picture, of a concrete situation. Chuang Tzu's story above of 60 characters is carried around in a pithy descriptive phrase of four characters; the phrase 1s never reduced further. Even its explanations are couched in vivid descriptions. (See Appendix 20.) In China, it is particularly appropriate to say that all ! Yü K'un, ed., Chung-kuo Hua-lun Lui-p'ien (anthology on Chinese theories of painting), vol. 1, p. 3, Hwa-cheng Shu-chü, 1984. 2 Quoted in Ke Lu, Chung-kuo Ku-tai Hui-hua Fa-ta Shih (a history of development of ancient paintings in China), Tan-ch'ing T'u-shu Yu-hsien Kung-su, 1987, pp. 10-11.

13. THE CONFIGURATIVE CONCRETE

331

thinking is poetic, and all poetry is painterly. Chinese body thinking never leaves the situation.’ Thirdly, and related to the above two points, when MerleauPonty said that our "body is our point of view on the world," he indicates two traits of his thinking that betray his objectivism despite himself. (1) The body as he said is "on the side of the subject," for a point of view is assumed by the subject, that in which the subject is, that from which the subject looks at the world. The body as our point of view is then the subject's outlook on the world, the subjective stance of the subject. (2) Yet a point of view is assumable by the subject; the subject can freely put down one point of view to assume another. Also a "point of view" is a correlative term--that on the world, significant only in terms of the world, and can be revised and improved on by the subject. It is something objective and manipulable after all, though situated on this side of the subject. Joining these two points, we can say that the body as our point of view on the world is something subjective ("the body") looked at objectively ("point of view"). It is in this sense that we can say that Merleau-Ponty looks at body thinking (thinking which recognizes the importance of the body as our point of view on the world) from a systematic (logical), external point of view. Moreover, although the body is our point of view on the world, we cannot replace our body with another. Our body is our irreplaceable point of view on the world, and "irreplaceable point of view" sounds odd because a point of view is by definition replaceable with another. Merleau-Ponty with other phenomenologists adjust this difficulty by that famous varying of profiles and perspectives; but however one walks around a vase to get its rounded view, what one gets is one's view, not someone else's from someone else's point of view. This oddity perhaps indicates that our body is not (just) our point of view

on the world,

but just capable

of functioning

as such,

! On the poetico-painterly character of Chinese thinking, see my "Sound, Sight, Sense--The Chinese mind and the Prospect of Comparative Philosophy," in Wen-Shih Cheh-hsüeh Pao, Vol. 36, December, 1988, pp. 231-284. On the aesthetic mode of Chinese thinking, see my "Chinese Aesthetics," in Robert E. Allinson, ed., Understanding the Chinese Mind, Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 236-64. ? The Primacy of Perception, p. 5.

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among other functions. In other words, the body as our point of view on the world is not the basic trait of our body. This is another way of realizing that, to say that our body as our point of view on the world, although a striking discovery, is to look at our body from an external (functional) point of view. In contrast, there is no such objective split and existential oddity in the Chinese thinking in terms of the body, the Chinese body thinking. Merleau-Ponty's "body" perhaps partakes of the connotation of t'i as in "hsin kuang t'i p'an" (The heartmind broadened, the body fattened)'--we do not say "shen p'an." For shen is the visible monogram of the subject, the way the subject concretely moves, the behavioral arc of the subject, the shen shih (life experience; we do not say t'i shih). Shen is that to which we point and say "Here is the subject." Shen simply is the subject (in the world and in history), not just that point of view in terms of which the subject looks at the world. To realize that the body also functions as a "point of view" comes later, when we assume a bracketed if not objective stance on the body. T'i is one of the modes of being of the subject, how it appears in the world; the basic mode of being of the subject is shen, how the subject lives as such in the world.’ But all these explanations seem forced. Usually the Chinese people just innocently think and talk about the self without even specifically thinking about the body that goes with it; these thoughts about shen and t'i (and chi [self], too) are so much taken for granted that ! The Great Learning, No. 6. ? The recent empiricists (e.g., Jonathan Harrison, "The Embodiment of Mind, or What Use is Having a Body?," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1973-74, 774, pp. 33-55; Arthur C. Danto, "Basic Actions," American Philosophical Quarterly, 1965, 2, pp. 141-48) usually take bodily continuity to constitute personal identity, so much so that Richard Swinburne has to greatly flex his intellectual muscle to refute it, saying that "while evidence of continuity of body, memory, and character is evidence of personal identity, personal identity is not constitute by continuity of body, memory and character." (The Coherence of Theism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977, 1986, etc., pp. 119-20) Three points can be made. First, Swinburne has a theological axe to grind, i.e., the bodiless Spirit must be personal. One can retort that "God is person" functions like "God is light." God is not

light but its source, as "medicine is healthy" means it produces health.

Hence, the Incarnation.

Second, perhaps God is then neither body nor personal but behind both, being their ground, leader, dynamism or, to use theological language, their parent-creator, brother-redeemer, heart-inspirer. Third, the empiricists (and apparently, Swinburne, too) mean by "body" empirical body from an external point of view, in the sense above explained. Cf. further, Stuart F. Spicker, ed., The Philosophy of the Body: Rejections of Cartesian Dualism, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970.

15. THE CONFIGURATIVE CONCRETE

333

they do not even come up for conscious discussion. It is in this sense, then, that we can say that Chinese thinking looks at (although "looks at" is itself an accommodation to objective thinking) "body thinking"-thinking in (terms of) the body, in the manner of the body as an identification of the self--from an internal, existential point of view. In general, only in this sort of Chinese body thinking can evocativemetaphoric thinking and argumentation (which is the way we think) come out naturally, unproblematically. By the same token, only in this light can we understand the Chinese mind, about which Lin Yutang said that! "Both peoples [Chinese and British] have a profound distrust of logic and are extremely suspicious of arguments that are too perfect. We believe that when an argument is too logical it cannot be true." To be critical of usual logic is possible only in the stance of body thinking. In contrast, rhetoric and its beauty in the West can have a bad connotation, suggesting an oratorical cheat that bewitches the audience into embracing an invalid argument. But a valid argument can also powerfully persuade; its persuasive beauty should not detract from, but on the contrary enhance, its validity. There is such a thing as true persuasiveness. "Argumentations" in Chinese philosophy are usually beautifully rhetorical as well. Their persuasive punch is often, understandably, lost in English translation. The Eight Great Essayists of T'ang-Sung Periods are superb rhetoricians; they merely continued the tradition of Chinese stylistic beauty. Both the Great Learning and the Doctrine of the Mean are respectively integral wholes of argumentative rhetoric. The Mencius and the Chuang Tzu are composites of beautifully carved pieces. Rhetorical persuasiveness of these essays helps clinch the argument, as do valid steps in argumentation. Where is the difference between invalid rhetoric and valıd one? We have ready on hand an impressive battery of the "organon" of logic inthe West. What needs to be done is not to challenge its legitimacy but to reconsider its significance. assessed

Two points are important: (a) The organon of logic should be from the viewpoint not of mechanical precision, but of

! With Love and Irony, N. Y.: The John Day Company, 1934, p. 5.

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rhetorical legitimacy and inevitability. Logic is an essential part of rhetoric. What is valid constitutes what is beautiful; true beauty 15 valid and all validity beautiful. Once this point is forgotten, we head for a separation of precision of the mechanical from organic integrity of the human. The separation breeds logical barbarism and rhetorical sophistry. For coherence without relevance is empty logic, and relevance without coherence is blind barbarism. True coherence is valid and beautiful, beauty being the coherent real. Coherence is beautiful, beauty is coherent, and logic is a grammar of coherence. Logic is a grammar of thinking coherence that convinces the thinker as valid. Beauty is real coherence that attracts, evokes, and tunes up our life into a real coherence. It would be odd if the grammar of coherence were to be itself incoherent and not beautiful. It is unthinkable for logic not to be somehow beautiful and for beauty not to be somehow logical.

16. PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF BODY THINKING

335

16. Concrete Significance of Body Thinking. We understand better some concrete aspects of human existence when we are in the configurative thinking of body thinking. Sociality (16.1.), historicity (16.2.) are understood in an analogical manner, a common version of which we can examine and correct (16.3) before we move on to seeing the interrelation between the analytical and the perceptual (16.4.). 16.1. Sociality in Configurative Thinking. The part-whole configuration in socio-ethical world of intersubjectivity can best be expressed musically. Cellist Terry King once said, "In music, every note 15 special." It is the notes that make up music; without notes music simply disappears in a thin air. And it is in music that notes are made precious; outside of music every note is just another noise. Only in music each note manifests its special individuality. Notes are individuals, bodily situations; music is bodily argument. Each note, each individual, in its own particular manner contributes to constituting the whole music of argument; the whole differently constitutes the integrity of each. And individual integrity is bodily constituted. As music is good to the extent that its notes are well played, so the community is as strong as the high quality of its people and their adequate quantity. How good the people are, so good is their community; too many or too few people make a weak community. Moreover, as a sound becomes a special note only in music, so I become myself only when I am bodily situated well in a social network; social body thinking shapes the self. To be a person is to become oneself as sovereign or subject, as father or son, as spouse, as sibling, as friend (to

quote from the Five Relationships). person, to fulfill a social position.

To be a person is to behave a social

And to be a person is to become it, to live a specific social person, to behave like one. To become a social person is to fulfill a specific set of social obligations, to behave appropriately in that position, to live an occupation and fulfill its obligations. To forfeit such occupational obligations is to forfeit living that social position; it is to forfeit oneself. Thus Mencius in his typical pungent manner declared that the ruler failing to fulfill rulership, "looting humanness, maiming righteousness," is a mere "ruffian" fit to be assassinated.’ | Mencius, 1B8. From a different perspective, Rene Le Senne saw that "duty" arises out of our experiential unity of the I, in his penetrating phenomenological metaphysics in Obstacle and

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As in society, so in logical order--the part lives in the whole. As the straight line of the horizon we see belongs to the contour of the globe, so the linear logical order in which we perform demonstration belongs to the musical configurative order of nature. We can see the beauty of logical appropriateness, of argumentative validity; we cannot think of a single instance where things are musically appropriate, configuratively coherent, but logical invalid. And yet, although we cannot find a single musical rhythm that is "logically invalid," nor can we imagine anything musical that is illogical, we can see that there could be something logical that is nonmusical. And when logic goes wild--obsessive, abstract, purely calculative, something logical can turn crude and offensive, threatening to become either trivial or tyrannical. And we would rather praise inconsistency than practice brutal consistency. All this shows that the linear logical order is part of and subject to the configurative order of musical beauty--metaphoric understanding, perceptual synthesis, and historical reciprocity, all of which are three aspects of part-whole analogical togetherness. To begin with, our understanding goes configuratively in three stages. (1) Our body meets the calling of the situation, and we are evoked to (2) extend our eyes through the familiar here which points to the unsuspected novel over there; this is metaphoric progress. (3) Then we compare the familiar with the novel and retrospectively realize their similarity, and thus expand our understanding by assimilating the novel into the new

novel.

familiar,

i.e., the familiar renovated

by the assimilated

Meaning is configurative connection seen among things. An idea is our reflection of meaning, our feat of association which enables us to understand one thing in terms of another. Such metaphoric association is therefore configurative. These steps form a configurative circle of epistemological assimilation--evocative start (at the curious in the familiar), metaphoric progress (from the familiar to the novel), retrospective realization (of similarity of the novel with the familiar). Secondly, from our bodily point of view, a thing obtains through our perceptual synthesis, again in three stages. We (1) walk around a Value, tr., Bernard P. Dauenhauer, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972. ! On the meaning of "meaning," see my Butterfly, pp. 364-73, 500 (Index on "meaning").

16. PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF BODY THINKING thing, or turn it around, and we (2) encounter a

series of profiles.

337 We

then (3) retrospectively obtain a sum of this series of profiles to realize this thing here and now. A thing 15 a configuration, a configurative circle of ontological appearance. Finally, we realize that both these syntheses, metaphoric, perceptual, are temporal ones; both our knowing things and our finding things are processive, retrospective, exhibiting a historical configuration. Truthful to Lao Tzu's adage, "Returning is the moving of the Way," I Ching's configurative hexagrams circulate, and the Yin-Yang divinatory Five Cosmic

Powers of Elements flow and ebb in circles, internecine,

inter-nascent. Chu Hsi makes little sense until read configuratively; here

a bit, there a bit, and then they cohere

into a point here, another one

there, and another. How about Chuang Tzu? He told stories. History is storytelling, which is therefore historical, a giving of an account, a retrospective recounting. Sartre said,’ *...aman is always a teller of stories. . . . sees every thing... through these stories . . . While you live, nothing happens. The scenery changes, people come in and go out, that's all[,] . . . an interminable and monotonous addition. . .. But when you tell about [it], 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." To tell a story is to remember, to recount, to "catch time by the tail," to

historize, in short, to con-figure. Chuang Tzu's argumentation is historical, in a down-to-earth bodily manner. Besides, Chuang Tzu is historical in another sense. His stories tell of a new meaning in a situation, an exploratory language which is so provocative as to seem senseless. What shows it to be inevitably sensible is its evocation in the hearer of a coherent vision of new configuration. This power of provocative communication is the power to create new history, the history of conveying new configuration to others, a con-figuring history that goes in a bodily experiential manner. ! Tao Te Ching, Chapter 40. ? Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, tr. Lloyd Alexander, N. Y.: New Directions, 1964, pp. 56-59.

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16.2. Historicity in Configurative Thinking. Now we are in a position to understand better that to engage in body thinking 15 to realize that we are in history. On the one hand, it belongs to the nature of the bodily subject that it interacts with its environment. And the environment (intra-bodily, inter-bodily, extra-bodily) changes and shifts systematically, that is, the pattern of the change can be intelligibly discerned (if only imperfectly and retrospectively). The subject is a unity of functions growing steadily with the patterned changes of the world. This orderly change (and its realization) is called history. Body thinking is historical 1n nature. On the other hand, a thing 15, from the standpoint of the body, an open series of sums of indefinite variegated perspectives--this "open series of sums" is history. This growth, this change, is history. Thus "thing" and "subject" are inter-defined historically. This means that, among other things, the interactive body adjusts its mode of thinking to the patterned-changes of the world. This is to say that the logic of thinking changes historically; thinking is a function of history. Body thinking 13, as situated in the world, historical thinking. From the perspective of the body, we have seen both that logical necessity has a performative a priori (something empirical’), and that historical eventuality has contingent necessity (something logical’). That 15, logical necessity is obtained only through its being (or being ready to be) performed in a certain manner, that is, "validly." And historical events in all their contingent openness implicate an infrangible inevitability that pontificates an intelligible order on our thinking. For the inevitability of the series of happenstances forms a rhythmic thrust that demands and shapes our understanding of their trend--we call it "history." On this "history" can say three points: (16.2.1.) History can be understood as the music of life; (16.2.2.) apodictic and normative truths are historical; (16.2.3.) actuality is somatically historical. 16.2.1. History is like a music of life. In music, one must weave meaning between the expected and the unexpected, neither to bore (as Perlman does) nor to manipulate (as Heifetz did) the listener. ! See 14.3. above. ? See 13.1. above.

16. PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF BODY THINKING

339

Or rather, the great performer produces the expected in the unexpected (not leaning on the expected, as Perlman does), and the unexpected in the expected (not leaning on the unexpected, as Heifetz did). Such a performance is rightly called "inspired," breathed-in with the divine breath of life, the performance that is alive. This is not to contrive through difficulties but merely to follow nature. For so is nature. Nature the expected pattern of growth (patterns and) natures our growth unexpectedly--the season follows the expected pattern, while everyday is different. To be alive is to be both different in the same and same in differences--in short, to be natural. Necessity in nature is incalculable, weaving out a logic of surprises, if one but has eyes to see its ever novel pattern, and ears to hear its ever fresh rhythm. Historical reason 15 natural; it is synthetic (not analytically boring) and a priori (not haphazard and arbitrary). Thus both the actual and the necessary form a complex, an interfold, a chiasm, in the body-performance of our life. This is because the body is both what is thought about, an empirical thing among things, and what thinks about things and discerns an intelligible order in them. The body performs that behavioral arc that makes sense through time, and performs that thinking (both about things and about itself, both "thinging" things and "self-ing" itself) that is valid for all time. The body is thus the fold-line in the inter-fold between necessity of thinking and contingency of the thought-about, the inter-fold that is the world. Thus we can even say that thinking (its logic and pattern) changes with the trend of time. This does not mean that modus ponens, say, changes, but that the way, 1.e., the logic and the pattern, in which we

use modus ponens shifts with the shifts of the situation, depending on who uses modus ponens where, when, and how. This is how the logic of the revolutionary clashes with that of the powers that be. Everyone is right, backed by one's own system of ideology, one's "philosophy of life," one's "way of looking at things" from where one is situated. "History" is a rhythmic wave formed by conflicting performances of various logical-bodily thinkings that join issue, thereby co-create wave after wave of situations through a series of conflicts.' ! What saves us from relativistic confusion is our common sharing of human bodiness, which situates itself in perceptual interactions with the world, modeling itself to the world, turning on the world to designate, and to signify it, to find meaning in it--in a word, to symbolize (be throwntogether-in) it. All these bodily activities form a communicative system--calling, responding--with others, a human unity. The same human bodiliness, the same human community. This is why anthropology, archeology, sociology, psychology, and political sciences--in fact, all sciences--are possible. For sciences are a network of intersubjective inter-bodily communication--calling, understanding, responding.

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16.2.2. Even the so-called apodictic truths develop historically. The Pythagorean theorem has become a partial truth in a more comprehensive system through inter-development of geometrical theorization. Such development is a manifestation of history. Apodictic theorization is then historical. Today's truth becomes tomorrow's partial truth, as today's perception is corrected and incorporated in tomorrow's. Perceptual historical truths are organically tied to intellectual interactions. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, "Thus perception and thought have this much in common--that both of them have a future horizon and a past horizon and that they appear to themselves as temporal, even though they do not move at the same speed nor in the same time. . . . [They] are capable of being true provided we keep them open to the field of nature and culture which they must express. . . What is given is a route, an experience which gradually clarifies itself, which gradually rectifies itself and proceeds by dialogue with itself and with others." History is this interactive, gradually to intelligibility.

intersubjective

"route"

that

"proceeds"

How about the normativeness of this historical body thinking? We remember that Kao Tzu's writings are now lost, and Hsün Tzu was not canonized by any of the dynasties of government, which variously

As a tree falling in the forest emits sound, were someone to be there to hear it, and as a thing is a sum of indefinite series of the subject's perspectival views, were there to be a subject at all, so "1+1=2" is true if someone is here to operate it. 1+1=2 is as synthetically operational ("synthetic a priori") as "sound" is perceptual and a "thing" 15 grasped in perceptual synthesis. Both perception and operation linger to make up history. And since the passage of time is both perceptuallyoperationally experienced and situated at the base of the universality of apodictic thinking ("true of all worlds"), even the universality of thinking is historical. Thus we see change in sameness--same modus ponens, different modes of using it. And we see Sameness in change--same bodiness, different situations mutually interacting; same systems of highway, different destinations; same love, different families. All these different sameness-indifferences and differences-in-sameness form "communities," mutually interfusing, mutually communicating.

! The Primacy of Perception, p. 21.

16. PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF BODY THINKING

341

practiced his views. Mencius was, despite his caustic warnings about people-primacy people-rooted governance, which warnings were not heeded. Why? Somehow through the ups and downs of history, something came about to call our normative attention. History itself thus forms a normative sieve to sift ideas and render judgments. Is this sieve "good" enough? Two bodily points show that this question is, though intelligible, unanswerable. (1) History is not at all external to us. On the contrary, we are history, or at least its vital ingredient. We are the bodily constitutive stuff of which history is made. History is the growth of our live activities, including our most abstract speculative engagements. (2) History is an ongoing story without its "finish," from our bodily standpoint (and what else do we have?). Once I am finished (dead), I no longer exist to see my finish; I exist as unfinished. Since we are part of history as an ongoing process, and we are (exist as) unfinished, the End of history is for us a contradiction in term.’ From point-(1) we can say that to ask about the validity of history is analogous to asking for the proof of the reliability of the law of contradiction on which the proof is based. It is not proper to demonstrate the propriety of historical judgment, for the demonstrative process is itself historical. From point-(2) we can say this. The question about the reliability of something is possible only when there exists a "something" to be judged, and "a something" means "an already finished something."

History is, however, we ourselves (in it), unfinished and

unfinishable (while alive), who yet ask about this very history. Therefore, we cannot (not in a position to) ask such a question. These two conclusions together amount to saying that judgment requires distance from the thing to be judged, history cannot be distanced from us, therefore we cannot judge history. On the contrary, it is history which is constantly judging us. We the judged are not in the position to judge the judge. And so, on surface, historical argument is circular. What is retained as historical is what is pronounced--as "good" or "bad." But what is pronounced historically turns out to be really so, and this "turning out" is an historical process. This circularity indicates that we bump our judgment against the wall of "ourselves." We cannot go beyond history; historical judgment is the final one for us. "A man is ! Merleau-Ponty said the same thing by showing how "a fully and definitively achieved painting is an idea bereft of sense," in The Primacy of Perception, pp. 189-90.

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judged after his coffin is sealed" (kai koan lun ting); of this judgment we the judged shall not know, for such knowledge requires our getting out

of our coffin to look at ourselves.

All this describes our historical

inherence in our body; our body makes history in which we move and have our somatic being. But, paradoxically, this is not to say that the judgment of history on us is completely out of our reach, given our human nature of selftranscendence.

We can talk to ourselves, reflect on our past, plan for the

future. Our past 15 our "coffin," and we do in a sense shed it to renew ourselves. This is accomplished every morning, when we get out of our bed,

our

"coffin."

Besides,

we

have

others

as our historical mirror,

imperfect though they may be--in public opinion, journalistic report, peer evaluation, and the like. Yet I know that such historical knowledge of myself is out of my hand. History 13 the I existing after I cease to exist, that 1s, not as I existing in my body but I as existing in the hand of the other, and in the future where I am no longer--bodily. I know this much. But this my self-knowledge, my history, is no longer mine; it is out of my hand, unknown to me. For all this knowledge is possible only from the point of view of my body, which has to cease to exist for my history to be complete, to be judged. These two phenomena,

self-transcendence and other-reflection,

give us our awareness of the existence of history and its judgment. But since both these phenomena are themselves part of history, they are a mere imperfect exhibition and reminder of the existence of historical judgment, not all of its content. We know that there is history and its judgment. We do not know precisely what it is, much less whether it is true and valid.

And we know that we do not know thus, and we know

enough to know why we do not know thus. This describes the historicity of our body thinking. | 16.2.3. Actuality is neither chaos nor order, but their primordial historical combination, which it was Cezanne's life passion to capture with his painterly brush.' "Cezanne did not think thought, between order the stable things which they appear; he wanted

he had to choose between feeling and and chaos. He did not want to separate we see and the shifting way in which to depict matter as it takes on form, the

! M. Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, 1964, p. 13.

16. PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF BODY THINKING

birth of order through spontaneous organization. . .. wanted to paint this primordial world . . . "

343

Cezanne

Perhaps this is one possible meaning of Chuang Tzu's animated and enigmatic Hun Tun that goes on, and this going-on--this "shifting way in which they [things] appear," this process of "matter as it takes on form," this "primordial" continuous "birth of order" (sheng-sheng pu hsi)--is history. This capturing of the process is bodily Logos in action; this process is a bodily Logos; this bodily Logos is history, a historical Logos clothed in the flesh of contingency. What does this historicity of our body mean? Five things at least. First, I am my "project," literally a "throw-forward" from here now to there thenceforth. This is how I live and this is what I am. This means that, secondly, the meaning of my existence is seen only from the projected completion of my project, my assumed future--" assumed" both as taken-up and as taken-as-completed, presumed, pre-assumed. 1 understand myself through my completed future, my completed before completion (coming - to - completion). But, thirdly, this self-understanding-backward (from the future), this retrospective understanding, is historical understanding, in this case a futuristic historical understanding. And this complex fact, fourthly, has a complex consequence. On the one hand, since I understand myself from my future completion which is yet to be, I am free. On the other hand, since this future completion is a completion (albeit pre-assumed) of past projected aspirations--since this completion depends on those (nows that were) on which the retrospective understanding looks back-and since these nows are determined, I am determined. And so I am the crossroads of these two moments of life, a determined freedom.

Merleau-Ponty puts it dramatically:'

"But to say that we are from the start our way of aiming at a particular future would be to say that our project has already stopped with our first ways of being, that the choice has already been made for us with our first breath. . . . If I am a certain project from birth, the given and the created are indistinguishable in me, . . . it is... impossible to name a single gesture which is . . . not spontaneous--but also | Sense and Non-Sense, p. 21, cf. 24-25.

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impossible to name a single gesture which is absolutely new in regard to that way of being in the world which, from the very beginning, is myself... . It is up to us to understand both these things simultaneously, as well as the way freedom dawns in us without breaking our bonds with the world." "Bonds" here are significant; they are echoes, allusions, repetitions from one moment of life to another--my past and future mutually symbolizing, my childhood and adult life mutually defining; they converge to form none other than myself. All this, fifthly, amounts to the following: If this circular mutuality between the past and the future forms myself and my world, forms myself con-forming (to) the world--if I

am

determined

freedom,

then

the

crossroads

of

this

circular

"determined"-ness is the integrity of my bodily life. This is my concrete bodily freedom that is understood only retrospectively. My freedom is my bodily historicity. This is the historicity of my body thinking. 16.3. Analogy in Configurative Thinking. Now, historicity is one manner, in time, of grasping part-whole configuration, from the viewpoint of the part. The so-called universality in thinking is really a grasping of this comprehensive fullness of the whole through reciprocal reflection of parts obtained everywhere, this interweaving of metaphor and

metaphored,

this

inter-involving

of

before

and

after,

this

interdependence of community and individual, this configurative shuttling of all between everything and everything else. The "logic" of grasping this part-whole configurative synthesis, starting at the part, is usually called reasoning by analogy. Ch'en Jung-chuo in his "Tso-wei Lei-pi T'ui-li teh Mo P'ien (Mo P'ien treated as [on] argumentation [by] analogy),"' claims that Mo P'ien is a treatise about analogical argument. With some reservations on his expositions both of Mo P'ien and of analogical argument itself, I still regard his essay as a significant support to my claim that Chinese argumentation is predominantly metaphorical, that is, analogical. I shall here use "metaphorical" and "analogical" interchangeably. The following four sub-sections are some of my thoughts about the relation between analogical connection and logically necessary connection, and the significance of the relation for life: (16.3.1.) Analogy goes from a particular to particular; (16.3.2.) analogy is a "logic" of discovery, of experience of principle; (16.3.3.) analogy is a logic of experience; | Taipei: E-hu Journal, Vol. 2, 1988, pp. 1-26.

16. PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF BODY THINKING

345

(16.3.4.) analogy is a logic of growth. Aristotle is correct when he said that analogy is not deduction from the whole to the part or that from the part to the whole; instead it goes from part to part. We must caution ourselves here, however. "From part to part" is a phrase possible only from the perspective of a general principle overseeing the entire argument. But analogy has no overall principle; here "part" is a retrospective word, meaningless during the process of analogical reasoning. Aside from this point, analogical reasoning does go from a particular to another. "If P then Q; not Q; therefore, not-P" (p. 12 in Ch'en's article) 15 a modus tollendo tollens (mode of denying by denying), with "If P then Q" as an overseeing principle. "P is like Q; not Q; therefore not P" is an analogical reasoning where "P is like Q" depends on concrete observation. In general, deduction goes from the general to the particular, and induction reverses it. The "punch" of both argumentations is derived from the general. Analogical argument goes from the particular to the particular; its punch lies in its discovery of the novel on the strength of similarity seen between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Analogy or metaphor (pi) is a logic of discovery (of similarity among particular things), of (my) coming to a new realization, and thereby of persuasion (of others). Thus the analogical argument is an inherently concrete argument. The mere form of "A:B::C:D" cannot tell us whether or not the argument is correct; we must look into the actual cases of A, B, C, and D, especially into the appropriateness of D. When a correct

D

is found,

there

is a "but,

of course"--"but"

indicates

a

surprised discovery; "of course" shows its persuasive "necessity," the appropriateness that strikes us as apt. This analogical "necessity" differs from the logical one that tends toward the trivial staticity of "A is A." This is because logical necessity originates in the formal procedure of deduction from an overall principle, thereby guarantees that the deduction is inescapable, that is, necessary. But this guarantee is obtained by confining the whole procedure to an already known general principle, hence a tendency to be trivial. Analogical necessity in contrast has no such overall guarantee from above; it is instead the inevitability of situational similarity which is discovered for the first time by this analogical argument. Ch'en cites four forms of /ei pi: (1) "p'i" ("to clarify this by ! Prior Analytic, Volume 2, Chapter 24.

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citing that";! (2) "mou" ("terms paired [pi] and walked in-parallel [chi hsing]"; this is "A:B::C:D"); (3) "yiian" ("you being so, how could I alone not be so?,"? an a fortiori argument); (4) t'ui" ("to give the identity of what is not taken [too clearly false to adopt] with what is taken [asserted]";* in other words, "P is like Q; not Q; therefore, not P"). But these are modes of how pi (analogy, metaphor) functions than what pi is, which is simply to "know the upcoming from the bygone, to know the hidden from the apparent." And the basis of this operation is "to take by lei; to give by lei." Here lei can mean genus to which specifics belong, and then /ei pi will be a regular deduction via major premise that presides over the entire logical process. It is when lei is taken as a newly discovered "similarity" that pi is really pi, a going from the particular to the particular, metaphorically. And so Ch'en is mistaken when he took "lei" in "lei pi" to mean a genus (t'ung lei, i lei) that governs the terms of comparison--"A and B both belong to C; A is D; Therefore, A is D." (p. 5); this is syllogism. Instead "/ei" should mean an analogy, a metaphor from the concrete familiar to the concrete unsuspected. All we know in this metaphorical process is its start; it is a first step taken in the fog, and no one is sure whether or not the new direction pointed to is the right one.’ "Even our mathematics no longer resembles a long chain reasoning. Mathematical entities can only be grasped oblique procedures, improvised methods as opaque as unknown mineral. Instead of an intelligible world there radiant nebulae separated by expanses of darkness." ! Mo P'ien, 45/4, 5; Ch'en is mistaken on p. 5, where he explains p'i-analogy both belong to C; A is D; therefore B is D." Analogy has no C.

? Ibid., 45/5. ? Ibid., 45/5. + Ibid., 45/5, 6. > Mo Tzu, 18/2. ° Ibid., 45/2. 7 M. Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, p. 3-4.

to

of by an are

be "A and B

16. PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF BODY THINKING

347

But because of this, this concrete "darkness" (Chuang Tzu's Hun Tun)! is all the richer for all its unfathomability. Analogical reasoning is concerned with this concrete riches; therefore its meaning is as inexhaustible as the meaning of a tangible thing, and can never be fully expressed. Instead of the background of clear intelligible principle, pi is silhouetted against the atmosphere of concrete ambiguities; pi is the latent silent reason in actuality. The unity (and transference) of senses radiates from the center called lived object that is "lived" in our body. That is where analogical reasoning starts. 16.3.22 Plato's Republic can be instructively compared to the Mencius. Both are dialogues, exchanges of arguments, and mixes of thinking, ethics, politics, cosmology. But the Mencius stays on the level of analogy; the Republic soared beyond it. The entire Republic can be taken as a gradual ascent from the argumentation that goes from particulars to particulars to the principle (Form) that governs it. Once the principle is found, however, the previous argument through particulars is dispensed with, and Western philosophers go into an elucidation of what this overall principle consists in. With the ascent, the flesh-and-blood relevance to actuality is gone. Preoccupation with rules of discourse stops discourse. Here if there is any discovery, it is in the realm of theory, for instance, a new theory and thesis coming out of

old ones through their theoretical extrapolation. And such an extrapolation is unwittingly patterned after the old discarded mode of analogy. Logical moves are analogical moves made explicit, and then discarded via the mediation and governance of the general principle. Ch'en cited (pp. 19-24) four fallacies mentioned in Mo P'ien (45/13-30). Unfortunately they are four examples, not four kinds, of fallacies, fallaciously attributing likeness to terms of comparison when there is none. Besides, we are not told--much less in terms of /ei pi itself--why they are fallacious, or in what their fallaciousness consists, and how to avoid it. Perhaps /ei pi itself, as a logic of exciting discovery, does not examine its own discovery, nor does it have time or resources to do so. Analogical argumentation cannot on its own account tell the correct /ei pi from the incorrect one. Such a Socratic examination is left to usual ' Cf. also the beginning of the Chuang Tzu, the "Northern

1/1-2.

? Cf. 14.4.5. and the first note there.

Darkness," the "Southern Darkness"

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logic. Perhaps usual logic serves as a grammar to check on the propriety of the language of /ei pi that informs; logic follows and retrospectively checks on analogy. If logic leads, then it functions as means of further analogical evocation, not as logical examination. Intuition of a new view comes suddenly, attended with immediately felt convincingness. But after the dawning of a new vision, its validity must be confirmed retrospectively, laboriously to show (prove in so many steps) how it sheds light on our experiences and problems. That is, confirmation shows us (demonstrates) how problems and scattered experiences take on a new hitherto-unsuspected configuration, which confers new meaning on past experiences and solves or dissolves problems. The dawning of new intuition is sudden, coming via evocation from situational cues, to metaphorically transpose us to a new view. Its confirmation is a continuous historical labor, an asymptotic reasoning process toward understanding its validity and significance. Or more accurately, there is, first, an analogical intuitive jump to the new view -"jump" in the sense that the obtaining of the view is yet to be guided by a middle term, an overarching principle. After the analogical jump, there is a metaphorical transition from the new vision to its significance for all previous experiences and problems, that is, "transition" of our attention from the new vision itself to taking it as a new viewpoint, now as a new light that illuminates, thereby focuses, coheres, and crystallizes all our past scattered experiences. To put it negatively, unless we first experience an overwhelming intuition of a novel view, all the later reasoning and confirmation remain futile and

irrelevant;

without

confirmation,

this

initial

intuition

shall

remain sporadic and superstitious. But then the terms--ambience, context, criterion--of significance must originate in the initial intuition. One must be converted to experiencing things in terms of that novel intuition, before one can understand what one is confirming. Thus reasoning of discovery operates contextually, and then reasoning in confirmation evocatively occasions the listener's conversion, and metaphors the listener to that new vision and point of view originally intuited. 16.3.3. All this amounts to saying that reasoning serves experience, which is always to experience-as. To put it in Russell's terminology, knowledge by description is effective only within the context of knowledge by acquaintance; the former works only after the

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latter has come to pass, analogically, evocatively. Someone said that he understood Dewey only after he stopped intending to criticize. This shift of attitude (from critical to understanding), of context (from evaluative to empathic), of experiential matrix, of universe of discourse, is what intuition of new view effects.

And this shift is a somatic one, a

shift of our bodily way of life. It may be that usual logic is analogy pushed to its limit, that logical implication is a taken-for-granted analogical relation, and that general overarching principle is just a shorthand summary of correct analogical transference. Merleau-Ponty defended psychoanalysis against its charge of "lack of evidence. Why this and not something else? . . . [E]xcluding all differential cases beforehand, it deprives itself of any counter-evidence." He says, ' "[I]f the suggestions of the analyst can never be proven, neither can they be eliminated: how would it be possible to credit chance with the complex correspondences which the psychoanalyst discovers between the child and the adult? . . . Rather, it 1s like the words of the oracle, an ambiguous symbol which applies in advance to several possible chains of events. To be more precise: in every life, one's birth and one's past define categories or basic dimensions which do not impose any particular act but which can be found in all." This defense can be applied to analogy. Here "correspondences" are analogies; they are "found" through bodily-experiential analogization. This is not surprising, because psychoanalysis often goes by a sort of analogical argumentation, understanding the present through the past, by seeing the past patterns repeating in the present. In analogy (metaphor, lei pi) we meet the "premeditation of the unknown" (Merleau-Ponty). The givens of our bodily life, such as heredity, environment, are the "symbol," the first term, in the analogical argument; the term gropes itself forward (upward) to freely interpret and extrapolate itself. One's early life projects itself into (analogizes toward) his future work. This particular accomplishment of this man called for this life; as his early life, so his later accomplishment. This is the metaphysical sense of the early life, that is, its metaphorical, analogical sense, a possibility that is

certain to actualize into that man's accomplishment which can be known ! Sense and Non-Sense, pp. 24-25.

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only after it is accomplished. If everything is similar to everything else in some respect, then analogical relation can be seen to obtain everywhere--hence the freedom in analogy. Yet this freedom is determined by how "in some respect" is determined by one's concrete situational viewpoint, which in turn is determined by how one was born and raised. This bodily-existential bond of similarity can be called an analogical-metaphorical bond of life, as determined as it is free. This is the historico-metaphorical base on which Mencius's argumentation proceeded. A. C. Graham recently made two points’: (1) Correlative thinking (that is, "analogical thinking") is before analytical thinking both in time and in space: analysis proceeds where correlation already is, Which is also necessarily in the foreground of analysis. (2) The West gradually loses its interest in detaching itself from correlation to analysis--largely due to several thinkers, such as Ryle's "category mistake" at the base of analysis, Kuhn's "paradigm shift" that Is a correlative switch, Derrida's "chains of oppositions" at the base of logocentric thinking, and Wittgenstein's literalistic meaning-naming as actually an operation of metaphorical "family resemblances." Graham's conclusion from all this is that "analytical thinking can never escape correlation deposited by habits or initiated by new insights," although we can critically move between the analytical and the analogical-correlative. We add to the above insights the following three points: (i) "Correlation" comprises analogy, metaphor, and paradigm, (ii) all of which start at our body, constituting an ensemble of body thinking, (iii) which in turn redefines and explains logical-analytical necessity. But how do analogy, metaphor, paradigm, and correlation differ from one another? They differ primarily in emphasis. Analogy is an initiation of correlative thinking; metaphor describes the thrust of such a movement; paradigm is a pattern (of metaphor) whereby thinking operates; correlation is a more general term that sees relation of two terms as a unit(y) of thinking. It is in the shift of paradigm that thought progresses through metaphor-ing, patterned correlatively in an i Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument Publishing Company, 1989, pp. 322-24.

? Cf. a footnote on ibid., p. 324.

in Ancient China, La Salle, Ill.: Open Court

16. PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF BODY THINKING

analogical manner. The analogical patterning of metaphoring dynamic correlative shifting of our accustomed paradigm.

351

is a

16.3.4. All this is the moving logic of discovery that is our thinking. This is the pattern of body thinking on the go--growing. If logic is the structure of thinking, then metaphoring is the patterned movement of the logic of thinking and such a movement is the body thinking that grows, for it is the body's nature either to grow or to die. Growth 1s a patterned movement toward novelty. Being a movement toward novelty, it is surprising; being a patterned movement, it 1s sensible and convincingly inevitable, what is "necessary" as logic calls it. Furthermore, growth is both something strenuous, requiring constant nurture and avoidance of injury, on the one hand, and something natural, what is inherent in the very definition of "nature," on the other. And, indeed, "sing" as used in the fourth century BC in China meant, not so much "the qualities that a thing had to start with (as in 'nature')," as the course of life-development proper to a thing. Mencius often described human Asing in terms of plant growth and the vegetation on the Ox Mount (6A7, 648). Thus the movement of growth is both historical and destined, contingent and necessary, nurturing and innate, descriptive and prescriptive; so is body thinking. How does this movement go? A. C. Graham said,’ "One of the first to appreciate that the analysis of concepts does not detach them from presupposed correlations was Ryle, the argument of whose Concept_of Mind may be converted into the correlative ratios.... Ryle. . discredit[s] the dichotomy of a body . . . extended in space and a mind which is not. He observes that our habit of treating the mind as different in kind from, yet interacting with, the body which is a machine, implies crediting it with a similarity . . . The mind as 'ghost in the machine' has to be conceived as 'a spectral machine." This has led to well-known difficulties; how can willing, which is non-

spatial, cause the limbs to move in space... ? Ryle sees the ! See A. C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao, pp. 124-25. 2 Disputers of the Tao, p. 324.

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problem as arising from an improper correlation at the back of thought: "Mind: head, hands, feet :: ruler: subjects! . . . which the

advent

of mechanistic

science

turned

into

hands, feet :: governor engine: other engines'...

'Mind:

head,

He invites us

instead to try out new correlations, 'Mind: head, hands, feet ::

University: colleges, libraries, playing fields, . ..

On this

approach, analytic thinking can never escape the correlations.."

Here, it is a metaphoric shift to extrapolate from [mind: body :: ruler: subject] to get to [mind: body :: governing engine: other engines] in order to explain the mind-willing causing the body-moving. It is another paradigm-shift to change [mind: body :: governing machine: other machines] into [mind: body :: University: colleges, libraries]. It is important to note that these two kinds of correlative shifts-metaphoric (pi) and paradigmatic (hsing)--are effected (1) through the body and (2) on the basis of the body. (1) The body carries out this shift; without the bodily movement the shift would not have occurred. And the body effects the shift only in so far as the shift is palatable to and approved of by the body, which therefore is the principle of the shift. (2) And the body moves-shifts this way in thinking rather than that because this way is more "preferable," more somatically appropriate, more comfortable. Therein is the value-thinking that is bodily. All Mencius's debates about how to take the metaphors of willow (6A1), water (6A2), the white (6A3), the internal (6A5), and so on, about the nature of our nature, ultimately follows the bodily preference. All Mencius's hortatory arguments from metaphor are to be read in this light. All this metaphoric thinking is bodily, and is the base and the end of all our thinking. Formal logic is a formalization of this thinking; the logical can be taken as formal transformation of the analogical. Therefore all thinking is (metaphoric-paradigmatic movement of) body thinking. 16.4. Analytical Truth, Perceptual Truths. Self-evident and analytic truths are the same for anyone who understands them. This is because their being true follows directly from our understanding them. Perceptual and empirical truths, in contrast, reflect experience which is unique to each individual. Are these two kinds of truths totally different from each other?

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353

They are both based on experience. The self-evidence of analytical propositions lies in that their analyticity means that their truths directly follow from our understanding them, our understanding is our experience of understanding, and their self-evidence lies in their self-evincing of truth in the identical manner in all our experiences of understanding them. The evidence of the truth of perceptual proposition also lies in the overlapping identicalness of our various perceptual experiences, socially and historically. If I doubt if what I see is a tree, I ask you, him, etc., to see if there is a tree there.

I can also look at it

again and again, from this angle and that, to confirm what I initially saw.

Thus both analytical and perceptual truths are based on the identicalness of experience. Their difference lies in how we obtain those truths. The analytical truth is obtained by the identicalness of our experience of understanding; the perceptual truth is obtained by the identicalness of our experience of perception. The identicalness of understanding directly follows from understanding; the identicalness of perception is a social and historical overlapping of perceptual experiences. Both kinds of truths are experiential. Since experience is bodily, both sorts of truths are bodily. The necessity of the analytical truth, such as 7+5=12, means that

were anyone capable of understanding to understand 7-5, she will always conclude that their sum is 12. It is in this sense that "7+5=12" is always true. The truth of perceptual proposition, such as "A falling tree in a remote forest must emit sound," means that were anyone capable of hearing to be near the falling, she would have surely heard the sound. It 15 in this sense that "A falling tree in a remote forest must emit sound" is always true. Thus nothing is changed; analytical truths are analytical, and empirical truths, empirical--one differs as before from the other. What is added here is the factor of (bodily) experience. As the perceptual empirical truth necessarily implies perceptual experience, so the analytical truth implies experience as its necessary factor. An empiricalperceptual truth requires experience to be meaningful, freed. from being neither true nor false. Similarly, unless it is understood ("correct understanding" is a redundant expression here), an analytical truth is meaningless--neither valid nor invalid. Furthermore, there is rationality (of natural inevitability) in

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veridical perception as there is perception (of steps and their validity) in rational argumentation. Argumentation and perception, then, share a common rational and experiential basis, which is our body. This is why perceptual experience has an "objective" basis and rational argumentation has a "practical" bearing and impact in the world. The common base of experiential rationality is revealed in the structural parallelism between perceptual experience and rational argumentation. The rationality of an argument lies in its capability of being checked by further arguments about it. And the argumentative steps count as confirmation of the validity of an argument, because of our prior assumption that our argumentative steps (based on some basic logical principles) are valid. It would be irrational not to assume so, for these steps are what it means to argue. All these--(1) checking an argument by further arguments, (2) belief in the validity of argumentative steps, (3) belief in basic logical principles--constitute rationality in argumentation. A parallel situation obtains in perception. (1) The truth of a perceptual experience is checked by further, that is, later and other, perceptual experiences. If you are not sure what you see is Peter, go see again, or call those who know Peter to go see. (2) We believe that these further perceptual experiences count toward a confirming evidence of a perceptual truth, because (3) we assume beforehand that our perceptual experience (among common normal persons) is veridical. We see then a parallel structure in argumentation and perception--checking an argument and a perception by further arguments and perceptions, believing in these steps of checking, and believing in logical principles of argumentation and in the sanity and respectability of common perception. And all these beliefs are in turn based on and justified by our experience that we have our body and that there exists the world (of things). And so, let it be repeated, nothing is changed; necessity is necessary, universality universal, and contingency contingent. We only stress that all this is bodily and experiential. "Analytical" means that a notion (meaning) is contained within the range of experience covered by another notion or word. "Analogy" means a process of discovering something new at the prompting of some cues in a familiar situation. "A priori" describes! the necessity of our coming in to organize ! Cf. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, A125.

16. PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF BODY THINKING

355

and unify various appearances to our senses. This bodily performance is what is required (hence, "necessary") according to the "nature of our mind" to constitute "experience of nature" as we call it. This is an a priori operation because it is our subjective operation before experience comes to be. It is our necessary constitutive condition for the possibility of experience. The a priori is "subjective" in two senses: (1) "the subjectivity of space explains how it is that all objects of (outer) experience must be spatial" (from the point of view of the Aesthetic), and (2) "the 'determination' of space depends on the activity of understanding" (from the point of view of the Analytic).' And the twofold subjective conditions (i.e, the self) for experience is what makes the a priori truth "true for all times," that is,

"necessarily true," and at the same time "constituting the concept of [hence, true of] an object." Brittan said ruefully,’ "Hans Reichenbach makes the interesting remark that 'Kant's concept of a priori has two different meanings. First, it means "necessarily true" or "true for all times," and secondly, "constituting the concept of an object." It is possible that part of our present difficulty in reconstructing a consistent Kant is owing to his failure to distinguish sharply enough between these two meanings...'"

Pace Brittan and Reichenbach, we must insist that it is natural that Kant

did not stringently distinguish, much less separate, the "necessary" from the "constitutive." In any case, all this prepares us to understand Brittan's explanation of many important notions. Brittan said,’ "A sentence is analytic if it is true in or of all possible, i.e., consistently describable, worlds. A sentence is synthetic just in case it is not analytic. A sentence is synthetic a posteriori true in case it is true in or of the actual world... . but not in or of all really possible worlds; it is . . . an accidental or contingent truth. A sentence is synthetic a posteriori ! Gordon G. Brittan Jr., Kant's Theory of Science, Princeton University Press, 1978, p. 106n. 2

e

Ibid., p. 139.

3 Ibid., p. 24.

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false just in case it is true in or of some really possible worlds and false in the real world. A sentence is synthetic a priori true just in case it is true in or of all really possible worlds, including the real world, but it is not true in or of all merely possible worlds, for example, the propositions of Euclidian geometry. A sentence is synthetic a priori false just in case it is false in or of every really possible world, for example, the propositions of non-Euclidian geometry." What is to be noted in all this is that all this amounts to explicating what has been stressed, i.e., all our thinking, whether logical, ontological, or empirical, are bodily performances in actuality. We must remember that the so-called scientific confirmation (verification) by experiments merely confirms our experience, and does not take its place. Experiment is a repetition of experience, and such a repetition is a reinforcement, not replacement, of experience; experience

15 the base of all experiments. Some experiences, immediate ones, cannot be repeated, and yet they are indubitably true all the same. They are my situational experiences (I am sitting now); they are my personal experiences (those of my kindergarten days). In fact, all experiences are uniquely immediate, each differing from the other. Scientists must "control" their experiments so as to extract from those varied experiences some features they share in common; this is called "scientific confirmation." And such a theoretical extraction (abstraction) show that the flesh-and-blood experience is unique and at the base of all our knowledge, scientific and ordinary. Even that radical skeptic David Hume said that we do not really have the option to disbelieve in the reality of the world in which we live. "We may very well ask, What causes induce us to believe in the existence of body [i.e., matter]? but 'tis vain to ask, Whether there be body or not? That is a point, which we must take for granted in all our reasonings." And likewise in perception. G. E. Moore said that these assumptions cannot be challenged because they are the standard of the veracity of a perceptual experience, the very definition of what it means to properly perceive. It would be irrational not to abide by them.” ! David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part IV, Sec. 2, Selby-Biggs's edition, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898, pp. 187-88. ? G. E. Moore, "The Refutation of Idealism" in Philosophical Studies, N. Y.: Humanities Press, 1922; "A Defense of Common Sense," in Philosophical Papers, N. Y.: The Macmillan Co., 1959; Some Main Problems of Philosophy, N. Y.: The Macmillan Co., 1953, Chapter 1.

16. PRACTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF BODY THINKING

357

In sum, as in argumentation, so in perception. All these-checking a perceptual or argumentative experience by further arguments and perceptions, belief in the veracity of logical principles and perception in general, belief in the existence of things and the world-constitute rationality in perception, and experiential ambience and basis in argumentation. Our thinking, like Antaeus in the Greek myth, can remain perpetually young, strong and lively so long as it can foot itself firmly on the ground of the mother Earth.

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17. Some Concluding Remarks. We now have only to capture what has been considered about configurative circularity of body thinking by (17.1.) considering beauty in logic and in life, then (17.2.) moving on to a final comparison between the West and China, and finally (17.3.) tying up the entire consideration by answering some lingering questions. 17.1. Beauty in Logic and in Life. We will here first (17.1.1.) explore how related beauty and logic are, then (17.1.2.) see how body thinking achieves threefold coherence in the world, (17.1.3.) how the achievement amounts to our growth via differences, (17.1.4.) how life negativities contribute to the growth, (17.1.5.) how violence is part of those negativities, (17.1.6.) how the very right-wrong distinction depends on this growth, and finally (17.1.7.) how all this enriches our understanding of what logic really is. 17.1.1. All that is explicated above amounts to saying that beauty is relevant to logic and logic is essential to beauty, that beauty makes sense and logic attracts our sublime sentiment. Real coherence is the con-crete,' the organic. The organically concrete is most discernible through its prime exemplification, the bodily. Therefore, beauty, logic, and the body are a triune dynamism of the really real, and the body 13 what we are, through which we partake of beauty, the real logical coherence. Beauty is empty and senseless if it is not beauty of the real. Beauty then is what renders logic relevant to reality. And the locus of all this happening is our body. But actually all beauty is not recognized as valid, nor is all validity beautiful. How does beauty add (logically) to validity? Can an already valid be "more valid" just because it happens to be beautiful as well? How is logical validity relevant to beauty and beauty to validity? These questions seems unanswerable. But aren't these questions unanswerable because they beg the question? For they make sense only if one pre-assumes that beauty and validity are separable. But our uncertainty persists; we want to know how "ugly" validity, if there be such, becomes "more valid" by adding beauty to it. We must be cautious here, however. Is "ugly argument" possible? If beauty and validity are two sides of the same coin, the coherence of the real, validity should be beautiful and beauty valid. We should not I.e., the concresced that is concrete.

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359

separate what nature has joined. Of course to praise the penmanship of a written-out argument is not to praise the beauty of that argument. Penmanship is a mere decorative aspect of the real (if the argument is valid), and decoration 15 pretty but not beautiful. But, then, what does a "beautiful argument" mean? How does it differ from straight argumentation that pays no attention to the beauty of its logical steps? The answer is that the so-called "straight argumentation" is already beautiful, if it clinches the conclusion and convinces the reader. A beautiful argument persuades and convinces by its sheer power of coherent validity. When every point fits and contributes to bringing out the conclusion, the argument is as beautiful as a persuasive performance at the Orchestra Hall or at the Olympic arena. But how do we know, wherefrom do we derive, the fit, the sense of the relevance? The sense of fit, in the final analysis, is something athletic and organic; the final principle of fit and coherence (of anything) is our body, as the above metaphors of musical and sport performances suggest. Kant said that all our categoreal reasonings came from our primal distinction of the right hand from the left. Kant should have added that this right-left distinction is bodily. All our reasoning is bodily. George Schrader's comments on this point bear quoting. He said,! ". . Immanuel Kant 15 the only philosopher who ever wrote an essay on... orientation. In 1786 he published an essay... : What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking? [Cassirer, IV, 349ff.| ... It is really very simple to orient oneself geographically, he says, for I can always appeal to [my] right and... left hand. "Without the capacity to distinguish between motion from left to right and that in the opposite direction. . . I would be unable to determine a priori any difference in the position of objects. . . . 'Thus I orient myself geographically by all the objective data of the sky only by virtue of a subjective ground of distinction [namely the right or the left hand]. . . ' [What Is Orientation in Thinking?" in Critique of Practical i George Schrader in Charles W. Hendel, ed., The Philosophy of Kant and Our Modern World: Four Lectures Delivered at Yale University Commemorating the 150th Anniversay of the Death of Immanuel Kant, N. Y.: The Liber al Arts Press, 1957, pp. 30-33. I wish he elaborated on this point of somaticity of thinking.

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Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy, tr. L. W. Beck (1949), p. 295.] This isa... simple observation, but not so ordinary . . . , for it lies at the base of Kant's theory of space and time, and thus of his theory of knowledge. One of the reasons which Kant gives for holding that space is intuited is the impossibility of . . . interchanging a right-hand for a lefthand glove. [Cf. Prolegomena zu einer jeden kunftigen Metaphysik, Sec. 13, Cassirer, IV, 34ff.; see also Von dem ersten Grunde des Untershiedes der Gegenden im Raume, Cassirer, II. 395.] . . . [I]n our intuition and construction of space, . . . the frame for . . experience, we begin with our own body. . . . However elaborate and comprehensive our conception of space and the world in space may be, it is always tied to . . . our having a right and a left hand. ... [A] map... is of little use unless he [a man lost in a forest] knows what actually is to the right and what is to the left. It is necessary to establish a connection between the map and the situation of one's own body before one can make an intelligent move. . . In our knowledge, whether scientific or metaphysical, we must begin where we are, with our own existence. This shift in orientation from transcendent reality to the finite subject constituted an essential moment in the 'Copernican Revolution.' It gave rise to a reassessment of truth and a new interpretation of knowledge." Kant says that our intuition of space begins with our distinction of the right hand from the left. Spatial coordinates are involved in thinking. Since space-intuition is bodily, thinking is bodily. Our thinking is body thinking, bodily performance. 17.1.2. Thus all our reasoning is bodily. Our thinking can now be widened to include, besides "logic" as it is usually called, analogization, historical storytelling, implicit metaphor. And here the regular logic manifests itself as not abstract and universal, but as the map of the body (as well as the world) and the flow-chart of the bodily "performance" of thinking--organic, beautiful, real. It is now a grammar of bodily beauty. We can already see an application of the above meditation. The principle of medical ethics is bioethics, the ethics of the living body

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361

We must follow how the body skillfully, inevitably, and spontaneously weaves itself through dilemmas and conflicts in its environment and through its history--weaves through them, incorporates them into itself, and grows. We must replace the current adversarial model of legal thinking in bioethics with bio-bodily thinking. In other words, beauty is coherence, and coherence in a wide sense is threefold: coherence among terms, propositions, and steps in an argument,

in what

one

says, then

coherence

between

what

one

says

(argues) and what is actually the case (actuality), and finally coherence of the perceived with the actual. The first coherence constitutes sense in an utterance and validity in an argument, what is aimed at by the coherence theory of truth. The second coherence is a harmony of what is said and argued for with what is actually the case. The theory enables us to understand that "1+1=2" can be applied to "One apple and another make two apples," and "It is fine today" implies "I believe that it is fine today." This is what 15 expressed by the correspondence theory of truth. The third coherence 15 what is sensed in actuality as sensibly patterned enough to constitute actuality, trustworthily real. This is what is captured in the revealment theory of truth. So far nothing new has been claimed except that "beauty" unifies what philosophy has separately pursued. What is new in the claim is that the body overarches these three aspects of coherent beauty, and facilitates their achievements. How? First, the body performs and goes through the terms, propositions, and steps of argument, synthesizing them, constituting them, into meaningful coherence, validity. Secondly, the body is both thinking and thought, seeing and seen, "thinging" things! and being one of the things. The body unifies what is said and what is said about, being on both sides, and effects their mutual correspondence. Thirdly, the body is a point of view on the world, perceiving the thing as sensibly patterned enough to be a structured thing, letting the thing reveal itself as this particular thing with these peculiar traits. The body perceives, and to perceive a thing as a thing is to perceive its pattern. 17.1.3.

And the threefold coherence in the world is somatically

achieved via a dialectic of order and disorder, in short, differences. 1 "Thinging things" is a favorite of both Chuang Tzu and Heidegger. etc. and my Chuang Tzu: World Philosopher at Play, pp. 61-90.

We

See Chuang Tzu, 22/50, 75,

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see here a threefold truth: "A great disorder is an order"'; pockets of small orders make up disorder; and "these opposite things partake of one." Let me explain. Disorder is everywhere to fill up a news hour everyday and make up a "great disorder." But then it requires some order at least to say so, for "disorder" is meaningful and meaning is some order. "And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nlgh. Conversely, pockets of small orders constitute disorder. Even

thieves have to have honor among them for thievery to work.^

War

would have been impossible without both agreements among adversaries on what constitutes insult and damage, and organized efforts at mounting an effective assault. Finally, these opposite things partake of one, for "Tao goes through them all into one" (Chuang Tzu 2/35); Tao

lives and thrives in chaos. Let us transpose all this to a personal level, and consider the notion of "difference." If difference is a correlative notion, then uniqueness is a communal one. For it is difference that makes for the uniqueness of each person, and thereby many persons. And this unique manyness produces two opposite results, because difference can be used in two opposite ways: difference can serve to separate a person from others, and can serve to recognize the otherness of others, thereby produces togetherness. On the one hand, difference can generate preference for one person against others, then partiality and prejudice, which sometimes breeds violence to result in separation. Separation can be radicalized ' So says Wallace Stevens in his "Connoisseur of Chaos" in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, N. Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980, p. 215. On the complex relation between order and disorder, see B. J. Hiley and F. David Peat, eds., Quantum Implications: Essays in Honor of David Bohm, London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1987; N. Katherine Hayles, ed., Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991. We claim that however complex order-chaos relations may be, they can be characterized by what is described here.

? Ibid. 3 Luke 21:28. 1 Chuang Tzu has movingly described how impossible thievery is without sageliness, in 10/11-13. Socrates has already exploited this point in his debate with Thrasymachus in the Republic of Plato, I. 251. "Honor among thieves" is a sine qua non for any communal solidarity. See Francis Macdonald Cornford, tr., The Republic of Plato, London Oxford University Press, 1941, 1977, etc., pp. 33, 35.

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363

into the death of others thus rejected. Separation can also cut into oneself, self-hatred can lead to death. On the other hand, difference can lead us to unite among us; unification is that of two or more differing individuals. Unification requires love of difference to accomplish. Difference can generate a desire to complement deficiencies of one's own and/or those of the other. Difference can lead to harmony and on to unity.

But difference which facilitates unification can also lead to some

conflict; harmony can comprise dissonance, and lips can be hurt by teeth. At the same time, conflict also requires eddies of unities to accomplish, such as honor among thieves. Thus management of difference in unity is crucial; management can steer unity into either healthy conflict or irrevocable separation and/or destruction. "Difference" is obtained through experience. "Management" is also a matter of experience; so are "separation" and "unification." Since experience is undergone bodily, all these words are bodily words. And undoubtedly, the best experience is that of harmony and beauty. Beauty is harmony of "coherence," correspondence, and revealment, all rolled

into one. The body performs and perfects this threefold harmony of truth. This truth is beauty; the body effects it. 17.1.4. The body effects the harmony of truth because the body is effected by truth's contraries--disharmony, incoherence, and those tragic shadows

of life that violate the coherence,

correspondence,

and

revealment requirements of truth. How do these life negativities fare in the somatic world of beauty? Shall one say that beauty is powerful in its digestive resoluteness toward the environmental contraries? Propositional falsehood, invalidity, unsoundness, and even outright self-contradiction

are "interesting" gadflies; they stimulate our thinking, train our discernment, contribute to biting humor that jars our common sense, and irony that lampoons our complacency. For mere tautology and platitudes dull and blind us. Invigorating consistency, awakened by atrocious invalidity, renders our bodily life coherent as nothing else does. The "body" of life-beauty digests theoretical contraries (part of environmental ones) to render itself strenuously fit and coherent.

Similarly, the purity of the lotus is nourished by the mud

underneath, by sheer contrast.

Untoward situations hurt life; tragedies

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cripple us. solidify, and is called the nobility that injustices. '

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Yet they also thereby "craft" (kung) us; they sharpen, purify the beauty of our life-expression. In China the poet "vexed person" (sao jen) who "sounds forth" (ming) true deepens--in the "unevenness" (pu p'ing) of life, its tough

Thus the misfortunes of life, by wounding the self, can open the

self out--from uncouth Oshallowness--into mature luminosity. The music of Mozart, Schubert, and Beethoven sparkles with tenderness, turbulence, and innocence; the music of Haydn and Mendelssohn is as threatened by their smooth circumstances with saccharin decorativeness, as state-sponsored arts are smothered by official "protection." The "Classics" are often the literature of the "age of decline" (shuai shih); comedies and tragedies of epic dimension in drama, novels, poetry, and in life are born of dire circumstances. Tough life trains our sinews, our literary sinews, our bodily-spiritual ones, and makes us "fit" for great tasks, as Mencius

noted’; tough life refines and "beautifies" ourselves

and our bodily expression of life. As with logical falsehoods, so with failures in life; as falsehoods can be metaphorically widened into further truths, so wounds and conflicts can slowly open one out to a deeper life. We have here a continuum of logical expansions and growth in life through bodily evocative metaphor, thriving under jarring incompatibles, both logical ones and lived ones. All this goes to saying that personal growth in assimilation is worlds apart from understanding everything, indifferently, from above, in terms of a fixed metaphysical frame. Assimilation of the new and strange takes two forms: digesting it into something familiar, a part of oneself, or accommodating it as the other, the alien and as such, again, a

part of oneself. In digestion one becomes richer and different; in accommodation one becomes wiser and, again, different. Reception of the strange into a part of oneself thus takes two forms, the familiar and ! Han Yu said, "In general, things not obtaining their evenness will sound forth," to begin his famous essay, "Letter to Meng Tung-yeh (Sung Meng Tung-yeh Hsü). Ou-yang Hsiu said, "The more pressed the situation is, the more crafted" the poetry is, in his "Preface to Collection of Poems by Mei Sheng-yü (Mei Sheng-yü Shih Chi). They represent the sentiment of many of other famous literary essays. These essays are conveniently collected in Hsieh Ping-ying, et al., eds., Anthology of Ancient Literature (Ku-wen Kuan-chih), Taiwan: San-min Shu-chi, 1971, etc. See pp. 258, 266-

67, 566, et passim. Quotations above from Han Yü and Ou-yang Hsiu are located in p. 454 and p. 563, respectively.

2 Mencius, 6B15.

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365

the alien. Since the strange always changes as the environment shifts in time, so digestion and accommodation changes, grows, the self in contents and in character. 17.1.5. Accommodation of the indigestible alien goes a long way in life. This is a self-emptying accommodation of untoward circumstances to the extreme, to accomplish self-fulfillment to the extreme. In contrast, people in sickness and senescence usually demand their surrounding to accommodate them; such a demand signals a deterioration of the self. When their demand fails, there emerges the problem of what they feel as "violence." But violence is not just a problem to be dealt with; it is also a life-process to undergo. We see at least four modes of undergoing accommodation of violence in which the self grows: living under tyranny, going through unavoidable losses and wounds,

death

as transfiguration

of the

self,

and

death

cosmic joy of the dry skull--all proposed by Chuang Tzu.

as

supreme

17.1.5.1. Tyranny does violence both to social justice and to people's visceral sense of justice. And both sorts of injustice make up one intolerable situation in which life must go on. To courageously oppose it amounts to playing the praying mantis waving its angry arms at the oncoming cart. Instead we must learn to play the prudent tiger-keeper, who knows all too well the tiger's disposition, how it cannot be fed out of "its time"

or "its nature,"

e.g., how

it cannot

be fed with

live or whole

animals without tearing into them in a rage, in short, how the tiger gets murderous because its natural disposition is thwarted. Thus the prudent keeper of the tiger goes-along (shun) with its disposition, and it comes to fawn on him without his meaning to make it so. The tyrant is the tiger; we must accommodate the tyrant as the tiger-keeper does the tiger: "When he wants to play the child, join him in playing the child. When he want to jump the fences, join him in jumping the fences. When he wants to burst the shores, join him in bursting the shores. Fathom him right through..."

Chuang Tzu, 4/59-62. 2 Ibid., 4/58-59, A. C. Graham's translation, in his Chuang-tzu: The Seven Inner Chapters and other writings from the book Chuang-tzu, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1981, p. 72.

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17.1.5.2. But all this makes us undergo /osses and wounds; the "knife" of tyranny and political disasters may cut us to being "onelegged." That celebrated compact Third Chapter of the Chuang Tzu began with the lowly cook Ting who feeds his lord Wen Hui (not at all famed for benevolent rule) with a bloody knife dancing through an ox to the tune of Spring Rain. This story of the dancing unity of knifing and feeding is immediately followed by a one-legged Commander of the Right, who (was) claimed to have earned his "singularity" (fu) from heavenly naturalness. It must have meant that--retrospectively at least-the Commander gained his "unique" integrity by following along with the painful life allotted to him.’ 17.1.5.3. Naturally all of us become ill and die. Accepting such an eventuality of life, we accommodate the inevitable death as a transfiguration of the self.’ "Soon

Master

Yü

fell

ill,

and

Master

Ssu

visited

him.

"Wonderful! how the maker of things is turning me into this crumpled thing. . . . Little by little he'll borrow my left arm to transform it into a cock, and it will be why I am listening to a cock-crow at dawn. . . [,] borrow my right arm to transform it into a crossbow, and it will be why I am waiting for a roasted owl for my dinner. . . [,] borrow and transform my buttocks into wheels, my daemon [life-thrust] into a horse, and they will be there for me to ride. . . Wonderful, the process which fashions and transforms us! What is it going to turn you into, in what direction will it use you to go? Will it make you into a rat's liver? Or a fly's leg?" What is noteworthy is that the self ("I [yÿ]" and "you [ju]" here are emphatic) persists throughout postmortem transfigurations. The result is a community of transfigured selves:*

! [bid., 3/12-13. ? Cf. my Butterfly, pp. 325-26, 348. ? Ibid., 6/47-55; Graham's translation, op. cit., p. 88.

* [bid., 6/45-47; Graham, ibid., p. 87-88.

17. SOME CONCLUDING REMARKS

367

"Four men, Masters Ssu, Yü, Li, and Lai, were talking together.

"Which of us is able to think of nothingness as the head, of life as the spine, of death as the rump? Which of us knows that the living and the dead, the surviving and the lost, are all one body? He shall be my friend. The four men looked at each other and smiled, and none was reluctant in his heart. So they all became friends." These transfigured selves are in addition expanded ones--together as a community of cosmic friends:' "Which of us can be-with one-another in not being-with oneanother, can do with-one-another in not doing with-oneanother? Who can climb the sky, roam the mist, whirl in the limitless,

living

in mutually

forgetting, without

limits?’ They looked at each other and smiled. against their hearts, they became friends."

end, without

Having nothing

17.1.5.4. Finally, the death that keeps the self transforming keeps the self forever--in the supreme joy of the dry skull on the "roadside" of cosmic vicissitudes. There is a delightful story of Chuang Tzu having a dream conversation with a dry skull at the roadside. First he asked the skull about the gory details responsible for its having come to such a rock-bottom misery, without a full body or a proper burial, forever wandering in lonesome homeless sorrow. Then, surprisingly, the skull confessed to its supreme selfenjoyment of "quietly making [rounds of] springs and autumns with the heaven and the earth." In disbelief, Chuang Tzu asked, perhaps generously, if the skull wanted him to ask the Arbiter of Fate to be reborn into its former warm life with its body, family, neighbors, and acquaintances.’ "The skull frowned deeply, wrinkling up its brows, and said, "Why would I [wu, emphatic] throw away more happiness than that of a king on a throne and take on the troubles of a human l Ibid., 6/61-62; my translation.

? Ibid., 18/27. 3 Ibid., 18/29.

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being again?" Some of the story's stupendous implications have been explored elsewhere.' It suffices here to note three obvious features of this story: To begin with, the "skull" belongs unmistakably to a specific person; it is no one else's. It is forever the core of one's unique personal individuality, even beyond death. Moreover, the skull is as abundantly bodily as nothing else is. It is all too natural for the writer and the reader to hear it, or rather, him,

"talk" with "knitted brows," as if the empty skull is inalienably endowed with its brain, its tongue, and its brows, forever.

Finally, the skull is dried up, thoroughly empty; casually tossed around

on the roadside,

it courts no one's attention.

And

as it is so

empty, so it is so accommodating. It echoes no less than the sky and the earth, the spring and the autumn, so much so that the heaven and the earth is as accomplished (wei) through springs and autumns, as all the rounds of springs and autumns are throughout the heaven and the earth. And this is joy unspeakable, neither to be lost to anyone nor stolen by anyone. So empty, therefore so full; so individual, therefore so inclusive; so personal, therefore so cosmic. This is the lowest (a mere skull discarded on the roadside) and the highest (all-encompassing in time, in space) the bodily self can go--in self-emptying, in selfextending. To top all these, we must note that, in the final analysis, all these

vast cosmic extensions of the self--through wounds, suffering, senescence, illness, and beyond dying--have nothing abstract about them. They are all too impingingly bodily and experiential. 17.1.6. But doesn't all this blur the distinction between what should be the case and what should not? How do we judge between the acceptable and the unacceptable, the veridical and the illusory, the true

and the false? Four points can be raised: To begin with, "to judge between" is to distinguish (fen). Apropos of distinction, "distinguishing" itself can be of three kinds, as ! See my Butterfly, pp. 14-22, 320-21.

17. SOME CONCLUDING REMARKS

369

brought out by Chuang Tzu--fen as contrived cutting, feng as natural mound (serving as a landmark for fiefs) standing out of the expanse of flat land, and chen as a raised path between fields, a mixture of the above two.' Our task, in Chuang Tzu's view, is to bring our contrivance of distinction (fen) in line with natural ones (feng, chen). Besides, as we naturalize (as it were) our distinguishing activities, we see that these distinctions, far from excluding one another (as logical truth does falsehood), come to inter-mingle, inter-involve, and interdepend. Chuang Tzu realized that this is so precisely (in what is commonly taken as a case of unmistakable illusion, that is) in his experience of dreaming to be a butterfly, the story of which ends the Second Chapter of the Chuang Tzu.’ "Once, Chuang Chou dreamed to be a butterfly. Flittingly, he was a butterfly, going as he pleased, not knowing that he was Chou. Suddenly, he awoke.

And he was surely Chou.

[But, then, he did] not understand--

[Did] Chou dream the butterfly? [Is] the butterfly dreaming Chou? There must, then, be a distinction [fen] [between] Chou and the butterfly. This it [is which men] call "things changing." For a detailed analysis of this story the reader must be referred to my Butterfly as Companion.’ Here it suffices to note two points with which the story ends, the two points which also sum up the entire ' See my Butterfly, pp. 422-23. ? Ibid., 2/94-96. 3 Pp. 171-78, 215-21, et passim. above.

Also see its description as an ironic mode of argument in 2.3.

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philosophical Second Chapter in the Chuang Tzu. First, the dream would not have happened without there being the uncompromising distinctions (fen) between dream and awakening, knowledge and uncertainty, truth and doubt. Secondly, these pairs of distinctions are at the same time inter-involved; one supports the other, one leads to the other (hua). The distinctions are internecine and inter-nascent, mutually opposed and dependent. Furthermore, the earlier we perceive these interrelated distinctions the better; in fact, Mencius called on us to admire and follow these "early perceivers" (Asien chüeh). Chuang Tzu called them "holy men" who distinguish and do not argue, and let things be [interrelated] and do not distinguish? And of course perception (of distinctions) is a bodily one. Finally, the distinction between the acceptable and the unacceptable goes beyond and behind that of logical truth and falsehood. The distinction applies to hurts and harms in life. "Nourishment of Life" (part of the title of the Third Chapter in the Chuang Tzu) happens in hurts; "hurting inside one's body" is, however, forbidden? The distinction of good hurts that nourish and bad ones that destroy lies in whether we can integrate the hurts into ourselves (our body) or not. The distinction parallels the notion of "waste" vs. that of "utility." Waste is something useless (wu yung); utility is something useful (out) of the useless (wu yung chih yung). Utility (yung) is synonymous with integration into our life. When we fail to integrate hurts into our body, they become something that hurts deeply. When we succeed in integrating hurts into us, they "nourish life (yang sheng)," so much so that we can dance with the knife that cuts, looking forward to roaming transformation of our bodily identity after illness and death,* and enjoying the ultimate royal joy of making the heavens and the earth with rounds of spring and autumn, even at the lowest level of a dry skull casually tossed on the roadside,’ as above quoted. ! Mencius, 5A7, 581. ? Chuang Tzu, 2/56-57. ? [bid., 5/58. * Ibid., 6/46-58. 5 Ibid., 18/22-29.

17. SOME CONCLUDING REMARKS

371

Therefore, bodily integration of hurts and falsehoods makes for both sageliness (identity, integrity, dignity) at the subjective level, and veridicality (validity, acceptability) at the object's level. Today's trash should be made into tomorrow's treasure and truth. It is these critical "moments of truth" that our life of true human integrity is made of. Truth is historical; history 1s something somatically undergone. And so truth is something historical and bodily. In other words, truth or validity is not something statically and eternally evaluated from the heaven of fixed ideals, but something to be accomplished correlatively, and historically--and bodily. Logical calculation of truth is just an interim estimate of where we stand in our historical process of accomplishing truth. 17.1.7. Let us go back to thinking about logic. Logic should include studies of rhetoric, the beauty of steps of argumentation, within its domain. Persuasiveness (simplicity, cogency, and elegance of the proof) is not irrelevant to logical validity. So far the Western studies of logic have steadfastly avoided this aspect of argumentation--for no reason. To avoid studying logical beauty of argumentation impoverishes logic and degrades it into mechanical aridity; logical validity becomes aridly irrelevant. Logic should be (and is) an excitingly elegant discipline, one of whose devices is analogical argumentation--concrete, cogent, persuasive. Non-analogical logic can be used either to criticize analogization or to elucidate its genius. From the standpoint of logic, evocative-metaphoric thinking looks suspicious; "analogical argument" is proverbially problematic in the Western tradition. This is because metaphorical thinking has a point of departure to analogize forward (literally, "upward") to something novel, whereas usual "logic" is a disembodied thinking, thinking from no point of view, moving from nowhere to nowhere in particular, always under the jurisdiction of an overall general principle. Western philosophers even boast of (idealize) it as "universal validity," saying, for instance, that "When you give me 2+2, you've got to give me 4 also, no matter what." Incidentally, the British people to their practical, commonsense frame share something in common with the are practical without discarding logic; very logically sensitive and straight (at

are also suspicious of logic due of mind, and to this extent they Chinese people. But the British Hume is very down to earth and least so he tried). They use logic

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to calculate praxis, and are suspicious of adhering to logic for its own sake. The Chinese people are innocent of such a complex relation with logic. They simply wanted to have nothing to do with usual logic, that is, such a disembodied thinking from nowhere and everywhere, strictly controlled by a general principle. This is why Mo Tzu's logical investigations fell by the philosophical wayside, until picked up recently under the pressure of the logical frame of mind of the West. This is also why Chinese dallying with logic produced non-sense, that is, logical nonsense and pragmatic senselessness of the School of Names, so called perhaps because they have mere names without matching reality. Such a Chinese mind has been unaware of how lethally effective logical maneuvers can become when applied to the practical nitty-gritty of life, as shown by the Western mentality exhibited in its philosophy, science, and technology. The West effected technological revolutions, industrial and post-industrial, at once rendering our life convenient and playing ecological havoc. This logical mind also cuts the selfs outlook on the world into two, from the mind (idealism) and from the body (materialism), each claiming an exclusive monopoly on the terms with which to think the world. Sartre in his clear-cut ontological dualism that is for ever mutually at war, propounded in Being and Nothingness, is a version of Platonic idealism, which later strangely embraced Marxist dialectical materialism, turning itself upside down in The Critique of Dialectical Reason, where ontological dualism was pushed to social poignancy. In any case, such a mentality ends up mechanizing (dehumanizing) our life in a// its dimensions. The recent fad, that conundrum about whether computers (can) think, ultimately stems from this logical dichotomy. Such mechanization threatens to produce what Chuang Tzu called chi hsin, which for the Chinese people perhaps meant "machinating heartmind" but in the West a straight "machine heartmind," an oddity or oxymoron (how can the heart-mind be a machine?) if not a contradiction. For, sadly, once what is naturally joined together, the mindbody, is put asunder, their combinations, "ghost in a machine," "machine mind," "thinking body," and the like, sound confusingly strange. Bertrand Russell's pun in a conversation with his nanny, "What is

17. SOME CONCLUDING REMARKS

373

matter?", "It does not matter."; "What is mind?", "Never mind," can be

the result more debilitating than hilarious. This is dehumanizing mechanization manifesting itself, both efficacious and anomie-ridden.

17.2. Self-Clarifying West, Bodily China. Thus far, the similarity (recognition of the importance of our body for thinking) and the differences between Chinese philosophers (spontaneous praxis) and Merleau-Ponty (argumentative self-critical clarification) have been considered. What then would be the possible emerging philosophy of body thinking? One thing is certain: We now have our body as the common base and emphasis in thinking about things, as the common ground of discourse between pragmatic China and the self-clarifying West. Thus a world-wide community of differences will be formed on the pivotal philosophy of body thinking. What can Chinese thinkers (Mencius, Chuang Tzu) learn from Merleau-Ponty? They can learn self-critical clarification on a metalevel, and their praxis will be clarified better to themselves. Specifically, they would recognize what body thinking 1s all about, and why it is an important thinking for our living. They would understand why disembodied thinking, as thinking cut off from our gut-feelings, 15 thinking irrelevant to life. Disembodied thinking is nonhumanly logical. When not applied to life, it becomes empty irresponsible wranglings as those among the sophists in the School of Names; when applied to life, such a thinking results in technological dehumanization attended with ecological disasters. And yet, such a nonhuman thinking can be used in the context of body thinking with benefit--as tools for thought experiment, as Chuang Tzu did while playfully jostling with Hui Shih, and as tools for expressing the inexpressible praxis, as in Mencius's stories and arguments, in Chuang Tzu's odd and bombastic phrases, so as to arouse people into paying attention to the essentials of human living. Modern philosophies in the West are mostly impressive collections of very sophisticated disembodied thinking. Here is the treasure trove for the modern Mencius and Chuang Tzu to dip in. What can the West learn from Chinese philosophers? Not just a realization that disembodied theoretical thinking is hazardous to ! Cf. 14.4.5. and the first note there.

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(human) nature. It is good that the recent deconstructionism exposed the dangerous irrelevance of disembodied structuralist thinking. But what a contorted label "deconstructionism" is, matched only by its formidable contents, with all their logical and terminological convolutions, that the label represents. Contorted "deconstructionism" betrays the internal contradiction of its performance, that is, destroying structuralism without discarding structuralist terminology, still clinging on to the systematic character of structuralism, albeit in a pulverized and contorted form--"pulverized . . . form" precisely characterizes the convoluted contradictory shape of deconstructionism, a cacophony of truncated arguments and formidable jargon. Besides, all this battery of bits of arguments and jargon is "deconstructed" self-consciously (almost self-ostentatiously) from systems of thought of "good ol days." For "deconstructionism" could have been easily "06 structivism," or "de-structionism," or even "de-struction." It would have been more spontaneous and straight to the point. And all this could have been obtained

Mencius.

by learning from

Lao Tzu, Confucius,

Chuang

Tzu, or

Similarly, the Merleau-Ponty in the West can learn from China

that, after having

argued,

demonstrated,

and

exhibited

the truth

and

importance of body thinking, he should forget about it all, and directly plunge into a soaring naturalness of body thinking itself--as in Mencius's spontaneous engagement in a hot metaphysico-political argumentation, as in Chuang Tzu's cool self-loss and roaming nonchalance in the world.

For self-forgetful exercise of body thinking is quite essential after critical self-clarification. Exercise in body thinking is an activity completely oblivious to itself; such non-self-consciousness shall integrate the bodily self by losing one's bipolar subject-object self (wu sang wo'). Concretely, it will be a loss of self-consciousness, an impediment to the self's activity (body thinking) of letting things be through the self. This unobstructed passage through the unobtrusive self will result in a spontaneous self-expression of things through the "mouth" or "mirror" of the self-forgotten self. The self by modeling itself after things turns to symbolize them, and becomes their self-expressions; the i Chuang Tzu, 2/3.

17. SOME CONCLUDING REMARKS

375

mirror-reflection of things becomes things' own expression. This is after all the principle of aesthetics, in the original sense of feeling-after things that fulfills both things and the mirror-self. In the end, the emerging bodily philosophy claims that truth is logically inseparable from its experience, that the experience of truth is

constitutive of truth, and that our body is the locus, the means, the

condition, and the perspective of truth-experience; constitutive of truth. This is not to say that truth is but to say that we will never understand truth without our body, thinking from our body, because and ontologically implied in truth.

in short, our body is nothing but our body, (in whatever sense) our body is logically

To think truth 15 to engage in body thinking.

Our body 15 the

origin, the condition, the perspective, and the constitutive element of our

thinking, of our thinking truth. To ignore this human primordial essential is to disregard body thinking. Exercising disembodied thinking forfeits this primordial humanness to court disaster--to dehumanize personhood, to pretend to be out of history, to mechanize society, and to pollute and perish ecologically. We can say, then, that the "truth" (whatever it is) reached by disembodied thinking (if any) is an existential contradiction.

And then, let us ask, where is the truth?

17.3. Three Questions on Body Thinking. By way of conclusion, three questions can be raised: (17.3.1.) Being different from usual thinking--abstract, universal, necessary--that is disembodied, what 15 it that entitles body thinking to be "thinking"? (17.3.2.) Why the redundancy of body thinking when we already have disembodied thinking? Does body thinking have anything significant, as "thinking," which disembodied thinking lacks? (17.3.3.) Doesn't body thinking have something of disembodied thinking (they are both "thinking"), and if so, isn't body thinking reducible to disembodied thinking, after all? 17.3.1. Thinking usually is taken to be theoretical, that is, abstract, universal, and necessary, as opposed to being concrete, specific, and contingent, all of which "body" is, however. Is body thinking qualified as "thinking"? Thinking may have to be universal and necessary; thinking does not, however, have to be abstract, that is, separate from actuality, to be

universal and necessary.

Concreteness of body thinking can be fully

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universal and necessary as shown above, from the level of concept (as compressed story of typical situation) to that of argumentation (evocative,

metaphorical’).

Existential

inevitability

is its necessity;

negating-denying it amounts to situational oddity or existential contradiction. For instance, for me to say that "It is raining" implies "I believe that it is raining"; to deny it, saying, "I say it is raining but I do not believe it is" constitutes a situational oddity which defies intelligibility. Chuang Tzu is emphatic about existential inevitability.’ "The

Heaven

is inside;

the

human

is outside;

virtue

is the

heavenly. Understand the movement of Heaven and man, be based on Heaven, be in virtue--then, hastening or staying, bending or stretching, one returns to the essential, expresses [speaks] the ultimate. . . . Horses and oxen [with] four feet--this is called the Heaven. Haltering horses's heads, piercing oxen's noses--this is called the human. . . . No losing of the Heaven with the human; no losing of the destined with the purposeful; no following fame with gain."

What cannot be helped goes (pu te i) on both inside us and outside; the two joined is the self-so (tzu jan), the "natural." This is Destiny (ming); this is Heaven (f'ien). To let-out the Heaven (t'ien fang) thrives life; to (willfully) go against Destiny destroys it. No greater universal necessity can be found. Mencius has the same existential exigency in mind. To feel alarm, however momentarily, at a baby crawling into well is all too natural, that is, humanly inevitable; to deny it constitutes an existential contradiction, amounting to asserting a humanness that is not-human. To extend one's solicitude toward one's elders to others's is humanly appropriate; to stop one's family solicitude at one's own elders is humanly inappropriate, that is, unethical and inhumane. Therefore, this "extension" of human feelings toward all "under Heaven" is a compelling imperative of being human. | The other two modes, the compact and the ironic, are explainable by these two basic modes, the evocative, the metaphoric. See 2.2., 2.3., 7.4., et passim. 2 Chuang Tzu, 17/50-52; my translation.

17. SOME CONCLUDING REMARKS

377

This whole chain of argument is universal and necessary for all its bodily concrete character--evocative (unbearable human feeling invariably and inevitably called forth from a typical imminent situation), metaphorical (necessary and universal extension of family-ism). To deny this chain goes against humanness, that is, existentially contradictory. Therefore, body thinking is concrete, wherein it shows necessary and universal connections of concrete notions. Body thinking is fully thinking. 17.3.2. Even granting the character of "thinking" to body thinking, why this redundancy of adding one more sort of thinking to what we already have, disembodied,

abstract thinking?

Isn't the latter

kind of thinking adequate enough for our thinking purposes? Disembodied thinking is thinking that is abstract (disembodied), separated from bodily actuality. Abstract thinking starts at abstracting itself from both bodily actuality and thinking from/in/of it. Thus body thinking is the womb (substratum, hypostasis) out of which disembodied thinking 1s born, the ground from which the airplane of abstract thinking takes off, as Whitehead said.'

Furthermore, the punch, the standard, and the purpose, if not the

raison d'étre, of abstract thinking lies in its effective application to actuality; the plane takes off from the ground only to land on it, with a renewed applicatory power of interpretation, as Whitehead noted.^ Our thought and science "ultimately send us back to the perceived world, which is the terrain of their final application. . . . [S]cience . . . leads us back to the structures of the perceived world." Irrelevance to actuality turns all impressive systematicity of abstract thinking into a mere decoration over the corpse of thinking; thinking must be applied to be fully vibrant. And this applied mode of abstract thinking becomes concrete thinking. Thus body thinking 15 that from which and to which body thinking operates, the beginning and the end, the womb, the standard, and the purpose, of disembodied abstract thinking. Far from being redundant, operating in the ambience of body ! A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality: Corrected Edition, N. Y.: Free Press, 1979, p. 5.

? Ibid. 3 Primacy, pp. 35, 37.

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thinking is a sine qua non for every thinking to be as it is. 17.3.3. Doesn't body thinking have something of disembodied thinking, though? For after all, they are both thinking. Thus, isn't the former reducible to the latter, in fact, so much the better for ambiguous

body thinking to do so, to gain clarity and rigor? It is indeed true that abstract thinking has much to offer by way of clarity and rigor. But at what cost, if disembodied thinking is followed as such instead of being learned and used? Concreteness is a concentration of all the life and effectiveness of thinking. Destroy it by abstract thinking and abstract thinking itself would be destroyed, as explained above in 17.3.2. Body thinking must learn from abstract thinking on how to be clear and rigorous, but in ways appropriate to concrete body thinking itself. No, body thinking is no more reducible to disembodied thinking than concreteness is dispensable in thinking. 17.3.3.1. Let us look into how irreducibly and indispensably concrete body thinking is. Take analogical argument. For all its concreteness, this argument is usually taken in the West as a rather primitive mode of thinking lacking in rigor. By "primitive" thinking is meant perhaps a thinking undertaken by naive "primitive" people. But if a thinking is valid it is valid, irrespective of who the thinker is. By "lacking in rigor" here is meant that jump ("is"), that transition without an overarching principle from one realm (A) to another (B), when one says "What turbulence is to the ocean (A) is what anger is to the man (B)." Lacking in an overarching principle indicates a lack in the validity of the transition from A to B; anyone logically can connect anything with anything else. Here this mediating principle is usually an abstract one, however; besides, once the principle is known, the transition from A to B

is its mere dispensable illustration. Such a cure of analogical argument kills it; with it goes its precious bite, relevance to actuality. The cure is at least as bad as the disease, if not worse.

That "A 1s B; B is C; so A is C" is valid is warranted by an overarching middle term, B. That the middle term in this syllogism can arch over these three propositions is warranted by the principle of distributed middle term. A:B::C:D has no middle term that overarches the move from A:B to C:D. Therefore analogical reasoning is at most probable, not valid. This illustrates how the validity of logical reasoning

17. SOME CONCLUDING REMARKS

379

requires an overarching principle among propositional moves. One can here go a step further, and ask of syllogism as to why the principle of distributed middle terms can serve as overarching principle. The answer is that this logical move is performed by the body, and the body is the arch-overarching principle because it is both a thinking and a thought-about, and that therefore the body experiences the entire operation, and therefore recognizes the validity (or lack of it) of the logical move. This is the base of syllogistic reasoning. The same base applies to analogical reasoning. That "1+1=2" or "where there is smoke, there is fire" is "sound," that is, applies correctly to actuality, also requires an overarching principle between logical moves and actuality. Usually this is supplied by the principle of causality, that every event has a cause. One can again ask as to why causality can serve as an overarching principle. The answer is the same: causality is based on our actual experience, and experience is based on our body experiencing and recognizing. It is the body that recognizes that "1+1=2" applies to actuality; the body says that "1+1=2" can analogically apply to "one apple plus another apple makes two apples," that "as 1+1=2, so one apple and another are two." Likewise, it 15 the body what recognizes that our causal reasoning works analogically in actuality: As "where there was smoke, there was fire," so "where there is smoke (in general, now, tomorrow, and so on), there is fire, in general." Likewise, "Where there is cause, there is effect; every

event has its cause(s)." Thus causal reasoning is an analogical reasoning via experiential projection. The soundness of the projection is warranted by our body and its experiential recognition. Hume illicitly tried to prove causality as an overarching principle by the method that is derived from analogical sphere and applies only in one sphere, logical not-analogical sphere, and so failed to see that causality can connect logic to actuality. Similarly, that "1+1=2" applies "one apple and another are two apples" now (from the perspective of the body) means that (a) were one to bodily perform "1+1," now, one will get "2," and were one to bodily perform "1+1," tomorrow, one will get "2," and so on; (b) as one experiences "1+1=2" is valid, now, so one experiences "one apple and another are two applies" is valid, and the same experience obtains tomorrow. and so on. Paul Ricoeur asks "[H]ow are they [feelings] linked to . . . meaning?" He answers, ! Paul Ricoeur, "The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling," in Sheldon

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"Feelings . . . complete . . . schematization of the new predicative congruence. .. a kind of insight into the mixture of like' and 'unlike' proper to similarity. . . [T]his instantaneous grasping of the new congruence is 'felt' as well as 'seen.' By saying that it 1s felt, we underscore the fact that we are included in the process as knowing subjects. If the process can be called . . . predicative assimilation, it is true that we are assimilated, . . . made

similar,

to

what

is

seen

as

similar.

This

self-

assimilation is a part of the commitment proper to the 'illocutionary' force of the metaphor as speech act. We feel like what we see /ike." Metaphor is this seeing-feeling congruence, this predicative assimilation, of no less than ourselves. "We" here clearly indicates an entire somatic person. Metaphoric assimilation is our becoming like what we see--bodily. This passage of Ricoeur's makes little sense unless "we" here is bodily presences of personhood. And such a somatic feeling lies at the bottom of seeing. Seeing a root when I pull out a flower plant in the backyard, I perceive (see, feel) the importance of the moral "root" in my life; as the root firms up and flourishes the plant, so my visceral sense of what is right and wrong supports and nourishes my personal integrity. Thus there is a tie between the plant's root and my moral sense; this tie I feel, that is, see immediately, as apt and inevitable. These two points, seeing, being apt, form metaphoric congruence. Similarly there is a tie between "22-4" (as calculated) and actual things thus calculated (apples, dollars).

We are said to understand "242-4," to "click into it,"

17.3.3.2.

Let us engage in an archaeology of truth via metaphor

when we see as apt the tie between "2" and "2" and "4," and the tie between this mathematical performance and apples (and dollars). It is in this manner that logical necessity, and pragmatic relevance of such necessity (rationality), are meaningful, somatically, metaphorically, and metaphysically.

Sacks, ed., On Metaphor, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, 1979, p. 154; Mark Johnson, ed., Philosophical Perspectives on Metaphor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981, p. 243. Emphases in the original.

17. SOME CONCLUDING REMARKS

381

as above interpreted. Let us pursue implications of the selfs becoming like what similarity the self sees in the place where the self is situated. This self-assimilation (literally becoming-alike) is at once a new discovery of something out there and a new creation of the self into something similar to what is new out there. And so truth--what is verily there, self-created (in the self)--is more than self-authenticating and selfrevealing. Truth is self-creative in the twofold sense of (1) creative of the self which becomes it and (2) creative of what is, the truth itself in every situation wherever the self goes and sees. "Fact," in contrast, is literally what is-already-accomplished, out there thrown-beside the self, to be investigated "objectively." As such, a fact needs verification to demonstrate (manifest, prove) its being true. This is where the correspondence theory of truth comes about. And we have to make sense of it as something coherently understandable, hence the coherence theory of truth. And perhaps our verification as demonstration is an avenue of truth's self-demonstrating--its manifesting itself, its showing-forth, its self-revealment. This is Heidegger's revealment theory of truth. All these theories are necessitated through the factuality of truth; truth either has already happened and objectified over against the self, and the self must now make some sense out of it (correspondence, coherence), or truth is objectively out there already, to manifest itself to the self (revealment). In other words, those theories of truth presuppose some distance of truth (already there) from the self; an overcoming of distance is achieved by our effort at correspondence, at coherence, and at

capturing truth's revealment.

In contrast, when metaphoric discerning and discovery happens, we become what is there, and what is there becomes as such through our becoming as such. It happens even in the immediacy of our experience here and now, such as seeing someone passing by. That someone has passed by may have to be demonstrated via the evidence of footprints, in order to bridge the distance between someone having passed by before and our being here now, later. But when we see someone actually passing by now, demonstration is not needed; there is no gap to bridge between our seeing and someone passing by before us. [Instead of demonstration we have here a bringing-over. Our seeing someone pass by, our experiencing of the event, "metaphors" us over immediately to our understanding it.

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Admittedly, in this special immediate situation, seeing is understanding as it is believing. Eidetically, however, seeing as such is not believing and understanding as such. As all painters testify, seeing brings us to what we see, in which we forget ourselves, that is, become

what we see. In other words, seeing brings us to meaning in which we come to dwell--to "understand." Metaphoric process is this process of our seeing bringing us over to what we see. All metaphors of a more elaborate kind are an elaboration of this basic metaphoric process. Similarly, our seeing 2+2=4 metaphors us to our understanding both that this is so (bringing us from 2 and 2 to 4) and that two apples and two more make four apples. Thus metaphor is our bodily vehicle of both a new discovery of truth out there and a new creation--we come to be the truth of what is there, be it "someone passing by" or "242-4" and the applicability of the formula to things like apples. Here there is no room for correspondence, coherence, or revealment. Here is only co-discovery and co-creation of both the self and the truth. This 15, ultimately speaking, what is at the basis of Mencius's metaphoric "argument," to our basic nature as the unbearing heart-mind at others's suffering, from our being naturally alarmed upon seeing a child about to crawl into a well (Mencius 2A6). The situation is a metaphoric occasion of new realization, an exigency that was noticed and thereby brought us to a realization of our innate "compassion," our "suffering-together" with, our heartmind unbearable at, others's suffering. This is the symbolic significance of somatic metaphor, where "symbol" means being-thrown-together in a twofold happening of discovery-creation of the novel, which

is, in Mencius's

story, also the

primordial. Thus metaphor is as much an expression (revealment) of a new situation as it is a new co-happening of truth between the situation and the self. Here is no gap, and so no room for mis-take, falsehood. Manifestation of this event is its own demonstration; its demonstration

as self-evincing (revealment) is its own demonstration as selfevidencing (self-proof in coherence or correspondence). This original sense of self-evident and self-evidencing truth is the origin of all other theories of truth, and this original self-evidencing truth is through and through bodily and metaphorical. It is in this sense that we understand that "Heaven, earth, with myself, were born together; myriad things, with myself, make one." ! Chuang Tzu, 2/52-53.

17. SOME CONCLUDING REMARKS

383

17.3.3.3. But then how is error possible? This question occupied many a thinker since the time of Socrates in the Platonic dialogue of Theaetetus. The problem was tackled by Josiah Royce.’ The question was also raised by Karl Popper in his "falsifiability" as a spur to scientific progress’ and among the early analytic philosophers in their "falsification principle." This preoccupation with error is understandable; without error no truth, as its correlate, is possible. In the world of metaphoric truth, however, the question is shifted from error and falsehood (a result of judgment, from a detached point of view of an ideal disembodied observer, on what has already expired as "fact") to the liveliness and fecundity of our metaphoric ferryover toward new discovery cum creation. The problem here is not so much

error,

falsehood,

and

contradiction

(which

can

be

fruitfully

exploited to effect a new and more apt vision) as live versus dead metaphor, that is, interesting vs. trivial, self-stunting vs. self-thriving, ferrying-over. Whoever comes back home to this natural somatic thinking in metaphor is all new creation. Old things and dichotomies have disappeared; all have become new. It is in this metaphoric bodying-forth of truth that the traditional themes of necessity, falsehood, history, etc., have been treated.

Logical necessity--validity, soundness--is thus experiential. And the same experience of soundness obtains in "As there is smoke, so there is fire" and "As A:B, so C:D"--according to how one bodily experiences their soundness. These experiences are as bodily as the above bodily experiences of logical necessity, whether in validity or in soundness. In general, the body is the overarching principle that connects (a) moves of logical reasoning (deductive, inductive, metaphoricanalogical), and (b) logic and actuality. For the body is the insertion of our thinking in the world: The body connects logical moves because it is both the actual performance of thinking and the thing thought about. ! See Josiah Royce, Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885) and The World and the Individual (two volumes) (1900). ? See Karl Popper, (1963).

The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1935) and Conjectures and Refutations

? Cf. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic, 1936, 1946; Antony Flew and Alasdair Macintyre, eds., New Essays in Philosophical Theology, N. Y.: The Macmillan Co., 1956.

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The body is a thing among things, that is, positioned on the side of the thought-performed actuality; the body also actually performs (acts out) logical moves. Bodily coherence is the sensible coherence of sensibility, sensuality, and sense, and of thinking with thought. Therefore the body judges (by connecting and experiencing) logical moves as valid, and judges (by connecting and experiencing) logical moves to actuality as sound. Thus, our body thinking supplies the mediating principle--the body as a point of view on the world, the locus where a valid step-bystep extension of understanding, analogical understanding, can be made without sacrificing concreteness. For the body is both a thing among others, and a vantage point at which understanding can take in all things within its reach. At the same time, this bodily principle does not dispense with concrete realms; the familiar realm to take off from, the novel one to understand, and the familiar-novel transition, constitute

body thinking. To repeat. Body thinking supplies the mediating principle of the body for analogical-metaphorical reasoning, thereby restores its rigor. And body thinking retains thereby the indispensable concreteness and novelty of knowing process. Body thinking is no more reducible to disembodied one than concreteness is dispensable in thinking. '

' See 16.3. on lei-pi t'ui-li usually translated as “argument by analogy" logical necessity.

and its relation with

EPILOGUE 18. The Historical, the Processive. Chinese body thinking is processive (18.2.), that is, concretely historical, going from the parts, in an analogical fashion, to a provisional whole, then on to another whole (18.1.). That is our conclusive impression. 18.1. The Partial, the Analogical, the Historical. Looked at from another angle, the painter's "quest is total even where it looks partial," says Merleau-Ponty. As one problem is solved, another turns up; as one is engrossed with one problem, another old one is solved. Historicity is hidden (sourde) in a labyrinth of detours and encroachments, where no "progress" is seen, only the shifting soil under foot is felt. This is no counsel of despair; instead it indicates that "the very first painting in some sense went to the farthest reach of the future," that each creation changes and deepens all the others, that each creation passes to have its life before them.' The before is the monogram of the henceforth, the partial is the analogy of the whole, and history and the world is a tapestry of metaphors, here and there, back and forth. Analogy is thus a prospective logic of discovery, proceeding from our bodily life; logic is a retrospective analogy through the prevenient governance of necessary and general principles, which in turn are discovered by analogical extrapolation from our bodily life. And so everything comes back to the reason of the body, which is what Pascal should have said of the reason of the heart. The reason of the body is so inclusive of disembodied abstract reasoning that the latter does not know it. It is this body which includes speculative reason that finally discerns the propriety of how and what we think, the appropriateness so compelling that we have to call it natural inevitability and logical necessity; body thinking is their inner secret connection. And the occurrence of such bodily analogical (metaphorical) thinking and knowing is itself evocatively bodily. "[I]f we make the thought appear upon an infrastructure of vision, this is only in virtue of the uncontested evidence that one must see or feel in some

! Primacy, pp. 189-90.

386

EPILOGUE

way in order to think, that every thought known to us occurs to a flesh."

"[Ideas] could not be given to us as ideas except in a carnal experience. It is not only that we would find in that carnal experience the occasion to think them; it is that they owe their authority, their fascinating, indestructible power, precisely to the fact that they are in transparency behind the sensible, or in its heart... . " This is because?

"There is a strict ideality in experiences that are experiences of the flesh: the moments of the sonata, the fragments of the luminous field, adhere to one another with a cohesion without concept, which is of the same type as the cohesion of the parts of my body, or the cohesion of my body with the world. Is my body a thing, is it an idea? It is neither, being the measurant of the things. We will therefore have to recognize an ideality that is not alien to the flesh, that gives it its axes, its depth, its dimensions. . . . [An idea 1s] a sense by virtue of its own arrangement, ... a meaning in its own mesh." of the body, both of ours and of the world. This is’ "a wild meaning, an expression of experience by experience, which in particular clarifies the special domain of language, . . . the very voice of the things.... And... we do not have to reassemble them into a synthesis: they are two aspects of the reversibility which is the ultimate truth." Body thinking truth."

is this our experience

toward

the

"ultimate

This brings us to a second look at the good old "contrast" between necessity and contingency; we now realize that the pair is less contrasts than complements. We have seen in the previous Part Five, "Linear Logicality," that body thinking, the body's logic--thinking ! The Visible, p. 146. ? Ibid., p. 150-51, 153. ? Ibid., p. 155.

18. THE HISTORICAL, THE PROCESSIVE

387

conditioned by the body usually taken as contingent--is relevant to necessary and universal thinking in philosophy. Now we see that the reverse is true also; necessity and universality belong to our bodily historicity. The flesh of our contingency is constituted by the bonetexture of events that makes universal sense; this sensible structure is necessary at the heart of historical contingency. Merleau-Ponty said,' "And if the historian unearths beneath its [art work's] manifest content the surplus and thickness of meaning, the texture which held the promise of a long history, this active manner of being, then, this possibility he unveils in the work, the monogram he finds there--all are ground for a philosophical meditation." Being is always in an "active manner." Shadow, depth, and line are really transitive verbs rendering Being visible; they are those actions through which Being comes to show forth its own meaning which the poet in the painter captures? Or rather, Being makes itself in the poetpainter; it lives him, inspiring him and expiring in him.’ Nature inspires man by calling him, and expires through his responses in painting (Merleau-Ponty), in poetry and music (the Great Preface to the Classic of Poetry). This is processive prevalent nature on the inside (Chuang Tzu, Cezanne) constitutive of universal necessity in our body thinking--nature on the outside, e-voked, ex-pressed. Painting and poetry are our thinking with hand, necessary in Being's phenomenologic; thinking is as living and inevitable as painting and poetry. Nature at our feet (Henry David Thoreau) is always being born, alive. The soil beneath our poetico-painterly feet is always shifting (Merleau-Ponty); thinking is historical, carnally logical. Thus pragmatic synthetic operation in mathematical demonstration is as performatively contingent as the inevitable sensible connection of human events is historically necessary. This is not to deny the integrity of necessity or contingency but to discern their dialectical "chiasm" at the heart of historical ongoings. Eating and calculation are as necessary in mathematics as mathematics is part of the historical movement of Being. This inter-involving starts at the body Primacy, p. 179.

? Cf. Ibid., pp. 167, 172, 183.

+ Cf. Ibid., p. 188.

388

EPILOGUE

which is, as Merleau-Ponty also noted, both a thing and what holds things, both what is thought about and what thinks. Thus we now see that historical causal efficacy and logico-mathematical discovery are two aspects of the same dynamism of Being in the necessary operation of the body's logic, our body thinking. 18.2. The Processive. Yuasa Yasuo claims that in Asia it 15 a common sense that the integrity of the body lies in a mind-body unity.' A. C. Graham notes the close connection of "human nature" (hsing) with "(the course of) human life" (sheng) in Chinese thinking. Both Yuasa and Graham stress that such bodily human nature is something fo be achieved, not given ready-made at birth. Nature is nascence, a forwarding nature-ing process. This view of forward-looking dynamism of "nature" in the minded "body" is entirely novel to the Western frame of mind that dichotomizes the mind from the body. Kasulis said,’ "In brief, what most distinguishes Eastern from Western mindbody theories is a methodological decision as to which phenomena should be analyzed. For the modern Western tradition, a mind-body theory is primarily concerned with the empirically observable correlations between mental and somatic phenomena. In the Japanese tradition, however, the mind-body theories generally focus on how a disciplined practice allows one to attain body-mind unity. . . . mind-body connection versus an acquired mind-body unity. Given this difference in perspective, it is not surprising that Western mind-body theories typically discuss the will, for example, asking whether it is free or determined, mental or somatic.

In Eastern

thought,

on the other hand,

the will

is

seldom analyzed. Conversely, Eastern mind-body theories frequently discuss how creativity is expressed within a standardized style or form, whereas Western philosophers believe such issues fall outside the domain of the mind-body ! Yuasa Yasuo, The Body: Toward an Eastern Mind-Body Theory, ed. by T. P. Kasulis, trs. by Nagatomo Shigenori and T. P. Kasulis, Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York Press, 1987.

2 A. C. Graham, op. cit., SUNY Press, 1990, pp. 7-66. 3 Yuasa, op. cit., pp. 3-4.

18. THE HISTORICAL, THE PROCESSIVE

389

problem. So aesthetics is seldom part of the West's approach to mind-body issues." For Mencius it is the nature of our innate nature to cultivate our four nature-buddings (ssu tuan),' to follow and cultivate our "great body" (ta t'i)? For Chuang Tzu just to return to being natural is enough; to contrive it defeats itself and hurts our nature. The dichotomizing West produced in Plato our ideal state of being, where our will and desire are under the reins of our reason. "Control" presupposes separation wherein controller overcoming controlee; rational control presupposes a split within our nature. From the Chinese perspective of the minded body, however, this "ideal" is a nonsense and an evil. Such an operation is as much of a nonsense for Mencius as a fool (man from Ch'u) pulling the seedlings to "help (them) grow," and as much of an evil for Chuang Tzu‘ as trying to "lengthen the duck's legs [and] shorten the crane's legs, . . . separate webbed toes [and] lop-off a sixth finger. . . The horse has hooves to tread the frost and knee high and prances. . . . Then came Po them, shaved them, clipped them, branded them in stable... starved them, made them tormented by bit and reins . . . by whip horses that died ... were more than half."

snow . . . lifts the Lo and... singed them, . . . camped trot, . . . gallop, ... and goad; and the

This situation of "(being at) one (with oneself)" is patterned after Nature which is/moves as-it-is/moves, a supreme awesome Self-So (tzu jan). This is in line with Lao Tzu's vision Mencius, 2A6.

? Ibid., 6A14-15. 3 Mencius, 2A2.

* Chuang Tzu 8/9, 10-11; 9/1-4, as translated by A. C. Graham, in his Chuang-tzu: The Seven

Inner Chapters and other writings from the book Chuang-tzu, London: George Allen and Unwin,

1981, pp. 200-01, 205.

> Tao Te Ching, Chapter 25. Modified version of Wing-tsit Chan's translation in 4 Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, Princeton University Press, 1963, p. 153.

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EPILOGUE

"The-Human takes-as-its-law the-Earth; The-Earth takes-as-itslaw the-Heaven; The-Heaven takes-as-its-law the-Tao;

The-Tao takes-as-its-law the-Self-So [=the Natural]."

Mencius has the story of "Ox Mount" covered with lush primeval evergreens, a virgin forest; Mencius compared such primal Nature to our nature.’ Chuang Tzu simply told us to lose ourselves (sang wo) in Nature. Nature is the Be-all and the End-all--the Origin, the Extent, the Scale, the Norm, the Power, the Goal--of our nature-ing.

Therefore, the forward direction of maturation and development is at the same time a returning to the primal root of the self. If the extent of our nature-ing growth is no less than cosmic in scale, the goal of it is the As-is to which we return. We grow up to what we have been born of, in, and for. Here the have-been, the have-been-in, and the being-for unite. To go forward is to come back home in what we are already, to become what we are and where we are in. This is one implication (among others) of the cyclical view of the cosmos. Hence, the unity and the forwarding dynamism of our nature both Graham and Yuasa noted. What they missed are the vast extent and the complex direction of this growth dynamism, which is vast as nature, cyclical as seasons; the dynamism of our nature grows no less than cosmic in extent and cyclical in its direction, symbolic of perfectness. This nature-dynamics is anything but reaching forth to dissipation (in an overreaching of the self); the dynamism of our nature is instead a cycle and equilibrium of an integral fullness of our pristine self? This cyclical equilibrium is moving without moving, centered in the cosmic navel of the bodily self, be-ing (coming to be) at home, the self. And in this cyclical equilibrium 15 placid limpidity that reflects and participates in the cosmic rounds of seasons, that is, the structural beauty

everywhere (cosmic) on the go (seasonal).

|

The sage, who is Mencius' "first discerner" (Asien chüeh), Chuang Tzu's "true man" (chen jen), is he who has achieved what we | Mencius, 6A8. 2 Chuang Tzu, 2/3. 3 Cyclism is taken in China to evince fullness of being. Cyclism begets dreary boredom--to the point of constituting a Buddhistic "hell"--only when cyclism is taken as "recurrence," a loaded term. See my Butterfly, pp. 5, 80.

18. THE HISTORICAL, THE PROCESSIVE

391

have and have already known, deep at heart. And the achievement is no less than cosmic and cyclical, yet no more than a return to what we are already. We now understand such sayings as follows: "Alaska is the part of me left unexplored"; "Alaska will get you. And it will give you back a part of yourself that perhaps you thought you'd lost forever." Similarly, mowing the lawn clears your inner backyard. Washing the dishes and mopping the kitchen ("chopping the wood, carrying the water") cleanse your soul. And when a knife cuts you, you bleed to manifest the sharpness of the knife. The cut unites the subject and the object. We now also understand the cosmic sociality of our self-ing nature. There is an immense complex inner body-scape that is indicated faintly in the drama of mind-body interaction. The unity of the vast body-scape is a reflection of landscape outside and both these "-scapes" together constitute the "world." At the center of all this is the focal point, the body.’ In one's bodily performance the subjective is one with the objective, and the unity constitutes the "world" for a specific individual. This personal world blends with those of members of the family, then with those of the community, and the "world" of a specific community comes about. This is the value system, the ethos, and the style of life of the community in which all of us move and have our somatic-social beings. Such a "world" is a community concord. This communityworld can then blend with other community-worlds to form a nation, a culture, a race, and their history. Thus civilization arises, humanity comes into being, the world emerges. The beautiful Great Learning schematically proffers this world-making process. The process and its proffer have poetry in their rhythm and thrust. The rhetorical rhythm, reflecting the poetic scheme of the cosmos, is the charm of the heartbeat of living ideas that throbs through thinking, our body performance, to throb throughout the cosmos. This cosmic throbbing is that celebrated "cosmos-flooding cA'i" that also floods the self (Mencius, 2A2). Thus Mencius could say; "To fully-realize one's heart-mind is to understand one's nature. Understanding one's nature, one understands Heaven. ! Indian philosophies, such as the schools of Yoga and Tantra, also refer to the body as cosmic, although their emphasis seems to be less on the body as cosmic than on the cosmos itself, to which the body serves a convenient and dispensable avenue. ? Mencius, 7A1; my translation.

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EPILOGUE

Preserving such-a heart-mind, nourishing such-a nature, one serves Heaven. Without wavering [till] dying young [or] old, cultivating one's bodily-life to abide-by the-event, one stands|firm-in the] destiny." Chinese (and Asian) literature, typified in this passage, inspires chanting and arouses the reader. Meticulous textual-literary criticism misses this rhythm, thereby misses the heartbeat of Chinese somaticsocial-cosmic thinking. Criticism is a looking in of the outsider, not a chiming in with the somatic-cosmic heartbeat. Understanding the life rhythm comes as one is captured by it to resonate in it; the understanding goes as one tries to look at it from above to analyze it. Unfortunately, Graham leans heavily on textual and literary criticism. Wallace Stevens in his peculiar mysterious wisdom has written a poem, mysteriously titled, "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon," which I think can be understood in this bodily-cosmic light: "Not less because in purple I descended The western day through what you called The loneliest air, not less was I myself. What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard? What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears? What was the sea whose tide swept through me there? Out of my mind the golden ointment rained, And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard. I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw

Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange." From the body-perspective, our comments are of course sixfold: (1) The "loneliest" is really the "lonest" depth of the bodily self (Mencius's "four buddings" of humanity) which are (to grow) reciprocal; (2) "the sea" has the "tide" of history in which I am ourselves "the compass of that sea"; (3) it 1s that "world" that is the Heaven and earth ' Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, N. Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980, p. 65.

18. THE HISTORICAL, THE PROCESSIVE

393

"in which I walked" out the Tao and live out our historical being; (4) the "ointment" is the bodily élan (ch'i) that suffuses the world; (5) it flows to "buzz" the "blowing hymns" overheard by Chuang Tzu, the Heavenly Piping. (6) "And there I found myself more truly and more strange"--in society, in history, in the Heaven and earth. The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons is about belleslettres, itself written in belles-lettres of exquisite beauty. The what and the how of the book are at one here. Then, after translating it into English, Vincent Yu-chung Shih confessed in his Introduction, that' "To be able to feel at home in it, one has not only to read widely, memorize, recite and chant passage after passage of literary texts, but also to use the language regularly as a normal means of expression. Only thus will one's eyes and ears as well as one's mind be attuned intuitively to its inner spirit and rhythm; only thus will one be able to have that feeling of joy of success and agony of frustration in creation. Such a feeling comes only with life long experience. This is true of native scholars, and doubly true of those who need to cross bridges of vast gaps, both cultural and linguistic." Thinking here in belles-lettres comes home to one only in one's course of life experience. Now that all of us "need to cross bridges of vast gaps" in time to go to that book of beauty, we all need to embody such a Chinese thinking in our bodily history. Such are the marvels of our body thinking, as mysteriously cosmic and necessary as it is meticulously historical. And the historical is incurably concrete, personal, and mundane.

In the West, one can usually ask over the phone about expensive book costs, and the price stays pretty stable. must go in person’ to get a "decent" price. In the West, much go by the "book," a set standard; in China, people who are varied.

how much an In China, one people pretty go by people,

Thus, in China, deals are always "custom-made,"

never "above

| See 13.2. ‚15.1. The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, tr. and annotated by Vincent Yu-chung Shih, Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1983, p. ix. 2 Many stores may have their respective prices, but usually they have their "books" to go by; they can quote their prices over the phone. ¬ Or dispatch someone with a personal note on one's name card.

394 board."

EPILOGUE In Chinese politics, especially, 2+2 is sometimes 5, some other

times 5,000, all depending on who, whom, when, where, how. Chinese justice is never blind.’ Mencius' ch'üan ("weighing" expediency) has the day, with a side glance at ching (the "woof" of normality’) to enhance ch'üan. Confucius's "Mr. Straight" hides his father-thief (of lamb); Mencius's legendary ruler, Shun, shoulders away his father-murderer.’

Lao Tzu says* "The Tao takes-as-its-law the natural." The processive in China is always historical, that is, concrete, personal, and situational, in a word, bodily. To consider the processive in all too bodily a manner is Chinese body thinking. This sentiment is echoed in the West by a metaphysical poet, Wallace Stevens, anticipating a coming-together of two great cultures: Two things of opposite natures seem to depend On one another, as a man depends On a woman, day on night, the imagined

On the real. This is the origin of change.

Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace And forth the particulars of rapture come. Music falls on the silence like a sense,

A passion that we feel, not understand. Morning and afternoon are clasped together And North and South are an intrinsic couple And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers That walk away as one in the greenest body.

| On a comparison of Chinese justice with Western blind one, see my History,

Thinking, and

Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991, Appendix II, pp. 203-204. also ibid., Appendix, pp. 116-117, about "objectivity" in the human world. ? This is where the normal tends to connote the usual, as in "Normally, we don't say so." Tzu (in Chapter 22) collapses linguistic normality with moral and social normativity. 3 Analects, Chapter 13/18; Mencius, 7A35.

* Tao Te Ching, Chapter 25. > The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, N. Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980, p. 392.

Cf.

Hsün

18. THE HISTORICAL, THE PROCESSIVE

In solitude the trumpets of solitude Are not of another solitude resounding; A little string speaks for a crowd of voices. The partaker partakes of that which changes him. The child that touches takes character from the thing. The body, it touches. The captain and his men Are one and the sailor and the sea are one. Follow after, O my companion, my fellow, my self, Sister and solace, brother and delight."

395

APPENDIX 1

397

Appendix 1 (to Preliminary Remark): On "Why did modern science not develop in China?". Related to the topic of different modes of thinking in cultures is the problem of "Why did the 'scientific revolution' not take place in China?" or "Why did modern science not develop independently in China?" On precisely these questions Professor Yung Sik Kim has written an informative and perceptive article, "Natural Knowledge in a Traditional Culture: Problems in the Study of the History of Chinese Science," Minerva, Vol. XX, No. 1-2, Spring-Summer 1982, pp. 83-104. Since it is a significant article, let me briefly summarize it first, then itemize my three evoked reactions on the topic. a. Kim first reports many thinkers who took this sort of "why not" question as inadmissible: A. C. Graham, N. Sivin, R. S. Cohen, B.

Nelson. For Graham the question can be answered only if factors can be isolated from their historical situation and show that they are necessary for the development of modern science. Since such work is impossible, answers given so far--experimentation, mathematics, stringent argumentation, linear time-concept, "divine legislator," "powerful merchant class"--amount only to showing how China went differently from Europe for the lack of those factors. Sivin mentioned three fallacies: one feature of the European Science as a necessary condition for all cultures, one set of ideas in China as an inhibiting factor, one sort of factors alone (intellectual, or

socio-economic) as answer to the question. For Cohen specific answers are already predetermined in the question, comparable cultural variables are hard to find and define, and they make causal conditional arguments difficult. Nelson discerned five complexes in J. Needham's answer to the problem. Kim then claims the supreme mistake in answering the question: assuming one developmental pattern of science common to all cultures. J. Needham was his target of attack. Then comes Kim's delineation of traditional Chinese "natural knowledge" as emphasizing principles over gadgetry (92, 99-101), natural knowledge taken as marginal (89, 94), and the importance of finding the role and position of natural knowledge in the Chinese

overall

system

of knowledge

(90, 96, 98,

103).

Kim

repeatedly cited Chu Hsi as an illustration, and concluded that the "why not" question is legitimate as long as we are careful about our answers, and that the question should be changed to "Why did the Chinese develop their knowledge of nature as they did and not as the Europeans

398

APPENDIXES

did modern science?" b. My evoked reactions are three, as follows. (1) For Kim, the question was not wrong but was wrongly answered, perhaps because the question is open to any perspective wherein it is asked and answered, while answers cannot be perspectively open. Questions are like koans to evoke free responses. (2) Graham cuts too much. His crucial word, "necessary," means causally and logically necessary; 2+2 must give 4, paper heated enough must burn. But if causality must (logically?) compel things to happen, then no historical or scientific studies are possible, for all probable explanations are excluded. Besides, it is not clear why modes of thinking such as stringent argumentation, linear time-concept, grammar, belong to contingent historical conditions. If he says that they have happened historically in a culture. then his own argument itself is contingent as well; it happened sometime in the 1970s. It is also subject to the same historical scrutiny as any other contingent events. Graham again cuts too much. (3) Clever inventions of gadgetry and instruments are not quite natural science for both the West and China. Thomas Edison is not an engineer, much less a scientist. Chu Hsi never considered technical artisanship as more than of secondary interest. Both cultures regard systematization of natural knowledge under overall principles as of the essence of "scientific" knowledge. Then, what is their difference? Can Chinese understanding of and attitude to nature be called "scientific" in the Western sense? Can Western attitude and understanding of nature be called "adequate" among Chinese scholars? Why did natural science in the West dropped investigation on the final cause in nature in an Aristotelian sense, casting only a side glance at formal cause, and limit itself to investigating on material and efficient causes? The pages in this essay skip all historical and circumstantial factors, brute factuals which generated modern science and technology in the West. The essay concentrates instead on the style of thinking which typically (not occasionally) happened in the West (but not in China). This Western style of thinking--formal, theoretical, analytical, abstract- manifested and developed itself in modern science. Also, the overall structural principles in China differ from those in the West. The Chinese ones are metaphoric, compact, storytelling; the Western ones

APPENDIX 1

399

are conceptual, abstract, formal. It is thus that this essay answers the above mentioned questions to some extent by way of elucidating different modes of thinking in two cultures, Chinese and Western. Cf. also, Chapter Four in my History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1991. My views also answer, at least in part, Kim's revised question as to why Chinese understanding of nature differs from Western scientific one.

APPENDIX 2

401

Appendix 2 (to Preliminary Remark): Western Philosophy, a "Series of Footnotes to Plato". Whitehead's famous dictum that Western philosophy is "a series of footnotes to Plato"' is still an amazingly apt description of the dominant feature of both the analytical and the phenomenological trends of Western philosophy. Analytical philosophy proudly displays its logical acumen as its main tool in the analysis of concepts and common sense. John Austin's insights on some utterances as "performative" is logically developed by John Searle in his "speech acts." Whitehead's noticing of reality as an organic process is turned into a Whiteheadian scholasticism of John Cobb, David Griffin and Lewis Ford.

Phenomenology began with Husserl's Wesenschau and in the transcendental Ego. This Platonic (ideational, analytical) trend 13 followed by Heidegger's ontological level that presides over the ontic, Sartre's sharp separation of the In-Itself from the For-Itself, various phenomenological analyses by Scheler, Schutz, Tillich that "read off" "the universal structure--ontological universals--of historical existence," "the ground of being." Note also Jaspers' levels of Existenz. Richard F. Grabau's quiet bombshell went generally unnoticed when he urged that universals are constructed out (not "read off") of experience, that anyone can interpret experience from cues in experience, that the universal is derived from and "understood in the light of existence, not existence in its light. Ontic reality clarifies and makes sense out of the universal; the universal does not make sense out

of and clarify ontic reality."

Clearly, however, Grabau still operates on

a Platonic scheme of the ontic versus the universal, the universal versus

existence.

l Whitehead, Alfred North, Process and Reality, N. Y.: Macmillan, 1929, p. 7; Corrected Edition by David R. Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne, N. Y.: The Free Press, 1978, p. 5. ? Richard F. Grabau, "Existential Universals," in James Phenomenology, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965, pp. 160.

M.

Edie,

ed.,

An

Invitation

to

APPENDIX 3

403

Appendix 3 (to Preliminary Remark): The Pragmatic Turn in The West. Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations! enumerated many difficulties of explaining how we come to "understand" the rules (of mathematics, of chess, for example) and "obey" them. This illustrates how difficult it is for Whitehead's aeroplane-like formal thinking to come down to concrete actuality. Thus, against meaning as stipulative (rule-like), Wittgenstein proposed meaning as "use" (sections 190-92, 194-95, etc.). Meaning as use amounts to meaning as embedded in actuality. That is the remarkable genius of Wittgenstein who had training in theoretical formalism of Western thinking. Wittgenstein was a rebel in that context. It was indeed a happy turn for the Western philosophy toward praxis. Wittgenstein and others who followed his inspiration struck out in this direction against the background of formal precision and in the ambience of formal rigor. This atmosphere typified the Western pragmatic turn, different from the Chinese philosophy which always moves and has its being in the world of praxis. The distinction makes it beneficial for both the Chinese and the Western styles of thinking to come together, as the first and the final sections of this Division stress.

! Sections from 185 through 199 (The English Text of the Third Edition), tr. by G. E. M. Anscombe, N. Y.: The Macmillan Company, 1953, 1968, etc., pp. 74--81*.

APPENDIX 4

405

Appendix 4 (to Preliminary Remark): Tillich and Concrete Universality. Concrete universality sounds somewhat odd, given our custom of regarding universality as something abstract. Paul Tillich has something instructive to say on this. He said,’ "The Logos doctrine [the 'Logos who has become flesh'] is misunderstood if the tension between universal and concrete is interpreted as a tension between abstract and particular. Abstraction negates parts of that from which it abstracts. Universality includes every part because it includes concreteness. Particularity excludes every particular from every other one.

Concreteness represents every other concrete

because it includes universality."

Unfortunately, this important insight is buried in a footnote, never explicitly elaborated. In fact, despite this insight, Tillich was so much of a Platonist (participation in being itself) that he took the relation between the concrete and the universal to be a "tension," in the

sense that? "ultimate concern must transcend every preliminary finite and concrete concern. But in transcending the finite the religious concern loses the concreteness . . The tendency toward ultimacy continuously fights against the tendency toward concreteness." Hence, the ". contradiction between the ultimate element and the concrete element in the idea of God." This interpretation of ultimacy threatens to identify it with abstraction (cf. ultimacy as "transcendence"). Concrete universality then must be understood afresh; it 1s an essential item in the concrete sort of thinking, and is one of the topics to be explained in this essay.

! Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume I, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951, p. 17, note 5.

? Ibid., pp. 212, 213, 219.

APPENDIX 5

407

Appendix 5 (to Preliminary Remark): Predominant Trends and Attitudes.

To characterize Western thinking as abstract-formal and Chinese thinking as concrete sounds offhand and cavalier. Of course, as long as all of us are human, people in the West also think in concrete terms, as people do in business and in poetry; so do people in China. What differentiates them is how each culture tends to classify this sort of thinking: the one as poetry (or business) that is distinct from philosophy, the other as the core of thinking that pervades philosophy as well as poetry and business. As an example let us take the strikingly similar insights strikingly similarly expressed in two famous poems: John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and Chuang Tzu's beginning passage to his famous Second Chapter, "Things, Theories, Even-ing Themselves Out." Keats wrote,

" ... What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

... And happy melodist, unwearied,

For ever piping songs for ever new; . . . " Chuang Tzu wrote, "Tzu Ch'i of South Wall Reclined [on an] armrest and sat, looking-up-to Heaven and sighed, So loosened-up, seemingly lost his counterpart. ',.. For now I lost me-myself, . . . [Do] you hear men's piping, and [are] yet [to] hear earth's piping; [Do] you hear earth's piping, and [are] yet [to] hear heaven's piping?'... " Who in the West would have thought of subjecting Keats' lines to philosophical scrutinies? Chuang Tzu's passage, in contrast, has consistently been taken as the zenith of philosophical wisdom. In the West, poetry is instinctive and concrete, philosophy speculative and formal-theoretical, and the twain seldom meet. In

408

APPENDIXES

China, every poem is philosophical, and almost every philosophical discourse explicates at least one poem, if it is not itself poetic, as shown in Chuang Tzu's passage above. The poetico-philosophical symbiosis in China makes for a twofold unity of reality itself. Again, the following two stories can be instructively compared to show how the same sort of stories are used in different ways: The first story was given by Raymond Smullyan, a logician, about a person living in Planet A, with Body A in State A, and then in Planet B, with Body B in State B, going out of one planet-body-state into the other via sleep-dream. This situation prevents us from absolutely judging what "reality" is.' The second story was given by Lieh Tzu about a ruthless ruler over an underling. The ruler dreamed every night to be a slave harried by hard work under the underling-turned-ruler; the underling dreamed every night to be a ruler enjoying himself. Distressed, the ruler consulted

his friend who

told him

that it is as it should

be;

it was

"fortune righting itself." The ruler eased his demands on his slaves, and his ailment was bettered.’ Smullyan, a logician with a flair for fiction, tells a story to prove that reality is relative; Lieh Tzu, an encyclopedist with a flair for fiction, tells a similar story with multiple implications, ethical, managerial, cosmico-religious; they are all concrete. Finally, the same story can be interpreted quite differently. Daniel Kolak, a philosopher with a flair for fiction, interpreted Chuang Tzu's famous butterfly-dream story (awakened from dreaming to be a butterfly, he was not sure whether he was a man having dreamed or a butterfly dreaming) to mean simply that "reality is a dream." In contrast, see my interpretation in The Butterfly as Companion.’ Enough has been shown that the West-China difference lies in their predominant trends and attitudes, not in who has what and who ! This is anthologized under the rubric of "Reality" in Daniel Kolak and Raymond Martin, eds., The Experience of Philosophy, Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1990, pp. 246-47. 2. The Book of Lieh-tzu, tr. by A. C. Graham, London: John Murray, 1960, pp. 68-69.

+ Op. cit, pp. 232-43.

Kolak is joined by Robert C. Allinson (Chuang Tzu for Spiritual

Transformatioin, Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York Press, 1990, Chapters 6 and 7) and James Legge (The Texts of Taoism, Vol. I, N. Y.: Dover Publications, [1897] 1962, p. 197). * See

"butterfly" in Index, p. 493, and "dream" in Index,

p.495.

APPENDIX 5 does

409

not.!

! See further on this point in my History, Thinking, and Literature in Chinese Philosophy, Taipei: Academia Sinica,

1991, Chapter Four.

APPENDIX 6

411

Appendix 6 (to Section 1.): Referent vs. Meaning. One is tempted to say, "We have no problem here because the meaning of 'I' remains the same; only its referents differ." But this is a strange solution. What sort of word is "I" when it differs in referent so often? The naive meaning-is-reference view still seems valid, as long as "is" here is not exhaustive in coverage. Traditional criticisms of this view are three: (a) Meanings can differ yet have the same referent; "the morning star" differs in meaning from "the evening star"; they yet refer to the same planet Venus.

(b) "The morning star" does not logically imply "the evening star"; their identity of reference can only be discovered empirically.

(c) Prepositions and conjunctions do not refer to anything tangible.

Therefore, meaning is not reference.’

In answer, we can say: (a) "different 'meanings,' same referent" shows that meaning is not just a matter of logical connection but also of empirical investigation; (b) "the morning star" may not logically imply "the evening star"; they are yet "empirically synonymous," 1.e., they actually "mean" the same planet, and we can find this to be so by empirical investigation; (c) conjunctions and prepositions do refer to, and mean, the relations among words in the sentence. In short, meaning has a lot to do with "use" (Wittgenstein), not just with logic, and one of the important uses of the word is to refer. We understand a word by pondering on its logical implications, because we ! Cf. William P. Alston, "Meaning," in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Paul Edwards, NY: Macmillan Publishing Co. and The Free Press, 1967, etc., V: 233-41, esp. p. 234.

412

APPENDIXES

originally use it to refer. "Pegasus" is "empirically meaningless" (no actual referent), though logically meaningful ("the winged horse"), and such a logical meaning is derived from empirical ones--"wings," "horse"--which, in turn, are derived from actual referrings. To put the genetic "history" of meaning graphically, "meaning" begins when it is defined with referring; we call it ostensive definition. Since then a word's meaning has been defined by use (Wittgenstein) and performance (Austin), while referring stands beside, ever ready to help. Usual definitions derive from ostensive ones whose meanings refer, and usual definitions themselves mean to refer. We can imagine neither meaning without reference nor reference without meaning.

APPENDIX 7

413

Appendix 7 (to Section 1.1.): Consciousness vs. Self-Consciousness.

Self-consciousness amounts to a spontaneous identification of the self as the self, a dynamic self-identity. What needs to be noted here is the spontaneity of the dynamism of self-identity. Although consciousness is self-consciousness, it is not self-conscious. The act of self-identification 13 not a deliberate self-confirmation or demonstration,

but simply a spontaneous self-affirmation, a taken-for-granted nod to oneself that comes as a matter of course. The Cartesian Cogito shows how much unnatural ingenuity is to be expended to force such a self-spontaneity into a logical selfdemonstration. Spontaneous self-affirmation is now transmuted into a logical af-firmation of the self. And the pristine selfhood of the I 13 gone; a mind-body dichotomy is one disastrous consequence. For the I is the I, as inviolable as the innocence of a baby; once tampered with, both the baby and his innocence are gone. Similarly, we see a curious backward twist--if not a contradiction--among the phenomenologists who harp on the nature of consciousness as consciousness of something, an intentionality that always transcends itself, pointing toward something beyond itself. For they betray themselves in their very harping, a conscious attention back onto this consciousness that attends beyond itself. This inward turn of consciousness to describe its essential outward turn perhaps contributed to convolutedness of phenomenological description. Chinese thinkers have none of this complexity; they are simply innocent. That this innocence has multiple depths of life is what this essay endeavors to bring out, while guarding itself against such a potential pitfall of the phenomenologists.

APPENDIX 8

415

Appendix 8 (to Section 1.2.): Universals in Images. In fact, a veteran writer, Scott Edelstein, told the aspiring writer to "keep in mind that universals are best [emphasis added] expressed through particular characters, events, and/or images." For "universals" are! "such" items "as love, hate, death, compassion, loneliness, . . . aspiration, despair, and ennui. . . . These items are universal because they are experienced by a great number of unique human beings." It follows that "if you simply write about [emphasize original] a universal, as a disembodied concept rather than as the result of particular people's actions and circumstances, . . . your reader isn't going to be... interested."

"To express these universals, therefore, you need to show them being

experienced by particular [emphasis added] people . . . " You may "give . . . a group of sensory impressions (sights, sounds, . . .) that engender [emphasis original] universal feelings... Imagine . . . geese flying south combined with the sound of fallen leaves crunching underfoot. Can you feel something just from these two images? Isn't it the same thing almost everyone feels in late fall?" Clearly, "concrete universal" as used here means universalized concretes. This has nothing to do with Hegel's (although he first coined the phrase) which is a formal theoretical category of the universal of the "concrete." Hegel tried to apply this category of "concrete universal" to actuality. Kierkegaard rightly claimed that Hegel failed.

! Scott Edelstein, The No-Experience-Necessary House, 1990, p. 45.

Writer's Course, Chelsea, Mich.: Scarborough

APPENDIX 9

417

Appendix 9 (to Section 1.2.): Feminism, the Gulf War, and Name-Rectification.

On musicality, see also Chuang Tzu, 2/1-9, a magnificent musical paean (in writing) to the musical in nature, impinging on us naturally and inexorably. The modern significance of rectification of names can be seen in the feminist movement, which has tried to right the wronged "name" of femininity by restoring the rights of women as persons in the society. This is understandable, given the fact that what it means to be a woman has been so corrupted that to go straight to a restoration of womanhood as we usually understand it makes no meaningful headway. How corrupted the customary meaning of "womanhood" is can be seen by comparing negative connotations in "sissy" with positive ones in "brotherly" (or "manly"), derogatory "woman in the street" with neutral "man in the street," condescending "old wives's tale" with praiseworthy "one's own man." After women are restored to their rightful position of persons in the society, however, one should go further into what it rightfully means to be a woman; for restoration of womanhood should not be confined to being a person, for to be a woman is to become a woman, not a "sexless

person," which is a pale term, even a contradiction in terms. Another example of modern rectification of name is the Gulf War which was supposed to have corrected Saddam Hussein's wronging of names--claiming Kuwait to be his, claiming to love his people by brutalizing his people, and spending all the nation's wealth in building up his armies, etc. Cf. Mencius, 7B4.

APPENDIX 10

419

Appendix 10 (to Section 1.2.): Affirmatives and Nature. Cf. Mencius's emphatic identification of "knowing [human] nature" with its "full realization" and "nurturing" (7A1). Cf. also 4A10, 6A11, 7A33. This is why the reverse 15 also true. For Mencius, to "chih yen"! ("understand words" [Legge] or "have insights into words" [Lau]) is to understand what a person is by the way he talks. Humanfe]ness is the home that nestles a person? And human[e]ness 15 intimately linked to the unbearing mindheart (to see others suffer) (2A6; this is a negative expression of roomy other-accommodation), on the one hand, and with the Flooding Elan of Life-Breath (2A2, 6A8), on the other. Affirmative words are a link connecting our inner recesses--secret inclination, intention, attitude--and the vast Nature both within and around us.

| Mencius, 2A2. 2 Mencius, 2A7.

APPENDIX 11

421

Appendix 11 (to Section 2.3.2.): "a of not-a" vs. "a and not-a". The West has no "a of not-a"; China has few "a and not-a."

I

suppose these two phrases share a core meaning of contradiction. I suppose also that the "of"-phrase is stronger than the "and"-phrase, in this sense. The "and"-phrase is a juxtaposition of incompatibles, and cannot be integrated into a story; the "of"-phrase is an integration of incompatibles, and cries out to be integrated into a story. This means that in the "of"-phrase a has not-a inside a, that is, a has not-a as an integral part of a, resulting in a "stronger" contrast between the incompatibles than if they are merely juxtaposed. Further, juxtaposition of incompatibles facilitates conflict; their integration promotes complementality. Thus the Western attention on the "and"-phrase tends to see contradiction in actuality. The Chinese emphasis on the "of"-phrase tends to look toward polar concord. Western political theories usually stress adversarial compromise; Chinese political theories are predominantly modeled after the family. China has a graphic phrase, "itself mutually spear shield" [tzu hsiang mao tun], that summarizes an ancient story of a merchant from Ch'u selling both an "impenetrable" shield and an "unstoppable" spear. He could not answer a query: what if his spear is tried on his shield. But "and"-phrases such as "spear, shield" are less in variety and number than those of "of'-phrases such as "use of [the] useless" or even "no[n-

]doing."

And one is hard put to find a Chinese notion which has no

story behind it. This shows the Chinese penchant for concreteness and

for the "of"-phrase type of the organic joining of incompatibles.

APPENDIX 12

423

Appendix 12 (to Section 2.3.2.1.): Wittgenstein vs. Lao Tzu. Didn't Wittgenstein say as much to conclude his Tractatus?’ "6.41: The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world

everything is as it is, . . .: in it no value exists ...

6.54: My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them--as steps--to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright." And the whole book concludes with, "7: What we cannot speak about we must consign to silence." This statement is equivalent to the beginning statement of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching: "Tao tao-able is-not Always Tao." But what a difference in how they said it! Wittgenstein is kind to us; he leads us up to the ineffability of the concrete, with which he ends his book.

He was all too kind to us; he even told us to kick "the

ladder," his own description. Lao Tzu takes concrete ineffability for granted by mumbling a poetic nonchalance, with which he begins his book. We feel a shift of wind here.

| Ludwig Wittgenstein, 7ractatus Logico-Philosophicus, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961, pp. 144, 151.

? Ibid., p. 151.

APPENDIX

13

425

Appendix 13 (to Section 3.2.): Pragmatic Explanation of Deconstructionism. I have purposely engaged in a pragmatic explanation of deconstructionism. After all, deconstructionism is a performance of literary-philosophical therapy. For its various applications to exegeses of the Bible and Zen Buddhism, see Robert Magliola's Derrida on the Mend'; "Sexual Rogations, Mystical Abrogations: Some Donnees of Buddhist Tantra and the Catholic Renaissance"; "Differentialism in Chinese Ch'an and French Deconstruction: Some Test-Cases from the Wu-men-kuan";

"French Deconstruction with a (Buddhist) Difference: More Cases from the Gateless Gate and Blue Cliff Record."

i Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press,

1984, 1986.

? In C. Koelb and S. Noakes, eds., The Comparative Perspective on Literature, ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988, pp. 195-213 ° In The Journal of Chinese Philosophy, January, 1990, pp. 87-97. * In Studies in Language and Literature, pp. 1-25, etc. the Bible.)

(I omit his deconstructionist exegeses on

APPENDIX 14

427

Appendix 14 (to Section 3.2.): Mencius, Wordsworth, and the Baby. Mencius, 4B12. The heart of a baby is well expressed in his own self-integralness, as the previously quoted conversation with a little boy shows. "Not losing" such a heart does not mean that the Great One is identical with the baby in him, but that the Great One survived the usual danger of losing the baby's self-integralness which, as it 15, 13 grown into cosmic self-integralness in the mode of the baby's selfintegralness. This growth is a moral-metaphysical one. This line is clearer and goes further than Milton's. John Milton said, "The childhood shows the man,

As morning shows the day."

(Paradise Regained [1671], IV. line 240) But no one 1s sure whether Mencius hit the same sentiment as William Wordsworth's, who wrote,

"My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life began; So is it now I am a man;

So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die! The child is father of the man;

And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety." ("My Heart Leaps Up," [1807])

APPENDIX 15

429

Appendix 15 (to Section 3.5.): Tillich and the Non-Metaphorical Matrix. On the non-metaphorical matrix two thoughts are in order, (1) about Tillich, and (2) about literalism. (1) Paul Tillich acknowledged Wilbur M. Urban's criticism that symbols need a non-symbolic point; pan-symbolism is meaningless. In pansymbolism all symbolizings hang in midair, without that to which all symbols symbolize and in which all symbols start, end, and make sense. Tillich came up with "God is being itself . . beyond the subject-object structure of everything that is."' Three reactions can be anticipated. First, one cannot help but be reminded of Aquinas' second proof for God's existence, as interpreted, among others, by E. L. Mascall,? that the causal

series that 1s the world,

if it is endless,

constitutes

an

eternal regress of explanations, forever hanging in unintelligible inconclusiveness, unless at the back of all this complex is a selfexplanatory reality which ultimately explains it all. In other words, Urban's critique and Tillich's response seems to reenact Aquinas' revised Second Way. To obviate standard criticisms on it we do not need to discard the Urban-Tillich dialogue in its entirety; we only need to avoid Tillich's Thomistic ontological response, Being-itself. This brings us to the second point. Secondly, Tillich's answer bespeaks his Platonic leaning, symbols as participating in being itself, and is subject to the same criticisms as Plato received: what "participation" could mean in this ‘context and, more fundamentally, how symbolic participation is even possible at all, if being itself 1s universal, essential to all, and

self-sufficient. Replacing the Platonic conundrum of "participation" with the Christian mystery of "creation" merely covers up the original difficulty. Finally, a question can be raised as to how Tillich's Being(Itself) is possible at all, how it is even knowable and describable as "being." To raise this question is to at once base description on non! Kegley, Charles W. and Bretall, Robert W., eds., The Theology of Paul Tillich, N. Y.: The

Macmillan Co., 1952, 1961, p. 334.

? E. L. Mascall, He Who Is, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1943, Chapter 5.

430

APPENDIXES

description, being on non-being, symbols on the non-symbolic, metaphors on the non-metaphoric, the self as the non-ego, and so on. Tillich seems to have moved in this direction when he said that God does not exist, meaning that God's existence differs from creaturely ones. (This move was later wrongly criticized as atheistic.) The God-is-dead movement may have been aimed at this implication. Be that as it may, Urban's criticism applies to metaphors as well; pan-metaphorism is as meaningless as pan-symbolism. I came up with an answer of the non-metaphoric matrix of immediately actual I-here-now. My answer obviates the above criticism to Tillich because the indescribable I-here-now is a non-self-conscious tacit presence, a transparent non-being that accompanies every identifiable object including the empirical self.

(2)

One can mean by "non-metaphorical" "literal," and one can say that metaphorism needs literalism to work. This amounts to an objection to making metaphorism basic; pan-metaphorism 15 as floating a universalism as disembodied view from nowhere in particular, amounting to all referrings without a secure literal moorage, an empty meaninglessness. This is a familiar response from a typical Western penchant for exactitude. Suppose we accept the challenge. First, let us consider what literalism is. — Literalism is an operation of designating something as something else, equating one with meaning the other. But what else is this designatory operation if not a form of ostensive definition, a pointing? But what is pointing? It is a performance of standing here, as a reference point, to refer us to

there. From "here" to "there," that is the structure of referringpointing, an operation of ferrying us over. And this ferryingover is none other than what "metaphor" means. This is what "literalism is dead metaphor" really means, a metaphoring process that is assumed, not noted. Such a ferrying-over (in a wide sense, perhaps) can be by way of similarity discovered (as A, so B), in which case it will ! Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, University of Chicago Press, 1951, Vol.

1, p. 237.

2 Chuang Tzu has a subtle distinction between the identifiable objective wo and the primal subject

wu in his Second Chapter.

The distinction is "subtle" because Chuang Tzu did not even mention

the distinction; he just performs it, presents it, as he executes his Chapter.

182-85, 416-17.

See my Butterfly, pp.

APPENDIX 15

be a simile, or by way we come to notice its evocation. Metaphor similarity in contrast,

431

of contrast (B is not-A, and by using A, negation, B), in which case it will be an is a unity of these two logical poles, contrast in similarity. It is a way of

moving us from here to there, and moving is (as both Aristotle

and Hegel reminded us) a unity of being(-here) and (=on the way to) being-not(-here). Metaphor accomplishes moving and becoming, which are synonymous; in this context, we become knowledgeable by moving out of ignorance into awareness.

APPENDIX 16

433

Appendix 16 (to Section 4.1.): Cognitive Fallacy in Plato and Socrates. There is a cognitive fallacy of a sort in Socrates and Plato. They reasoned like this. (a) To have knowledge is to leave opinion; to know truth is to embrace it and 15 eo ipso to discard mistakes. (0) Therefore, to know goodness is eo ipso to leave evil to do good. (a) is correct; the inference to (0); however, is invalid. For (a) is in the order of knowing; (b) is in the order of doing. Knowledge is one thing; practice is another. To know how to do something (right) is not to.do it, any more than getting a map (and instruction) to Chicago is to get to Chicago, much less to get there. As Tseng Tzu said,' "The burden is heavy; the road is far." The road from (a) to (b) is an arduous one, not to be pasted over by such a feeble and mislaid measure as the weakness of the will. Unfortunately, "Can virtue be taught?" in Meno is posed within the same misplaced cognitive context. The reverse side of this is that, to quote from Pascal in our way,

there is a wisdom in the hand (Aristotle's practical wisdom,’ Heidegger's circumspection’) that reason does not know, because to know is not to do, any more than theoretical chemistry is itself chemical engineering. This is what that old Wheelwright told his ruler that reading the dead ancients' words

is merely to chew

their dregs, because

he could

not,

during those long years, transmit even to his own son what he had got in the hand and responded to in the heart as he carved out wheels.” The entire world of religion serves to traverse this gap between knowing the truth and living it, whether by enlightenment, by meditation, or by faith. It is in this light that we see how revolutionary Wittgenstein's meaning as use and Chinese body thinking are. Both amount to bridging the gap from the side of praxis, while the traditional Western philosophy since Plato and Socrates begins at the side of knowledge and is often not even aware of the gap (cf. Hegel's the rational as the real!), except for occasional "odd balls" such as the Stoics, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and

l Analects, 8:7. 2 Aristotle, Nicomachaean Ethics, Bk 6, 1140a9-10, 20-21, b4-6, etc. ? Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trs. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, London: SCM Press, 1962, pp. 95-107. 4 Chuang Tzu, end of Chapter Thirteen.

434

APPENDIXES

Pascal. Descartes and Kant have significance of praxis. Unfortunately, belong strictly to a cognitive solution into a mind-body dualism, and Kant Reason to be critique of/by reason, not

indeed vaguely hinted at the Descartes thought his Cogito to of cognitive doubt, thus falling thought his Critique of Practical by praxis.

APPENDIX 17

435

Appendix 17 (to Section 4.3.1.): History, Usage, and Etymology. It 15 instructive in this context to be reminded of Lin Yutang's view on translations of Chinese phrases. He castigated Western sinologues for their literal translations, saying, "Fascinated by the pictographs, they like to chew up each character by itself (Ezra Pound, Florence Ayscough) as if every modern English word (e.g. 'breakfast') should be interpreted and translated according not to its usage, but to etymology." "Resonance of the spirit" (for ch'i-yün) "hardly means anything in English"; the phrase is to be translated as "tone." For ch'ihsiang ("atmosphere and form," as Lin has it) Lin wants "impression (on a spectator)", and for shen-yün ("soul and tone," as Lin has it) Lin wants "facial expression," εἰς. One can understand Lin's impatience with etymology-mongers without having to go as far as Lin went--sticking only to usage and

completely disregarding etymology.

But "ch'i yün" is not just "tone," nor is "ch'i-hsiang" just "impression," nor is "shen-yün" just "facial expression." These common usages are also permeated with lingering depths and atmosphere of etymological connotations. The truth must lie somewhere between, or rather, in a combination of, conventional usage and etymological connotation.

! Lin Yutang, The Chinese Theory of Art: Translations from the Mastes of Chinese Art, N. Y.: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1967, pp. 4, 36-37.

APPENDIX

18

437

Appendix 18 (to Section 4.3.1.): "Elements" as Concrete Universals.

M. Merleau-Ponty said of "old term 'element,' in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatiotemporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being. The flesh is in this sense an 'elernent' of Being. Not a fact or a sum of facts, and yet adherent to /ocation and to the now. Much more: the inauguration of the where and the when, the possibility and exigency for the fact; in a word: facticity, what makes the fact to be a fact. And at the same time, what makes the facts have meaning, makes the fragmentary facts dispose themselves about 'something.' . . . an element, as the concrete emblem of a general manner of being. . . . 'elements' (in Bachelard's sense), that is, not objects, but fields, subdued

being, non-thetic being, being before being . . . their auto-inscription . . 1]

! Cf. Appendix 26, below. The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968, pp. 139-40, 147, 267. Cf. F. E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon, N. Y.: New York University Press, 1967, pp. 70-71, 180-85.

APPENDIX 19

439

Appendix 19 (to Section 4.3.1.): Specific and General Descriptions in China. J. N. Mohanty’ distinguished a specific empirical description from a general philosophical one. This distinction is made possible by an "analytic" perspective, that is, from a formal theoretical standpoint. In China, the distinction may exist, but very subtly and almost imperceptibly. A general philosophical description such as "localized pain" is presented with a story-description of its circumstances and coagulated into a gnomic phrase such as "boiling beans [with] burning beanstalks."

J N. Mohanty, Transcendental Phenomenology: An Analytic Account, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989, p. 7.

APPENDIX 20

441

Appendix 20 (to Section 4.3.1.): Concrete Phrase-Concepts. These phrase-concepts are situated in the concrete to "bleed" out universal significance--by evoking us into metaphorically seeing the situational-generic significance. That is, the metaphorical meanings of those concrete universals are indefinite until applied. And their application is apt or inept, depending on a specific subject in a specific situation to discern the meaning of a phrase, as in a sensible reading of a poem. In fact, many passages in the Analects and the Mencius (and in other Chinese classical literature) are strewn with poetic quotations. Meaning, application, situation, subject matter--they form a dynamic configuration of interaction and interdependence to constitute the universality of concrete universals. To discard this open situational dynamism of a concept is to fix the meaning once and for all. And to do so is to turn this meaning dynamism into dead literalism, which leads to horoscope and numerology, i.e. occultism, a primitive pseudo-science. What distinguishes it from natural science is that the latter substantiates-verifies--literalistic meaning of universals--natural laws--by inductive generalization from numerous factual experiments. Occultism 1s science without experiments and its inductive generalization. In any case, Chinese scholarship traditionally frowns upon occultistic literalism, that is, mechanistic explication of concrete universals, calling such hermeneutic literalism "machine mind" (chi hsin). Instead, extrapolation of meaning from concrete incidents and summarized stories (gnomic phrases) depends on the subject-in-aspecific-situation, who is mature enough--"great man" (fa jen) enough-to be transparently discerning. So the discovery of meaning is an organic process of "this" specific instance metaphoring the "I" forward "now" to "that" specific implication.

APPENDIX 21

443

Appendix 21 (to Section 4.3.2.): Historical Understanding vs. Genetic Fallacy. Professor Chiin-chieh Huang has repeatedly emphasized this historical understanding of a theory as the characteristic of Confucian scholarship in his "Confucianism in postwar Taiwan."' One can say that such historical understanding is valid in Taoism also, and that in China accusation of genetic fallacy (illegitimately identifying how it came about with what it is) or of Hegelian pan-rationalism (illegitimately taking every contingent event to be fully rational) won't work; these accusations work only when we separate body from thinking. In China thinking is totally embodied; here history and existential development is part and parcel of thinking itself.’ My questions put to Professor Uto, Shokichi may not be irrelevant here. Those questions are valid only when our body in its historical development is separated from thinking. I am yet to work out detailed and systematic answers, in the light of Chinese body thinking, to my following questions such as these: (a) Are there checks against an infinite regress of justification? The question emerged (genetically!) as I read, "[Russell] determined the sensations . . . and . . . logic as the hardest of hard data. [They] are, according to him, . . . more certain than . . . matter and mind."

This is

a modern Hume; how about Descartes, etc.?

Hence, an infinite regress.

(b) "Systematic investigation" into "the constructive phase of... philosophical theories" is a "process of philosophic discovery," and so is unrelated to genetic (reductive) fallacy. Yet, how something grows is not what it is; how a theory came about is not what it consists in. Still, no genesis, no product; genetic understanding is part of inner understanding. How are the two understandings related? ! Chün-chieh Huang and Erik Zürcher, eds., Norms and Their Popularization in Chinese Culture, Leiden: E. J. Brill, forthcoming. ? See Appendix 30 on a comparison of philosophical Taoism with Epicureanism and Stoicism. ? Cf. 8.1. above. Shokichi Uto, Constructics: Constructional Studies on Philosophical Theories, Tokyo: Hokuju Shuppan, 1984.

444

APPENDIXES

One can say, à la Aristotle, that genetic understanding (understanding of a thing by understanding how it came to be understood) is in an epistemological order, the order of discovery, while essential understanding (understanding of what a thing is as it is now) is in an ontological order, in the order of analysis of the thing itself. And these two orders are reverse each to the other, as Aristotle said.

But a question still remains. Why must one understand how a house ts built in order to understand what a house is, or understand the story of "Eureka!" before understanding Archimedes' theory? Is the story of Newton's apple essential to (understanding) his theory of universal gravity? (c)

Is genetic investigation meant to replace or replenish investigation into a finished theory? Does only genetic understanding let us know what the author really means? But how so? The above questions are important because genetic understanding are of two kinds: one relevant to understanding a theory, and one not. John Rawls's early articles help us understand his later Theory of Justice; so does Josiah Royce's Religious Aspects of Philosophy his later two volumes of The World and the Individual. But Kants early writings on cosmology may or may not help one understand his First Critique, depending on one's standpoint. As for his many revisions of the Critique, some would be trivial, some others may be important. Genetic development of a theory is a historical process, a mixture of materials essential and not-soessential to that theory. To take all of them as equally essential approaches Hegelianism. | Thus we need some criteria to spot relevant historical materials for understanding a theory. But sadly "relevance" is already value-loaded; such criteria themselves often prove to be derived from a particular theory, as history of philosophy repeatedly instantiates. There seems to be no objective ground, no neutral meta-level, in hermeneutics.

(d)

Chinese concrete thinking differs in kind from Western theoretical one. How does genetic understanding apply[ there, perhaps more aptly?

APPENDIX 22

445

Appendix 22 (to Section 5.2.): The Hidden Self. Even the book exclusively devoted to the theme of "demonstratives," say, Palle Yourgrau, ed., Demonstratives,' is silent on this aspect of the matter. Another example of Western reticence. on this matter is in Western philosophers's treatment of the paradox of (egoistic) hedonism. Henry Sidgwick first mentioned it, and his description is worth quoting at length:? ". . . [S]elf-love is liable to engross the mind to a degree incompatible with a healthy . . . outflow of those 'disinterested' impulses . . . , the preexistence of which is necessary to the attainment . . . of the happiness at which self-love aims. I should not, however, infer from this that the pursuit of pleasure is necessarily self-defeating and futile; but merely that the principle of Egoistic Hedonism . . . is practically self-limiting; ie. that a rational method of attaining the end . . . requires that we should . . . put it out of sight and not directly aim at it. . . [T]hough it presents itself as a paradox, there does not seem to be any difficulty in its practical realisation, when once the danger indicated is clearly seen. For it is an experience only too common among men... that they let the original . . . goal of their efforts pass out of view, and . . . regard the means to this end as ends in themselves: so that they at last even sacrifice the original end to the attainment of what is only . . . derivatively desirable. . . . [I]t [is] . . easy and common to forget the end in the means overmuch . . . " "But if one has to "even sacrifice the original end" of pleasure to attain the original end of pleasure, hedonism as "the pursuit of pleasure" is not just "practically self-limiting" but remains paradoxical, if not "self-defeating." Two observations are due here.

(a) Such a paradox is taken at most as mere practical self-limitation, namely, a small procedural nuisance. Sidgwick the discoverer of ' N. Y.: Oxford University Press, 1990. 2 Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, London: Macmillan and Co., 1874, etc., 1963, pp. 13637.

446

APPENDIXES

the paradox himself down-played its importance as just an indication that (egoistic) hedonism is "practically self-limiting." No later ethicist (so far as I know) would deign to mention, much less discuss, this paradox--Moore, Brandt, Margolis, Hospers, Alston, Rawls.

(b) But the paradox is an indication that self-engrossment defeats itself. In fact, the entire hedonism is a maximization of our natural self-interest; its (hedonism's, self-regard's) paradox shows the hidden nature of the self, that 1t expresses itself fully only when not noticed or interested in for its own sake.

APPENDIX 23

447

Appendix 23 (to Section 5.3.): Grabau and Existential Universals.

Richard F. Grabau's article "Existential Universals" comes close to the main theme of this essay. It is worth going into where they differ.’ Grabau correctly objected to the phenomenologists' "reading off" existential universals from experience by a passive Wesenschau, an intuition of essences "already fully there"; but this objection is based on his conviction that experience is something already thematized ("prethematized experience" does not exist [p. 151]), and on his observation that such "existential universals" differ so much among themselves. This is not quite the same as this essay's insistence that thinking is concrete and concrete situation is thoughtful. Grabau correctly claims that language thematizes experience, thematization is symbolization, words are symbols to articulate experience, and we create symbols "to come to grips and orient" ourselves "in the world" (152). Consciousness is a way not of being present to things but of organizing and integrating them (152, 154); consciousness "can create whatever meaning it wishes" (158). This is why each philosopher comes up with a meaning framework so different from one of other philosophers. For Heidegger we are being-unto-death; for Sartre and Camus death is no part of the meaning of life but its absurd end (151). Death is a dominant fact of life for Heidegger; life is for Cassirer (158). Kierkegaard wants commitment; Nietzsche wants doubt, the freedom from commitment (159). These constructs-symbolic forms--become universals when they come to be shared and communicated (158), that is, come to "build up into . . . networks of ideas of objects and relations, attitudes and feelings" for many people and "serve as the framework within which they conceive themselves and their world" (155). How consciousness creates meanings, and how these meanings become framework, much less "universal" framework shared widely, are

not pursued. My essay proposes the creation of meaning by situational evocation, the turning of meaning into communal interpretive framework through metaphorical extension.

! In James M. Edie, ed., An Invitation to Phenomenology. Experience, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965, pp. 147-60.

Studies

in the

? For a similar sort of dialogue with M. Merleau-Ponty, see 14.4.5., 15.4., below.

Philosophy

of

448

APPENDIXES

Finally, Grabau has a conclusion like one in this essay. Grabau said that "the universal is precisely what no one is interested in" in "the meeting of existences" (160). This essay calls attention to a different factor: it is the spontaneity of experience itself that makes existential universals, if there be any, tacit and unnoticeable in our thinking, by the nature of our thinking itself.

APPENDIX 24

449

Appendix 24 (to Section 6.3.): The Dog, the Music, the Person. Eyebrows may be raised: is the dog or the music another person? My response 15 that they are personified through my personal self-nihilation. When the boy is lost in his pet or the musician in her music, the person is not a cup dipped in water. Without the boy the pet is a mere moving thing; without the musician the music is less than sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ As was mentioned at the beginning of this section, it is "I" the person who in my self-nihilation lets a mere thing or vibration come out as something personal, the other, to be petted or played, and thereby to be lost in. Here the situation in which I am (lost) is a "someone" in which--in whom--to interact. This situational "you" in which I am (lost) is naturally understandable on the basis of personal mutuality of nihilative lettings-be. I can personify the situation because I am a person constantly nihilating my surrounding; my personification occurs through my self-nihilation. But at the level of experiential immediacy, I find myself lost in gazing at my pet and lost in making music. It is this experience that clues me into an awareness of my personal nihilation. And so the boy gazing at his pet and the musician lost in her music-making are cited to explicate self-discovery of personhood in self-losing.

! Here the "less" is a mere nullity.

APPENDIX 25

451

Appendix 25 (to Section 6.8.): Philosophy as Existential Biography. And this essay is perhaps an outline of that biography. An outline of this sort is a Platonism in reverse. It is a faint form that echoes from a distance, waiting to be incorporated into the full-blooded actuality of personal drama and cultural history. Richard F. Grabau said something similar in his "Existential Universals."' Grabau said that universals are not "read off" ready made from the situation, but really created by consciousnesses "projecting and recommending different conceptions of human existence" (159); on being successfully communicated and shared by others, these concepts become universals" (157). Thus "the universal . . . is... derivative. It must be understood in the light of existence, not existence in its light. Ontic reality clarifies and makes sense out of the universal; the universal does not make sense out of and clarify ontic reality" (160).

! In James M. Edie, ed., An Invitation to Phenomenology, Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965, pp.

147-60.

APPENDIX 26

453

Appendix 26 (to Section 7.1.): "Elements" as the Elemental Powers of Being. Maurice Merleau-Ponty said that "To designate it [flesh, body] we should need the old term 'element,' in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatiotemporal individual and idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being . . . the inauguration of the where and the when . . . what makes a fact a fact... what makes the fact have meaning . . .” He also spoke of the flesh (body) as "the formative medium of the object and the subject." This is borne out by F. E. Peters who, reporting Aristotle on stoicheia (elements), said, ". . . the stoicheia [elements] as the ultimate irreducible bodies out of which all things are made . . . the stoicheia do change into one another in a never-ending cycle (De gen. et corr. II, 331a, 337a . . .).'? All this makes sense in terms of the fluidity of Shen and Ch'i. Elements are the elementary powers of be-ing, midway between idea and thing, power and thing, bringing them into being. Chinese thinking has identified two of them as basic, Shen and Ch'i, and five others, Metal,

Wood, Water, Fire, and Earth. See Appendix 18 above.

` M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, tr. Northwestern University Press, 1968, pp. 139-40; italics mine. 2

Alphonso

Lingis,

Evanston,

Ill.:

.

Ibid., p. 147.

+ F. E. Peters, Greek Philosophical Terms: A Historical Lexicon, N. Y.: New York University press, 1967, p. 70.

APPENDIX 27

455

Appendix 27 (to Section 7.2.2.): "Renewal in the Wide Sense." "Renewal

in the wide sense" means

(1) renewal that allows for the distinction between "good" and "bad" renewals;

(2) renewal in nature which includes renewal into corruption to--for the sake of--rebirth';

(3) we participate in nature's renewal into rebirth, and our renewal is good. We, however, can only be violent with an intent to kill, which is "bad." Good and bad renewals occur only among humans.

! [ts reverse--renewal into death, rebirth toward corruption--does not hold. death, once done, is done; "repeated deaths" make no sense.

For corruption and

APPENDIX 28

457

Appendix 28 (to Section 7.2.2.): Mind-Body Involvement in the West, in China. The West took more than a thousand years since Plato before

coming to terms with the inter-involvement of mind with body and perception with conception at the pre-reflective level--among the

phenomenologists such as Martin Heidegger, Gabriel Marcel, and especially Maurice Merleau-Ponty. They stressed the bodily unity of perception with conception, but extended the unity only up to the aesthetic horizon and were rather hushed about ethical realm, although both Heidegger and Marcel did stress the religious transcendent realm almost to a fault. Perhaps this relative silence on ethics occasioned the rise of such figures as HansGeorg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, and Karl-Otto Apel in social hermeneutics, in which, however, that concept-percept interfusion at the

mind-body pre-reflective level is relatively taken for granted, if not neglected. Thus one can almost generalize (things are much more complex than this) that Plato and Aristotle have the logico-mathematical mind exclusively as the leader and controller of appetite and will in the light of total teleological harmony, while On Five Elements in the Mencian tradition has mindheart as the leader of six bodily organs which can feel and tend or refuse to tend toward what is desired. And while the Western realization of the mind-body unity can occasionally exclude considerations on ethics or be lost in the preoccupation of social dimension, the On Five Elements in the Mencian tradition have kept in view all these dimensions of human unity and continuity.

APPENDIX 29

459

Appendix 29 (to Section 8.3.): Logos, Mythos. Originally in Plato, /ogos is a descriptive, classificatory, diairetic account of what things are; mythos is a genetic, originary, synagogic account of how things came to be as they are; akoei is a fictive, historical story; paramythia is an imaginative account of what is beyond our capacity for rational certitude.’ In other words, they are all stories about something.

But later, people in the West somehow came to classify these

various stories by how they operate, e.g., logically, fictively, or imaginatively. This approach led to separating Jogos as logical (necessary) argumentation from the rest as fictive (imaginative) stories. Chinese concrete thinking has no such split. In China to think 1s to tell stories; narrative is argumentation and thinking, narrative in logicometaphoric sequence.

! Robert Zaslavsky, Platonic Myth America, 1981, pp. 219-20.

and Platonic

Writing,

Lanham,

MD:

University

Press of

APPENDIX 30

461

Appendix 30 (to Appendix 22): Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Philosophical Taoism. Philosophical Taoism, on the one hand, and Epicureanism and Stoicism, on the other, are usually lumped together in the West. We must see wherein they are similar and wherein they differ. They are similar in two ways. First, they all stress what and where we are, in person. We must assess ourselves, distinguish what is within our power and what is beyond our power, and cultivate our longterm pleasure. Moderation and prudence for the sake of life-long happiness is the basic tenor. Thus, secondly, all of them are intensely this-worldly and pragmatic. They are all averse to speculation for speculation's sake. They are all philosophies for living, and for them all speculations are for this our happy living in this world. They differ in two ways. First, in the West, prudence, that astringent caution, that turtle-like pulling-back into oneself, is the supreme virtue. As a result, ascetic atmosphere prevails despite their expressed intention--serenity--to the contrary. Epicureans are anything but sensual epicures; Stoicism is austerity. In contrast, philosophical Taoism has tendency, no, atmosphere, of playful celebration of what we

are and how we live--naturally. Taoists positively revel in the way things go, and mingle freely in and among things, alive and non-alive. Secondly, in the West, Epicurean-Stoic prudence has never gained widespread circulation among literary writers, much less among thinkers; they cannot begin to compete with Shakespeare or Plato in popularity. In contrast, Taoistic rejoicing in nature and naturalness has become the unobtrusive undercurrent in China; joy in nature constitutes the main stream in Chinese literature, and philosophical Taoism is one of the two major trends of Chinese thinking, far beyond other schools such as Legalism. Epicureanism-Stoicism wilted, while Taoism flourished. If asked why, the answer is obvious: reason is looked at differently, resulting in different life-attitude. Reason that 15 supposed by all of them to run through whatever happens is inevitable, but inevitability in Stoicism-Epicureanism is something inexorable, patterned after Platonic geometry of cosmic Forms. Consequently, the world is fate and our serenity, leaden asceticism. In Taoism reason is not dead geometrical formula and leaden serenity due to our limitation; here reason is more poise than a counsel

462

APPENDIXES

of withdrawal, and results in more playful spontaneity than ascetic austerity. The Taoist reason of the Heaven and earth is naturalness; here our limitations enable us to roam and enjoy ourselves in the roomy universe. Taoism is happy beautiful meandering as the river, the breeze; here even the roadside skull makes rounds of springs and autumns with/within the vast unhurried skies and land.' Thus Taoism and Epicureanism-Stoicism differ in their atmospheres, in their perspectives on the cosmic reason and on our lifeattitude, and in their positions in the history of thinking in their respective cultural traditions. Incidentally, Stoicism is similar to Confucianism. Epictetus was similar to Mencius in insisting on the goodness of human nature; prolepseis, pre-reception, that 13, prenatal givens, prenatal disposition, is good.” Epictetus was also similar to Hsiin Tzu,’ a late Confucian thinker (b. 312-340 BC; d. 213-236 BC), in insisting on learning to distinguish between what is within our power and what is not.‘ Furthermore, now that the Stoic distinction between what is and

what is not within our power is mentioned, we notice two more points of difference between Stoicism and Taoism. First, a Taoist such as Chuang Tzu would respond that what is out of our control may belong to us, and what is within our control may not. That is, what belongs to us--our feelings, our judgments--is often out of our control, and what does not belong to us we may be able to intervene and modify--boiling a kettle of water, helping someone in need. In other words, what is within our control is not always the same as what belongs to us. What we can do something about may not be ours. Secondly, to control or not to control, that is precisely not the question, any more than what does or does not belong to us is. What is

incumbent upon us is not any of these but to realize that even our

identity itself delightfully changes with others', such as in the stories of Chuang Tzu dreaming to be a butterfly and of a conversation with a Chuang Tzu, 18/22-29; see my Butterfly as Companion, Albany, N. Y.: State University of New

York Press, 1990, pp. 14-22. 2 Cf. Discourses, 1. 22.

3 Hsün Tzu, 17/5-10, 22/63-70, 23/10-15. 4 Enchiridion, in Discourses, I. 22, 29, etc.

APPENDIX 30

463

roadside skull in its exquisite cosmic joy. And after realizing this we should enjoy ourselves going along with the vicissitudes of things, "making rounds of seasons with the skies and the fields."

! On all this, check into "butterfly," "roadside skull," "stoic, stoicism," in the Index of my The Butterfly as Companion.

APPENDIX 31

465

APPENDIX 31 (TO SECTION 10.2.) ON CHINESE HOROSCOPE. On Chinese horoscope, see the divinatory uses of the J Ching in various manuals for divination on the Taiwan book market (cf. also Dr. Paul Carus, ed., T. Suzuki and Dr. Paul Carus, trs, T'ai-Shang Kan-Ying

P'ien: Treatise of the Exalted One on Response and Retribution, La Salle, Ill.: The Open Court Publishing Co., 1950;

Derek Walters, The T'ai Hsüan Ching: The Hidden Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: The Aquarian Press, 1983;

Classic,

I Ching: Taoist Book of Days, Foreword by Jose A. Arguelles, Berkeley: Shambhala Publications, 1974;

Suzanne

White's

Company, Inc.,

Book 1976.

of Chinese

Chance,

N.

Y.:

M.

Evans

and

On Chinese cosmogony and geomancy, see Shan

Hai Ching, N. J. Girardot, Myth and Meaning in Early Taoism: The Theme of Chaos (hun-tun), Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983; Raymond

1973,

John

Magic, NY:

Van

Over,

Blofeld,

ed.,

Taoist

Tales, NY:

New

The Secret and Sublime:

American

Library,

Taoist Mysteries

and

E. P. Dutton & Co., 1973, and other countless manuals on

the Taiwan market today.

On statecraft, see Dr. J. J. L. Duyvendak, tr., The Book of Lord Shang: A Classic of the Chinese School of Law, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1928, 1963;

John K. Fairbank, ed., Chinese Thought & Institutions, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1957; Han Fei Tzu, Shun Tzu, and Confucianism in the T'ang period. On

medical

gibberish,

see Arthur Kleinman,

et al., eds., Medicine

in

Chinese Cultures: Comparative Studies of Health Care in Chinese and Other Societies, 1975;

U.S.

Department

of Health,

Education,

and

Welfare,

466

APPENDIX

A Barefoot Doctor's Manual: The American Translation of the Official Chinese Paramedical Manual, Philadelphia: Running Press, 1977, 1990;

Douglas Salker & Clark Glymour, eds., Examining Holistic Medicine, Buffalo, N. Y.: Prometheus Books, 1985;

Richard Wilhelm, tr., The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, N. Y.: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962;

James R. Ware, tr., Alchemy, Medicine, and Religion in the China of A. D. 320: The Nei P'ien of Ko Hung (Pao-p'u tzu), Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1966. Cf. Charles Luk, The Secrets of Chinese Meditation, N. Y.: Samuel

Weiser,

1972, Taoist Yoga: Alchemy andf Immortality,

same press, 1973, The Transmission of the Mind Outside the Teaching, N. Y.: Grove Press, 1974;

Bruce Holbrook, The Stone Monkey: An Alternative, Chinese-Scientific, Reality, N. Y.: William Morrow

and Company,

1981, and others.

On

grappling with the significance of all this, see John Blofeld, Taoism: The

Road to Immortality, Boulder, Colo.: Shambhala Publications, 1978;

Cary F. Baynes & Hellmut Wilhelm, The I Ching or Book of Changes, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950, 1967;

Al

Chung-liang

Huang,

Embrace

Tiger,

Return

to

Mountain--the

Essence of T'ai Chi. Moab, Utah: Real People Press, 1973;

R. C. Zaehner, Zen, Drugs & Mysticism, N. Y.: Random House, 1972; James N. Powell, The Tao of Symbols: How to Transcend the Limits of Our Symbolism, N. Y.: Quill, 1982; Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics, N. Y.: Bantam Books,

1975, 1977,

etc.;

R. G. H. Siu, The Tao of Science: An Essay on Western Knowledge and Eastern Wisdom, Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1957;

Gary Zukav,

The Dancing

Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New

APPENDIX 31

467

Physics, N. Y.: William Morrow and Company, 1979; Yuasa Yasuo, The Body: Toward an Eastern Mind-Body Albany, N. Y.: State University of New York Press, 1987.

Theory,

From Section 11.3 - Footnotes:

Karl H. Pribram, Brain and Perception: Holonomy and Structure in Figural Processing, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publisher, 1991 David Bohm and Basil Hiley, The Undivided Universe: An ontological interpretation of quantum theory, Routledge, 1993

INDEX A Abrutality, 273 Academia Sinica, 399

Acid wits, 3 Act-Cogito of affirmatives, 129 Actual-historical necessity, 47 Actuals, 13, 30, 205 Aeroplane-like flight of imaginative speculation, 12

Aesop's Fables, 261

Af-firmation of self, 413 Affirmative definitions, 52 Affirmative notion, 37

Affirmative proposition, 198 Affirmative propositions, 198 Affirmative statement, 33, 152 Affirmative words, 419

Affirmatives make ironies, 177 Af-firmings of one's identity, 37 Agee, James, 262, 263, 264

Air of mount of high abstraction, 222 Air of objectivity, 244 Airplane, 12, 202, 246

Airplane flight, 120, 121 Airplane of abstract thinking, 377 Akoei, 459

Al Chung-liang Huang, 466 Alaska, 391

Albany, 467 Alchemy, 466 Alchemy andf Immortality, 466 Always Name, 64 Always Tao, 423 Amaury de Riencourt, 119 American Translation of Official Chinese Paramedical Manual, 466 Amnesty International, 273 Analogico-metaphorical reasoning proceeds, 315 Analogization, 294, 315, 349, 360, 371

mold of, 295

Analytical Goldinger, 323 Analytical Truth, 352 Analyticity, 4 Analyticity means, 353 Anthropology, 159 philosophical, 233 Apel, Karl-Otto, 457 Apodicity of demonstratives existential, 86 Appendix 1, 10 Appendix 10, 37 Appendix 11, 63 Appendix 12, 64 Appendix 13, 84 Appendix 15, 93 Appendix 16, 103 Appendix 18, 107, 453 Appendix 19, 112 Appendix 2, 18 Appendix 20, 330 Appendix 21, 117 Appendix 24, 140 Appendix 25, 145 Appendix 28, 161 Appendix 29, 203 Appendix 3, 18 Appendix 31, 234, 465 Appendix 4, 20 Appendix 6, 23 Appendix 7, 24 Appendix 9, 34 Apple, 245, 293, 361, 379 Apples, 361, 379, 380, 382 Apples means, 379 Aquarian Press, 465 Aquinas, 429 Aquinas' second proof, 429 Aram Khatchaturian's ballet, Arbiter of Fate, 274, 367

Archaeology of truth, 380 Archeology, 159 Archery, 26

112

470 Archimedean fulcrum, 50

INDEX Behavioral arc, 129, 158, 236, 339

Archimedes' theory, 444 Architectural contrivance, 174 Architectural sense, 174 Arguelles, Jose A., 465 Aristotelian hiatus, 151 Aristotelian practical knowledge, 204

Berkeley hit, 292 Berkeleyan solipsism, 120 Berkeley's insight, 218 Berkeley's perspective, 217 Bernstein, death of Leonard, 272 Bio-bodily thinking, 361

Aristotelian sense, 398

Bioethics, 360, 361

Aristotle, 229, 230, 259, 304, 310, 311, 325, 345, 444, 453, 457 metaphysical systems of, 47 Aristotle's epistemological order, 8 Aristotle's explanation of contingency, 303 Aristotle's ontological order, 8 Arranging-managing facts, 10 Arthur F. Wright, 14 Arthur Wright, 207 Artificialism, 67 Asia, 388 Astringent caution West, 461

Astrology, 234 Astronomy, 123 Athenian legacy, 84 Aubrey, John, 244

Austin, 24, 32, 307

Austin's doctrine, 306

Automobile, 149 Axiology, 279 B Bach, 265 Baldest of terms, 133 Bantam Books, 466

Barefoot Doctor's Manual, 466 Base of Thinking, 121 Basil Hiley, 467 Battery of bits of arguments, 374 Battery of organon of logic, 333 Baynes, Cary F., 466 Beacon of awareness, 95

Beethoven, 364 Beethoven's Pastorale Symphony, 68

Berkeley, 291, 293, 465

Biological first nature accident of, 257 Biological foundation, 242 Biological principle, 145 Biological structure, 234 Biology, 280 Birth of human, 291

Blake, William, 267 Blofeld, John, 465, 466

Blood-tattered people, 128 Blowing hymns, 392, 393 Blowing of wind, 119 Blue Cliff Record, 425 Bodiliness, 159 Bodiliness of logical necessity, 313 Bodily China, 373 Bodily Performative A Priori, 294 Bodiness, 159, 178 Body A, 408 Body B, 408 BODY THINKING, 229, 232, 236, 239, 251, 254, 375 Bohm, David, 467 Boiling beans, 111 Bond, 236, 350

Bond Book Book Book Book

of similarity, 350 III, 102 of Changes, 466 of Chuang Tzu, 58 of Lord Shang, 465

Boulder, 466 Brahms's Variations, 293 Brief Lives, 244

Bringings, 286 British people, 371

471

INDEX Brittan's explanation of important notions, 355

Buddha, 69, 84 Buddhism, 83, 311

Buddhist wings of, 104 Buddings of human nature, 202 Buffalo, 466 Burton Watson, 321 Butterfly, 72, 78, 79, 156, 191,

369, 408, 462 Butterfly make Chou dream of, 78 By/in, 315 C C. D. Broad, 43

Calligraphy, 187 Chinese, 119, 187

grass style of Chinese, 118, 186 Cambridge, 466 Can virtue, 433 Capone, Al, 102

Carpentry, 326

Cartesian Cogito, 85, 89, 317

Cartesian Cogito shows, 413 Cartesian offense, 4

Cartesian performance of Cogito, 240 Cartesian point of view, 249 Cartesian threefold point, 78 Carus, Dr. Paul, 465

Carving of Dragons, 393 Cataract-like change, 177 Categoreal blank, 18 Categoreal reasonings, 123, 359

Categorical Imperative, 311 Catholic Renaissance, 425 Catholicism, 83

Cellist Terry King, 335 Centrifugal circle, 169 Centrifugal circles of world, 169 Centripetal-centrifugal dynamism of self-thing-cosmic circle, 169 Cerebral system, 242 Ceremonial music, 200

Cezanne, 245, 268, 269, 316, 342, 343 Cezanne returns, 316 Cezanne's life passion, 342 Cezanne's Nature, 309

Chairness, 99, 131 Chapter Four, 399 Chapter Twenty-Two, 35 Chapters Two, 38 Ch'en Jung-chuo, 344 Ch'i, 30, 119, 153, 154, 155, 190, 250, 254, 265, 267, 391 air, 267 cosmic, 162, 183, 185, 187, 190 cosmic flow of, 188 homeostatic river of, 155 homo-cosmic, 184 manifests, 154 Mencius' cosmos-flooding, 192 polar continuum of current of homo-cosmic, 180

social dynamics of bodilycosmic, 161

Ch'i drawing, 155 Ch'i flows cosmic-natural energy of, 119 Ch'i of T'ai Chi Boxing, 67 Ch'i of things, 177 Ch'i Wu Lun. Nothing, 83 Ch'i yün, 435 Chia Tao, 111

Chia Tao riding, 110 Chicago, 433, 465

Ch'i-current of things, 222 Ch'ien fang, 188 Chih, 40, 98, 154, 188, 314 Chih yen, 419 Children of Tarma, 109

China, 1, 3, 4, 9, 38, 44, 94, 97, 131, 132, 152, 197, 198, 199, 212, 213, 222, 260, 266, 319, 351, 358, 364,

14, 15, 17, 30, 37, 108, 111, 113, 155, 183, 191, 200, 207, 208, 228, 250, 255, 321, 326, 330, 373, 374, 393,

472

INDEX

394, 397, 398, 407, 408, 439, 457, 459, 461 concrete metaphorical thinking of, 126

China accusation of genetic fallacy, 443 China drew-out people, 55 China examples of mode of thinking, 198 China makes, 408 China of A. D. 320, 466 China spreads, 22 China thinking, 20, 443 China- West difference, 225 Chinese affirmation, 58, 197, 199,

205 Chinese affirmation rights, 198

Chinese affirmative notion, 29, 30 Chinese annals, 113

Chinese argument, 202

Chinese argumentation, 42, 51, 88,

103, 113, 202, 203, 320, 344 Chinese argumentative thinking, 38 CHINESE BODY THINKING, 5, 9, 14, 16, 17, 21, 97, 100, 101, 103, 104, 106, 113, 116, 154, 197, 210, 213, 217, 220, 227, 228, 260, 261, 315, 328, 331, 332, 333, 385, 394, 433 Concrete universality of, 101, 106 cosmic universal aspect of, 117 Chinese body thinking lies, 13 Chinese body thinking spreads, 101 Chinese body thinking vis-a-vis Western theoretical thinking, 9 Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese

Book of Life, 466 box, 206 Ch'an, 425 character, 181 characters, 97, 118 Ch'i functions, 156

Chinese Classics, 47, 128 Chinese cogitation, 163 Chinese concept, 30

Chinese concrete 57, 199 Chinese concrete 214, 220, 221 Chinese concrete concrete nature

argumentation, body thinking, 2, modes of, 88

Chinese concrete thinking, 1, 2, 14,

16, 20, 22, 41, 42, 81, 85, 132, 164, 202, 203, 204, 222, 444, 459 Chinese cosmogony, 465 Chinese cosmological universality, 201 Chinese cuisine, 10, 225 Chinese culture, 1, 10, 122 Chinese Cultures, 465

Chinese emphasis, 421 Chinese epistemology, 28, 103 Chinese essays, 108 CHINESE HOROSCOPE, 465 Chinese intellectual history, 51 Chinese jargon, 213 Chinese justice, 394 Chinese lack of linguistic devices, 113 Chinese language, 92, 162 Chinese literature, 98, 392, 461 Chinese logic, 41 Chinese manner, 9

Chinese medicine, 107, 122, 320 Chinese metaphor, 197, 222 Chinese mind, 92, 163, 198, 200, 203, 333, 372 Chinese mode, 3

Chinese mode of thinking, 9, 14 Chinese modes, 10 Chinese modes of argumentation, 88 Chinese modes of thinking, 11, 15, 220 Chinese natural knowledge Kim's delineation of traditional, 397 Chinese negation, 58, 197, 198, 199

473 Chinese negatives, 205 Chinese notion, 315, 421 Chinese notions, 29, 40, 88, 176

Chinese penchant, 421

Chinese people, 84, 109, 119, 125,

200, 207, 213, 332, 371, 372 Chinese people display, 224 Chinese perspective of minded body, 389 Chinese philosophical exposition, 39 Chinese philosophy, 16, 38, 128, 131, 163, 207, 208, 211, 215, 217, 254, 256, 278, 290, 307, 333, 399, 403 historical understanding of, 117 Chinese philosophy negative statements, 38

Chinese phrase, 125 Chinese phrases translations of, 435

Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese

physics, 122 political theories, 421 politics, 394 proverb, 122 religious tradition, 83 sayings, 88 scholarship, 441 scientific theory, 122 scripts, 107

Chinese sentences, 130 Chinese sentiment, 9, 225

Chinese somatic-social-cosmic thinking, 392 Chinese stylistic beauty, 333 Chinese system of knowledge, 397 Chinese table manners, 225

Chinese terminology, 254 Chinese textual understanding, 117 Chinese thinking, I, 4, 9, 15, 47, 50, 88, 97, 100, 106, 108, 115, 116, 153, 156, 163, 164, 198, 199, 201, 203, 207, 214, 215, 220, 222, 225, 232, 235, 254,

321, 328, 332, 388, 393, 407, 453, 461. concrete, 89

Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese Chinese 29

thinking lies, 14 thinking looks, 333 thinking starts, 202 thought, 17, 465 toes, 214 treatment of affirmatives,

Chinese understanding, 42, 398

Chinese understanding of nature, 399 Chinese usage of words, 72 Chinese view of dinner, 10, 225 Chinese word, 163 Chinese world, 329 Chinese writings, 98, 162, 207, 225 bible of, 207 Chinese Zodiac signs, 117 Chineseness of Chinese thinking, 215 Ching Ch'ing, 193 Chou dream, 369

Chou make dream of, 78 Christian mystery of creation covers, 429

Christian's Sin, 91 Chrysanthemums, 320, 322 Chu Hsi, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 337, 397, 398 Chu Hsi's call, 46 Chu Hsi's education, 46 Chu Hsi's view, 45

Ch'u selling, 421 Chü t'i, 214 Ch'üan, 394 Mencius', 394 Chuang Chou, 72, 369 Chuang Tuz's unmindful expansion of self with/to, 194 Chuang Tzu, 26, 27, 40, 53, 57, 58, 61, 62, 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, 81, 83,

474

INDEX

84, 86, 87, 88, 91, 93, 94, 122, 140, 149, 160, 161, 172, 186, 194, 207, 208, 211, 217, 224, 254, 264, 270, 274, 280, 287, 290, 297, 308, 309, 310, 311, 314, 321, 327, 329, 333, 337, 343, 365, 367, 369, 370, 372, 373, 374, 376, 389, 390, 393, 407, 417, 462 butterfly's dream, 156 Chuang Tzu dream, 77 Chuang Tzu finds, 261 Chuang Tzu starts, 254 Chuang Tzu. Chuang Tzu, 194 Chuang Tzu. First, 370 Chuang Tzu. He, 83 Chuang Tzu's approach, 191 Chuang Tzu's argumentation, 337 Chuang Tzu's arguments, 260 Chuang Tzu's cool self-loss, 374 Chuang Tzu's denial, 270 Chuang Tzu's descriptions, 87 Chuang Tzu's dream, 156 Chuang Tzu's enjoyments, 270 Chuang Tzu's famous butterflydream story, 408 Chuang Tzu's Heaven, 309 Chuang Tzu's interpretation, 189 Chuang Tzu's joy of roadside skull, 274 Chuang Tzu's own famous Three kinds of Words, 87

Chuang Chuang Chuang Chuang Chuang Chuang

Tzu's Tzu's Tzu's Tzu's Tzu's Tzu's

passage, 407, 408 point, 287 Sages, 91 statement, 191 story, 31, 281 story of 60

characters, 330

Chuang Tzu's story of butterfly dream, 81

Chuang Tzu's theory of co-birthing, 59 Chuang Tzu's thought, 321 Chuang Tzu's true man, 390

Ch'un, 224 Chiin-chieh Huang, 182 Churchism Protestant, 84

Cicada's wings, 191 CIRCULAR CONFIGURATION, 319 Classic of Changes, 308 metaphysics of, 308 Classic of Chinese School of Law, 465 Classic of Four Books moldy archive of, 212 Classic of History, 121 Classic of Poetry, 281 Clever inventions of gadgetry, 398 Climatic phenomena, 107 Cobb, Whiteheadian scholasticism of John, 401 Coffee Shoppe, 266 Cognitive Fallacy, 433 Cohen, R. S., 397 Collage of stories, 113, 323 Collected Works of Hsün Tzu. Here metaphors, 53 Commander of Right, 366 Community of Cultural Differences, 204 Comparative Hermeneutics, 214, 225 Comparative Studies of Health Care, 465

Com-passionate feeling, 115 Complementality, 421 Concept of Mind, 351 Concept-percept interfusion, 457 CONCLUDING REMARKS, 195, 358 Concrete actuality, 19, 88, 176, 403 Concrete ambiguities, 347 Concrete argument, 345 Concrete argumentation, 20, 22, 42, 54, 58, 103, 142, 199 Concrete Argumentations, 42 Concrete Arguments, 321

475

INDEX Concrete body thinking, 2, 97, 164, 212, 256, 313 Concrete character, 377 Concrete characteristics of circle, 43 Concrete complexity, 176 Concrete Concepts, 321

Concrete reality, 53 Concrete realms, 313, 384

Concrete reflections, 261

Concrete relation, 183 Concrete riches, 347

Concrete contents, 19, 203, 213

Concrete Cua example, 323 Concrete effect, 315 Concrete elaborations of map of

Concrete Significance of Body Thinking, 335 Concrete significant implications, 323 Concrete situation, 53, 62, 81, 200, 330, 447 Concrete situational viewpoint, 350

world, 126 Concrete element, 405

Concrete situations, 255 Concrete sort, 114

Concrete concern, 405

Concrete Concrete Concrete Concrete Concrete Concrete Concrete Concrete Concrete Concrete

entity, 248 essence of triangle, 301 experience, 20 guidance, 323 historical content, 112 human activities, 17 immediacy, 95 implications, 82 incidents, 441 inevitability, 201

Concrete sort of thinking, 405 Concrete sounds, 407

Concrete specific chairs, 131 Concrete specifics, 31, 131

Concrete nature of thinking, 4 Concrete Notions, 22, 315

Concrete thing, 57 Concrete thinking, 1, 2, 4, 7, 9, 14, 19, 20, 21, 58, 89, 95, 97, 106, 113, 121, 127, 128, 164, 183, 198, 200, 201, 204, 205, 206, 214, 377 Concrete thinking proceeds, 97 Concrete thinking works, 7 Concrete understanding, 20, 22, 200 Concrete understanding of notions, 22 Concrete understandings, 125 Concrete Universality, 405 Concrete universality of body thinking, 116

Concrete nouns, 107

Concrete Universals, 97, 106, 437

Concrete instances, 261

Concrete living, 226 Concrete manifold negation, 206 Concrete matters, 2

Concrete metaphorical thinking, 213 Concrete mode of thinking, 1, 3 Concrete names, 107

Concrete object, 162 Concrete observation, 345 Concrete one, 214 Concrete particulars, 12, 120, 150,

198, 202, 208, 300, 315 Concrete people, 176 Concrete performance, 298 Concrete personal thinking, 44 Concrete Phrase-Concepts, 441 Concrete point, 199

Configurative Thinking, 335, 338, 344 Confucian corruption of high, 93 Confucian apothegms, 54 Confucian exhortation, 287

Confucian morality, 52

Confucian rectification, 38

Confucian scholarship, 443

4/6 Confucians' cavalier exhortation, 216 Confucius, 8, 24, 32, 34, 39, 40, 47, 48, 54, 55, 56, 71, 72, 73, 81, 83, 85, 90, 91, 94, 103, 113, 117, 118, 142, 165, 169, 176, 188, 191, 198, 200, 261, 290, 326, 374 Confucius' Analects, 54 Confucius' forthrightness, 73 Confucius’ insistence, 73 Confucius' instruction, 73 Confucius' irony, 73 Confucius' pregnant compact sayings, 199 Confucius serve, 91 Confucius's Analects, 98

Confucius's compact argumentation, 205 Confucius's description of manner, 31 Confucius's experiential compactness, 54 Confucius's Mr. Straight, 394 Confucius's thinking, 118 Confucius's universals, 117, 118 Conjunction of words, 271 Connective sense, 199

Consciousnesses, 451 Conservativism, 212

Constative, 32 Constative utterance, 32

Constituent parts logical progression, 276 Construal, 259 Construction of science, 329

Construction of triangle, 300 Contingent Conditions, 276 Contradicts, 23, 62, 64 Controlee, 389

Copernican Revolution, 74, 124, 360 Copulars, 394 Corporate convention, 30 Corpse of thinking, 377

INDEX Correlative thinking, 350 Cosmic actuality, 205 Cosmic breath need, 186 Cosmic Ch'i, 17 Cosmic concord, 201 Cosmic creativity, 139 Cosmic destiny, 55 Cosmic joy, 463 Cosmic joy of dry skull, 365 Cosmic living space, 185 Cosmic network, 165 Cosmic One, 160 Cosmic patterns, 281 Cosmic principle, 45 Cosmic reverberations, 89

Cosmic rhythmic change, 49 Cosmic rounds of seasons, 390

Cosmic spread, 155 Cosmic Trinity, 266 Cosmological context, 165 Cosmological exhortations, 254 Cosmology, 126, 347, 444

political, 34

Couperin, 293 Crane's legs, 389 Critique of Dialectical Reason, 372 Critique of Practical Reason, 124,

125, 359, 434 Critique of Pure Reason, 231 Crystallization, 300 Cua replies, 324 Cua, Antonio, 323 Cua's ideal theme, 324 Cultivation of good personality, 47 Cultivation of innermost resonance,

106 Cultural Cultural Cultural Cultural Cultural 226

difference, 225 differences, 4, 9, 17 diversity, 226 history, 451 manner of management,

Cultural mode, 10, 11

Cultural Mutuality, 204 Cultural traditions, 462

477 Cultural understanding, 10, 227 Cultural variables, 397 D D. Therefore analogical reasoning, 378 Dahmer, Jeffrey, 148, 172 Dahmer's hand, 173 Dancing Wu Li Masters, 466 David Griffin, 401 Death of body, 274 Death's door, 102

Digestion one, 364 Dilthey switches, 210 Dilthey thought, 209 Dilthey works, 209 Dilthey's basic Kantian stance of theoretical formalism, 210 Discernful description of affırmation, 41

Deconstruction of past, 84

Discoverer of paradox, 445 Disembodiedness, 270, 301 Division insights, 228 DIVISION ONE, 5, 16, 228 Division proceeds, 20

Deconstructionism, 83, 84, 300,

Division stress, 403

Declarative utterance, 32

374, 425 Deductive demonstration proceeds, 315 Delirium, 215 Demonstratives, 22, 23, 26, 27, 29,

30, 36, 42, 44, 81, 82, 85, 86, 87, 89, 93, 100, 101, 120, 128, 164, 174, 178, 180, 197, 198, 199, 203, 205, 206, 271, 445 negative side of, 86, 87 Taoist ironic understanding of, 87

Demonstratives metaphor, 42, 44

Deontological one, 326 Derrida, Robert Magliola's, 425

Descartes, 50, 81, 135, 136, 240,

295, 434, 443 Descartes thought, 434

Descartes's I, 81

Description of Chinese body thinking, 17 Descriptive Metaphysics, 230 De-selfed technical mindset, 211 Devastation of self, 211

Diairetic account, 459 Dialectic of inevitable inter-flow, 183 Dialectic of order, 361 Dialogal, 210 Dictionary definitions, 320 Digestion of immediate world, 264

Division Two, 4, 227, 228 Doctor cures, 136

Doctor qua doctor, 136 Doctor-like considerateness, 136

Doctor's objective considerateness, 136 Doctrine of Mean, 34, 123, 333

Doctrine of Mean harp, 28 Dogs, 98, 171 Domain of mind-body problem, 388 Donnees of Buddhist Tantra, 425

Dragon of heart of lively-literary movement, 281

Drama of body thinking, 197 Drama of history, 173 Drama of interchange, 173 Draweth redemption, 362 Dream conversation, 274, 367 Dream functions, 78 Dream world, 78

Dreamwork of language, 259 Duck's legs, 389 Duke Huan, 327 Duke of Chou, 191 Duke of Yeh, 8

Duke Yüan of Sung, 31 Duplication of wombing-family relationship, 143 Durable theme, 252

4178

INDEX

Dutton, E. P., 465 Duyvendak, Dr. J. J. L., 465 Dynasties of government, 340 E Early Taoism, 465 Eastern mind-body theories, 388 Eastern Mind-Body Theory, 467 Eastern thought, 388 Eastern Wisdom, 466 Ecological disasters, 373 Ecological havoc, 372 Ecology, 52

End of history contradiction, 341 Energeia, 323 English translation, 333 English word, 435 Enjoyments, 270 Entertainings, 240 Environmental conditions, 1 Environmental contraries, 363 Enzo Paci, 238

Ecstases, 268

Eo, 433

Ecstasis, 268

Edison, Thomas, 398

Education, 46, 48, 55, 133, 142, 143, 262, 465 existential, 55

Education of artistic sensibility, 264 Effortlessness, 68 Effortlessness of nature, 68 Ego Platonic trend transcendental, 401 Egoistic Hedonism, 445 Egology, 81 Eight Great Essayists of T'angSung Periods, 333 Eighth Chapter, 26 Eighth Cua, 328 Einstein's gravitational field equations, 54 Ekstasis, 258, 268 Eldering one, 260 Elemental Powers, 453

Elementary powers, 453 Embodiedness, 270 Self-oblivion of, 270 Embrace Tiger, 466 Eminent degree, 250 Emotionality, 215 Empathetic intolerance, 39 Empathetic performance, 16 Empirical-perceptual truth, 353 Empiricals, 108

Empiricism, 71, 328 Enablement, 139, 143 Enchantments, 277

Epictetus, 462 Epicureanism, 461 Epicurean-Stoic prudence, 461 Epistemological assimilation, 336 Epistemological examination of vision, 256

Epistemological order, 444 Epistemological relations, 169 Epistemologically I hide, 132 Epistemologies, 231 Equalizing of Things, 122 Equipments, 206 Erh shang hsüeh, 122 Erle Loran, 245

Ersten Grunde des Untershiedes der Von dem, 124, 360 Essayists Chinese, 91

Essence of T'ai Chi. Moab, 466. Essences, 447

Essentialism, 15 Eternities, 192

Ethical Argumentation of 1985, 328 Ethico-ontological progression, 105 Ethico-political exhortation, 205 Ethics, 15, 60, 66, 151, 279, 347, 457 Human, 52 medical, 360

479 Ethics of living body, 360 Etymological connotation, 435 Etymological connotations, 435 Etymological contrivance, 92 Etymological punning, 92 Etymology, 147, 149, 256, 435 Euclid, 13, 244 Euclidian hedgerows, 13 Europe, 397 European science, 397 Evans, M., 465 Evens, 59

Evergreens primeval, 390 Evocative-metaphoric dynamics of human growth, 307 Evocative-metaphoric thinking, 287, 371 Evocatives, 89 Evolvement, 48 Exactitude, 430

Exactitude of notes, 187 Exceptionless rules of thumb, 325 Exclamatory sentence flesh-and-blood actuality of, 87 Exegeses of Bible, 425 Exegesis, 92 Exegetical, 234 Exemplification prime, 358 Exeter, 264

Exhibition of conceptual concentration, 261

Exhibition of flow, 157 Existences, 448

Existential Biography Philosophy, 451 Existential character, 94 Existential consensus, 161 Existential contradiction, 376

Existential Existential Existential Existential

development, 443 exigency, 376 impossibility, 271 inevitability, 376

Existential literature of absurdity, 303 Existential modality, 27 Existential oddity, 332. Existential significance, 34 Existential Universals, 447, 451 Existentials, 291 Existential-socio-cosmic understanding, 308 Expectedness, 146 Experienceable, 293 Experiential ambience, 357 Experiential basis, 354 Experiential continuum of comprehensive truth, 302 Experiential expansion, 12 Experiential givens, 44 Experiential manner, 337 Experiential matrix, 349 Experiential process of truth, 300 Experiential projection, 379 Experiential rationality, 354 Experiential recognition, 379 Experiential structure, 238 Experiential thinking, 9 Experiential totality, 237 Experiential understanding, 41, 210 Experiential world, 19 Explainability, 18 Explicate, 127, 301 Explicate self-discovery of personhood, 449 Explicates, 16 philosophical discourse, 408 Explication, 53, 61, 75, 199, 213, 261, 311, 314, 315 organic, 221 Explication of affirmative concrete notions, 54, 57 Explication of concrete universals, 441 Explication of first mode of concrete thinking, 54 Explication of simple affirmative statements, 199

480 Explications, 176, 261 Explications of concrete thinking, 213 Explicative expansion, 261 Explicatory operation, 261 Extensa, 248

Externalization of life experiences, 209 Extraordinary Ordinariness, 83 F Facial expression, 435 Factic, 237

Facticity, 237, 437 Facto, 77

Factuality, 100, 211, 294 Factuality of truth, 381 Factuals, 113, 398 Fairbank, John K., 465 Fallacies, 347, 397

19-24 four, 347 Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness, 247 Fallouts, 301

Falsifiability, 59, 297, 298, 383 Falsifiability principle, 298

INDEX Five Primary Elements, 107 Flesh-and-blood relevance, 347

Flexuous way of subject's daily

undergoings, 236 Flood of humaneness starts, 184 Flooding Elan of Life-Breath, 419 Flower pot, 174 Focal event, 245

Foci, 328 Following Classics, 280 Font of significance, 274 Ford, Lewis, 401 Formative medium of object, 453 Formative ontological power, 139 Formless matter, 50

Forth/, 257 Fortiori argument, 346 Fortiori no morals, 46 Foucault-esque archeological insights, 100 Four Beginnings of Humanness, 254 natal, 260 Four Greats, 67

Falsification principle, 383

Falsifiable, 297

Four Levels of Performance of Thinking, 279 Four of Chuang Tzu, 38

Fatherliness, 37 Female/, 139

Four Seas, 52, 183, 201 Foxes, 273

Femininity, 417 Feminist movement, 417 Fictive stories, 459

Figural Processing, 467 Filiality, 32, 54, 117, 188 Firmament of All-Inclusive, 164 First Awakened, 325

First Chapter, 170 First Critique, 444

Five Activities, 182

Five Cosmic Powers of Elements Yin-Yang divinatory, 337 Five Elementary ways, 222 Five Elements, 182, 328, 457

Five Ethical Relationships, 292 Five Points, 214

Frame of expectation, 221 Frame of mind of West, 372 French Deconstruction, 425 French Revolution, 46 Freud, 215, 259 Fritjof Capra, 466 Frogs, 67 From/in/of, 377 Fructify, 142 Fulfillments, 55 Fulfillments show, 55 Fullness, 344, 390

G

|

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 457 Gadamer's phrase, 210 Gateless Gate, 425

481 Geese, 415

Gegenden im Raume, 124, 360 Gendlin, E. T., 234

General Bodily Validity, 287 General Genetic 444 Genetic Genetic 444 Genetic 117 Genetic

Descriptions, 439 development of theory, Fallacy, 443 understanding, 196, 443, understanding of thinking, understanding of two

kinds, 444 Geomancy, 234, 465

Geometrical demonstration, 301

Geometrical formula, 461 Geometrical one, 220

Geometrical proof, 296

Geometry, 13, 244, 252, 294, 313 Euclidian, 356 non-Euclidian, 356

Geometry of cosmic Forms Platonic, 461

George Berkeley's perceptual subjectivism, 217 Germ of general identity of things, 27 Gesticulation, 329

Gestural expression, 301 Gestural expressions, 302 Girardot, N. J., 465

Goblet Deeps, 160 Goblet Words, 88 Chinese sayings, 88 Goblet Words lodge, 88 God-is-dead movement, 430

God's existence, 43, 429, 430 God's omnipotence, 271 God's power, 271 Goings elementary, 73 Golden Past, 46 Governmental service, 73

Grabau, Richard F., 401, 447, 451

Grabau's correct intuition, 220 Graham stress, 388 Graham, A. C., 294 Graham, C., 350, 388, 397 Graham's conclusion, 350 Grain, 108, 315

Grain of sand, 267 Grain of time, 216 Grain of wood, 108 Grain of wood of things, 30 Grain shooting, 192 Grammar of coherence, 334 Grammar of thinking coherence, 334 Graphic concretes, 110 Graphic phrase, 421 Graphics, 101, 106, 107, 108, 113 Grass of brush, 186 Grazings, 202 Great Awakening, 81 Great Learning, 123, 142, 143, 391 Great Man, 127 Great One, 20, 76, 91, 193, 427

Great Preface, 281

Great Tao, 61, 314

Great Thing, 72, 85 Grecian Urn, 407 Greek religions, 84 Greek Slave of slaves, 112 Grove Press, 466

Gulf War, 417 Gut level, 98

Gut-level feelings, 274 Gut-level mini-storied notions, 322 H Habermas, Jürgen, 457

Han Fei Tzu, 111, 465 Han Fei Tzu Similarly state laws, 93 Han period, 125 Han Yü. Chuang Tzu, 91 Hao bank, 86, 87 Hao bridge, 86 Happenstances, 338 Harp, 413

482 Harries's modification, 259

Has/is, 270 Health, 122, 128, 136 Hearer of coherent vision of new configuration, 337 Heart

cosmic, 49 li's, 46 Heart leaps, 427 Heart of baby, 76, 84, 85, 427

Heart of beings, 192

Heart of hearts, 183, 193

Heart of historical contingency, 387 Heart of humane compassion, 211 Heart of humane justice, 211 Heart of literary expression, 281 Heart of literature, 280 Heart of matter, 281 Heart of morality, 39 Heart of oneself, 183 Heart-heaven dynamism, 183 Heartmind, 30, 51, 85, 115, 127, 150, 183, 184, 190, 254, 311, 372, 382 machine, 372 Heartmind hermeneutics, 115

Heartmind of baby, 20, 127 Heartmind of new-born baby, 127 Heartmind of tree, 311 Heartminds, 194

Hearts of alarmed pity, 170 Hearts of man, 280 Heaven concrete interior decoration of, 7

Heavenly Piping, 393 Hedonistic paradox, 127 Hegelian synthesis, 196 Hegelian system, 231

Heidegger, 195, 224, 256, 291,

447, 457 Heidegger, M., 234 Heidegger's ontological level, 401 Heidegger's revealment theory of truth, 381

INDEX Heisenberg, 204 Hellmut Wilhelm, 466 Her/his own way, 327 Herbert Read, 119 Heredity symbol, 349 Hermeneutical circle, 120 Hermeneutical insight, 100 Hermeneutical methodology, 225

Hermeneutical principle of entire

book, 66 Hermeneutics, 99, 115, 204, 210, 214, 221, 225, 444 cultural, 97, 225 intercultural, 197 social, 457 Hermeneutics amounts, 217 Hermeneutics of intimate selfknowledge, 104 Hermeneutics of logical necessity perceptual, 220 Hermeneutics of systematic understanding, 100 Hermeneutics works, 210 Heteronomy of Decree, 182 Heuristic principles, 214 Heuristic value, 92

Hick's ingenuity, 298 Hidden Classic, 465 Hidden I, 132 Hidden Self, 445 Hiddenness, 26, 61, 95, 97, 119,

132 Hiddenness of body, 61, 314 Hiddenness of concrete, 316 Hiddenness of I, 120 Hiddenness of self, 21 interpersonal implications of, 127 Hiddenness of self means, 132

Hiddenness of structure of concrete, 61, 314

Hidings, 93 Him/her, 328 Hinduism, 83 Historical actuality, 108

483

INDEX Historical body thinking, 312 Historical causal efficacy, 388 Historical connections, 89 Historical continuity, 190 Historical data, 7 Historical dimension, 109 Historical eventuality, 338 Historical existence of human, 208 Historical existential understanding, 196 Historical indices, 47 Historical judgment, 341 Historical judgments, 312 Historical labor, 348 Historical law of rhythmic development, 48 Historical movement, 387 Historical necessity, 47 Historical painting, 7 Historical particulars, 208 Historical performance, 3 Historical precedents, 37, 110 Historical process, 371, 444

Historical Historical Historical Historical Historical

process of living, 210 reversion, 46 sequence, 305 situation, 397 stage, 300

Historical stories, 109

Historical storytelling, 206 Historical thinking, 109, 309, 312 Historical tradition of sociopolitical rectification, 100 Historical understanding, 210, 443 Historical understanding of theory, 116, 443 Historical vase, 7

Historicity, 299, 319, 335, 344, 387 Historicity of body, 343 Historicity of body thinking, 328, 342, 344 Historicity of thinking, 255 Historico-cosmic significance, 307 Historico-metaphorical base, 350

Historico-metaphorical expansion, 170 Historiography, 255 Chinese, 113, 188

History Understanding of, 210 History of philosophy, 286, 444 Hitler, 312 Hobbes, 244

Holbrook, Bruce, 122, 466 Holistic Medicine, 466 Home one, 185 Home-Hell Relations, 149

Home-hell relationship, 183 Homo-cosmic symbol, 172 Horse, 51, 90, 111, 322, 325, 366, 389, 412 White, 322 Horses, 171, 376, 389 Horses of events, 90, 173

Horses's heads Haltering, 376 Hortatory arguments Mencius's, 352

Hortatory performances, 85 Hsiang, 181 Liang, 122 Hsin, 181, 277, 281, 372 wen-ize, 281

Hsin kuang t'i p'an, 332 Hsiu shen, 215 Hsüan chieh, 161

Hsün Tzu, 34, 35, 52, 53, 72, 154, 340, 462 Hsün Tzu's elaboration, 35

Hsün Tzu's metaphorical logic of systematic definitions, 52 Huang-Lao Taoism, 308 Huger, 265 Hui Shih, 373 Hui Tzu, 86 Hui Tzu's attention, 86 Hui Tzu's reason, 86 Human Existence, 291

Human Feeling, 242

484 Humanness, 25, 32, 49, 105, 106, 230, 231, 292, 302, 312, 335, 375, 376, 377 Hume, 29, 42, 43, 74, 120, 167, 302, 371, 379, 443 Hume, David, 29, 167, 356 Hume's intention, 29 Hun Tun, 343 Hussein, Saddam, 417 Husserl, Edmund, 238 Husserl's aversion, 245 Husserl's fight, 293 Husserl's Lebenswelt, 250 Husserl's notion of lived body, 238 Husserl's Wesenschau, 401

Hybris, 309 Hypothesi, 208 I I Ching, 466 I Ching's configurative hexagrams, 337 I Then, 166 Ian Ramsey, 167 lan T. Ramsey, 43 Idealisms of Hegel, 120 Ideality, 289, 386 Ideation of triangle, 301 Identicalness, 353 Identicalness of experience, 353 Identicalness of experience of perception, 353 Identicalness of experience of understanding, 353 Identicalness of perception, 353 Identicalness of perceptual experiences, 353 Identification of self, 27 Ideograms, 118 Ideographic-onomatopoetic characters, 92 Ideographs, 107 I-here-now's primordial contacts, 30 LIt perspective, 168 I-It relation, 167

INDEX Illocutionary force of metaphor, 380 Immanence, 329

Impenetrability of objects, 197 Imperative functions, 311 Imperative of human, 376 Imperative of life, 226 Imperceptible, 157 Imperceptible tidal shift, 163 Imperishables, 191 Imperishables of Dead historical weight of, 191 Impersonalism Spinoza's geometrical, 182 Imperturbableness, 40 Impossibile, 105 In/of thinking

Performance, 279

Inappropriateness, 32 Inauthenticity of crowd, 181 Incisive.expression of ironic mode of things, 177 Incompatibles, 69, 197, 364, 421

integration of, 421 Indescribability, 94 Indeterminacy, 304 Indeterminacy of future occurrence, 304

Indeterminacy principle of one sort, 209

Indexicality, 23 Indissoluble, 3

Individuation of mind, 242 Indubitable, 27

Indubitable truth, 24 Inductive generalization, 441 Indwellings of metaphorics Mutual, 89

Ineffability, 59, 67 concrete, 423

Ineffability of concrete; 423 Ineffable, 59, 95 Ineffable darkness, 315

Inescapability, 52

Inexpressible, 61, 314

485 Inexpressible praxis, 373 Infantility negative connotation of, 91 Infinite passion, 181 Infrangible inevitability, 338 Ing,94 Ing form, 253 Inherence historical, 342 Inherence of subjective existence, 86 Initiative point of worldgeneralization process, 150 Inner Touch, 141

Innerly-felt virtue, 182 Innocence of baby, 413 Innocent tenderness, 277 Insane self-stretch, 268 Inscrutable Oriental, 104

Instantiates, 444 Instantiation, 213 Institutionalism Confucian, 84 Integrities, 47, 48 Intelligence, 179, 242 Intensive feeling, 244 Intention of essay, 3 Intention of formal knowledge, 204 Intention of law of Nature, 50 Intentionality, 181, 237, 413 Human, 181

Interactive body, 338

Interactive network, 253 Interminableness, 298 Internalization, 139

Internalization of acceptance, 139 Interpersonal mutuality, 166 Interpersonal relation, 173 Interpersonal Relations, 132 Interpersonal relationship, 132 Intersubjectivity, 151, 320, 329 socio-ethical world of, 335

Interweaving of expression, 280 Interweaving of metaphor, 344 Interweaving of two, 145

Intuitions, 244 Investigation genetic, 444 Invigoration, 50 Ironicity, 75, 77, 93 Ironicity of concrete, 77 Ironics, 89, 90, 93, 197

Ironics point, 89 Irony cosmic, 59

Is/goes, 152

Is/moves, 389 I- Thou event, 152 I- Thou mode, 168

I- Thou reciprocity, 168, 210 I- Thou

relation, 166

J J. Glenn Gray, 256 J. L. Austin, 31 Jabs, 70, 71

Jade, 108 Jade-and-wood of things, 315 James R. Ware, 466

Janus-like uncertainty, 147 Japanese tradition, 388 Jen, 30, 63, 193, 324, 327 Jesus, 134

John Austin, 24, 307 John Austin's insights, 401 John Hick, 271, 297 John Keats' Ode, 407

John L. Austin's doing, 306 Josiah Royce, 160, 383

Josiah Royce's Religious Aspects of Philosophy, 444 Jots, 169 Journal-like manner, 3

Ju Ming, 67 sculptor, 67 Ju Ming's artistry, 67 Judaism, 83

K Kafka's abstract fantasy, 245 Kantian framework of empiricalrational dichotomy, 209

486

INDEX

Kao Yao, 121 Karsten Harries, 259

Lao Tzu, 20, 60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 67, 71, 74, 91, 139, 224, 231, 290, 314, 322, 323, 374, 394, 423 Lao Tzu. Forced, 67 Lao Tzu's 5,000 odd characters, 61, 314 Lao Tzu's adage, 337 Lao Tzu's ineffable hiddenness of

Keats, 407

Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, 63, 423

Kantian position, 323 Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 310 Kant's philosophical enterprises, 11 Kant's transcendentalism, 75, 89 Kao Tzu's writings, 340 K'e, 87

Keats' lines, 407 Kierkegaard's mode of thinking, 2 Kierkegaard's objection, 180 Kierkegaard's truth, 181 King Hsüan of Ch'i, 51, 183 King Hsüan's jitters, 202 King Hsüan's secret empathy, 115 King Hsüan's visceral reaction, 211 King's jitters, 115 King's power, 115 Knife of tyranny, 366 Knower, 161, 262, 283 Knower notices, 283 Knowers, 161 Knowns, 103 Koans, 398

Kolak, Daniel, 408 Kreisler, Fritz, 293 Ku, 162

Shih, 163 Kuan Tzu, 164 Kuhn, Thomas, 176, 213 K'un, Yü, 330

Kung-sun Lung, 314, 322 Kuwait, 417 L L. W. Beck (1949), 124, 360 La Salle, 465 LaFargue, Michael, 70 Langer, S. K., 233 Langer, Susanne K., 234, 242

Language Body, 239 Language of lei pi, 348 Language of literal signs, 288

Tao, 93

Lao Tzu's vision, 389

Last-night Chuang Chou, 78 Later Awakened, 325 Law of contradiction, 341 Law of freedom, 98

Law of human nature, 48 Law of living, 98 Law of metaphysical necessity, 47 Law of nature, 48 Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 467 Laws of nature, 305

Laws of thought, 208 Layered Words, 88 Learning history, 48 Lebenswelt, Edmund Husserl's, 302 Left Three Streets, 125

Legal system, 32 Levels 1, 60

Liang, 122

Libraries, 352

Lieh Tzu, 408 Life Drama, 145 Limpid, 262 Lin Yutang's words, 110 LINEAR LOGICALITY, 249, 386 Linguistic definition, 82 Linguistic device of denial of description, 95 Linguistic self-denial, 95 Lin's impatience, 435 Li-principle raises, 50 Liszt, 293

Literalism, 53, 429, 430 Literalism leads, 441 Literalism machine mind

487 hermeneutic, 441

Literary criticism, 392 Literary expression, 281 Literary imagination, 261

Literary Literary Literary Literary

manner, 208 means of exposition, 225 Mind, 393 tapestry, 281

Literary texts, 393

Literary-philosophical therapy, 425 Literature of age of decline, 364 Liu Hsieh, 280 Liu Hsieh's book, 281 Liu Ssu, 91

Liver

rat's, 366

Lodge Words, 87, 88 Logical Operations, 276 Logical-experiential base of statements, 206

Logico-concrete necessity, 57 Logico-empirical unity, 246 Logico-mathematical discovery, 388 Logico-mathematical mind, 457 Logocentric thinking, 350 Logos historical, 343

Logos doctrine, 405 Logos of things, 317 Loneliest, 392 Loneliest air, 392

Loneliness, 292, 415 Lonest depth, 392 Lookings, 166 Loran, 245

Lord Y üan of Sung, 329 Lotus, 363 Lovelessness, 147 Luk, Charles, 466

Lung, 281 Ly, 97 Lyricism, 268 M

M. I. T. Press, 466

Macrocosmos, 131, 172 Made Public, 278 Management of affairs, 192 Management of difference, 363 Manifest content, 387

Manifold Significance, 182 Manipulability, 211 Mantis, 365 Manual operation, 297 Manual performance, 10 Manyness, 362 Marcel, G., 234 Marcel, Gabriel, 223, 231, 232, 457 Marcel's sayings, 224 Marx, 45 Master Ssu, 366 Master Yü, 366 Masters Ssu, 367

Mathematics, 252, 313, 346, 387, 397 Matrixes, 306 Matrixes leads, 306

Max Black, 259 Maximization of natural selfinterest, 446 Maxims philosophical, 71 Meaningfulness of claim, 28 Meaningfulness of statement, 298 Meaninglessness, 430 Medical misfortune, 128

Meditation, 67, 81, 82, 94, 194, 360, 433 philosophical, 387 Meditations, 161

Meditative, Meditative Meditative Meditative

195 conversation, 272 invitation, 224 loss, 77, 83

Meditative moment, 194

Meditative searching questions, 55 Meditative thinking, 195 Megalomaniacal, 128 Meh, 108 Meh luo, 108

488

INDEX

Melodious winds, 187 Melodist, 407 Memory amounts, 257 Memory share, 256 Men I, 77 Men. I, 83

Mencian evil, 211 Mencian tradition, 457 Mencius calling, 282 Mencius calls, 91

Mencius' compassionate alarm, 277 Mencius' Four moral Buddings, 49 Mencius hit, 427

Mencius' insight, 123 Mencius' point, 277 Mencius stays, 347 Mencius' story, 170, 321

Mencius' three stories, 210 Mencius's argumentation, 350 Mencius's contribution, 182 Mencius's debates, 352

Mencius's 419 Mencius's Mencius's Mencius's Mencius's 109

emphatic identification,

feeling, 217 ideal government, 143 imperturbability, 185 own concocted story,

Mencius's seeking-for heart, 189

Mencius's spontaneous engagement, 374

Mencius's story, 281, 382

Mencius's writings, 98 Mental activity, 242 Mental acts, 242

Mental body, 136 Mental management, 10 Mental movement, 229

Mental performance, 241 Mental phenomenon, 243 Mental-and-material energy, 250 Menuhin, 187 Menuhin, Yehudi, 186

Meridian

medical, 108

Merleau-Ponty looks, 331 Merleau-Ponty means, 150 Merleau-Ponty put, 101 Merleau-Ponty puts, 340, 343 Merleau-Ponty starts, 254 Merleau-Ponty, M., 437 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 232, 453, 457 Merleau-Ponty's apt example, 149 Merleau-Ponty's body, 332 Merleau-Ponty's perception, 28 Merleau-Ponty's project, 309 Merleau-Ponty's words, 114 Metanoia, 144

Metaphoric, 42, 87, 89 Metaphoric act, 94, 121, 129 Metaphoric argument, 282 Mencius's, 382 Metaphoric argumentation, 322 Metaphoric assimilation, 380 Metaphoric association, 336 Metaphoric compactness Yin-Yang reciprocity of ironic, 226 Metaphoric congruence, 380 Metaphoric ebb, 53 Metaphoric evocation Mencius's, 205 Metaphoric extension, 85, 123, 304 Metaphoric implication, 61, 314 Metaphoric mode of concrete argumentation, 175, 199 Metaphoric move, 121, 123, 222, 225 Metaphoric occasion of new realization, 382 Metaphoric performance, 222

Metaphoric process, 90, 382 Metaphoric Metaphoric somatic, Metaphoric Metaphoric Metaphoric situation,

progress, 336 push 190 reinforcement, 58 shift, 352 similarity of novel 89

489

INDEX Metaphoric Metaphoric Metaphoric Metaphoric Metaphoric

stretch, 200 thinking, 352 truth, 383 understanding, 336 way, 285

Metaphoric ways, 89, 90

Mo Tzu, 93 Mo Tzu's logical investigations, 372 Mo Tzu's not-so-honorific use of man, 91

Mobile I, 153

Metaphoric-ironic thinking, 108

Mohanty, J. N., 230, 439

Metaphorics, 89, 90, 179, 197, 224 affirmative, 179

Monkey, 190, 261

Metaphorics ironics, 93 Metaphorics of compact, 129 Metaphorism, 430 Metaphors Mean, 258 Metaphysical center of astronomical thinking, 126 Metaphysical map, 283 Metaphysical principle of cosmos, 47

Mom Besides, 20

Monkey Uncle, 71 Monkeys Crowds of, 71 Monkeys chestnuts, 71 Monopoly of truth, 1 Moon-lit door, 110 Moorage, 430 Moore, G. E., 247, 298, 356

Metaphysical scheme, 308

Moral Philosophy, 124, 360 Moralness, 273

Metaphysics, 47, 74, 121, 122, 123,

Morning Three, 71 Motherliness, 140

Metaphysico-political argumentation, 374

151, 172, 208, 230, 279, 287 Chinese, 122, 126 concrete, 122

revisionary, 230 Metaphysics of things, 122 Meteorological conditions, 246 Microcosmos, 130, 131, 172

Mighty Stream of vital Thrust of Heaven, 307 Mikel Dufrenne, 295

Mill's view of logic, 218 Milton, John, 427 Mind-Body Involvement, 457 Mind-body Unity, 182 Mindheart, 30, 39, 181, 182, 183, 190, 201, 419, 457 Mindheart of alarm, 202 Mindhearts, 180 Minnows, 86, 87, 144

Minnows' joy, 86

Minutest details, 204

Mirror-reflection of things, 375 Mo P'ien, 344, 347

More Cases, 425

Mount of universe, 211

Mozart, 161, 162, 277 music of, 364 Mozart's music, 276, 277 Mr. Straight Body, 8 Multiple Summation, 85 Muscle of creative novelty, 98 Music each note, 335 Music every note, 335 Music of argument, 335 Music of world, 288 Musical beauty, 336 Musical inevitability, 276 Musical order of harmonious progression charms, 47 Musical performance of life flow, 160 Musical repetition, 160 Musical significance of action, 149 Musicality, 417 Mutual acceptance, 138 Mutual adjustment, 137 Mutual appreciation, 214

490

INDEX

Mutual Benefiting, 204 Mutual composition, 137 Mutual configuration, 320 Mutual contrast, 59

Mutual correspondence, 361 Mutual discussion, 137 Mutual entrance wombs, 142

Mutual feelings, 137 Mutual help, 125 Mutual implications, 82 Mutual involvement of freedom, 47 Mutual opposition, 58 Mutual reinforcement negative, 58 Myriads, 45 Mystical Abrogations, 425 Myth of Cave, 231 Myth of Cave urges, 219 N Nagel, Thomas, 219 Nameable, 95 Nascence, 69, 388 Natal matrix of mind, 309

Natal place, 279

Natal scale of value, 278

Natal society, 287

Natura naturata, 69 Natural Ch'i, 190

Natural Knowledge, 397 Nature dialectic of, 50 ecological, 52 Nature-ing growth, 390 Natures, 158, 339, 394

Nebulae, 346 Necessitarian view of world, 241 Needham, J., 397

Negation of not-A, 59 Negations, 100 Chinese, 38

Negativa, Negative Negative Negative Negative

41 connotation, 91 connotations, 417 existential truth, 43 ingredient, 190

Negative irony, 179 Negative manner, 273 Negative Nihilation, 144 Negative proposition, 38 Negative prudential maxim, 57 Negative rhetorical questions, 55 Negative side, 133 Negative uses of language, 81 Negativities, 358 Negativities fare, 363 Negativity, 68, 133 Negativity, A., 133 Nei P'ien of Ko Hung, 466 Nelson, B., 397

Neural impulses, 243 Never Land, 112

Never Land of myth, 112 Never Never Land, 113

New American Library, 465 News hour, 362

Newton's apple, 444 Next Generation, 109 Nietzsche, 199, 225, 433, 447 Nihilate, 138 Nihilates, 133, 183 Nihilation, 133, 137, 139, 144, 145, 449 Nishida Kitaro, 311

Nishida's view, 311 Nisus, 145, 181 No. 1-2, 397

Nominatives, 36, 37

Non-metaphoric reference point, 129 Non-Metaphorical Matrix, 429 Normalcy, 128 Normativeness of historical body

thinking, 340.

Normativity, 221 cosmic universal, 100 Northern Dark waters, 62 Northern Darkness, 58 Not Here, 81

No-tao's 33 extant chapters, 61, 314

49] Note Jaspers' levels of Existenz, 401 Nothingness, 367 Sartrian dynamic, 138 Notings, 130 Nourishment of Life, 370 Nows, 343

Nozick, Robert, 231 Numerological, 108 Nuremberg Trials, 273 Nutrition, 10, 134, 225

O O King, 184 Objectification, 209, 223 dialectic of symbolic, 244 Objectifies, 223 Objectify, 102 Objectivation, 311 Objectivism, 298, 300, 331 Observational, 167 Occultic, 108 Occultistic literalism, 441 Occupational obligations, 335 Octopus, 19 Octopuses, 18 Of/by reason, 434 Ol days, 374 Oliver Sacks, 43

Olympic arena, 359 Oneness, 29, 59, 118, 215 cosmic, 59

Oneness of concrete world, 59 Ongoings, 328 heart of historical, 387 Ontic Platonic scheme of, 401 Ontic reality, 401, 451 Ontological, 101, 105, 117, 137, 141, 142, 169, 356 Ontological appearance, 337 Ontological base, 94 Ontological basicness of demonstratives, 87 Ontological births, 164 Ontological communication, 165

Ontological doctrines, 233 Ontological dualism, 372 Ontological evocation, 152 Ontological exchange, 156 parity of, 156 Ontological feeling relation, 166 Ontological growth, 142 Ontological intentionality, 156 Ontological inter-flow, 157 Ontological inter-involvement, 237 Ontological interpretation of quantum theory, 467 Ontological law of identity, 102 Ontological liturgical exercise, 195 Ontological mileage, 220 Ontological moments, 166 Ontological music, 158 Ontological Nausea, 283 Ontological necessity, 105 Ontological nisus, 156 Ontological order, 444 Ontological possibility, 137 Ontological radiation, 196 Ontological resonance, 138 Ontological response, 429 Ontological reversibility, 250 Ontological stages, 180 Ontological understanding, 308 Ontologico-social root, 109 Ontology logician Quine's, 120 Opalesce, 88 Open Court Publishing Co, 465 Operational term, 297 Opposites, 65, 72, 73, 81, 85, 87, 214 Opposites of future, 147 Oppositions Derrida's chains of, 350 Oratorical cheat, 333 Orchestra Hall, 359

Orderliness, 305

concrete, 261 Orderliness of nature, 36

Organ space, 149

492 Organic manner, 9 Organic process, 242, 401 Organic process of specific instance, 441 Organic unity, 176 Organist, 149 Organon of logic, 333 Orient Oneself, 124, 359 Oriental mentality, 92

INDEX Part Four, 228, 229 Part One, 4, 8, 20, 22

PART SIX, 319

Part Three, 4, 21, 195 Part Two, 4, 8, 95, 97

412, 430 Ostensive definition points, 238 Ostensive performance, 30

Part Two concrete thinking, 20 Partaker, 395 Parthenon, 231 Particularities of things, 157 Particularities of things flow, 157 Part-Whole Configurative Argumentation, 320 Passional ideals of joys, 55 Passional parsimony, 56

Other Societies, 465

Pasts, 312

Osmose, 262 Ostensive definition, 237, 238, 271,

Other Writings, 124, 360 Outside One, 60 Overview of New Physics, 466 Owl, 366 Ox, 51, 72, 99, 102, 106, 115, 123, 138, 170, 183, 202, 211, 260, 366 Ox Mount, 211, 351, 390 bald, 52 Oxen, 39, 376

Oxen of things, 31

Pedagogical evocation, 85 Pedagogy, 73 People Press, 466 Perceivable object, 29 Perceiver, 42, 329 Perceivers, 370

Perceivings, 29 Percept, 120 Perceptiveness

social, 152 Percepts, 42, 43, 44

Oxford English Dictionary, 307 Ox's jitters, 170 P Pace Brittan, 355 Pace Merleau-Ponty, 314 Paganini, 293 Paganini's Caprices, 48 Pai, 298

Oxen's noses, 376

experience-construction, 46 Percepts make no sense, 43 Perceptual beings, 288 Perceptual empirical truth, 353 Perceptual experience, 353, 354 Perceptual experiences, 353 Perceptual field, 301 Perceptual historical truths, 340 Perceptual proposition, 353

Palaz of Hoon, 392

Perceptual synthesis, 159, 336

Palle Yourgrau, 445 Palm of humaneness, 171 Palpates, 251 Palpation, 251 Paradise Regained 1671, 427 Paradoxicality, 76 Paramythia, 459 Parenting, 142, 167

PART FIVE, 249, 386

Perceptual truth, 353

Perceptual Truths, 352, 353

Perceptual truths of human, 319 Perfectness, 390 Performative, 22, 24, 32, 225, 259,

294 Performative character of logical necessity, 301 Performative Cogito, 129, 130

INDEX Performative community of confirmation, 33 Performative efficacy, 239 Performative expression of life pulse, 160 Performative force, 32 Performative of strenuous spontaneity, 193 Performative one, 196, 298 Performative thinking, 195, 196,

197 Performative thinking per forms, 197 Performative utterance, 187, 239 Performative utterance of constative, 32

Performatives, 16, 24, 205, 216 Performatives of thinking, 128 Peripatetic painting scroll, 197 Peripatetic perspective, 173 Peripatetic round of pseudodialogues, 65 Perishability somatic, 274 Personhood, 144, 183, 291, 307 body-ness of, 172 social, 307 Personification, 326, 449

Perspectival, 252 Perspectival distortions, 316 Perspectival horizons, 207 Perspectival revolution, 245 Perspectival subversion, 258 Perspectival variation, 253 Perspectival views, 159 Pervasion, 49 Peter Elbow, 53 Peter Elbow's graphic description, 44 Peter Pan, 112

Peter Pan. Peter Pan magic of, 112 Peter Pan's imagery, 112 Peters, F. E., 453

Phenomenological analyses, 401

493 Phenomenological description, 413 Phenomenological explanatory enterprise, 230 Phenomenologists, 202, 215, 233,

331, 413, 457 Phenomenologists' reading, 447 Phenomenologists resort existential, 224 Phenomenology, 328, 401 Phenomenology of body, 233 Phenomenology of perception, 233, 315 Philadelphia, 466 Philology, 212 Philosophers's treatment of paradox, 445 Philosophical analysis, 201 Philosophical efforts of rationalist tradition, 328

Philosophical exposition, 245 Philosophical Investigations, 403 Philosophical irrelevance, 289 Philosophical oddities, 199 Philosophical one, 439 Philosophical poetry, 225 Philosophical program, 329 Philosophical road, 74 Philosophical significance of body, 232 Philosophical status, 252 Philosophical Taoism, 461 Philosophical theories, 443 Philosophical theory of correspondence, 179 Philosophical thinking, 112 Philosophical truth, 238 Philosophical wayside, 372 Philosophical wisdom, 407 Philosophy aims, 245 Philosophy of body thinking, 373 Philosophy of concrete thinking, 204 Philosophy of movement, 232 Physical body, 302 Physical law of nature, 48

494 Physical movement, 229 Physical object, 171 Physical performance of laughter, 241 Physical thing, 238 Physiognomy, 294 Physiological substance, 236 Physiology, 172 Physis, 122 P'i mou, 345 Pi So, 297 Pietistic meditative manner, 253

Pilot flying, 246 Pipings, 268

Pipings of Heaven, 77, 83

Placid, 267 Placid limpidity, 390 Placings, 93 Plane-and-pilot flies, 246 Planet B, 408

Plato, 18, 68, 100, 131, 194, 208, 219, 259, 389, 401, 429, 433, 457, 459, 461 Platonic conundrum of participation, 429 Platonic dialogue of Theaetetus, 383 Platonic division philosophical tradition of, 231 Platonic idealism war version of, 372

Platonic injunction, 219 Platonic leaning, 11, 429 Platonic-Kantian abstraction, 209

Plato's dissection of reality, 50 Plato's Matter, 18

Plato's Myth of Cave, 245 Plato's Myth of Divided Lines, 231 Plato's Republic, 253, 347

INDEX Poetico-painterly feet, 387 Poetico-philosophical symbiosis, 408 Poetry of world, 288 Pointings, 93, 238 concatenation of, 93 Polanyi, Michael, 74, 166 Polar concord, 421

Polar Continuity, 177

Polar Polar Polar Polar Polar Polar

continuum, 177, 180 contrast, 179 distinction, 177 one, 179 relation, 179 tensions, 187

Polaroid picture of scene, 223 Political body, 154 Political concord, 26 Political disasters, 366 Political ramification, 34 Political realm, 115 Political sciences, 159 Political theories, 421 Political welfare, 25 Politico-cosmic concord, 133 Politico-historical disaster, 128

Politico-historico-cosmological unity, 116 Ponens, 158, 159, 300, 339 Ponens shifts, 339

Popper, Karl, 383

Posit, 90 Positive Nihilation, 137 Postural schema

corporal, 206

Potentiality, 181, 304 Powell, James N., 466

Pragmatic Explanation of Deconstructionism, 425

Plato's Third Man Argument, 231 Playfulness, 91

Pragmatic Turn, 403 Praktognosia, 149

Plerosis, 133 Plerotic love, 133

Prances, 389

Plies of situational import, 88

Po Lo, 389

Pre-1980 days Cua, 323 Predicative assimilation, 380 Predominant Trends, 407

495 Preliminaries of suffering, 245 PRELIMINARY REMARK, 7, 228 Premeditation, 180, 349

Prenatal disposition, 462 Pre-reflective level, 457 Presences, 61, 314

Presences of personhood, 380 Prevenient governance, 385 Pribram, Karl H., 467 Primal, 28, 315

Primal a priori matrix, 12 Primal distinction of right hand, 359 Primal Nature, 390

Primal origin, 28 Primal paradigm of Yin-Yang interaction, 84 Primal paradigmatic inspiration, 326 Primal pointer, 93 Primal reverberation somatic, 325 Primal root of self, 390

Primal stage, 283

Primal state, 262 Primal structure of internal touch,

142 Princeton University Press, 466 Prioris, 291 Prius, 19 Processive, 394 Processive manner, 319

Processive prevalent nature, 387

Procrustean bed, 214, 225

Professor Chün-chieh Huang, 443 Professor Uto, 443 Professor Yung Sik Kim, 397 Projective capability, 44 Prolepseis, 462 Prometheus Books, 466 Pronunciations of words, 92

Propositional falsehood, 363 Propositional meaningfulness, 298 Propositional moves, 379 Propre, 236

Prospectus of Work, 310 Protestantism, 83 Psyche, 246 Psychic, 218, 239 Psychic fact of thinking experience, 317 Psychoanalysis, 349 Psychological coincidence, 288 Psychological incidents, 277 Psychologism, 218, 220, 293, 299 Psychologism of Mill, 120 Psychology, 156, 159, 172, 243 Pu, 39 Pu jen, 40 Pure drawing, 245 Puzzlings, 79 Pythagoras, 244 Pythagorean theorem, 340

Q

Quicksand of endless interpretations, 220 R Rachmaninoff, 48, 293 Random House, 466

Rapids cosmic, 180 Rapids of cosmic flow, 188 Ratiocinate, 294 Ratiocination, 14 Rawls, John, 255, 444 Realisation, 445 Reason cosmic, 45

Reasonings, 356 Reciprocity historical, 336 somatico-ontological, 153 Reciprocity of obligations, 187 Reciprocity of personal interaction, 173 Rectificatory implications, 29 Reducible, 313, 378, 384

Referent shows, 411 Referents, 174, 178, 411 Referrings, 412, 430

496 mutual, 320

Reformations social, 26 Regulatory pulsation, 98 Reichenbach, Hans, 355 Reinterpret, 213 Relational words, 300 Relativistic confusion, 159

Religion, 83, 84, 272, 466 Religion serves, 433 Religious concern, 405 Religious holy day, 108 Religious language, 298 Repairer, 136 Replaceable, 331 Replications, 221 Replications of metaphoric move, 122 Replications of same operations, 221 Republic of China, 39 Resemblances, 250, 294, 350

Resoluteness digestive, 363 Resonance of spirit, 435

Resonances of different sizes, 48 Revealment, 250, 363, 381, 382

Revealment requirements of truth, 363 Revealment theory of truth, 361 Reversibility, 251, 386 Revisive, 263

Rhetorico-literary devices West, 198

Ricoeur, Paul, 379 Ricoeur's makes little sense, 380

Right Three Streets, 125 River water, 155

Rorty, Richard, 120, 231 Rosenberg, Jay F., 71 Round A, 66 Rounds A, 65 Rulership, 184, 198, 335

Running Press, 466 Russell, Bertrand, 28, 372

INDEX Rustic beauty, 69 Rustic countryside, 68 Ryle, Gilbert, 12, 167 Ryle's category mistake, 350 S Saccharin decorativeness, 364 Sacrificial slaughter, 102, 115, 138, 170, 183, 202, 211 Sageliness, 371 Sailor-vessel relation, 135 Salker, Douglas, 466 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 223, 232 Sartre's negative function of nihilation, 145 Sartre's nihilation, 139

Sartrian hell, 138 Sayable, 65 Scapes, 391 Schematization, 120 Schematization of new predicative congruence, 380 Schnabel, Artur, 186 Schneewind, J. B., 11

School of Names, 372, 373 Schrader, G. A., 234 Schubert, 364 Schutz, Alfred, 302 Scientific confirmation, 356 Scientific knowledge, 208, 209, 398 Scientific language, 294 Scientific progress, 383 Scientific revolution, 176, 213, 397 Scientific studies, 398 Scientific thought, 208 Scrutinies philosophical, 407 Searle, John, 306, 401 Searle, John R., 306 Sec. 13, 124, 360 Second Chapter, 87, 94, 270, 407 philosophical, 370 Second Chapter of Ch'i Wu Lun, 77, 83

497 Second Chapter of Chuang Tzu, 59, 369 Second Way, 429 Secret of Golden Flower, 466 Secrets of Chinese Meditation, 466 Section 1, 411 Section 1.1, 413

Section 1.2, 415, 417, 419 SECTION 10.2, 465

Section 11.3-Footnotes, 467 Section 18, 319

Section 2.3.2, 421

Section 2.3.2.1, 423 Section 3.2, 425, 427 Section 3.5, 429

Section 4.1, 433 Section 4.3.1, 435, 437, 439, 441 Section 4.3.2, 443 Section 5.2, 445 Section 5.3, 447

Section 6.3, 449 Section 6.8, 451

Section 7.1, 453 Section 7.2.2, 455, 457 Section 8.3, 459

See Appendix 20, 113 See Appendix 26, 156 See Appendix 27, 160 Self-Clarifying West, 373 Selfishness, 49, 105, 298 Self-possession of nature, 84 Selves, 79, 97, 105, 144, 257 transfigured, 366, 367 Semantic resources, 259 Senescence, 51, 368 Senescence demand, 365

Sensory experience, 120 Sensory experiences, 36 Sensuality, 384 Sensuous perception, 233 Sensuousness, 233

Sentience, 242 Separative relation, 262 Series of Footnotes, 401 Sexual perversion, 172

Sexual Rogations, 425

Shakespeare, 257, 461 Shambhala Publications, 465, 466 Shan Hai Ching, 465 Shang, 39 Sheep thievery, 8 Shen, 31, 155, 188, 214, 254, 332 Shen Ch'i, 155 Shen p'an, 332 Shen shih, 332 Sheng, 181 Shih, 87 Shih Ching, 125, 126 Shorthand expression of concrete experienced reality, 108 Short-shorthand expression of story, 108 Short-short-shorthand compression, 108 Shun Tzu, 465 Sibelius's Violin Concerto, 186 Menuhin's virile performance of, 187 Sidgwick, Henry, 445 Signification, 108, 187, 287 Similars concrete, 131

Sine qua, 299, 315, 378 Sings, 322 Sinologues Western, 435

Sissy, 417 Situatedness, 26 Situatedness of body, 255 Situatedness of thinking, 255 Siu, R. G. H., 466 Sivin, 397

Sivin, N., 397 Six Characteristics of Body Thinking, 252 Six Pernicious Influences, 107 Sixty-four Hexagrams, 107 Sleepy, 192 Slightings of royal tradition, 55 Smullyan, Raymond, 408

INDEX

498 Social Social Social Social Social

body thinking, 335 conditioning, 277 consensus, 161 context, 287 dimension, 457

Social interactions, 184

Social obligations, 335 Social order, 36

Social origin, 302 Social position, 32, 335 Social realm, 184 Social role, 16, 173

Social science Chinese, 122 Social world, 302 Sociality, 94, 142, 153, 155, 180, 291, 292, 302, 319 existential background of, 292 somatic, 291, 292 Sociality fits, 150 Sociality of self-ing nature cosmic, 391 Socio-existential act, 161

Socio-historical convention, 307 Sociology, 159, 172 Socio-ontological root, 109 Socio-political twist, 28 Socrates, 7, 12, 18, 55, 83, 84, 87,

180, 199, 231, 253, 261, 383, 433

Socratic examination, 347

Socratic inquiry, 253 Socratic knowledge, 63 Socratic one, 87 Socratic search, 245

Socratic therapy, 61, 314 Solidary community of cultural diversities, 226 Somatic base, 246 Somatic context, 274 Somatic death, 190 Somatic gesture, 240 Somatic knife, 50

Somatic performance, 237 Somatic phenomena, 388

Somatic power, 239 Somatic reverberation, 325 Somatic thinking, 383 Somatic unity of empirical fact, 307 Somatic world of beauty, 363 Somatic world-constituting act, 237 Somatic-social beings, 391 Someone claims, 126

Sonic flow, 160 Sonic patterns of reference, 232 Sonic water, 157 Sonship, 37 Sorites, 323 South Hill, 320 Southern Hills, 322 Spatiotemporal, 437, 453 Spectral machine, 351 Speech act, 306, 380 Speech acts, 306, 401 Speech-act unity, 306 Spine of death, 367 Spinoza's conatus, 156 Spinoza's geometrical system of things, 156 Spouter of platitudes, 54 Spring Rain, 366 Spring-Summer 1982, 397 Ssu, 214

St. Paul, 136 Star Trek, 109 Starry heavens, 125 State A, 408

State B, 408 State University of New York Press, 467

Statistical average of observed happenings, 208 Stipulative definition, 237 Stoic distinction, 462 Stoicheia, 453 Stoicheia elements, 453 Stone Monkey, 466 Story-Shaped World of Brian Wicker, 283

499 Straight bodies, 8 Straightness, 8, 118 Strenuosity, 215 Strivings, 120, 287 Structuralism, 374 Structuralist terminology, 374 Structuralist thinking, 374 Structure of Body Thinking, 281 Structure of I, 128

Study of History of Chinese Science, 397 Subjecthood, 24 Subjectification, 244 Subjectivism, 164, 182, 298 Subjectivity, 181, 219, 299, 300, 308, 311 phobia of, 298 Subjectivity of space, 355 Sublimity, 292 Subsumes, 307 Summary of Parts One, 195 Sun Tzu, 125

Supple ontological power, 156 Supple strength, 67 Suzanne White's Book of Chinese Chance, 465 Suzuki, T., 465 Sweeter, 407 Swift passage of time, 192 Swindle of actuality, 76 Symbiotic circle, 171 Symbiotic front, 109 Symbolizings hang, 429 Symphonic melodies of concerto, 277 Synagogic account, 459 Synthetic a priori judgment, 120 Synthetic a priori operation, 297 Synthetic extension, 297 Synthetic nature of 7 5 12, 296 Synthetic operation, 387 Synthetic totality of thought experiments, 237 Systematic investigation, 443

Systematicity of abstract thinking, 377 Systematicity of facts concrete, 213

Systematization, 44 Systematization of natural knowledge, 398 Systemization, 108 Systemization of dialectic, 145 T T'a,39

Tactical situational waste, 174 T'ai Chi, 67 T'ai Chia, 25

T'ai Hsüan Ching, 465 Taipei, 399 T'ai-Shang Kan-Ying P'ien, 465 Taiwan, 443 Taiwan book market, 465 Taiwan market, 465

Take Chinese argumentation, 221 Take P. F. Strawson, 230

T'ang dynasty capital of, 125 T'ang period, 465

T'ao Ch'ien, 320, 322

Tao, 61, 63, 64, 65, 69, 231, 314, 316, 317 hearing, 66 Tao of Nature, 69

Tao of Physics, 466

Tao of Science, 466

Tao of Symbols, 466 Tao of things, 35, 66 Tao Te Ching, 60, 65, 66, 68, 69,

224

Tao Thus, 216

Tao way, 63 Tao. Storytelling, 71 Taoism, 38, 58, 60, 72, 77, 83, 85,

104, 113, 126, 144, 215, 313, 443, 461, 462, 466 philosophical, 461 Taoism affirmation, 38 Taoism reason, 461

500 Taoism use words, 195 Taoist Book of Days, 465 Taoist insights, 93 Taoist language, 95 Taoist Mysteries, 465 Taoist penchant, 95 Taoist penchant of negatives, 68 Taoist perspective, 88, 89 Taoist reason of Heaven, 462 Taoist Tales, 465 Taoist writings, 27, 69 Taoist Yoga, 466 Taoists revel, 461 Taoists take, 37 Taoists's writings, 63 Te, 30 Tea, 392

INDEX Theme of Haydn means variations, 293 Theoreticals, 108 Theoreticity, 221, 251 Theoretico-practical knowledge, 205 Theories of truth, 381, 382 Theorization, 20, 176, 340 geometrical, 340 Theory of Justice, 444 Thickless knife, 72 Thinkable, 14 Thinking Body, 291 Thinkings, 158, 339

Third Chapter of Chuang Tzu, 366 Thou home of, 166

Teacher puts, 69 Technical artisanship, 398 Technical skill, 204 Technical term, 330

Thou-It's integrity, 166 Thou's background, 168

Technical terms, 328

Thou's home, 166

Technological calculative thinking, 279 Technological dehumanization, 373 Technological innovations, 33 Technological revolutions, 372 Teeth of necessity, 164 Teleological argumentative tower, 231 Teleological harmony, 457 Teller of stories, 303, 337 Tender kindness, 102

Tender self-acceptance, 103 Tender spot, 102 Tender-kind presence, 103 Tenders one's own aching tooth, 102 Terminological convolutions, 374 Textual-literary criticism, 392 Texture of Reality, 200 The-Duke-of Chou, 191 Thematization, 447 Theme of Chaos, 465

Thou lives, 166 Thou-It's correlate, 166

Three Questions, 375 ΤΊ, 332 Ti, 39 Tiao, 281 Tiao lung, 281 Tiger, 119, 365 Tiger's disposition, 365 Tillich, Paul, 405, 429

Timbrels, 407 Time Stream

wave of, 308

Tis, 356

Togetherness, 109, 136, 137, 279,

287, 336, 362 historico-cosmological, 116 Togetherness of normative hermeneutics, 116

Toi, 223

Tollendo tollens, 345

Tonus of vital existence elementary, 244 Tortoise shells, 107 Totters, 231

501 10010665 challenge, 174 Tr, 124, 360, 465, 466 Traditional Culture, 397 Traditionalism, 213 Tragedies, 188 Tragedies cripple, 363 Tragedies of epic dimension, 364 Train of arguments, 294 Transcend Limits of Symbolism, 466 Transcendent object, 168 Transcendent reality, 124, 360

Transcendent realm religious, 457 Transcendent subject, 168 Transcendental, 296 Transcendental demands, 295 Transcendentalism

Kantian legitimizing, 230

Transcendentalism of reason, 75 Transfiguration of self, 365, 366

Transfigurations, 366 Transformative accommodation mutual, 286

Transformative extrapolation, 286 Transitive force, 166 Transitive quality of active affirmation, 33 Transitive verb, 33, 72, 215 Transitive verbs, 387 Transmission of Mind Outside, 466

Transmutation of life perspectives, 257 Transmutations, 260

Transmute everything, 257 Transparency of consciousness amounts, 171 Treatise of Exalted One, 465

Trees of field, 288 Trite, 55, 276, 308 Triune dynamism, 358 Trod,68 Trs, 465

Truculence acidity, 84

Ts'ai Yung, 330 Ts'ao Chih, 111 1520 Ts'ao emperor, 111 Tseng Tzu, 117, 433 Tso-wei Lei-pi T'ui-li teh Mo P'ien, 344 T'ui, 346 Tung Chung-shu's cosmological scheme, 308

Turnings, 286 TV saga, 109

Twelve Branches, 107 Two Themes, 229 Twoness, 215

Typewriter, 149 Tzu ΟΠ of South Wall, 407 Tzu hsiang mao tun, 421 U U. S. Department of Health, 465 Ultimacy, 405 Umbilical cord of knowledge, 256 Unbroken Flow effortlessness of, 67 Uncle Sai, 90, 173

Unconveyables, 327

Undivided Universe, 467

Undulatory freedom, 98

Unexpectedness, 146, 147, 159

Unfalsifiable, 297, 298 Unfathomability, 347 Unfinishable, 341 Universalism, 430

pedagogical, 73 Universalityc leads, 51 Universalityc of contingent sort, 50 Universalityi, 51 Universalityi of inductive sort, 50 Universalityi tries, 50 Universalityn, 51 Universalityn of necessary sort, 50 Universals, 99, 100, 101, 106, 107,

117, 118, 131, 206, 220, 291, 401, 415, 441, 447, 451 Chinese, 113, 116, 131

502 Chinese concrete, 107, 108 concrete, 31, 47, 51, 97, 100,

101, 106, 107, 113, 117, 131, 270, 441 existential, 128, 447, 448 literary, 261 Universals carry Chinese, 116

Universals Chinese body thinking concrete, 106

Universals of things, 100 University of California Press, 465 University of Chicago Press, 465 Unmindfulness, 189 Unnameable, 64 Unnoticeableness of natural unity, 4 Unpublished Text of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 310 Unsayable, 60, 61, 65, 314 Something, 61, 314 Unspeakability of Thou, 223 Unspeakable, 60, 368

Unspeakable convincing reciprocity, 152 Unspeakable naturalness, 118 Unverifiability of metaphor, 222 Urban, Wilbur M., 429 Uriel Weinreich, 259 Utah, 466 Utilitarian corner, 326 Utilitarian position, 323

Utopia

historical myths of ancient, 278 V Van Gogh's A Pair, 68 Variegated perspectives, 338 Vectorial polarity, 182 Vehicle of new discovery of truth, 382 Venus, 411

Verifiability, 297 Verity, 28 Verse, 207

biblical, 207

INDEX Vibration of appearances, 268 Vienna Circle, 120 Village of Ultimate Virtues, 279 Vincent Yu-chung Shih, 393 Violin, 277 Violin bends, 186 Violin concerto, 277 Violinistic nucleus, 277

Violin's soul, 277 Visceral reaction of alarmed pity, 210 Visual experience, 247 Visual pattern of deductive argumentation, 163 Vitalism of li, 47 Vol. XX, 397 Volcanic eruption of haphazard W

novelties, 163

Waismann, Friedrich, 38 Waker, 259 Walters, Derek, 465

Wang chi, 40 Wang Hsi-chih, 119 Wang Hsien-ch'ien's words, 88 Wang shen, 40 Wang wo, 40 Water-nature of things, 163 Wave of repetitive concretes, 52 Way of Heaven, 26 Way of human subject, 236 Way of man, 26 Way of nature, 65 Way of things, 280 Way things, 65, 279, 280, 322 Way Yin ineffable, 65 Wei pu, 40, 198 Weightier, 191 Weiser, Samuel, 466 Weiss, Paul, 231 Welfare, 465 Wen, 281 Wen hsin, 281

503 Wen hsin 1120 lung, 281

Western airplane-like abstractive thinking, 315

217, 219, 220, 328, 401, 403, 433 phenomenological trends of, 401 Western pragmatic turn, 403 Western problem, 217 Western realization of mind-body unity, 457 Western scientific one, 399

Western argumentation, 202

Western sense, 398 Western senses, 220

Wen Hul, 366 Wen sums, 280 West-China difference lies, 408

Western abstract thinking, 202 Western affirmation, 198

Western analysis, 213

Western counterparts, 225 Western cultural enterprise, 15

Western Western Western Western Western 12 Western

Western elaborations, 235

Western terms, 220

Western attention, 75, 421

Western attitude, 398 Western body thinking, 9 Western concept, 315 Western contribution, 75

Western ethical thinking, 323 Western fashion, 329

Western fire of theoretical thinking baptism of, 214 Western formal analysis, 14 Western formal sensitivity, 21 Western formal theoretical thinking, 9 Western formal thinking, 1 Western frame of mind, 388 Western frame of reference, 329 Western framework, 214

Western Knowledge, 466 Western logical sensitivity, 97, 132, 220 Western mentality, 372 Western mind-body theories, 388

shoes, 214 studies of logic, 371 style of thinking, 398 styles, 403 technological operation,

tendency, 254

Western theoretical abstract thinking, 213 baptism of fire of, 214 Western theoretical one, 444 Western theoretical thinking, 204, 213 Western theoretico-technocratic mode, 11 Western thinking, 1, 4, 11, 16, 215, 220, 222, 232, 234, 255, 295, 403, 407 Western tradition, 221, 371, 388 Western view of body thinking, 228 Western way of thinking, 323 Whale, 62

Western mode, 11 Western mode of thinking, 3, 12,

What/how, 60 Wheelwright, 327 Wheelwright comment, 327 Wheelwright Pien, 327

Western one, 202

Whence, 139, 272, 310

221, 235

Western penchant, 430 Western people, 1 Western philosophical world, 248 Western philosophy, 81, 83, 100,

120, 203, 206, 208, 211, 212,

Whitehead, A. N., 233 Whitehead, N., 12, 247 Whiteheadian aeroplane of thin air, 211 Whitehead's aeroplane, 18

504 Whitehead's aeroplane flight of theoretical thinking, 213 Whitehead's aeroplane-like formal thinking, 403 Wholes of argumentative rhetoric, 333 Wide Sense, 455

William Morrow, 466, 467 With/in home, 144 With/within, 462 Wittgenstein, 46, 350 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 59, 223, 403

Wo, 40, 262

Womanhood, 417

restoration of, 417 Wombing Forth Persons, 139 Wombing-family relationship, 142 Wordsworth, 427

Wordsworth, William, 427 Wranglings, 373 Wright's words, 207 Wu fei Chuang Tzu's, 39 Wu lun

Y

ch'i, 59

Ya,40

Yes No, 71

Yin Yang, 222 Yin-Yang contrastive interflows of contraries, 163 Yin-Yang interrelationship, 177 Yin-Yang paradigmatic principle, 85 Yin-Yang theory, 59 Yonder time-ly, 312 Ytian, 346 Yuasa Yasuo, 467

Yuasa Yasuo claims, 388 Yün Nan-t'ien, 330 Yung, 40 Yutang, Lin, 163, 333, 435 Z Zaehner, R. C., 466 Zaner, Richard M., 232 Zen, 69, 195, 466 Zen Buddhism, 83, 425 Zen master, 171

Zen schools, 84 Zodiac, 107

Zu einer jeden kunftigen

Metaphysik Prolegomena, 124, 360 Zukav, Gary, 466

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