Phenomenology, Transversality, and World Philosophy 9781498520409, 9781498520416, 1498520405

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Phenomenology, Transversality, and World Philosophy

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Phenomenology, Transversality, and World Philosophy Hwa Yol Jung

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

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Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Copyright © 2021 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. Chapter 2, Hwa Yol Jung, “Transversality and Geophilosophy in the Age of Globalization,” originally printed in Calvin O. Schrag and the Task of Philosophy after Postmodernity, eds. Martin Beck Matuštik and William L. McBride (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002), pp. 74–90, Copyright © 2002 by Northwestern University Press. Revised essay printed with permission. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jung, Hwa Yol, author. Title: Phenomenology, transversality, and world philosophy / Hwa Yol Jung. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Phenomenology, Transversality, and World Philosophy explores the concept of world philosophy (Weltphilosophie) to take into account the reality of today’s multicultural and globalizing world, as well as the constructive roles played by phenomenology and transversality”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020050677 (print) | LCCN 2020050678 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498520409 (cloth) | ISBN 9781498520416 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy—History—21st century. | Globalization. | Multiculturalism. | Phenomenology. Classification: LCC B805 .J86 2021 (print) | LCC B805 (ebook) | DDC 181/.119—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050677 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050678 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

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This book is dedicated to my two sons, Eric and Michael, and their spouses, Sharon and Suzanne, who are not only good human beings but also devoted and caring parents to their children—Wiley, Adeline, Damien, and Wyatt.

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Contents

Foreword by Michael Jung

ix

Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 1 PART I:  ORIGINS OF TRANSVERSALITY 1  The Dao of Transversality as a Global Approach to Truth: A Metacommentary on Calvin O. Schrag

11

Chapter 1 Addendum: Review Essay on Calvin O. Schrag’s The Self after Postmodernity (1997) 33 2  Transversality and Geophilosophy in the Age of Globalization

41

3  The Task of Public Philosophy in the Transversal World of Politics

59

 dward O. Wilson’s Theory of Consilience: 4  E A Hermeneutical Critique

93

PART II:  TWO ELEMENTAL PRECONDITIONS OF WORLD PHILOSOPHY 5  Transversality, Harmony, and Humanity between Heaven and Earth 119 6  Phenomenology and Body Politics

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PART III:  WORLD LITERATURE AND WORLD PHILOSOPHY 7  Z  hang Longxi’s Contribution to World Literature in the Globalizing World of Multiculturalism

157

vii

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viii

Contents

 8  Wang Yangming and the Way of World Philosophy

187

 9  Transversality and Fred Dallmayr’s Comparative Political Theory

219

10  E  douard Glissant’s Aesthetics of Relation as Diversality and Creolization

239

PART IV:  HETEROTOPIA AND RESPONSIBILITY AS FIRST ETHICS 11  Reading Maurice Natanson Reading Alfred Schutz

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12  R  esponsibility as First Ethics: John Macmurray and Emmanuel Levinas

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13  Taking Responsibility Seriously

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14  Václav Havel’s New Statecraft of Responsible Politics

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Bibliography 343 Index 371 About the Author

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Foreword

Hwa Yol Jung was born on May 17, 1931, in Chinju, South Korea, starting life under Japanese rule. He was born into a long line of first sons, the patriarch of which was a teacher who was awarded his clanship after successfully commanding forces in the sixteenth-­century war with Japan. Although his family led a simple life, Hwa Yol’s mother fostered a love for school and learning. Unable to help him directly with his lessons, she stayed up late by candlelight to help support his studies alongside one of his older sisters who was also a motivated and successful student. Hwa Yol became resourceful in many affairs and during the Korean War used courage and wit to escape the Chinese-­backed Northern Korean forces. In Seoul, he and a friend fled the grasp of war and headed south, crossing rivers on the back of a cargo train. Later, he showed his value to the U.S. Army by translating interactions with the Korean population and in his early twenties oversaw a large number of personnel. He learned to type and perfected his English through managing the payroll and memorizing and implementing the court martial manual (indicating the nature of the interaction between troops and the locals). Hwa Yol was shown a way to seek higher education in the United States by a fellow Korean who had found a sponsor. An American soldier and friend told Hwa Yol that his mother had some contacts at Wabash College in Indiana and was willing to arrange a sponsorship for him. She could not send much money, but what she did send, he arbitraged into a much greater amount in military script. Another soldier convinced Northwest Airlines to take military script in his own name to buy Hwa Yol’s ticket to Chicago. The night before he was to leave for the United States, Hwa Yol was swept up by the Korean Army for conscription into their ranks. His best friend, who was supposed to meet him, knew immediately what had happened. He rushed to Hwa Yol’s apartment to retrieve the paperwork necesix

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Foreword

sary to free him from a local jail that was being used as a holding cell for new recruits. Hwa Yol had no time to notify his family about the incident, and they were mortified to find his apartment riddled with bullet holes the next day. After landing in Chicago, where he was christened Frank Chung by the immigration intake officer, Hwa Yol took a train to Indianapolis, finally making his way to the gates of Wabash College with a few dollars to spare. The following year, he transferred to Emory University, where he met his future wife and collaborator, Petee Schwartz. Their devotion to each other was unbroken and unrivaled until she died in 2004, after forty-­four years of marriage. Times were difficult at first, but Hwa Yol sped through his education and eventually took his Ph.D. to Moravian College, where he spent his academic career. In 1969, he began a postdoctoral fellowship with John Wild, who was a great influence and brought the world of phenomenology into Dr. Jung’s work. His phenomenological investigations immediately became a passion and endless source of contemplation. He envisioned and wrote about a web of thinkers and studies. He was a feminist, student of civil rights, skeptic of technology, and perhaps above all saw an oncoming ecological crisis and acted to bring an awareness of it for the entirety of his career. Dr. Jung published several books and countless articles. His home was never long without the sound of an evolving litany of typewriters, each one regularly demanding to begin a new line with a ping followed by the zip and thunk of its carriage. He loved tennis and cooking and excelled at both. His feasts were legendary, always fueling an extended conversation. His chopping knife was a blur, and his motions created a whirlwind of steam that followed him through the kitchen. He had a very specific pose, a well-­rehearsed technique, and a fastidious gaze when he tended to a salmon as it cooked over the haphazard arrangement of bricks that was the back porch barbecue pit. It was impossible to stop eating at his table, and he himself was known never to waste a scrap when he attended a meal. He was regarded as quiet and reserved. This was true only most of the time and very untrue for special moments. Dr. Jung’s great love was books, and he singlehandedly carried a certain online retailer through its early years. There was absolutely no point in gifting him a book, because it was impossible to find one he didn’t have. One of his favorite shirts quoted Erasmus in large type: “When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.” The stacks on his desks defied all laws of architecture and balance, but he knew exactly where each one lay. The cartography of his library was an exact analog of his thought processes and conceptual prioritizations. Each book was completely consumed, heavily annotated, and tagged with sticky notes or pages folded in

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Foreword xi

half; the soul of the book cherished, the body, not so much ravaged as transmogrified and infused with his understanding of it. As a teacher, Dr. Jung was impactful on the students who allowed him to be. To students in Western society, his lessons could seem jarring or outré, but in a purposeful way, that was designed to make his students reconsider their own preconceptions. He enjoyed creating and witnessing those reactions. Many of his students became friends, intellectual companions, and colleagues, no doubt due in equal measure to both existential and epicurean offerings. This volume is the last completed work of Dr. Jung, who passed away on August 15, 2017. After his retirement from teaching in 2002, he accelerated the release of several volumes, which serve as an omnibus of his philosophies. His writing encompasses many disciplines that concern humanity’s relation to the world and humans to each other, and it examines the differences among people and how understanding those differences can sustain us. Hwa Yol Jung’s life was one full of love and discourse through which he developed a worldview that is widely respected, an achievement that rose through the emphasis of time spent sitting, thinking, and listening, with speaking reserved for only when necessary. —Michael Jung August 15, 2020

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Acknowledgments

First of all, I wish to thank Mickey Morales, my dearest companion, whose diligence, proficiency, and incredible accuracy in handling word processing are unmatched by anyone else I have known in my over fifty-year writing career. Without her assistance in preparing this book, I would not have been able to complete it. I am truly grateful for her assistance. Second, I am thankful for Moravian College’s Reeves library staff—the librarian Janet Ohles, for making my research and writing as comfortable as she could, and Debbie Gaspar and Nancy Strobel, for taking care of my needs for interlibrary loan books for many years. Third, I also want to thank Debra Kratzer-­Comer and Stacy L. Adams at Panera for preparing coffee in the early mornings to perk up my tired brain and body for new days of writing. Finally, Jana Hodges-­ Kluck and Kari Waters of Lexington Books, for their infinite patience with the promise of help whenever I needed it. My gratitude also goes to the following journals and publishers for granting me permission to reprint my previously published essays, which have been revised for this book: Chapter 1, “The Dao of Transversality as a Global Approach to Truth: A Metacommentary on Calvin O. Schrag,” Man and World, 28 (1995): 11–31 (no longer published), Kluwer Academic Publishers, Copyright © 1969, Springer Nature; Addendum, “Review Essay of Calvin O. Schrag,” The Self after Postmodernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), Philosophy and Social Criticism, 24. 6 (1998): 133–40; Chapter 2, Hwa Yol Jung, “Transversality and Geophilosophy in the Age of Globalization,” in Calvin O. Schrag and the Task of Philosophy after Postmodernity, eds. Martin Beck Matuštik and William L. McBride (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002), pp. 74–90, Copyright © 2002 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2002. All rights reserved; Chapter 3, “The Task of Public Philosophy in the Transversal World of Politics,” in Comparative Political Theory xiii

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xiv

Acknowledgments

and Cross-­Cultural Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Hwa Yol Jung, ed. Jin Y. Park (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009), pp. 19–54, Copyright © 2009 by Lexington Books. All rights reserved; Chapter 4, Hwa Yol Jung, “Edward O. Wilson’s Theory of Consilience: A Hermeneutical Critique,” International Journal of Public Administration, 25 (2002): 1171–97, Taylor & Francis, reprinted by permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandf online.com); Chapter 5, Hwa Yol Jung, “Transversality, Harmony, and Humanity between Heaven and Earth,” Diogenes, No. 237, Vol. 60.1 (2013): pp. 97–104, SAGE Publications, doi:10.1177/0392192113519953, Copyright © ICPHS 2014; Chapter 6, Hwa Yol Jung, “Phenomenology and Body Politics,” Body and Society, 2.2 (June 1996): pp. 1–22, SAGE Publications, doi:10.117 7/1357034X96002002001, Copyright © 1996 SAGE Publications; Chapter 7, “Zhang Longxi’s Contribution to World Literature in the Globalizing World of Multiculturalism,” in Cross-­Cultural Studies: China and the World: A Festschrift in Honor of Professor Zhang Longxi, ed. Qian Suoqiao (Leiden: Brill, 2015), pp. 209–39, reprinted with permission; Chapter 8, with kind permissions from Springer Science+Business Media: Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, “Wang Yangming and the Way of World Philosophy,” 12 (2013): 461–86, Hwa Yol Jung, Copyright © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media; Chapter 9, “Transversality and Comparative Political Theory: A Tribute to Fred Dallmayr’s Works,” in Letting Be: Fred Dallmayr’s Cosmopolitical Vision, ed. Stephen F. Schneck (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), pp. 230–50; Chapter 10, Hwa Yol Jung, “Edouard Glissant’s Aesthetics of Relation as Diversality and Creolization,” in Postcolonialism and Political Theory, ed. Nalini Persram (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007), pp. 193–225, Copyright © 2007 by Lexington Books. All rights reserved; Chapter 11, reprinted by permission from Springer Nature: Springer Nature, Hwa Yol Jung’s “Reading Maurice Natanson Reading Alfred Schutz,” in Schutzian Social Science, ed. Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999), pp. 87–113, Copyright © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 1999, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2944-4_5; Chapter 12, “Responsibility as First Ethics: John Macmurray and Emmanuel Levinas,” in John Macmurray: Critical Perspectives, ed. David Fergusson and Nigel Dower (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), pp. 173–88; Chapter 13, reprinted by permission from Springer Nature: Springer Nature, Hwa Yol Jung’s “Taking Responsibility Seriously,” in Phenomenology of the Political, ed. Kevin Thompson and Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), pp. 147–65, Copyright © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2000; Chapter 14, Hwa Yol Jung, “Václav Havel’s New Statecraft of Responsible Politics,” in Phenomenology 2010, Vol. 5: Selected Essays from North America, Part 2: Phenomenology beyond Philosophy, ed. Lester Embree, Michael Barber, and Thomas J. Nenon (Bucharest: Zeta Books, 2010), pp. 177–95.

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Introduction

This book explores and attempts to advance the concept of world philosophy (Weltphilosophie) after the pioneering model of the visionary and incomparable thinker Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s world literature (Weltliteratur) in order for philosophy to take into account the accented reality of today’s world, which is multicultural and globalizing (see particularly Chapters 7, 8, and 10). The three phrases in the title of this book—phenomenology, transversality, and world philosophy—form a triptych in a circle, as it were. Globalization is a movement that defines the intellectual climate of our time. Since everything, including globalization, is an encompassing matter of communication, the late Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the expression a global village to characterize the shrinking world created by the electronic mass media, which has superseded the Gutenberg age of printing which, as one survey showed some years ago, is the most revolutionary invention in the making of the modern world. The phrase “a global village” has become so popular and commonplace that many of us forget its author’s name and how it came about. Without understanding its proper meaning, it may sound as though it contradicts the idea that today’s world has been moving toward a cosmopolis. McLuhan’s faithful followers have now “digitalized” the global village, in a phenomenon that might be called “McLuhan 2.0.” In terms of media and communication technology, McLuhan, whose masterpiece is The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962), also had an unerring sense of the flow and rhythm of Western history since the Homeric oral culture of ancient Greece. In this respect, he deserves to be ranked with such great philosophers of history as Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, and William McNeill in the twentieth century. McLuhan’s controversial motto—“the medium is the message”— 1

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Introduction

scales Western history in broad strokes—for some too broad—as much as it revolutionized communication theory. It is worth inserting here that for McLuhan electronic media have replaced the Gutenberg revolution of printing in the modern Western world, which highlights the sense of sight since the alphabetic invention in the eighth century B.C. In Western philosophy, too, Plato’s eidos (ideas) have culminated in Descartes’s cogito (ergo sum) in the epistemological pursuit of “clear and distinct ideas.” When we string together these three visual terms, Cartesian epistemology is nothing but an epistemology of vision. On the other hand, McLuhan favors the “pariah” sense of touch even in television viewing over vision. Furthermore, as the world has become for McLuhan “a global village” whose symbol is fashioned after the model of ancient Greek oral or pre-­ literate culture, so is Francesco Clemente’s painting The Four Corners (1985) drawn on the palm and five fingers, mainly the thumb, of the left hand that accentuates the sense of touch since two hands are the main organs of touch. For Clemente the world is divided into a sum of five continents and thusly world philosophy is intercontinental philosophy. Goethe’s world literature, too, is described in terms of the West (the self) and the East (the other); it is identified with the intercontinental literature of the two continents of the West (Europe) and the East (Asia). When I began to write essays in comparative philosophy in earnest, I borrowed the simple expression “Only connect!” from E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End and often used it as their epigraph in the same way Martin Buber has humbly said once, “I only erect bridges” rather than building a (philosophical) tower. I found to my delight the versatile writer Arthur Koestler who wrote that “connecting” is an act of creativity. Later, I discovered the more encompassing term transversality in reading the fellow phenomenologist Calvin O. Schrag. We happened to have the same mentor, John Wild— Schrag as a doctoral student in philosophy at Harvard and I as a postdoctoral student at Northwestern and Yale. At Northwestern in the fall of 1961, I was introduced by Wild in his graduate seminar to phenomenology or the second school of phenomenology, which hybridized Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology and Søren Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy in reading Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1927 and English trans. in 1962). My conceptualization of transversality integrates Merleau-­ Ponty’s critique of Hegel’s Eurocentrism by way of “lateral truths” and Schrag’s use of transversality as the mediating term in reconciling the extreme difference between modern philosophy on the one hand and postmodern philosophy on the other. Schrag is convinced that in the twenty-­first century the “transversal logos” has replaced the “universal logos” as the “lynchpin” of philosophizing. From the standpoint of phenomenology as a philosophical movement,

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Introduction 3

transversality may be viewed as the newest stage of philosophizing. Added to Merleau-­Ponty’s concept of “lateral universals” and Schrag’s “transversal logos” is—most importantly, I think—the Martiniquan francophone Edouard Glissant’s thesis on “creolization” or “hybridization” (métissage or English trans. “cross-­breeding”) culturally, ethnically or racially, and linguistically (interestingly, e.g., English spoken in Singapore is called “Senglish”). Transversality is symbolized in the Greek letter X (chi) by drawing two diagonal lines in any given rectangle in geometry. This is the reason why I prefer the British spelling of “conneXion” to the American spelling of “connection.” Glissant’s critique and refutation of Eurocentric universality is to be understood in terms of his concise passage: “La pensée de l’Un ne soit pas la pensée du Tout” (Thinking about One is not thinking about All). In reading comparative literature on world religions, I came across the most interesting intimation by Tomoko Masuzawa that philosophical universalism is printed with the “font” of Western religious monotheism that “bewitched” or spooked the language of religious pluralism. Be that as it may, Glissant’s idea of métissage is also to be understood in the context of the postcolonial experience of the Caribbean islands, that is, the idea of postcoloniality is neither exclusively Western nor exclusively non-­Western. Rather, transversality points to the confluence of different cultures, of different species, of different academic disciplines, and of different senses, i.e., intercultural, interspecieistic, interdisciplinary, and intersensorial matters under the conceptual rubric of, say, what Heidegger calls Differenz as Unterschied—a wordplay of the two synonyms in German which implies that meaningful relationality hinges on difference—it is never a flatland of the same or identity. In transversality, no one culture, no one species, no one academic discipline, no one sense hegemonizes or monopolizes the rest. In the final analysis, Glissant’s thinking guides us to understand the future “direxion” of the globalizing world of multiculturalism, that is, of creolization or hybridization which is the intertextual world of hyphens and hybrids. For Goethe, what the self is to the West the other is to the East. In the literary or, for that matter, academic circle, what is rarely known is the fact that he was highly critical of the Delphic oracle/Socratic dictum, “Know thyself,” which has been the most sanctified philosophical canon of Western philosophy from Socrates to St. Augustine, Descartes, Husserl and Foucault—to name a few notables. Goethe was audacious enough to play a daredevil in challenging Socrates for seeking “a false contemplation” because humans know themselves insofar as they know others or the world, and they come to know the world in themselves and themselves in it. When we add Goethe’s famous lines in Faust, that is, “In the beginning was the deed!” (Im Anfang war die Tat!), the “grayness” of theory (theoria) and the

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4

Introduction

“greenness” of life, he reminds us not of the reclusive and narcissistic life of solitary contemplation preached by the hedgehogs of Western philosophy (e.g., Descartes in particular) but the great Sinic sages of public and cosmopolitan ren (humanity both as a collectivity and as, more importantly, the quality of being human). To sum up: Goethe’s contention against the “monadic” vita contemplativa is judicious for the very simple reason that philosophy is done always in-­the-­world, never out of it. From the very start, doing philosophy is “intermonadic.” Furthermore, it is done for-­the-­world since the philosopher is “a civil servant of humanity.” He or she is not engaged in building conceptual castles where nobody or no general public can live—to use the language of Kierkegaard against Hegel. Last but not least, Goethe was, as far as I know, the first major European thinker, unlike the hedgehogs of Western thinking from Plato to Descartes and Kant, who recognized the importance of the sense of touch not as “untouchable” but as sufficiently fundamental to deconstruct the traditional hierarchy of the senses from highest sense of sight to the lowest sense of touch, that is, to reconstruct the synaesthesis of the senses. In the tradition of existential phenomenology, Heidegger’s ontological definition of Dasein as Being-­in-­the-­world (in-­der-­Welt-­sein)—the hyphenated expression—fits well for Goethe’s correlative definition of the self and the world. However, Karl Jaspers as “citizen of the world”—to borrow the expression of Hannah Arendt—must be singled out in discussing him in relation to Goethe who has been presented as a “proto-­phenomenologist” despite the fact that he never used the term phenomenology in his writings as far as we know and Fritz Heinemann wrote of “Goethe’s phenomenological method.” On the occasion of receiving the Goethe Prize in 1947, Jaspers whose slogan was “communicating in philosophy” delivered his address on the subject of “Unsere Zukunft und Goethe” which was rendered in English translation as “Goethe and Our Future.” In his four-­volume Die grossen Philosophen on “world philosophy,” in addition, Jaspers includes four Eastern thinkers—Buddha and Nagarjuna from India and Confucius and Laozi from China. Jaspers was “worlding” philosophy—to use a kind of Heideggerian expression. Furthermore, ardent Goethe followers such as Edward W. Said, the author of the powerful, unrivalled, and influential work, Orientalism (1978), the East unfortunately stops at the borders of the Middle East and failed to reach the Far East in spite of what Chinese scholars such as Zhang Longxi in the footsteps of Goethe, China is the “ultimate [Eastern] Other” of the West. My speculation is what the British literary scholar, I. A. Richards, who wrote a good book on Mencius, once remarked: learning to master Chinese is the most taxing and difficult feat to achieve “in the evolution of the cosmos”—to use his own expression.

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Introduction 5

Chapter 1 and its Addendum should be read as a tribute to and an expression of my indebtedness to Schrag’s conceptualization of transversality which permeates this entire book. Chapter 2 had been written for a Festschrift in honor of his scholarly achievements. In a recent email, he commented that transversal geophilosophy is “my most original contribution to current philosophy.” For me, geophilosophy is the ultimate philosophy (ultima philosophia) of our time and our future, especially for our young posterities now living and yet to be born. My concern for transversality began when I wrote my first essay on geophilosophy East and West to celebrate the “First Earth Day” in 1970, where I was very critical of the domination of technology or technological rationality and parts of Western anti-­geophilosophical thought that was found in Christianity, Francis Bacon, and Descartes. My critique of anti-­geophilosophical thought in Western modernity was, has been, and still is founded in Sinic thinking, especially in Chan/Zen Buddhism in reading such thinkers as Daisets Teitaro Suzuki, who was then identified with Japanese Zen. Chapter 3 is concerned with the mission of public philosophy as practical philosophy. Public philosophy, unlike academic philosophy, writes about res publica, matters of and for the general public in order to save the earth from despoliation and destruction, partial or total. Therefore, the task of public philosophy is far more important than academic discussions, debates, and conferences in order to save the earth. Chapter 4 is, I think, invaluable in the way we pursue academic subjects, both regarding what and how they must be studied. It is from the perspective of transversality that is interdisciplinary in nature in order for us to meet the needs and demands of today’s world which is globalizing and multicultural. Interdisciplinarity refutes the hegemony of one discipline such as Wilson’s model of consilience based on biogenetics. Wilson’s theory of consilience has abandoned the importance of humanities and cultural sciences altogether. It ignores Giambattista Vico’s healthy dictum: verum ipsum factum—i.e., truth is what we make (unmake and remake) (e.g., it is said that woman is not born but made). What Vico wrote in On the Study Methods of Our Time in 1709 is a healthy and instructive reminder for us today of the dominance of the natural sciences: [T]he greatest drawback of our education methods is that we pay an excessive amount of attention to the natural sciences and not enough for ethics. Our chief fault is that we disregard that part of ethics which treats of human character, of its dispositions, its passions, and of the manner of adjusting these factors to public life and eloquence. We neglect that discipline which deals with the differential features of the virtues and vices, with good and bad behavior-­patterns, with the typical characteristics of the various ages of man, of the two sexes, of social and economic class, race and nation, and with the

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Introduction

6

art of seemly conduct in life, the most difficult of all arts. As a consequence of this neglect, a noble and important branch of studies, i.e., the science of politics, lies almost abandoned and untended.

In Part II, Chapters 5 and 6 propose what I call two elemental preconditions for world or intercontinental philosophy. In so doing, I contend in Chapter 5 that transversality and harmony go together well, since the aim of harmony as a concept of music is to organize the “differentiated many” sounds in orchestra or voices in chorus. When we mix two or more colors, we get another color, whereas when we harmonize different sounds or voices, we get harmony, each without losing its distinction. In Chapter 6, the body has often been left out or taken for granted in discussing sociality or the so-­called philosophy of the (rational) mind. However, it was Nietzsche who radicalized Western modernity in claiming that the soul, mind, or brain is only a component of the body. There can never be a disembodied mind but only embodied mind or Reason. Indeed, the body is the necessary medium of our insertion-­ in-­the-­world, that is, our “being-­in-­the-­world.” In Part III, much of the importance of Chapters 7, 8, and 10 have already been discussed in the very beginning of this introduction. Here I should add to it to emphasize the unique and important contribution of the neo-­Confucian philosopher Wang Yangming to the cause of constructing world philosophy and moral philosophy in particular, that is, his thesis on the “unity of knowledge and action”: “knowledge is the beginning of action and action is the consummation of knowledge.” Performance as the epicenter of this circularity of knowledge and action is called sincerity (cheng), which is etymosinologically spelled “word-­achieved” or “word-­performed.” The British analytical philosopher John Austin, too, classified the type of statement, which is neither descriptive nor prescriptive, as “performing utterances.” However, Wang’s performance as sincerity is not analytical but quintessentially ethical or moral. In Sinism, sincerity is the performative magic of the social. Chapter 9 is a tribute I paid to Fred Dallmayr for a Festschrift on the occasion of celebrating his scholarly achievements. There is no other scholar who has contributed more than he to the cause of promoting comparative or transversal political theory. Part IV discusses the concept of responsibility as first ethics based on heterotopia, the place where ethics is constructed on the basis of the primacy of the other, not of the self. Let me preface this Part by saying that as a graduate student I became disenchanted with political behavioralism, whose approach to the study of politics took the stance of value-­neutrality and took the political realism of Machiavelli to its heart. Naturally, I became attracted to the classical political philosophy of Leo Strauss since the time of Plato and Aristotle. As a post-­doctoral student, I read the literature

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Introduction 7

of existential philosophy and was disenchanted with Strauss’s “essentialism,” the position that truth is eternal. Thus I was drawn to the tenets of existential phenomenology known as the second school of phenomenology initiated by Heidegger in Sein und Zein (1927). Now I have been trodding the path of Levinas, who defines ethics not as a branch of philosophy but as the first philosophy as my conception of responsibility as “the first ethics,” which is based on heterotopia, the place where ethics is constructed on the basis of the primacy of the other, not of the self. Chapter 11 focuses on the lack of ethics or moral philosophy in the development of phenomenology as a philosophical movement that is exemplified in the phenomenological writings of Alfred Schutz and his student Maurice Natanson, who was responsible for introducing me to the social phenomenology of Schutz. Chapter 12 is devoted to Levinas and the forgotten Scottish philosopher John Macmurray who delivered his prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of Glasgow in 1953 and 1954 under the title of “The Form of the Personal.” I was invited to participate in a conference on “John Macmurray: Critical Perspectives” in St. Andrews, Scotland, whose proceedings were published in 2002. In my essay, I contrast Levinas with Macmurray, their convergences and differences. Their main convergence lies in a revival of the Hebraic or Judaic tradition and mode of thinking. Their difference is based on Levinas’s critique of Heidegger’s “ontology” in consonant with phenomenology as a philosophical movement whereas Macmurray focuses on a critique of the “I think” (thinking subject) against the “I do” (acting agent). Levinas’s critique of Heidegger is against “ontology,” whereas Macmurray’s critique is against the modern tradition of “epistemology” since Descartes. Whatever their main difference may be, they agree on the issue of ethics based on the primacy of the other or “altarity,” which puts the other on the altar or a higher place than the self (e.g., altruism for its namesake, care, and love). Chapter 13 is a systematic construction of the ethics of responsibility based on the primacy of the other against the prevailing tradition of “rights talk” in the Anglo-­American world since the time of John Locke. Chapter 14 examines the extraordinary new statesmanship of Havel, who read Levinas’s work in his prison years, which resulted in his anti-­Machiavellian statecraft based on the idea of politics as “morality in practice.”

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Part I

ORIGINS OF TRANSVERSALITY

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Chapter One

The Dao of Transversality as a Global Approach to Truth A Metacommentary on Calvin O. Schrag

1. Eurocentrism, narcissistic or hegemonic, persists despite the proverbial dictum that the world has become a “global village.” Philosophy, which is supposedly the rational guardian of everyday life and the intellectual bastion of human civilization, has sadly and hopelessly fallen behind this quotidian wisdom and remained by and large in the insulated cave world of outdated ethnocentrism. The institution of Western thought called Eurocentrism is that habitus of mind which privileges the West or Europe as cultural and moral mecca of the world.1 Eurocentrism is European ethnophilosophy proclaimed to be universal or global. It may be likened to the Korean proverbial frog who lived in the bottom of a deep well, looked up at the sky one day, and proclaimed his new discovery: “That’s the universe!” Most recently I came across a rather incredulous pronouncement that “the history of philosophy is ultimately an argument between Jews and Greeks” (italics added).2 Postmodernity celebrates the end of modernity whose irreducibly singular goal is to christen and canonize Europe as axis mundi, as the world’s capital of culture, politics, and, above all, economics. The deconstruction of Eurocentrism is an important modulation of the postmodern condition the insight of which has often been overlooked.3 The basic mood of postmodernity is pointing to the recognition of the Other, of alterity, in the multiversity of cultural practices and intellectual discourses. It is committed to discovering “ways of making connection in the face of difference”—to borrow the elegant expression of Carol Gilligan in describing the “different voice” of women4—by seriously challenging the Eurocentric claims of truth which are meant both to “enlighten” all humanity and to “emancipate” it from, as Kant 11

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Chapter One

put it, its “self-incurred tutelage.” It is well known that Kant himself, the paragon of the Enlightenment, tailgated David Hume’s racial prejudices: He not only ridiculed the “grotesqueries” of Asians but also denigrated Africans as inferior and uncultured. The “enlightened” champion of human dignity, obligatory moral integrity, and universal knowledge masquerades his Eurocentrism and racism.5 In sum, Kant’s allegedly universal views of humanity were all markedly “colored.” Speaking of (Western) “metaphysics” as the “white mythology”6 that reflects Western culture, Jacques Derrida observes that “the white man takes his own mythology, Indo-European mythology, his own logos, that is, the mythos of his idiom, for the universal form of that he must still wish to call Reason.”7 Postmodernity thrives on multiversity. Its world is, according to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “rhizomatic” or “rhizomorphic,” whose principle of assemblage feasts on such notions as connectedness, multiplicity, deterritorialization, the between-ness of the middle, and heterogeneity. The rhizome has the characteristic of horizontal or lateral, subterranean, and pererrated growth with no beginning or ending. It is “interbeing” that cherishes “a transversal movement.”8 But for difference, there would be no multiplicity. Without difference, there would be no need for interbeing. What modernity is to postmodernity, identity is to difference.9 The notion of difference is what makes all the difference between modernity and postmodernity. Europe’s inability in modernity to accept the otherness of an Other, that is, its inability to tolerate the Other’s difference, had led to and resulted in the conquest, colonization, conversion, or assimilation of non-Western others. One writer calls it “the achievement of a modern mentality.” To sum up in the succinct expression of Norman O. Brown: “The solution to the problem of identity: Get lost.”10 Modernity is addicted to identity. It is indifferent to difference, to alterity, which is the requisite condition for any plurality, any multiplicity, to exist. In essence, it short-circuits difference into identity and thus plurality into singularity or uniformity. Modernity protects and expands a political economy of identity, when difference is reduced merely to a variation of identity. Postmodernity’s aversion to identity and its allegiance to difference is seen in a motley mushrooming of neologisms: Among the most prominent are Heidegger’s Differenz as Unterschied? Derrida’s différance, Jean-François Lyotard’s differend, Emmanuel Levinas’s heteronomy, Michel de Certeau’s heterology, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s heteroglossia. Let us compare the “modernist” Hegel and the “postmodernist” Heidegger on the question of the difference between identity and difference. In his eagerness to prove the teleology of history, of world history or the end of historical progress, Hegel falls short of making the dialect open-ended or “unfinalizable” (Bakhtin’s phrase). After the final synthesis, which is identified with the coming of the State (which, according

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The Dao of Transversality as a Global Approach to Truth 13

to Marx who contradicted Hegel, will wither away by the lethal weight of the dialectical necessity to the “powerless,” noncoercive state of anarchy or perfect freedom), his dialectic comes abruptly to a dead end: It reaches the “end of history.” For Hegel, synthesis is the outcome of the mediation between identity (affirmation) and difference (negation) by securing the identity of identity and difference. Thus, the ultimate synthesis consummates the absolute (en)closure of identity to the exclusion of all difference. In the end, the State as the final synthesis of his dialectic totalizes the End of History.11 Thus Gianni Vattimo pithily concludes that “it is precisely in the Hegelian dialectic that the history of the notion of identity in the metaphysical tradition is in fact accomplished.”12 Contrariwise, Heidegger’s Differenz as Unterschied offers a postmodern alternative to the cultural politics of Eurocentric identity. For Unterschied has the double meaning of difference and the between (Unter/ schied): It works like a revolving door capable of flinging reversibly in both directions that connect and preserve difference and the relational at once, that is, difference as dif/ference (Differenz as Unter/schied). Difference as dif/ ference is capable of having a transitive relation that conserves the principle of complementarity. The relational—or interbeing—which may be interhuman or interspeciesistic—is marked by the (inter)play of difference and as such promotes a pluralistic world, i.e., the world of diversity and multiversity. 2. The present paper is inspired by, and a metacommentary on, the latest work of Calvin O. Schrag entitled The Resources of Rationality: A Response to the Postmodern Challenge [RR], which is engaged in and committed to a constructive dialogue with such philosophical luminaries as Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Richard Rorty, and Bakhtin in drawing his own philosophical cartography of communicative praxis. Complemented by his essays in Philosophical Papers [PP] (1994),13 Schrag’s The Resources of Rationality continues and expands his original project of writing a career or curriculum vitae, as it were, of the decentered subject in the context of communicative praxis in his earlier work Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity [CP] (1986),14 whose endeavor, I should stress, has a morphological affinity with the Russian literary theorist Bakhtin’s dialogism.15 My discussion in what follows, however, is confined to the thematic relevance of Schrag’s “seminal” and “interesting” notion—both in their etymological senses—of transversality or transversal rationality to the comparative philosophy of culture in general and ethnography in particular as a postmodern

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Chapter One

challenge which will help us to lead to the globalization of truth, i.e., transversal truth. For Schrag, transversality results from “a refiguration of universality” (RR, 170),16 which amounts to the idea that “‘universal’ is transmuted into ‘the transversal’” (RR, 170). He invokes—timely so—Merleau-Ponty, whose refiguration of the concepts of universality both classical and modern, according to Schrag, still awaits the full recognition it deserves (RR, 170).17 By drawing upon the resources of Jean-Paul Sartre, Lyotard, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Schrag calls for the transmutation of universality into transversality, for the deconstruction of universality by transversality. His transversality transcends Eurocentrism in modern philosophy, particularly in the logocentric tradition of Enlightenment thinking from Kant to Hegel, Marx, and Habermas. Most importantly, transversality is a key concept in Schrag’s philosophy of communicative praxis when he sums up: “The universal logos of logocentrism is dead. The transversal logos of communicative rationality is alive and well” (RR, 164). It facilitates “a communication across differences” that recognizes “the integrity of particularity and the play of diversity” (RR, 154). The “new metaphor” of transversality as an interpretive approach embraces the conception of truth as the way of communicability. It is in this context that Schrag cites Félix Guattari approvingly: “Transversality is a dimension that tries to overcome both the impasse of pure verticality and that of mere horizontality: it tends to be achieved when there is maximum communication among different levels and, above all, in different meanings”18 (see RR, 152–53 and PP, 306n. 15). As a “refiguration” of rationality, transversality is for Schrag a passageway between modernity and postmodernity, that is to say, between the modernist overdetermination and the postmodernist underdetermination of reason and its claims (PP, 9). His transversal shifter is meant to scale the continental divide between modernity and postmodernity. It intends to dissolve, as it were, their difference. By way of transversality, he means to subvert and overcome the dichotomy between modernism and postmodernism by splitting diagonally19 the difference between the Scylla of the pure verticality of “transcendentalism” and the Charybdis of the pure horizontality of “historicism.” In other words, transversality means to “circumvent both the synchronic verticality of totalitarian hegemony and the diachronic horizontality of anarchic multiplicity” (RR, 163). In the very words of Schrag himself: Thus truth as communicability . . . is at once a disclosure of similarity and difference, unity and multiplicity, the commensurable and the incommensurable. Historicism forgets similarity, unity, and commensurability; transcendentalism forgets difference, multiplicity, and incommensurability. And each forgets the other because both decontextualize the intentionality of communicative praxis (PP, 274).20

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The Dao of Transversality as a Global Approach to Truth 15

All in all, Schrag’s conceptualization of truth as the way of communicability maximizes the advantages and minimizes the disadvantages of both modernist “transcendentalism” and postmodernist “historicism,” and promotes at the same time their dialogical enrichment or cross-fertilization. Schrag’s transversality is closely connected with Merleau-Ponty’s thought in dealing with the problematique of cross-cultural as well as cross-disciplinary issues, although Merleau-Ponty falls short of replacing the universal with the transversal—the term that he employs in his unfinished work The Visible and the Invisible.21 For Schrag as for Merleau-Ponty, transversality is the crossfertilization of different cultures. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is used in genealogy, geometry, optics, and conchology with an overwhelming accent on the meaning of “across,” “col/lateral,” and “intersecting.” In conchology, it refers to all shells that are “of greater breadth than length”; in geometry, it is “a line intersecting two or more lines, or a system of lines.” Transversality is the crossroads of truth across the boundaries of different cultures: It is the way of thinking about truth cross-culturally. Within the phenomenological movement, Merleau-Ponty’s thought stands out as a radical departure from Edmund Husserl who privileged Western philosophy based on Greek theoria—the idea of which is absent in Oriental thought. When Husserl spoke of India and China as “anthropological specimens,” he had in mind the lack in Oriental thought of speculative universality with apodictic insight and method. Although Merleau-Ponty acknowledges the deep rootedness of Western civilization in ancient Greek thought, he faults the ancient Greeks with having no “idea of the world in movement.”22 His sensitivity to the potential contribution of non-Western thought to global philosophy is clearly evidenced in two sources which pertain to interdisciplinary transversality: (1) his editing in 1956 of the impressive tome Les Philosophes célèbres, with his own short introductions, which includes a section on “The Orient and Philosophy” consisting of two contributions—one on Indian philosophy by Jean Fillizat and the other on Chinese philosophy by Max Kalternmark,23 and (2) his interest in ethnography or the ethos of other (non-Western) societies and cultures in the ethnographical writings particularly of Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Merleau-Ponty contends that the arrogant path of Hegel that excludes Oriental thought from absolute and universal knowledge and draws “a geographical frontier between philosophy and non-philosophy,” also excludes a good part of the Western past. Philosophy as a perpetual beginning is destined to examine its own idea of truth again and again because truth is “a treasure scattered about in human life prior to all philosophy and not divided among doctrines.” Thus, the life-world and its different versions both Occidental and Oriental are the sources and resources from which truth emerges. If so,

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Chapter One

Western philosophy is destined to reexamine not only its own idea of truth but also related matters and institutions such as science, economy, politics, and technology. Merleau-Ponty writes with telling poignancy and profundity: From this angle, civilizations lacking our philosophical or economic equipment take on an instructive value. It is not a matter of going in search of truth or salvation in what falls short of science or philosophical awareness, or of dragging chunks of mythology as such into our philosophy, but acquiring—in the presence of these variants of humanity that we are so far from—a sense of the theoretical and practical problems our institutions are faced with, and of rediscovering the existential field that they were born in and that their long success had led us to forget. The Orient’s “childishness” has something to teach us, if it were nothing more than the narrowness of our adult ideas. The relationship between Orient and Occident, like that between child and adult, is not that of ignorance to knowledge or non-philosophy to philosophy; it is much more subtle, making room on the part of the Orient for all anticipations and “prematurations.” Simply rallying and subordinating “non-philosophy” to true philosophy will not create the unity of the human spirit. It already exists in each culture’s lateral relationships to the others, in the echoes one awakes in the other.24

In his lateral pursuit for truth, transversal truth, Merleau-Ponty means to take nothing for granted or prejudged. It is just here that he makes a decisive break with the “conceit” of Hegel’s Eurocentrism or vertical universalism. As childhood and adulthood are one inseparable ontological order of the human, so Oriental and Occidental cultures and societies are one integral part of the life-and-death cycle of humanity everywhere thereby pointing the way to philosophical truth. The idea of ontogenesis and phylogenesis must in brief be correlated from one society to another in discovering the ontological continuity of all humanity. We expect to learn as much from “primitive” societies as from “civilized” ones regarding the condition of common humanity unless we believe in cultural evolutionism which is “the old accomplice” of European ethnocentrism.25 Merleau-Ponty thus contends that “there is not a philosophy which contains all philosophies; philosophy as a whole is at certain moments in each philosophy. To take up the celebrated phrase again, philosophy’s center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.”26 In the end, for Merleau-Ponty the Oriental past must also have an honored place in the famed hall of philosophies to celebrate its hitherto “secret, muted contribution to philosophy.” He writes decisively: “Indian and Chinese philosophies have tried not so much to dominate existence as to be the echo or the sounding board of our relationship to being. Western philosophy can learn from them to rediscover the relationship to being and initial option which gave it birth, and to estimate the possibilities we have shut ourselves off from in becoming ‘Westerners’ and perhaps reopen them.”27 Here the “lateral

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The Dao of Transversality as a Global Approach to Truth 17

universal” or transversality opens or reopens philosophical diplomacy which would negotiate com/promises—in its etymologicl sense of compromissum— of truth between Orient and Occident. In his tribute to French ethnography, the ethnography particularly of Mauss and Lévi-Strauss, Merleau-Ponty addressed the “lateral universal” that is ethnographically acquired and relevant. In contrast to the “overarching universal” of objective science, the “lateral universal” is acquired “through ethnological experience and its incessant testing of the self through the other person and the other person through the self.” In ethnography, the “lateral universal” is the way of “learning to see what is ours as alien and what was alien as our own,” which has “a diacritical value.” It is diacritical only because the Other is not merely an extension of the self. In diacritique, the difference between the self and the Other, between the West and the East, is as real as the difference between “night” (yin) and “day” (yang).28 Diacritically speaking, the act of transforming and being transformed are the twin faces of the same process: They are in transitive reciprocity. In his Inaugural Lecture in 1960 at the Collège de France, LéviStrauss in turn echoed the voice of Merleau-Ponty in paying moving homage to the “savage mind” of “primitives,” whose “pupil” and “witness” he was, to the end of preserving the lateral continuity of all humanity, not the vertical hierarchy of the “civilized” on top and the “primitive” at bottom.29 Merleau-Ponty was, indeed, a visionary who pointed the way to postmodern ethnography represented today in the writings of Clifford Geertz, James Clifford, Stephen A. Tyler, Vincent Crapanzano, Johannes Fabian, Renato Rosaldo, and George E. Marcus, who treat ethnography as cultural diacritique and in so doing are most sensitive to cultural differences by enfranchising or empowering the “different voices” of other societies and cultures.30 Ethnography, particularly a postmodern variety, is concerned with the ethics of writing about the Other’s difference by acknowledging the integrity of what Geertz calls first-hand “local knowledge,” that is, by honoring the hermeneutical autonomy of the Other. In Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity, Schrag touches on ethnology of the science of ethos which is close to John Stuart Mill’s discourse on “ethology” defined as the scientific study of individual moral character in Book VI of A System of Logic (1843)31 entitled “On the Logic of Moral Sciences,” whose German translation happened to be Geisteswissenschaften. Schrag defines ethnology as “the study of the formation of human character as it develops out of the folkways and mores of a given society which tend toward institutionalization” (CP, 199). The keyword in his discourse on ethnology is ethos, which is viewed as, following Heidegger, “abode” or “dwelling place” (CP, 200) of the moral character of the human. Schrag’s philosophy of communicative praxis is an attempt to “disassemble” “knowledge and value as properties of mind and character,

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Chapter One

attached to a lonely, monadic self, cut off from the world” (CP, 201). When it is conjoined with rhetoric, ethos becomes “a question about the fitting response of the decentered subject in its encounter with the discourse and social practices of the other against the backdrop of the delivered tradition. The ethical requirement within the space of ethos is that of the fitting response” (CP, 202). The “fitting response” refers to one’s responsiveness to and responsibility for others. However, Schrag’s ethos as the “fitting response” falls short of reaching the Copernican revolution of radical heterocentricity, which was initiated by Ludwig Feuerbach and propounded today particularly in Emmanuel Levinas’s heteronomy and Mikhail Bakhtin’s heteroglossia which are, I think, the quintessence of ethical hermeneutics. As heterocentricity is the groundless ground of the ethical, alterity may be spelled altarity32 for the very reason that altar is derived from the Latin altare which means “a high place.” Thus, the idea of “altarity” elevates the world of the Other, of alterity, and transforms it into an “elevated text.” In the elevated ethics of altarity, responsibility, not freedom, is primary because responsibility is to heterocentricity what egocentrism is to freedom. The former is other-directed, while the latter is self-centered. Let me go a step further: But for the “fitting response,” the dialogism of transversality would degenerate into the monologism of universalism. In the early traveloques of Europeans, it was not altogether uncommon for them to portray non-Europeans in the deformed or disfigured shapes of Sciopod, Cyclops, Blemmyae, and Doghead.33 The “primitives” or “savages” were “naked” (unclothed) in culture as in body.34 The Christocentric approach to truth, the “canonization” of truth as universal, proselytized and practiced by Christian missionaries or the “merchants” of Christocentric truth in China as well as in other areas was notorious for violating the proprietary rule of the “fitting response” or transversality by lending a dead ear to the voice of the indigenous Other. For them, Confucianism or Buddhism may be “saved” from incorrigible “errors” in morals as in knowledge. The lack of missionaries’ “fitting response” resulted in what Stephen Greenblatt calls “Christian imperialism”35 the primary purpose of which was “conquest” and “conversion.” Calling God “the Master of Heaven” and considering them as “different only in name” (i.e., naïve nominalism), for instance, are indicative of the complete failure of Christian missionaries to listen to the voice of the “inscrutable” Other as alterity. Thus by pontificating Christocentric truth, they violated the most basic existential condition of life to understand others.36 The Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), who worked in China from 1582 until his death there in 1610, scorned as a bad idea the Chinese conception of the universe as one single substance and insisted on the Christian truth of separating an immortal soul from a mortal body and of the exclusive privi-

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The Dao of Transversality as a Global Approach to Truth 19



lege of humans to possess the soul.37 Jacques Gernet describes the absence of missionaries’ “fitting response” to the Chinese when he writes: “If the doctrine of the Master of Heaven [i.e., God] was regarded by many Chinese as a threat to the most venerable traditions of China, to society, morality and the state, this cannot simply have been a xenophobic reaction as has so often been suggested. Instead of rejecting from the start the arguments of the Chinese, it might have been worth taking the trouble to learn from them.”38 There are, however, a handful of Western thinkers whose orientation was not Eurocentric (e.g., Giambattista Vico39 and Johann Gottfried Herder). The French naturalist Joseph-Marie de Gérando (Degérando) wrote a short essay Considérations sur les diverses méthodes à suivre dans l’observations des peuples sauvages (1800)40 whose advanced and sophisticated ethnomethodology was seemingly heeded by twentieth-century French ethnographers and anthropologists. Since there was no anthropology or ethnography before 1800, the advent of Degérando’s essay coincides with Michel Foucault’s view that before the end of the eighteenth century “man” did not exist, i.e., there was no anthropology or ethnography.41 Degérando’s anthropological “considerations” were meant to be “applied to any society differing in its moral and political forms from those of Europe.”42 One notable “consideration” of Degérando is of ethnomethodological nature. To quote it fully: That main object . . . that should today occupy the attention and zeal of a truly philosophical traveller would be the careful gathering of all means that might assist him to penetrate the thought of the peoples among whom he would be situated, and to account for the order of their actions and relationships. This is not only because such study is in itself the most important of all, it is also because it must stand as a necessary preliminary and introduction to all the others. It is a delusion to suppose that one can properly observe a people whom one cannot understand and with whom one cannot converse. The first means to the proper knowledge of the Savages, is to become after a fashion like one of them; and it is by learning their language that we shall become their fellow citizens.43

The “fitting response” as willingness to listen is the first act of recognizing the Other’s alterity by enfranchising and empowering its hermeneutical autonomy. By listening attentively to the original voice of an Other, in other words, it wishes to understand the world in the way the Other understands it for him/herself.44 The Western misempowerment of the Other’s language resulted in grave misreading of the Other’s gestures, signs, and words. When Spanish armored ships visited Chinese harbors for their first encounters, they fired cannons as a gesture of salutation but ended up with frightening the Chinese. Even the “eloquence” of gesture, which is alleged to be a universal way of communication in the absence of a common language spoken or written,

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Chapter One

can never be presumed to be transparent but always is opaque and porous. It, too, is a hermeneutical enactment which is subject to interpretation. The dancing of Columbus’s crew as a gesture of friendly invitation was read or misread by the native Indians as a sign or readiness for aggression or attack. There is a humorous account of the origin of the name Yucatan: The Spaniards asked the native Indians what their land was called, they answered nic athan, which meant “we don’t understand what you are saying,” but it was misconstrued as the very name of the native land, namely, Yucatan.45 3. Humanity has been wrestling with the labyrinthine question of Pan (One) and Proteus (Many) whose difference is manifested also in the recent quarrel between the immutable, fixed and bound monologism of modernity and the mutable, protean, and unbound dialogism of postmodernity.46 The language of universality is by and large an invention of Western modernity whose logocentrism engenders the undifferentiated homogenization of the entire globe under the totalizing one-dimensional ideology or “universal im/position” (Heidegger’s Ge/stell) of “modernization” (Westernization), which perpetuates the Kipling syndrome of the “white man’s burden” that misegenates East and West.47 The language of modernization in the name of universality is the ultimate edge of the sprawling limits of modernity. The modernist logic of universality oversimplifies a complex assemblage or alliance of different entities into the linguistic grid of identity. Couched in the speculative theory of (universal) human nature, it serves as decoy to conceal often the unwholesome sides of racism, sexism, and speciesism.48 It is the conceited and disguised logic of taking particularism as universal, of confusing unself-consciously particularism with universalism.49 The pure theory of human nature independent of culture is, indeed, a meaningless idea, a misnomer, a fiction, or even a chimera, as it were. There can be no pure nature independent of culture as long as so-called reality and language are intertwined. The nature of human nature can never be “natural,” it is always already a cultural construct and effect which has no “second nature.” As culture invariably fashions the high resolution of human nature, the nature of human nature is also value-laden or normative (e.g., the Western tradition of natural law theory), that is to say, it is culture-bound, culturespecific, culture-dependent, as well as culture-emergent.50 The alleged universality of human nature in the modern West has often and unfortunately been the ideological conceit of Western superiority in culture and morals to the non-Western world(s). It is worth repeating Schrag here: “The universal

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The Dao of Transversality as a Global Approach to Truth 21

logos of logocentrism is dead. The transversal logos of communicative rationality is alive and well.” To sum up: Transversality is indeed a deconstruction of universality whose totalizing tendency, parenthetically speaking, violates the fundamental rule of deconstruction: The former is an alternative to the latter. Transversality is meant to rescue philosophy and other disciplines from the monologic quicksand of universality. Clearly Schrag means to provoke transversality as a new interdisciplinary procedure of philosophical pedagogy including universality as an object of its critique. What must be emphasized here is the fact that he has also created an innovative intertextual object which belongs not only to no one discipline but also to no one culture.51 The interdisciplinary crossing of philosophy and ethnology (or cultural anthropology) is also cross-cultural. As an intertext of multiple crossings, transversality is the seminal concept which must be fully explored, carefully nurtured, and widely disseminated with the hope of becoming a “household” word in the circle of philosophy. It is, indeed, the “fitting response” to the postmodern challenge of proliferating multiplicity. In disseminating it as a new intertext, it is more than just a technique of transporting or shuttling ideas back and forth from one discipline or culture to another: It is a new beginning of hermeneutical ontology, of that enabling act of interpreting the order of things or—to use Schrag’s own familiar expression—the logos of communicative praxis.52 Transversality does not “sublimate” but “overcomes”53 universality. Thinking does not come to an end with the end of universality. Rather, the end of universality signifies another beginning, that is, the new beginning of transversality whose transfiguration is neither overarching totalization nor fragmenting disintegration. As such transversality may be likened to the famous wooden statue of Buddha at a Zen temple in Kyoto whose face marks the dawn of “enlightenment” (satori) or signals the beginning of a new regime of knowledge and morals. From the crack in the middle of the old face in the Buddha’s statue, there emerges an interstitial, luminal face that signifies a new transfiguration. Since the new face emerges from the middle, it also symbolizes the arrival of Maitreya (i.e., the “future Enlightened One”) or Maitreyan, Middle Way.54 Thus the “new face” of transversality as interface points to the emergence of the “middle” or “third” term which mediates and permits disciplinary and cultural border crossings.55 The transmutation of universality into transversality points to the Dao, the direction in movement, of globalizing truth in which non-Western thought, primitive or otherwise, can no longer remain ignored, marginalized, and colonized. In challenging Europe’s unproven claims for the privileged possession of universal truth, Merleau-Ponty introduced the suggestive idea of the “lateral universal” in heralding the recent development of French ethnography, the French

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cultural hermeneutics of the Other. He contended that “if Western thought is what it claims to be, it must prove it by understanding all ‘life-worlds.’”56 He further contended that there is no one universal philosophy which contains all philosophies. Rather—to repeat—philosophy’s center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere. In search of truth, global truth, philosophy will have to become eccentric or decentered and dehierarchized. There is indeed a common esprit de corps between Merleau-Ponty and Schrag, who says in a footnote that “one does not begin with the Being-question; one backs into it through an exploration of the forms of communicative praxis” (CP, 110 n. 21). Overturning universality into transversality, Schrag takes up seriously Merleau-Ponty’s cryptic challenge to replace such notions as concept, idea, mind, and representation with such notions as dimensions, articulation, level, hinges, pivots, and configuration.57 Schrag no longer speaks the language of universality; rather, it is transformed into that of transversality. While the long-cherished tradition of universality pivots around the logic of identity, transversality is accompanied by the logic of correlation or what Merleau-Ponty calls “diacritical conception.” It is a “rupture of novelty,” as it were, which serves as a corrective to universality. To use the heteroglossic language of the dialogist Mikhail Bakhtin, transversality makes a mockery of universalism as monoglossic: The former, in other words, “carnivalizes” the latter. We may even venture to say that while Merleau-Ponty is still handcuffed by the traditional language of universality, Schrag’s conception of transversality reforms and goes beyond it. What transversality is to universality, the eccentricity of difference is to the centricity of identity. Any ethnocentrism, whether it be Eurocentrism, Sinocentrism, Indocentrism, or Afrocentrism, has no place in transversality. In transversality, Being is porous and promiscuous and thus capable of being transformed into transcultural Interbeing. Insofar as Schrag’s communicative praxis replaces the monologic reason of the Enlightenment tradition, it advances a “fitting response,” which is a definitively novel project of what has yet to be said or done, to the postmodern challenge for the globalization of truth with a revision in splitting the difference between two extremes, between the anarchy of difference and the totalitarianism of identity. In the end, Schrag’s transversality refutes both “faceless universalism” on the one hand and “ethnocentric chauvinism” on the other—to use the well-chosen expression of the neo-pragmatist Cornel West.58 As both interruption and transformation, Schrag’s transversality is paradigmatic: It transgresses and subverts universality. Its potential contribution to the study method of comparative philosophy and comparative culture is truly metamorphic and cannot be overemphasized for the simple reason that it allows philosophizing across disciplinary and cultural boundaries. In the age of globalism, the “vertical thinking” of universality glued onto Eurocentrism runs into a roadblock. The

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logocentric normalization of universality has now become passé and transformed. As contrasted with the “vertical thinking” that digs the same hole deeper and deeper, the “lateral thinking” of transversality digs a new hole in another place so that it may overcome the aporetic of universality.59 There is, however, a note of caution: The cultural hermeneutics of the Other is always risky, the Other may get “lost in translation.”60 NOTES 1.  By positioning itself as the teleological temple of the world, Eurocentrism becomes a tribal idolatry. See the astute sociological observer of both modernity and postmodernity Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), p. 110. It would be remiss if I forget to mention the most celebrated work on a critique of Eurocentrism: Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). He defines Orientalism as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (ibid., p. 3). He has recently written a sequel to it: Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993). 2. Susan Handelman, “Jacques Derrida and the Heretic Hermeneutic,” in Displacement, ed. Mark Krupnick (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), p. 114. For a focus on Eurocentrism as the split between “Greek cognition” and “Hebraic spirituality,” see Vassilis Lambropoulos, The Rise of Eurocentrism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 3.  See a special double issue of Human Studies, 16 (April 1993) on “Postmodernity and the Question of the Other,” edited by the author. 4.  “Teaching Shakespeare’s Sister,” in Making Connections, ed. Carol Gilligan, Nona P. Lyons, and Trudy J. Hanmer (Troy: Emma Willard School, 1989), p. 10. 5.  See David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, eds. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1875), I: 252, and Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), pp. 110–11. Cf. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Editor’s Introduction: Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 10–11. It is noteworthy that Kant’s term grotesquery is connected to “deformity,” “anamorphosis,” and “caricature” whose linguistic morphology possesses the property of something to be laughed at. In Playing in the Dark (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), Toni Morrison quotes the sociologist Orlando Patterson approvingly: “We should not be surprised that the Enlightenment could accommodate slavery; we should be surprised if it had not” (p. 38). 6.  As logocentrism is also phallocentric, some feminist writers would call “the white mythology” “the white, male mythology.” See, for example, Adrienne Rich, who writes: “I had been taught that poetry should be ‘universal,’ which meant, of course, nonfemale.” “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), p. 44. Since reference is often

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made to “the feminine East” (yin) and “the masculine West” (yang), there is a strong parallelism between the feminist critique of the “one-sex” model and the critique of Eurocentrism as uni/versalism. See also Jane Flax, Disputed Subjects (New York: Routledge, 1993), Chap. 4, “Is Enlightenment Emancipatory?” pp. 79–91. 7.  Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” p. 213. See further Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). When he was asked in an interview if logocentrism is “a singularly European phenomenon,” Derrida answered: “Logocentrism, in its developed philosophical sense, is inextricably linked to the Greek and European tradition. As I have attempted to demonstrate elsewhere in some detail, logocentric philosophy is a specifically Western response to a much larger necessity which also occurs in the Far East and other cultures, that is, the phonocentric necessity: the privilege of the voice over writing. The priority of spoken language over written or silent language stems from the fact that when words are spoken the speaker and the listener are supposed to be simultaneously present to one another; they are supposed to be the same, pure unmediated presence. This ideal of perfect self-presence, of the immediate possession of meaning, is what is expressed by the phonocentric necessity. Writing, on the other hand, is considered subversive in so far as it creates a spatial and temporal distance between the author and audience; writing presupposes the absence of the author and so we can never be sure exactly what is meant by a written text; it can have many different meanings as opposed to a single unifying one. But this phonocentric necessity did not develop into a systematic logocentric metaphysics in any non-European culture. Logocentrism is a uniquely European phenomenon.” Richard Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 115–16. 8.  A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 25. Schrag’s own reference to Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation of the “rhizome” is found in The Resources of Rationality: A Response to the Postmodern Challenge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 32. 9. For questions and issues involving identity and modernity, see particularly Modernity and Identity, eds. Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) and Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). For a comparative perspective, see Culture and Modernity, ed. Eliot Deutsch (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991). 10. See Norman O. Brown, Closing Time (New York: Random House, 1973), p. 76, and see also Louis Villoro, “The Unacceptable Otherness” (trans. Katherine Hagedorn), Diogenes, No. 159 (1992): 68 (italics added). For a general discussion of the knowledge of distant places and peoples and the role of temporal/spatial (i.e., chronotopical) distance that plays in the formation of knowledge and power, see Mary W. Helms, Ulysses’ Sail (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). 11.  This tendency to overarching totalization in Hegel and Marx is the target of criticism by Theodor W. Adorno in Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973). In Marxism and Totality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), Martin Jay gives us an exhaustive account of the career of the

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concept totality and ends with “post-structuralism” in the broadest sense of the term as a challenge to totalism. 12.  The Adventure of Difference, trans. Cyrian Blamires (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 160. Cf. Mark C. Taylor, Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. xxiii: “In his search for a reconciling middle ground, Hegel, in keeping with the tendency of Western thought, privileges identity and unity. Hegelian philosophy can be understood as a systematic attempt to secure the identity of identity and nonidentity and the union of union and nonunion.” Cf. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained, trans. Don Barry et al. and ed. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 17–18. Moreover, Lyotard takes issue with Hegel by asserting that “Auschwitz” refutes Hegel’s speculative doctrine that what is real is rational and what is rational is real since “Auschwitz” is real but is not rational. “Auschwitz,” I might add, is a happening of the unthinkable. See ibid., p. 29 and The Differend, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 179. In A Pluralistic Universe (New York: Longmans, Green, 1909), William James discussed critically “Hegel and His Method” (pp. 85–129) in the early part of this century and pointed out that the “sublimity” of Hegel’s rationalism lies in the absolute Idea whose truth is conceived as monistic, indivisible, eternal, universal, and necessary. The rationalist universe of Hegel’s thought is dictated by the “must be” and not conditioned by the “may be.” 13. Calvin O. Schrag, Philosophical Papers (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). 14. Calvin O. Schrag, Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). 15. Schrag’s Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity has no single reference to Bakhtin. I intimated its affinity to Bakhtin’s dialogical thought in “Mikhail Bakhtin’s Body Politic: A Phenomenological Dialogics,” Man and World, 23 (1990): 85–99, at p. 88. In a letter to me from Schrag after he had read the original version of my paper, he mentioned that the editor of his work commented that it has a close affinity to Bakhtin’s thought. The Resources of Rationality specifically discusses Bakhtin’s unique idea of “chronotope”—the word signifying the inextricable nexus and continuum of time and space. Although Bakhtin’s philosophical affiliation is with the neo-Kantian school of Hermann Cohen at Marburg, he occasionally makes reference to Heidegger but never Merleau-Ponty in his later writings. It is noteworthy that Charles Taylor, too, acknowledges the importance of Bakhtin’s dialogism in “The Dialogical Self,” in The Interpretive Turn, ed. David R. Hiley, James F. Bohman, and Richard Shusterman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 304–14 and Multiculturalism and “the Politics of Recognition” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 16.  The sociologist Norbert Elias distinguishes the egocentric view of society from the social web of interdependent individuals which he calls “a figuration.” See What Is Sociology? trans. Stephen Mennell and Grace Morrissey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), pp. 14–15. 17.  In his attempt to place Merleau-Ponty in the context of postmodernity, G. B. Madison emphasizes Merleau-Ponty’s commitment to Eurocentric modernity. See The

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Hermeneutics of Postmodernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 73. For my own attempt to appropriate Merleau-Ponty in the deconstruction of the basic grammar of intercultural texts, see Rethinking Political Theory (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1993), Chap. 5, “The Spectre of Ethnocentrism and the Production of Intercultural Texts,” pp. 91–110, and “Phenomenology, the Question of Rationality, and the Basic Grammar of Intercultural Texts,” in Analecta Husserliana, Vol. 46, Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996), pp. 169–240. 18.  See Guattari, Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed (Harmondsworth, 1984), p. 18. 19.  David Farrell Krell sketches das Geviert as envisioned by Heidegger in which the crossing of Being is not a crossing out (Durchstreichung) but a crossing through (Durchkreuzen). In the fourfold proximity of sky, earth, gods, and mortals, Being is at the center of diagonal crossings. See “Analysis,” in Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. 4: Nihilism, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), p. 289. 20.  Here we cannot help but mention the convergence between Schrag’s transversality and Hannah Arendt’s definition of human plurality when the latter writes: “Human plurality, the basic condition of both action and speech, has the twofold character of equality and distinction. If men were not equal, they could neither understand each other and those who came before them nor plan for the future and foresee the needs of those who will come after them. If men were not distinct, each human being distinguished from any other who is, was, or will ever be, they would need neither speech nor action to make themselves understood.” The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 175–76. 21.  Ed. Claude Lefort and trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 270. 22.  Texts and Dialogues, ed. Hugh J. Silverman and James Barry Jr. (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1992), Chap. 12, “The Founders of Philosophy (1956),” p. 123. 23.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Les Philosophes (Paris: Mazenod, 1956). 24.  Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), Chap. 5, “Everywhere and Nowhere,” p. 129. This piece was originally published as an editor’s introduction to Les Philosophes célèbres. We should heed Sigmund Freud, who said that the child is the father to the man. Both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, there is a continuum between the child and the adult in each individual and the “primitive” and the “civilized” in each culture. Even the most grown adult and the most “civilized” society retain at least partly if not more childishness and primitivity, respectively. There can be no two separate ontological orders. They mutually implicate each other. The theme of philosophy and non-philosophy in Merleau-Ponty and in contemporary continental thought is discussed in Philosophy and Non-Philosophy Since Merleau-Ponty, Continental Philosophy I, ed. Hugh J. Silverman (New York: Routledge, 1988). 25.  See Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State, trans. Robert Hurley with Abe Stein (New York: Zone Books, 1989), p. 17. Jürgen Habermas continues to tread on the path of Hegel’s Eurocentrism as well as of the project of modernity as an unfinished task. In Studies of the Theory of Ideology (Berkeley: University of California

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Press, 1984), John B. Thompson notes that “in fact Habermas’s ‘reconstruction’ of the developmental logic of world-views looks very much like a mere project of Piaget’s ontogenetic stages on to the phylogenetic scale; many readers will no doubt balk at what appears to be a continuation of Hegelian ambitions with cognitivedevelopmental means. One is bound to wonder, moreover, just how Habermas’s theory of social evolution can be applied to the developmental course of societies outside of Europe, just how it can avoid the ethnocentrism and oversimplification which characterize so many evolutionary schemes” (p. 298). In his discussion of anti-Semitism as a persistent occurrence within Western civilization, Vincent P. Pecora advances a stinging critique of Habermas’s failure to respond to Ernst Nolte’s controversial claim that Nazism committed “Asiatic” deeds. Pecora writes: “It is not simply that, in reaffirming the primacy of the ‘political culture of the West’ and Germany’s moral salvation within it, Habermas inadvertently manages to re-demonize all that is non-Western. It is also that such rhetoric subtly serves precisely to absolve the West from its own obvious complicity, not only in Germany’s war crimes, but also in the long narrative of Western imperial power.” “Habermas, Enlightenment, and Antisemitism,” in Probing the Limits of Representation, ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 160. 26.  Signs, p. 128. 27.  Ibid., p. 139. Cf. Disputers of the Tao (La Salle: Open Court, 1989), p. 428, in which A. C. Graham writes: “The great interest in exploring alien conceptual schemes is in glimpsing how one’s own looks from outside, in perceiving for example that the Being of Western ontology is culture-bound, not a universally valid concept. . . . [T]he fear that Whorfianism plunges us into a chaos of linguistic relativism, may not be insuperable; I myself do not think it does, and in any case there are plenty of acute minds ready to welcome chaos.” 28.  In “The Myth of the Other: China in the Eyes of the West,” Critical Inquiry, 15 (1988): 108–31, Zhang Longxi concludes his most interesting discussion with a note on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Bildung as opposed to Hegel’s theoretical Bildung, which attempts to attain the universal and absolute knowledge of philosophy: “to know the Other is a process of Bildung, of learning and self-cultivation, which is neither projecting the Self onto the Other nor erasing the Self with what belongs to the Other. It is rather a moment when Self and other meet and join together, in which both are changed and enriched in what Gadamer calls ‘the fusion of horizons’. . . . That moment of fusion would eliminate the isolated horizon of either the Self and the Other, the East and the West, and bring their positive dynamic relationship into prominence. For in the fusion of horizons we are able to transcend the boundaries of language and culture so that there is no longer the isolation of East or West, no longer the exotic, mystifying, inexplicable Other, but something to be learned and assimilated until it becomes part of our knowledge and experience of the world” (ibid., p. 131). For Zhang’s argument for pluralistic (or transversal) literary hermeneutics, see The Tao and the Logos (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992). The demonstration of how different philosophical or cultural horizons between East and West may be fused is an interesting and important question, the discussion of which is beyond the scope of this paper.

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29.  Structural Anthropology, Vol. 2, trans. Monique Layton (New York: Basic Books, 1976), Chap. 1, “The Scope of Anthropology,” pp. 3–32. 30. The parameter of postmodern ethnography is found in Writing Culture, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 31.  (London: Longmans, Green, 1925). 32.  See Mark C. Taylor, Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). This is a “deconstructive” masterpiece on alterity in contemporary, postmodernist Continental thought. What Derrida’s neologism “différance” is to différence (only in writing), Taylor’s “altarity” is to alterity. The idea of altar as an “icon” for human spirituality and as representing the elevated world of the Other became clear to me when I was reading Robert Farris Thompson, Face of the Gods (New York: Museum for African Art, 1993). 33. See Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). 34.  For the rhetorical gyration of primitivity from control to desire, from fear to hope, see Marianna Torovnick, Gone Primitive (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 35.  Marvelous Possessions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 70. 36.  It is worth noting and emphasizing that the idea of existence (ex/istence) has been profoundly misunderstood among its antagonists as well as its protagonists: as its etymology shows, what is really central to it is not the centrality but the eccentricity (ex-centricity) of the self toward the world of other people (Mitwelt) and other things (Umwelt). The human as eccentric is a being who is exposed to and outreaches the outside world. Thus, the motto of existence must be: Do not go inside, go outside! Be an ethical agent first, not an epistemological subject. The authenticity of existence is guaranteed not by egocentricity but only by heterocentricity or a dialogue of eccentric agents. It is found not “in here” but “out there,” not in “(en)closure” but in “disclosure.” The Sinic expression of the “human” has two ideograms: “human” and “between” or “inter”: It means that the quintessence of being human or of existence is the interhuman, which is similar to Martin Buber’s das Zwischenmenschliche. Thus, existence is always and necessarily coexistence or “communal existence” (kyōdō sonzai). As a relational concept, existence is a gathering of humans who are “other” to one another. The “world” or the human life-world—seken in Japanese—is composed also of two ideograms: “living” and “betweenness.” As the study of ethos, ethnology cannot escape the questioning of ethics, which is always the study of the “betweenness” (aidagara) or relationships “between man and man” (ningen). See Watsuji Tetsurō, Rinrigaku, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1965). One key chapter of this work has been translated: “The Significance of Ethics as the Study of Man” (trans. David A. Dilworth). Monumenta Nipponica, 26 (1971): 395–413. 37.  See Jacques Gernet, China and the Christian Impact, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Gernet’s work is among rare works that examine the Chinese views of the West, particularly Christianity. Cf. Paul Demiéville, “The First Philosophic Contacts Between Europe and China” (trans. Martin Faigel), Diogenes, No. 58 (1967): 78–103. In Cultures in Conflict, trans. Ritchie Robertson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), which is the best summary account in

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a small volume of various encounters throughout the world between European and non-European cultures, Urs Bitterli encourages other cultures to write directly for themselves. He is right in intimating that the understanding of China, for example, is greatly hampered by Westerners’ linguistic inability to read the abundance of Chinese records and documents and to surmount the problem of translation. 38. Gernet, China and the Christian Impact, p. 247. 39.  Vico was a cultural pluralist and transversalist who believed against the current of the Enlightenment that diverse cultures cannot be conformed into the Procrutean bed of universalism. In the study of comparative culture, he prompted the ethnomethodological understanding of other cultures. See Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), “Giambattista Vico and Cultural History,” pp. 49–69, and Against the Current, ed. Henry Hardy (New York: Viking Press, 1980), “Vico’s Concept of Knowledge,” pp. 111–19 and “Vico and the Ideal of the Enlightenment,” pp. 120–29. In Anthropology Through the Looking-Glass (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), Michael Herzfeld develops an anthropological theory that attempts to avoid Eurocentrism on the basis of Vico’s trajectory of comparative culture. 40. Its English translation is The Observation of Savage Peoples, trans. F. C. T. Moore (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969). Degérando’s thought belongs to the same intellectual tradition of such cultural ethnomethodologists as Vico and Herder. 41.  The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 308. 42.  The Observation of Savage Peoples, p. 60. 43.  Ibid., p. 70. The passage is also cited by Bitterli in Cultures in Conflict, p. 171. Bitterli labels Degérando’s ethnomethodology as “a radical historicism based on empathy” (ibid., pp. 171–72). 44.  The battle of identity and difference is connected to that of naming and in turn to the issue of “looking” and “listening.” By recognizing “the limits of the European project of visualizing the Other” (i.e., of identity), Craig Owens urges that “It is time to stop looking, and listen to what [the other] may have to say” (i.e., to difference). See Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, ed. Scott Bryson et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), “Improper Names,” pp. 284–97, at pp. 295–96. 45. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possession, p. 104. 46. In The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation (New York: Basic Books, 1994), Robert Jay Lifton speaks of the principle of commonality in the midst of mutability and multiplicity rather than identity or sameness. Lifton insists, however, that the vitality of Proteus Unbound is not identified with the death of the self or the endless fragmentation without a centrifugal core. “The protean self,” he writes, “becomes a bridge between the modern and the postmodern, a source of continuity that takes in radical discontinuity” (p. 231). Interestingly, he began to formulate his idea of proteanism uniquely as a twentieth-century phenomenon in his earlier work Boundaries: Psychological Man in Revolution (New York: Random House, 1969), “Self,” pp. 37–63. He exemplifies Jean-Paul Sartre as a model of the protean style of life (pp. 46–49).

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47.  Following Gianni Vattimo’s translation of Heidegger’s term Gestell (Ge-Stell) into Italian as im-pozitione (im-position), David Kolb translates it as “universal imposition” by pointing out that “all beings without exception stand revealed under this call [of Gestell].” See The Critique of Pure Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 145. Cf. Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference, Chap. 7, “Dialectic and Difference,” pp. 158–86. 48. In “The Counter-Enlightenment,” in Against the Current, pp. 1–24, Isaiah Berlin sums up the complex issue of the dispute between the Enlightenment advocacy of universal human nature and the counter-Enlightenment cultural pluralism. In his famous legal briefing published as Should Trees Have Standing?: Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects (Los Altos: William Kaufmann, 1974), Christopher D. Stone argues against speciesism by linking it to both racism and sexism, which are frequently justified by way of “natural law.” 49.  Cf. Watsuji, “The Significance of Ethics as the Study of Man,” p. 412: “Such a thing as ‘human existence in general’ does not exist in reality. The concept of ‘universal man’ spoken of by European thinkers of the past is very plainly a product of Europeans. And this is fine as far as it goes. But the significance of world history lies in the fact that the Way of man is realized in various kinds of climatic and historical specific types. Just as the universal can be universal only in particulars, so too human existence can be universal human existence only through its particular forms of existence. ‘Inter-national’ between-ness in the true sense also becomes possible only when each historical nation strives for the formation of the totality in its own distinct particularities. To try to be ‘inter-national’ by transcending the fact of being ‘national’ is nothing but an abstract fantasy.” In the concluding paragraph of Fundamental Problems of Philosophy, trans. David A. Dilworth (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1970), Nishida Kitaro writes: “Cultures, of course, are plural. They cannot be reduced to unity, for when they lose their specificity they cease to be cultures. . . . A true world culture will be formed only by various cultures preserving their own respective viewpoints, but simultaneously developing themselves through the mediation of the world. In that respect, first deeply considering the individual ground of each culture, we must clarify on what basis and in what relation to other cultures each individual culture stands. . . . We can learn the path along which we should truly advance only as we both deeply fathom our own depths and attain to a profound understanding of other cultures” (p. 254). Here both Watsuji and Nishida are talking about coordinates of transversalty as a cross-cultural phenomenon. In so doing, they remind us of Johann Gottfried Herder’s argument for the importance of individual national culture as the basis of deploring the homogenizing tendencies of modern civilization. 50.  Here we need a cultural anthropology of the nature of human nature. For an interesting culturalist critique of the sociobiological determination of human nature, see Marshall Sahlins, The Use and Abuse of Biology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976). Confucius is more judicious than most philosophers when he observes that humans are nearly alike everywhere, but they are wide apart in their practices. Cf. Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Modern Library, 1957), p. 11, where John Dewey emphasizes that all human conduct is interaction or transaction between elements of human nature and the environment both natural and social.

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51.  Roland Barthes writes convincingly: “Interdisciplinary studies, of which we hear so much, do not merely confront already constituted disciplines (none of which, as a matter of fact, consents to leave off). In order to do interdisciplinary work, it is not enough to take a ‘subject’ (a theme) and to arrange two or three sciences around it. Interdisciplinary study consists in creating a new object, which belongs to no one. The Text is, I believe, one such object.” The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), p. 72. Whatever we can say about certain similarities between Schrag and Habermas in their formulation of communicative rationality, there is one fundamental difference: Schrag’s formulation is capable of opening and extending itself to the cultural horizons of the non-Western world by virtue of transversality, while Habermas’s cannot be and remains hopelessly Eurocentric. 52.  For a discussion of the intertext between hermeneutics and cultural anthropology, see Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), Chap. 9. “Hermeneutics and Anthropology,” pp. 145–63. He is not out of tune with the notion of transversality when he admits that as “there is no . . . single unifying language,” cultural hermeneutics “tries to appropriate the language of the other rather than translate it into its own tongue” (ibid., p. 149). The concept of intertextuality and its ontological implications are discussed in John Frow, “Intertextuality and Ontology,” in Intertextuality, ed. Michael Worton and Judith Still (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), pp. 45–55. 53. Martin Heidegger speaks of “overcoming metaphysics” whose “enframing” (Gestell) culminates in modern technology by means of which the human becomes the “master” of the entire earth. See The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), Chap. 4, “Overcoming Metaphysics,” pp. 84– 110. If, as David Kolb contends, the relation between the East (Japan) and the West in Heidegger’s thought is not reciprocal, the notion of transversality acquires far more importance than otherwise in creating transitive reciprocity between the East and the West. For Kolb’s discussion of the relations between the East (Japan) and the West in Heidegger’s thought, see The Critique of Pure Modernity, pp. 230–34. 54.  Barthes visited Japan in 1977, became fascinated with Japanese culture, and constructed a semiology of Japanese culture in L’Empire des signes (Genève: Skira, 1970), which includes a photograph of the Buddha statue (p. 73) while on the opposite page (p. 72) is his handwritten inscription: “Le Signe est une fracture qui ne s’ouvre jamais que sur le visage d’un autre signe.” While he was writing this work, Barthes was deeply self-conscious of the necessity and urgency of overcoming what he calls “Western narcissism.” 55. Here we have in mind Heidegger’s Mitte (Middle) or Unter/schied (dif/ference). “Heidegger’s Mitte,” Mark C. Taylor writes, “is not the Hegelian mean [Mitte] that mediates identity and diference by securing the identity of identity and difference. The delivery of difference is also the delivery from every form of all-inclusive identity that negates, reduces, absorbs, or swallows up otherness” (Altarity, p. 44). Because the struggle for transversality as a new paradigm or tao may be likened to the struggle for transvestism, we have a vested interest in Marjorie Garber’s extremely suggestive and highly sophisticated discussion of transvestism or cross-dressing in Vested Interests (New York: Routledge, 1993). She treats transvestism as “category

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crisis” whose extraordinary power is intended to disrupt, expose, and challenge the very notion of stable identity. Thus transversality, like transvestism, emerges from a crisis period in overturning the old epistemic or ontological regime of universalism. Both transversality and transvestism are “third” terms which have nothing to do with the numerology of ranking the political and economic status of the world into the “first,” “second,” and “third” world. In transgressing what is prohibited in modern universality, transversality is a kind of passport that permits border crossings. As the third term, it mediates, and overcomes the limits of, the “first” term of universalism and the “second” term of particularism (or ethnocentrism). Consider also the interesting phenomena of “transsexualism,” “transculturalism,” and “transdisciplinarism” in that the “sex” of writing is not determined by the writer’s biological sex; nor is the “race” of writing by the writer’s biological race; nor is the “discipline” of writing by the writer’s field of training or specialization. 56.  Signs, p. 138. 57.  The Visible and the Invisible, p. 224. 58.  See “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” in Out There, ed. Russell Ferguson et al. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 19–36. 59.  The double reading of “lateral thinking” as new and correlative is inspired by Edward de Bono in New Think (New York: Basic Books, 1968). 60.  The complex question of translation is gleaned through in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). It is rather bemusing to recall that when I as a youngster was reading world literature in Japanese translation, someone told me in good faith that Japanese translation is so good that it is better than the original!

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Chapter One Addendum

Review Essay of Calvin O. Schrag’s The Self after Postmodernity (1997)

In Schrag’s ambitious work under review, the question of the self as the subject in both thinking and doing resurfaces as its focus in and beyond the life and times of modernity and postmodernity. As such it invokes the revisioning of classical phenomenology and existential phenomenology. In his recent extended discussion of the self in Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (1997), Schrag urges that “[t]he current republic of philosophy is in need of a recovery of the phenomenological subject.” For this very reason, it is proper to place the spirit of his philosophizing squarely in the lasting and venerable legacy that Husserl initiated and left behind for the succeeding generations of phenomenology from which the spirit of phenomenology as a philosophical movement rather than as a doctrinaire school of thought was derived and perpetuated. It is the twofold idea of phenomenology as a philosophy of infinite tasks. In the first place, the philosopher is a perpetual beginner. The practitioners of phenomenology after Husserl, that is, from Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to Gadamer, Ricoeur, Levinas, Derrida, and now Schrag, have proven again and again that the end of phenomenology is the account and justification of its beginning, which also defines and warrants its philosophical rigor. Indeed, the phenomenologist becomes his/her own interlocutor. This is what Schrag himself meant by “radical reflection” some years ago and more recently by “hermeneutical self-implicature,” which is the conscious recognition of the self as both speaker and listener on the one hand and author/writer and reader on the other. It is that cherished and inherited fountainhead of philosophizing that calls for the philosopher’s own constant vigilance and demands his/her unending self-scrutiny. This, however, never means to be self-indulging. On the contrary, the “radicality” of phenomenological reflection is to be mindful of its own source and resource in the nonreflective structures of our experi33

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ence with or in relation to others, the totality of which Husserl momentously called the life-world (Lebenswelt). In the second place, in phenomenology as a philosophical movement, its “possibility” exceeds and surpasses its “actuality.” As an ongoing movement, it is distinctly marked by its expanding horizon(s). In other words, it refers to the appropriation and reappropriation of the past (tradition) for the sake of innovation, further exploration and discovery. In this sense, phenomenology is that philosophy that is always in the process of becoming. Therefore, there is indelibly a dialectical zone of ambiguity—in the etymological sense of the term—between continuity and discontinuity or, better, between tradition and innovation. This dialectical ambiguity is placed by Heidegger in question as phenomenological method that combines “construction” and “destruction” as well as “reduction”—the triptych of phenomenological method—in his 1927 lecture text called The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie). In phenomenological method, according to Heidegger, construction and destruction are mutually “pertinent” or implicated. Construction is necessarily destruction, that is, “a deconstructing of traditional concepts carried out in a historical recursion to the tradition.” In this way, deconstruction involves no blank and blind negation of tradition by condemning it as “worthless” but rather “a positive appropriation of tradition” itself. Here I mentioned Heidegger’s “critical process” in phenomenology of deconstruction because, it will become clear later, it is central to Schrag’s approach to his present work under review. Schrag, who has been a persistent interlocutor of Heidegger’s thought for many decades, voices Heidegger’s phenomenological concern exactly seventy years later. The question of both “before” and “after” is always already imbricated in the “deconstructive” endeavor of the “now.” In The Self after Postmodernity, Schrag begins his discussion with a tribute to the “deconstructive” effort of Gilbert Ryle for whose honor he originally presented it as a series of lectures at Trent University in Canada in 1995. Indeed, there is “a ring of oddity” in coupling a British architect of analytical philosophy and Continental phenomenology. However, Schrag shrugs off the idea of oddity by acknowledging quickly that it was Ryle who reviewed Heidegger’s “deconstructive” masterpiece Sein und Zeit (1927) for the English-speaking world. Both Heidegger and Ryle—Schrag, too, for that matter—engaged in the act of “deconstruction” (Abbau): one in deconstructing Descartes’s wrong-headed modern “world-view” and the other in deconstructing Descartes’s wrongly designed architecture of mind and body as a two-story edifice. I should also add that for Schrag, for whom the principium of truth is communicability, the discovery of an affinity between Heidegger and Ryle, for example, is no accident. Dialogue both within and without the

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Review Essay of Calvin O. Schrag’s The Self after Postmodernity (1997) 35

phenomenological circle is the true hallmark of Schrag’s philosophical style. What, one may ask, would the “republic of philosophy” be like without dialogue? Schrag’s immortal “insiders” are Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, Levinas and Derrida, while his prominent “outsiders” are Habermas, Foucault, Rorty, Lyotard, Deleuze, and Guattari. Schrag is by no means engaged in eclecticism which Ricoeur, for example, regards as the enemy of philosophical reflection. Yet we can truly marvel at and must admire the absence in Schrag of the “anxiety of influence” or, for that matter, the forethought of originality. The reaffirmation and rehabilitation of the self as subject or the phenomenological subject in Schrag take their birth from the structuralist aftermath of the “death of man,” the “death of the subject,” or the “death of the author.” The death of the phenomenological subject by Foucault was announced, albeit prematurely in retrospect, in his concluding remarks of The Order of Things: “Man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” The tidal waves of structuralism had left nothing untouched and unscathed. Schrag’s subject is no exception: He willingly began to speak in favor of the “decentered subject”—the subject whose center is not “nowhere” but only defocused and diffused. As there are structuring and structured structures, the structuralist grammar of language such as “synchronics” and “diachronics” has left its permanent marks on and lasting traces in Schrag’s phenomenological portrait of the self as an interlocking web of four dimensions: (1) the self in discourse, (2) the self in action, (3) the self in community, and (4) the self in transcendence. Discourse, action, and community are three interconnected “sites” or “markers” of the self as subject. The regulative grammar of the self as subject that is seated in discourse, action, and community is the dialogical principle or the principle of “betweenness” that accepts the open trafficking or bordercrossing of any two contrary categories as complementary while rejecting the “reified” or “bogus” dichotomization or polarization of one category and the other. To accept the principle of “betweenness” is to avoid both overdetermination and underdetermination of any given phenomenon. Schrag rejects, in other words, the Scylla of one category and the Charybdis of the other that creates the unbridgeable gulf between two categories: the self (ipseity) and the other (alterity), autonomy and heteronomy, subjectivity and objectivity, act and system, existential praxis and structure, parole (speech act) and langue (linguistic system), philosophy and non-philosophy, etc. First, as discourse is the first “site” of the self as subject that defines the very humanity of humans, Schrag is concerned with the question of linguisticality or rhetoricality in the configuration of discourse. The aim of sighting discourse as a “site” of the self is “to examine the formation process of the

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self as a who that is implicated in the economy of discourse” (p. 16).1 The definition of the self that is cited in discourse ranges from a critique of Cartesian dualism that engages in the faulty translation of the existential question “Who am I?” into the metaphysical question “What is man?” and thus commits a category mistake. By the same token, the existential formation of discourse is distinguished from narratology that transforms narrative into an abstract and reified object of allegedly disinterested inquiry. Schrag is also critical of the portrait of the self by postmodernists, particularly of Lyotard who is, according to Schrag, “clearly the most postmodern of the postmodernists” in launching “the frontal assault on philosophies of unity and identity” (p. 28). “The [postmodernist] slide from diversity, plurality, and multiplicity to heterogeneity, paralogy, and incommensurability,” Schrag writes, “is too hurried, too facile, inviting a skewing of the phenomenon of discourse as it is lived through and more proximately experienced in our quotidian existence” (p. 30). He speaks favorably of Ricoeur, who furrows “a promising path” for the definition of the self as subject by distinguishing deftly “idem-identity” (the “what” of the self in discourse) and “ipse-identity” (the “who” of the self in discourse). While one appeals to “objective criteria of identification,” the other points to “the identity of selfhood.” To take one for the other is, of course, a category mistake. Second, the discursive self is a relational phenomenon because “saying” is always a “saying” of something (the “what” of the “said”) to someone else (the “who” of the other). It is a constitution of the self always with other selves. The self in action is also social because it involves the act of doing with or for others—one is ontological and the other ethical. Moreover, the self in action and the self in community are inseparably linked because they are concerned with the formation of the “we” in self-constitution or self-identity. To indicate the unity of three modulations of the self, Schrag uses the expression “agentive subject” presumably in contradistinction to the “cognitive subject” (e.g., the Cartesian ego of the cogito as res cogitans). Philosophers like John Macmurray distinguish “the self as agent” and “the self as subject” in order to delineate the (heterocentric) “I do” (in discourse, action and community) from the (egocentric) “I think.” Within the phenomenological tradition itself, Merleau-Ponty speaks of the “instituting self” rather than the “constituting self” that is inevitably caught in the egological sphere of transcendental subjectivity. Moreover, the instituting subject takes into account the “agentive” function of the self as actor while recognizing the role of the “instituted” structures of history and society. For Schrag, the agentive self in both action and community, that is, in the formation of the “we,” lives in the middle way between autonomy and heteronomy and between the “sovereignty” of pure activism and the “subor-

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Review Essay of Calvin O. Schrag’s The Self after Postmodernity (1997) 37

dination” of pure passivism. Most interestingly, the formation of the “we” is instituted primordially by way of the body. It is first and foremost intercorporeal. Schrag speaks of “bodily self-identity” based on a phenomenology of embodiment which deconstructs the Cartesian legacy of mind/body dualism and of the body as “extended substance” (res extensa). The body as lived or lived body is my (social) foothold in the world. Thus, I am my body. The lived body is indispensable to the genealogy of self-formation and—I might add— social formation. As Schrag puts it, it is “veritably who I am” (p. 54). He captures with clarity in both substance and expression the distinction between “having” and “being” a body: “The body inhabits space; it does not simply occupy it” (p. 55: his emphasis). The social space or world is intercorporeal simply because I inhabit the world with other (inhabiting) bodies. Terry Eagleton issues an important reminder that the aesthetic (aisthesis) is meant to be a de facto discourse of the body and that the aesthetic as “performative” is proposed and advanced in opposition to the hegemonic grip of speculative and specular theoria. Nietzsche means to invert theoria with aisthesis. However, Schrag is uneasy with Nietzsche’s “aestheticism,” which reduces the world to an aesthetic phenomenon. He challenges as a problematic the valorization of bodily desires in Deleuze and bio-power in Foucault that accord “a ubiquity to the aesthetical” at the expense of rationality in the constitution of the self as subject. In this sense, Schrag takes the side of Habermas in promoting his philosophy of communicative praxis although, in my own view, Habermas’s theory of communicative action is at best a limping affair because its rationality is bereft of the body, that is, it is disembodied and because the rationality of communication lodges in the flatland of undifferentiated consensus. Without differentiation or distinction in defining human plurality, communication is unnecessary or nullified. Schrag chooses to opt for the Kierkegaardian “hermeneutics of the subject” that imbricates or intertwines the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. As community is constitutive of selfhood or the existential question “Who am I?” Schrag contends that “It is difficult to situate any positive role for community within the parameters of postmodern discourse” (p. 79). Schrag, I think, is right to the extent that the postmodernist politics of difference against the modernist politics of identity fails by and large to recognize human plurality or heterogeneity as the home base from which we relate ourselves to and communicate with others. The self and community are said to be related only because the self is defined as relational. It is the absence of a “with”—and “for”—others structure in the genealogy of self-formation that makes the genuine ethic of care and responsibility impossible in human action. Despite his seminal ontology of empowerment and a critique of the knowledge/power nexus, Foucault speaks carelessly of the “ethic of care for the self as a practice

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of freedom” (p. 67). I say that he is careless because he is unaware of the ethic of care as primarily heteronomic rather than autonomous. In this connection, Schrag makes a unique contribution to the formation of the communal self as an ethical issue, as an ethic of responsibility that encounters Levinas’s ethics as first philosophy and responsibility as first ethics. Schrag calls it Levinas’s “ethics of alterity.” While Levinas’s “meontological” (i.e., ethical) conception of the self both rejects the ontological and privileges the primacy of the other, Schrag promotes his phenomenology of communicative praxis by connecting the “ontological” order of “descriptive responsivity” with the “ethical” issue of “normative responsibility” based on the Greek concept of kathakonta (“the fitting”). In the final analysis, Schrag sums up his conclusion concisely and with a clarity that is reminiscent of the received wisdom of Alfred Schutz, Edmund Burke, John Donne and Maurice Merleau-Ponty: The self in community [as well as I might add, action] is a self situated in this space of communicative praxis, historically embedded, existing with others, inclusive of predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. Never an island entire of itself, the self remains rooted in history but is not suffocated by the influx of historical forms and forces. The communalized self is in history but not of history. It has the resources of transcending the historically specific without arrogating to itself an unconditioned and decontextualized vision of the world (p. 109).

When history or culture possesses us, it would indeed constitute “a nihilism in disguise”—to use the expression of Merleau-Ponty. The self answers the world by first authoring it. Third and last, transcendence is birthed with disenchantment or, as Max Weber puts it, the “disenchantment of the world” (Entzauberung der Welt). It is triggered by the discontentment of the present condition whatever it may be. Transcendence involves for Schrag an emergent and voluntary act of answering or construing the “who” of the self after postmodernity. After the fashion of Kierkegaard, Paul Tillich and, in particular, Levinas, religion for Schrag belongs without question to the sphere of cultural formation. Since it is legitimately as cultural as science, morality, and art, religion is considered by Schrag as the fourth sphere of culture. Here I wish to single out Schrag’s discovery of transversality as the unique, innovative and seminal contribution to philosophy in general and phenomenology as a philosophical movement in particular. Indeed, transversality measures his phenomenological avant-gardism beyond both the modernized and the postmodernized world.

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Review Essay of Calvin O. Schrag’s The Self after Postmodernity (1997) 39

Inspired directly or indirectly the philosophical insights of Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Deleuze and Guattari, Schrag promotes transversality as dialogical enrichment across differences and embraces the conception of truth as the way of communicability. The consolidation of truth as communicability is possible because truth’s center, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, is everywhere and its circumference nowhere. Speaking of transversality as “an open-textured process of unification,” Schrag explains that it moves “beyond the constraints of the metaphysical oppositions of universality versus particularity and identity versus difference. Transversal unity is an achievement of communication as it visits a multiplicity of viewpoints, perspectives, belief systems, and regions of concern” (p. 133). In the footsteps of William James whose “pluralistic universe” hinges on the idea that there is no single perspective from which the world can appear as “an absolutely single fact,” Schrag’s concern for the problematic of perspectives can be traced back to his earlier work Experience and Being: Prolegomena to a Future Ontology (1969) which shows his foresight into what the future stored for us. While Sartre proclaimed that we are condemned to freedom and in reacting to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty declared that we are condemned to meaning, Schrag encounters both by saying that we are first and foremost condemned to perspectives. By deconstructing both modernity and postmodernity, transversality splits the difference between them and administers a double-edged pharmakon to both. In its intent and goal, transversality is best described as the Maitreyan middle way between the two extreme tendencies of modernity’s “universality” and postmodernity’s “incommensurability”: between, in Schrag’s own words, “the Scylla of a hegemonic unification” on the one hand and “the Charybdis of a chaotic pluralism” on the other. As a harmonics of different perspectives, transversality attempts to bridge the gulf between two opposing categories as complementary. It is not, however, to be identified with or mistaken for the Aufhebung of Hegel’s philosophical politics of identity since it is not a vertical and unitary but a lateral and correlative movement in between and across both cultural space and historical time. Transversality resembles Heidegger’s das Geviert as the fourfold unity of sky, earth, gods and mortals whose center is Being. There is a difference, however, between transversality and das Geviert. While das Geviert focuses on the statics of Being, transversality puts a positive accent on the movement of “crossing through” (Durchkreuzen) and thus the dynamics of “Interbeing”—to borrow another seminal concept from the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh. There remains an afterthought of Schrag’s phenomenology of the self as subject. It concerns an extension of or addendum to his definition of the self which is placed in three “sites” of discourse, action and community. What

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may be added here is nature as the fourth “site” of the self whose definition must reject the two extremes of anthropocentrism and naturalism. There is an intriguing Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times! It refers to the stressful times of crisis. Expressed in two ideograms of “danger” and “opportunity,” “crisis” signifies our ability to take advantage of an opportunity at hand to overcome a clear and present danger. It required a paradigmatic form of thinking. In addition to the discursive, actional, and communal self, the question of the self in nature is concerned with the definition of the “ecological self” and the resolution of ecological ethics. Greening is an issue of “Interbeing” between humans and non-humans on earth as “the quintessence of the human condition”—to borrow the expression of Hannah Arendt. The discourse of ecological ethics begins with the idea of ethics as if the earth—the all-encompassing element of all elements—really matters. When the ecological crisis is a matter of life or death for humanity, it acquires the urgency of an “ultimate concern.” There is no good reason why we could not speak, as Aldo Leopold does, of the continuum of humans and non-humans as “a biotic community,” the sustainability of which requires our care and responsibility for non-humans. In other words, community may be defined in terms of both interhuman and interspeciesistic relationships as the ecological continuum called “Interbeing.” The future beckons the urgency of ecological ethics as care and responsibility for the well-being of the whole earth. Since we must think and act globally, the utmost importance of ecological ethics is undeniable for the world, which is said to have become a global village. Thus it is no exaggeration to say that the “greening” of the earth is our “ultimate concern” for the new millennium. In conclusion, it must be said that my addendum of the self in nature does not subtract from or diminish the thoughtful and unsurpassable contribution that Schrag’s work under review makes to philosophy and phenomenology as a philosophical movement. I read Schrag’s first book Existence and Freedom (1961) at the recommendation of the late John Wild when I began to study phenomenology by way of reading Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit in his graduate seminar at Northwestern University in the fall of 1961. Reading Schrag’s Existence and Freedom and other later works has become an integral part of my learning and viewing the nature of phenomenology as a philosophical movement. I am eagerly looking forward to reading what comes after The Self after Postmodernity. NOTE 1.  All bracketed pagination refers to Schrag’s text under review.

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Chapter Two

Transversality and Geophilosophy in the Age of Globalization

Figure 2.1.  Reproduction of The Angelus (1857–1859) by Jean François Millet Jean-Charles Millet: © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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1. PROLOGUE In their joint work What is Philosophy? Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari define philosophy as that discipline that is engaged in creating and advancing concepts.1 Transversality and geophilosophy are taken to be two transformative and paradigmatic concepts. By reterritorializing the traditional boundaries of conceptualization, both cultural and disciplinary, they have momentous imports and consequences for the future of philosophy and the world, which is said to have become a global village or cosmopolis. The idea of interfacing transversality and geophilosophy dawned on me as a direct result of Calvin O. Schrag’s response to my review in Philosophy and Social Criticism of his most recent work The Self After Postmodernity.2 In concluding my review of Schrag, I intimated that the concept of the “ecological self” would be thought of as an extension of or addendum to his definition of the “self after postmodernity,” or, if you will, the “post-postmodern self,” which is meant to transverse rather than sublate modernity and postmodernity. The importance of the “ecological self” can no longer be ignored or underestimated because today the very fate of the earth hangs in precarious balance. The earth (oikos) is the dwelling place of all beings and things both human and nonhuman. It is no mere accident that we are fondly called earthlings. No doubt the well-being of the earth as a whole should continue to be our ultimate concern and the defining moment of humanity on earth in the new millennium. 2. TRANSVERSALITY AND THE OVERCOMING OF EUROCENTRISM The discovery of transversality is Schrag’s seminal and paradigmatic contribution to philosophy in general and phenomenological hermeneutics in particular.3 Inspired directly and indirectly by the philosophical insights of Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, and Foucault, Schrag develops transversality as dialogical engagement and enrichment across differences and embraces the conception of truth as the way of communicability. He contends that transversality moves “beyond the constraints of the metaphysical oppositions of universality versus particularity and identity versus difference. Transversal unity is an achievement of communication as it visits a multiplicity of viewpoints, perspectives, belief systems, and regions of concern.”4 As a “refiguration” of rationality, transversality is for Schrag a passageway between modernity and postmodernity, that is to say, between the modernist overdetermination and the postmodernist underdetermination

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of reason and its claims. His transversal shifter is meant to scale the continental divide between modernity and postmodernity. It intends to dissolve, as it were, their difference(s). By way of transversality, he means to subvert and transgress the dichotomy between modernism and postmodernism by splitting diagonally the difference between the pure verticality of modernist “transcendentalism” and the pure horizontality of postmodernist “historicism.” By administering a double-edged pharmakon to both, transversality is best described as the future-oriented Maitreyan middle way between the two extreme tendencies of modernity and postmodernity: between, in Schrag’s own words, “the Scylla of a hegemonic unification” on the one hand and “the Charybdis of a chaotic pluralism” on the other. It, in other words, unlocks the deadlock between the two. In the very words of Schrag himself: Thus truth as communicability [i.e., transversality] . . . is at once a disclosure of similarity and difference, unity and multiplicity, the commensurable and the incommensurable. Historicism forgets similarity, unity, and commensurability; transcendentalism forgets difference, multiplicity, and incommensurability. And each forgets the other because both decontextualize the intentionality of communicative praxis.5

Within the phenomenological movement, Schrag’s formulation of transversality or “transversal universals” are, as he himself acknowledges, “somewhat reminiscent” of the “lateral universals” of Merleau-Ponty for whom history is an open notebook full of ambiguous pluralities (Vielseitigkeit) and culture has a multiplicity of ethos. Transversality advances the cause of cross-cultural fertilization or hybridization as well as cross-disciplinary engagement in which truth as communicability privileges, and is monopolized by, neither the West nor philosophy alone. Here we cannot resist comparing Schrag’s construction of truth as communicative praxis with the dialogism of Mikhail Bakhtin—the Russian literary theorist and philosopher.6 Listen to the deep and prodigious voice of Bakhtin. Speaking of Dostoevsky, who is his philosophical protagonist, he writes without equivocation: At the center of Dostoevsky’s artistic worlds must lie dialogue, and dialogue not as a means but as an end itself. Dialogue here is not the threshold to action, it is the action itself. It is not a means for revealing, for bringing to the surface the already ready-made character of a person; no, in dialogue a person not only shows himself outwardly, but he becomes for the first time that which he is—and, we repeat, not only for others but for himself as well. To be means to communicate dialogically. When dialogue ends, everything ends. Thus dialogue, by its very essence, cannot and must not come to an end. At the level of his religious-utopian world-view Dostoevsky carries dialogue into eternity, conceiving of it as eternal co-rejoicing, co-admiration, con-cord. At the level of

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the novel, it is presented as the unfinalizability of dialogue, although originally as dialogue’s vicious circle.7

There is indeed the difference between the dialectical and the dialogical of Bakhtin (cum Dostoevsky). The dialectic from Plato to Hegel, Marx, Kojève, and now Francis Fukuyama privileges a transcendental and teleological ending or closure, whereas the dialogical of Bakhtin is without “finalizability.” Thus, Bakhtin’s dialogism is very much like the Sinitic logic of yin and yang as mutually complementary, which produces a familial circle of sixty-four hexagrams.8 In other words, the dialectic ends in the identity of identity and difference, whereas the dialogical refuses to identify difference with identity, i.e., homogenize the two. In the tradition of Western metaphysics there exists the underlying assumption, though never warranted or proven, that truth is universal in that it is immutable, timeless, and objective for all humanity. The idea manifests itself in the guise of “human nature.” The logic of sublated identity has been the regulative idea of modernity and modernization that is decisively Eurocentric or Orientalist in its formulation of both knowledge and power. Not only does modernity place Europe at the center of what has happened and will happen, but modern Europe also has legislated for itself the zoning laws of universality: what is particular in Western modernity is universalized while what is particular in the non-West forever remains particular. European ethnophilosophy lays monopolistic claim on universality. For good reason, this Eurocentric orientation is often called a “white mythology.” Since the West is the central focus of truth as universal, the non-West in its knowledge and power has been marginalized or ignored. The logic of transversality challenges Eurocentrism or Orientalism—as well as, for that matter, Occidentalism such as Sinocentrism or Afrocentrism—and attempts to go beyond it.9 It opens up a brand-new space for comparative philosophy and comparative culture that is neither Orientalist nor Occidentalist. Merleau-Ponty contends that the arrogant and dialectical path of Hegel excludes Oriental thought from absolute and universal knowledge and draws “a geographical frontier between philosophy and non-philosophy.” Philosophy is destined to examine its own idea of truth again and again because truth is “a treasure scattered about in human life prior to all philosophy and not divided among doctrines.” If so, Western philosophy is destined to reexamine not only its own idea of truth but also related matters and institutions such as science, economy, politics, and technology.10 In his lateral pursuit for truth, transversal truth, Merleau-Ponty means to take nothing for granted. It is just here that he makes a decisive break with the “conceit” of Hegelian Eurocentrism or vertical and universal transcendentalism. As childhood and adulthood are one inseparable ontological order

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of the human, so Oriental and Occidental cultures and societies are made up of one continuum of the life-and-death cycle of humanity everywhere thereby pointing the way to philosophical truth. We expect to learn as much from “primitive” societies as from “civilized” ones regarding the conditions of common humanity unless we believe in cultural evolutionism that is “the old accomplice” of European ethnocentrism. Merleau-Ponty thus contends that “there is not a philosophy that contains all philosophies; philosophy as a whole is at certain moments in each philosophy. To take up the celebrated phrase again, philosophy’s center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.”11 In the final analysis, truth is a diffused and decentered happening. The value of transversality is squarely placed in seeing what is ours as alien and what was alien as our own. To be sure, ethnography—especially phenomenological ethnography—is invaluable for philosophy’s transversal search for truth. Transversal truth must be sought and proven by understanding all sociocultural life-worlds. Thus Merleau-Ponty is forthright in suggesting that transversal truth is acquired “through ethnological experience and its incessant testing of the self through the other person and the other person through the self”12 which is, by the way, no easy task to accomplish. It is in this context that he pays his fitting tribute to French ethnography, the ethnography particularly of Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss. In turn, in his Inaugural Lecture in 1960 at the Collège de France, Lévi-Strauss echoed the transversal voice of MerleauPonty in paying moving homage to the “savage mind” of “primitives,” whose “pupil” and “witness” he was, to the end of preserving the lateral continuity of all humanity, not the vertical hierarchy of the “civilized” (Western) on top and the alleged “primitive” at bottom.13 3. INTERFACING TRANSVERSALITY AND GEOPHILOSOPHY Transversality and geophilosophy are imbricated concepts. They overlap and complement each other. Transversality is a geometric concept. Were etymology any marker of truth, then it should be relevant to geophilosophy as the disciplined study of the earth (geo). Geophilosophy is not just a recent Western invention: Indeed, it is global stretching from the East to the West and from the North to the South. Transversality as communicative praxis, too, cultivates neither the narcissistic conversation of the West with itself nor the conversation between modernity and postmodernity within the Western hemisphere alone. Rather, it creates, as Schrag himself—who has also an interest in comparative philosophy—puts it, “a new space”—the brand-new space of intercultural discourses between the West and the non-West—in order to attend the urgent matters of the earth.

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What is geophilosophy? It is the philosophy of the whole earth as elemental of all elements, of the affairs of all earthly inhabitants both human and nonhuman. To draw a cue from Deleuze and Guattari, “the earth is not one element among others but rather brings together all the elements within a single embrace.”14 It is a grave mistake to identify geophilosophy simply with environmental philosophy for the reason that the earth is also quintessential to the interhuman condition.15 The purpose of geophilosophy is comprehensive and inclusive in investigating the interdependent zone between the interhuman and the interspeciesistic realm. In alliance with transversality, geophilosophy claims to be a topology of Interbeing. The most basic principle of the ecological is placed in the notion that everything is connected to everything else, that not one thing exists in isolation from others in the universe. In a nutshell, reality is nothing but consummately social process. Indeed, Interbeing—to borrow the deep and felicitous concept of the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh who now lives in southern France—is the geophilosophical paradigm. M. C. Escher’s Verbum (1942) is the genealogical and geometric rendition of the ecological as a Great Chain of Interbeing. The Great Chain of Interbeing is always already embodied or enfleshed, that is to say, it is first and foremost intercorporeal. Only by way of the body or flesh are the self and the world said to be intertwined or chiasmic. The body is the material precondition for our (inter-)being-in-the-world. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, the world and the body, which is the locus of the sensible and sensuous, are made of the same material.16 Thus corporeality or embodiment as intercorporeality may be said to be “archisociality”—to borrow the expressive term of Dany-Robert Dufour.17 But for the body or flesh, sociality itself is unimaginable. For that reason alone, we are compelled to somatize sociality. In this respect, it is wrong or only half-right to say that the body is the medium of communication: Rather, it is communication or in itself a primordial “interbeing.” Interbeing is a transversal of time and space, that is, “chronotopical”—to use Bakhtin’s idiosyncratic but pithy language. The body, which intersects or transverses the boundaries of time and place, is preeminently a geophilosophical idea. The aim of body politics (in the plural), in turn, reterritorializes philosophy itself. According to Merleau-Ponty: [The body as] flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. To designate it, we should need the old term “element,” in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being [interbeing]. The

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flesh is in this sense an “element” of Being [Interbeing]. Not a fact or a sum of facts, and yet adherent to location and to the now.18

The contribution of contemporary feminism to the body as a geophilosophical idea is unsurpassed. It overturns the history, and radicalizes the geopolitical culture of the body and thus philosophy itself. On the temporal plane, the “calendar of the flesh” is synchronized with the calendar, solar or lunar, of nature’s passage.19 Adrienne Rich’s new “politics of location” begins with the body. By returning to the body, which is for her a place name, she means to rebel against “the idolatry of pure ideas” and break loose from the “universal shadow of patriarchy.”20 The ecological destruction of the earth constitutes the ultimate limits of Western modernity which has disenchanted the world in the name of humanity’s infinite progress based on the cultivation of “enlightened” reason that demystifies “soft” magic by “hard” science and technology or what Heidegger calls “calculative thinking” (Gestell) as opposed to “meditative thinking” (Gelassenheit).21 Let us take Descartes and Bacon as the paragons of the calculative thinking of Western modernity. Descartes regarded men as the “masters and possessors” of dumb nature. His cogito hypnotized and dazzled Western modernity in which epistemology has become prima philosophia. “The French,” Deleuze and Guattari declares, “are like landowners whose source of income is the cogito.”22 The epistemological subject or the I of the “I think,” which is for Descartes disembodied, is by necessity egocentric or monologic. The cogito exemplifies a thinker’s desire to seal himself/herself off from the world and to keep his/her thinking pure or uncontaminated by the presence of the Other. The true philosopher is for Descartes is one who takes infinite delight in the permanent state of solitude, social isolation, and hibernation. As the I of the “I think” is a cloistered self, in the final analysis, the Cartesian mind as res cogitans is in the perpetual state of social paralysis and is incapable of socializing with others both human and nonhuman. The cogito, in other words, is a fatal abstraction for sociality. The I of the “I think” is the epitome of an “invisible man” in total isolation from others, both other minds and other bodies. As a thinking substance, the mind needs nothing more than itself to think: It signifies cogito ergo non-sum. For this reason, Schrag is well aware of the importance of the primacy of the “agentive self” over the “cognitive self.”23 Bacon initiates the technological élan that establishes and justifies the total domination by men of nature or, as he himself calls it, “the inquisition of nature.” Bacon’s experimentalism allegedly improves on and supersedes the Scholastic bookish learning whose “cobwebs” produced neither substance nor profits. For the fruits of science do not grow in books. For Bacon, instead,

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the “dignity” of human knowledge is maintained by “works of utility and power.” The framework of modern technological rationality or Gestell was laid down by Bacon when he insisted on the unity of knowledge and power in one (i.e., scientia et potentia in idem coincidunt) and discovered “in the womb of nature many secrets of excellent use” in overcoming the necessities and miseries of humanity (i.e., philantropia). The earth or nature is for Bacon, in short, nothing more than a dead pile of use-objects for humans.24 What is to be done in order to overcome the “death of nature” or the “ecological crisis”? In Chinese the expression crisis is composed of the two logograms of “danger” and “opportunity.” “Crisis” means to turn “danger” into “opportunity.” Geophilosophy whose epicenter is Interbeing is meant to seize an opportunity to overcome the ecological danger which humanity is confronting today in two interrelated ways. In the first place, it is predisposed to the abiding sense of community among all beings and things, not just among humans alone.25 In the second place, in opposition to anthropocentrism, geophilosophy favors the ecocentric approach in which the earth becomes first and primary and humans are care-takers/givers and agents of responsibility for the well-being of the whole earth. The earth does not belong to or is possessed by humanity but rather humanity itself belongs to the earth. It is the matter of shifting or transforming our “mentality” and perspective. The ecocentric question is “Why do humans build the road where animals cross?” whereas the anthropocentric question is “Why do animals cross the road we build?” The eleventh-century Chinese neo-Confucianist Zhang Zai wrote the most celebratory passage that exudes with a touch of humility the cosmic and ecological sense of Interbeing and elevates the abiding sense of piety as unyielding reciprocity: “Heaven is my father, and Earth is my mother, and even such a small creature as I find[s] an intimate place in their midst. Therefore that which fills the universe I regard as my body and that which directs the universe my nature. All people are my brothers and sisters, and all things are my companions.”26 The “land ethic” of the incomparable American conservationist Aldo Leopold, whose weighty and poetic deliberation of “thinking like a mountain” is legendary and exemplifies Heideggerian Gelassenheit (serenity), is also predicated upon the notion of “a biotic community” in which the land designates a composite term for an extended sense of community. For Leopold’s topophilic idea of community, which preceded James Lovelock’s hypothesis of Gaia as a living organism by exactly three decades, includes soil, water, plants, worms, micro-organisms, and of course animals. He is right to advance the idea that all ethics rest on the “single premise” that “the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.”27 Echoing the Kantian sentiment of ethics, however, he bemoaned the fact that “[t]here is as yet no ethic dealing with man’s relation to land and to the

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animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus’ slave girls, is still property. The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations.”28 I find no fundamental lacuna or contradiction between Leopold’s “biotic community” and Schrag’s “self in community” which may be stretched to include nonhuman beings and things. The “ecological self” is, indeed, an extended, added, or modified—if you will—dimension of Schrag’s communal self. Schrag sums up what he means by “the self in community” which combines, I think, the received wisdom of Alfred Schutz, Edmund Burke, John Donne, and Merleau-Ponty, as follows: The self in community is a self situated in this space of communicative praxis, historically embedded, existing with others, inclusive of predecessors, contemporaries, and successors. Never an island entire of itself, the self remains rooted in history but is not suffocated by the influx of historical forms and forces. The communalized self is in history but not of history. It has the resources of transcending the historically specific without arrogating to itself an unconditioned and decontextualized vision of the world.29

But for difference, there would be no meaningful diversity. But for diversity, there would equally be neither reciprocity nor community, that is, no “communal self.” Indeed, without difference the notion of Interbeing based on the primacy of the Relation (primum relationis) is ultimately unthinkable. The connective inter in Interbeing designates asymmetrical reciprocity. The necessity of (ecological) communication exists because, on the one hand, human community consists of distinct individuals who are, as Schrag puts it, “agentive” and, on the other hand, (external) nature is made up of myriads of distinct beings and things or “ten thousand things”—to use the poetic expression of Sinism. The communal self is neither unitarian nor communitarian. Both unitarians and communitarians are not fully aware of the fact that difference is a marker of communication, community, and all relationships. Heidegger’s Differenz as Unterschied is an “adventure of difference” that plays and feeds on the combined meaning of the words that double or couple difference with the between (Unter/schied) that at once connects, preserves, and promotes both difference and the relational. Difference (Unter/schied) is capable of conserving the principle of complementarity in our relationships with other humans and nonhumans alike. Heidegger’s fourfold crossing (das Geviert) transverses sky, earth, gods, and mortals (humans who are most mortal of all mortals and nonhumans).30 Because the biotic community is an interconnecting gathering of many distinct beings and things which are together capable of orchestrating, it produces harmony, the harmonics of invisible sounds. In other words, the communal self whose regulative idea is harmony is quintessentially ecological.

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The most fundamental thrust of geophilosophy based on the “earth first” or ecocentrism is first and foremost ethical. There is no ethics involving egocentrism or a mere plurality of monadic subjects for whom, as MerleauPonty puts it elegantly, “the world and history are no longer a system with [multiple] points of entry but a sheaf of irreconcilable perspectives which never coexist and which are held together only by the hopeless heroism of the I.”31 The ethical can never be sanitized by the heroism of the I whoever he/she may be. Separately, we are condemned to perish. I would contend, moreover, that only heteronomy or the primary of the Other over the self is the ethical site of responsibility if not the site of the ethical itself. For the making of heteronomy in which ethics becomes first philosophy and responsibility becomes first ethics, we need the guidance of Levinas. Schrag is well aware of the importance of Levinas’s “ethics of alterity.” While Levinas refuses to interface the ontological with the ethical, that is, the ethical is fundamentally “meonotological” (non-ontological) mainly because of Heidegger’s impasse, Schrag attempts to promote—correctly, I think—his phenomenology of communicative praxis by interfacing the “ontological” order of “descriptive responsivity” with the “ethical” issue of “normative responsibility” based on the Greek concept of kathakonta (“the fitting”). The responsible self is the “agentive” self who answers the world by first authoring it—to use the formulation of Bakhtin’s dialogism. The discovery of heteronomy, of a “Thou” as alterity, is truly the Copernican revolution of social and ethical thought. Heteronomy was first discovered in modern European philosophy by Ludwig Feuerbach in the mid-nineteenth century. It may judiciously be called “Copernican” simply because what egocentrism/ethnocentrism is to geocentrism, heteronomy/interculturalism is to heliocentrism. Levinas continues and preserves Feuerbach’s Copernican revolution of heteromony in which the face of the Other as ethical transcendence is elevated to the altar of both interhuman and interspeciesistic relationships (i.e., “altarity,” as if it were).32 Now the heteronomic ethic of responsibility confronts and runs counter to the Anglo-American institution of “rights talk” or the talk of “the I’s have it” which places the self as the dead center of the moral and political universe and lends a deaf ear to the issue of responsibility. Indeed, rights talk is deeply implanted and entrenched in American soil and unshakably embedded in the American soul. It is no accident that Americans are called “born Lockeans” who honor, guard, and defend jealously entitlements, the inviolable sovereignty of the individual, and possessive individualism. Locke is the possessive individualist par excellence since for him the concept of the human as laborer or exploiter of nature is necessary for the acquisition of private property as absolute rights. The utilitarianism of labor and industry

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in exploiting and dominating nature or the land, which when uncultivated by human labor (i.e., wilderness) is called by Locke “waste,” builds the society of acquistive individuals (or homo oeconomicus). For Locke, things of nature are useless unless they acquire “value” on account of labor and industry. In the end, Lockean possessive individualism incorporates the antisocial principles between humans on the one hand and between the human and nature on the other hand.33 Mary Ann Glendon speaks most critically of the scotoma of the Anglo-American “rights talk.” “The American rights dialect,” she writes, “is distinguished not only by what we say and how we say it, but also by what we leave unsaid.”34 As every “want” is being translated into a “right” whose language is extended now to trees and animals, we tend to trivialize the magnitude of the dire plight of the wounded, weakened and fragile earth whose well-being is indispensable for the sustainability of all earthbound creatures including humans. There is indeed a paradox and incongruity when “rights talk” is anthropomorphically extended, albeit well-intended in all quarters of environmental ethics, to stones, trees, and animals, i.e., “rights” of stones and trees and “animal rights.” For example, in the recent work entitled The Natural Contract, Michel Serres expresses the innovative and imaginative sentiment of a holistic and global approach to environmental philosophy with the intent of making peace with the ruinous world of nature in the same way his compatriot Rousseau intended with the interhuman world by way of social contract.35 It was also the visionary Rousseau who warned that “you are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and that the earth belongs to no one.”36 So far, so good. Nevertheless, there is a conceptual flaw, something unnatural and incongruous about Serres’s language of “contact,” Rousseau notwithstanding, in order to overcome the wretched and unbearable condition of inhumanity in the war-like “state of nature” but not to overcome inhumanity to the nonhuman world (i.e., the domain of nature). 4. EPILOGUE I hope that transversality and geophilosophy based on a Great Chain of Ecological Interbeing will govern the future of philosophy which is becoming global in approach and content: cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural. Transversality is no doubt a hermeneutical principle which demands the disciplined listening of the Other and is predisposed to the (Gadamerian) idea that the Other might very well be right. Geophilosophy measures the earth as the all-encompassing element which brings all the elements in its range. In its holistic method and content, environmental philosophy is the geophilosophy

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par excellence for the reason that it is concerned with the very question of how to dwell properly on earth. In his attempt to construct a geophilosophical paradigm, Félix Guattari raises a weighty and timely question: The ecological crisis can be traced to a more general crisis of the social, political and existential. The problem involves a type of revolution of mentalities whereby they cease investing in a certain kind of development, based on a productivism that has lost all human finality. Thus the issue returns with insistence: how do we change mentalities, how do we reinvent social practices that would give back to humanity—if it ever had it—a sense of responsibility, not only for animal and vegetable species, likewise for incorporeal species such as music, the arts, cinema, the relation with time, love and compassion for others, the feeling of fusion at the heat of cosmos?37

Indeed, responsibility as first ethics becomes an ethics of the future world that is hurrying into a global village. To apostrophize my conclusion: the new millennium belongs to heterocracy, which, as the moral habitus of humanity’s conduct, is neither egocentric nor anthropocentric. It cannot be otherwise: By ceasing our investment in the long misguided theories of egocentrism and anthropocentrism, heterocracy is destined to reenchant the world—the earth and humanity in the one and same embrace. It is destined to embrace the earth as an intimate and felicitous home for all beings and things. NOTES 1.  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 5. 2.  See my “Review Essay,” of Calvin O. Schrag, The Self After Postmodernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), published in Philosophy and Social Criticism, 22 (1998): 133–40 (hereafter cited as SP), which is reproduced in this work as “Addendum” to Chapter 1. 3.  Schrag began to explore the issue of transversality in earnest in 1989. See “Rationality Between Modernity and Postmodernity,” in Philosophical Papers: Betwixt and Between (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 255–306. See also Calvin O. Schrag, The Resources of Rationality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), and SP. For an extended discussion of Schrag’s quest for transversality, see my “The Dao of Transversality as a Global Approach to Truth: A Metacommentary on Calvin O. Schrag,” Man and World, 28 (1995): 11–31, which is reproduced in this work as Chapter 1. 4. Schrag, SP, p. 133. 5. Schrag, Philosophical Papers, p. 274. 6.  See Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogical Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981)

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and Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). See also the author’s “Bakhtin’s Dialogical Body Politics,” in Bakhtin and the Human Sciences, eds. Michael Mayerfeld Bell and Michael Gardiner (London: Sage Publications, 1998), pp. 95–111. 7. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 252 (emphasis added). 8. In The Propensity of Things, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1995), p. 124, François Jullien observes that Chinese reason does not function in the same way as Western reasoning. “Chinese reasoning,” he writes, “seems to weave along horizontally, from one case to the next, via bridges and bifurcations, each case eventually leading to the next and merging into it. In contrast to Western logic, which is panoramic, Chinese logic is like that of a possible journey in stages that are linked together.” In other words, Chinese reasoning is pragmatic, concrete, existential, and inductive, whereas Western reasoning is theoretic, abstract, essential, and deductive. 9.  See Fred Dallmayr, Beyond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-Cultural Encounter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). See also the author’s The Question of Rationality and the Basic Grammar of Intercultural Texts (Niigata: International University of Japan, 1989). Edward W. Said’s Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978) is an influential critique of the ideology that places the West at the center of world culture and power and marginalizes the non-West. 10. In Signs, trans. Richard C. McClary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), “Everywhere and Nowhere,” pp. 126–58 at p. 139, Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes with telling poignancy and profundity on the Orient in relation to the West. 11.  Ibid., p. 128. 12.  Ibid., p. 120. 13.  See Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Scope of Anthropology,” in Structural Anthropology, Vol. 2, trans. Monique Layton (New York: Basic Books, 1976), pp. 3–43. 14. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 85. The most classic work on phenomenological geophilosophy is Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). Bachelard’s poetics reverberates with the “sonority of Interbeing,” as it were. For a recent comprehensive and systematic contribution of phenomenology to geophilosophy in Bachelard’s tradition, see Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993) and The Fate of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 15.  When Homi K. Bhabha entitles his major work The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), he means to treat culture as a geophilosophical idea. 16. See my “Phenomenology and Body Politics,” Body and Society, 2 (1996): 1–22, which is reproduced in this work as Chapter 5. For Merleau-Ponty, psychoanalysis needs the concept of the flesh whereas the body is an anthropological idea: He writes that “a philosophy of the flesh is the condition without which psychoanalysis remains anthropology.” See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort and trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 267. 17.  See François Dosse, Empire of Meaning, trans. Hassan Melehy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 130.

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18. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, pp. 139–40. We would be remiss if we fail to recognize the difference between Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze and Guattari concerning their respective conception of the earth: For Merleau-Ponty, the earth is one element among others whereas for Deleuze and Guattari it is the allencompassing element of all elements. 19. See Luce Irigaray, “Love Between Us,” trans. Jeffrey Lomonaco, in What Comes After the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 170. 20.  See Adrienne Rich, “Notes Toward a Politics of Location (1984),” in Blood, Bread, and Poetry (New York: Norton, 1986), pp. 210–31. 21.  For extended discussions of the Weberian theme of “the disenchantment of the world” (die Entzauberung der Welt), including the desacralization of nature, see particularly Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1954); Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981); and Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 22.  Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, p. 104. An unusually perspicacious non-Cartesian contribution to the discourse of nature is Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). “An identical ‘humanism’ [anthropocentrism],” he writes, “underlies both Cartesian rationalism and the [French Enlightenment] encyclopedia’s empiricism, a humanism that finds fulfillment in what Descartes called the mastery and possession of nature” (p. 118). For another sober and stimulating anti-Cartesian inquiry into the moral sense of nature, see Erasim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 23. Cartesian epistemocracy based on the cogito is necessarily ocularcentric as well as disembodied and egocentric/monologic. In pursuit of “clear and distinct ideas,” which happen to be all visual terms, there is in the cogito the transparent identity between the mind’s I and the mind’s eye. The cogito is unmistakably video ergo sum. It is interesting to note that there are two ways of translating subjectivity into Chinese: zhu/guan/xing and zhu/ti/xing—both in three ideograms. The middle ideogram (guan) in the first stands for visualized “ideas,” whereas the middle ideogram (ti) in the second is “body” signifying subjectivity as already embodied. Li Zehou, who is China’s foremost aesthetician today, coined subjectality for zhutixing in order to distinguish it from subjectivity for zhuguanxing. Subjectality is for him the material and embodied foundation of subjectivity: The former informs the latter. See Li Zehou, “Subjectivity and ‘Subjectality’: A Response,” Philosophy East and West, 49 (1999): 174–83. In the long-established and venerable tradition of Confucianism, the good (ethical) and the beautiful (aesthetic) are inseparably linked by way of harmony: What is good is beautiful and what is beautiful is also good. Moreover, humaneness or benevolence (ren), which is the highest Confucian moral virtue, is closely affiliated with music. For the youthful Nietzsche, too, music stands for a consummately aesthetic phenomenon. In The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), Terry Eagleton is most suggestive when he sums up the Nietzschean legacy of the aesthetic (aisthesis) in two related ways: (1) the aesthetic is preeminently a carnal

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and performative affair and (2) born of the discourse of the body and cultivated by the senses, it is the revolt of the body’s praxis against the tyranny of the theoretical (theoria) which is purely spectatorial. 24. Contrary to the commonplace, even unconscious, belief that technology is our panacea for environmental problems or what I call “technologism,” which is a problem in itself, it is worthwhile to quote Oswald Spengler’s long, powerful, and truly prophetic passage from his 1931 work Der Mensch und die Technik (1931) or Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932), pp. 90–94: “Every high Culture is a tragedy. The history of mankind as a whole is tragic. But the sacrilege and the catastrophe of the Faustian are greater than all others, greater than anything Aeschylus or Shakespeare ever imagined. The creature is rising up against its creator. As once the microcosm Man against Nature, so now the microcosm Machine is revolting against Nordic Man. The lord of the World is becoming the slave of the Machine, which is forcing him—forcing us all, whether we are aware of it or not—to follow its course. . . . [I]t is . . . the tragedy of the time that this unfettered human can no longer grasp its own consequences. Technics has become as esoteric as the high mathematics which it uses, while physical theory has refined its intellectual abstractions from phenomena to such a pitch that (without clearly perceiving the face) it has reached the pure foundations of human knowing. The mechanization of the world has entered on a phase of highly dangerous over-tension. The picture of the earth, with its plants, animals, and men, has altered. In a few decades most of the great forests have gone, to be turned into newsprint, and climatic changes have been thereby set afoot which imperil the land-economy of whole populations. Innumerable animal species have been extinguished, or nearly so, like the bison; whole races of humanity have been brought almost to [a] vanishing-point, like the North American Indian and the Australian. All things organic are dying the grip of organization. An artificial world is permeating and poisoning the natural. The Civilization itself has become a machine that does, or tried to do, everything in mechanical fashion. We think only in horsepower now; we cannot look at a waterfall without mentally turning it into electric power; we cannot survey a countryside full of pasturing cattle without thinking of its exploitation as a source of meat-supply; we cannot look at the beautiful old handiwork of an unspoilt primitive people without wishing to replace it by modern technical process. Our technical thinking must have its actualization, sensible or senseless. The luxury of the machine is the consequence of a necessity of thought. In [the] last analysis, the machine is a symbol, like its secret ideal, perpetual motion—a spiritual and intellectual, but no vital necessity.” 25.  For my intimation to apply the idea of sociality to interspeciesistic as well as interhuman relationships, see “Toward a New Humanism: The Politics of Civility in a ‘No-Growth’ Society,” Man and World, 9 (1976): 283–306. The first original work in English on Heidegger’s philosophy of the earth is Vincent Vycinas, Earth and Gods (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961). See also Michel Haar’s recent study, The Song of the Earth, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 26.  Wing-tsit Chan, ed., A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 497. For my discussion of Sinism (Confucianism, Daoism,

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and Chan/Zen Buddhism) and geophilosophy, see “The Way of Ecopiety: An Essay in Deep Ecology from a Sinitic Perspective,” Asian Philosophy, 1 (1991): 127–40. 27.  A Sand County Almanac, special commemorative ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 203. 28. Ibid. 29. Schrag, SP, p. 109. If we were to define narrowly the notion of community as bonding or cementing of so-called rational beings alone, there would be no “biotic community” and we would be forever condemned to confine ourselves to interhuman relationships. In order to speak of interspeciesistic relationships, we should bring the idea of communication down to primordial, pre-linguistic, sensuous, and bodily contact. Listen to what Toni Morrison has to say: “No, it was not language; it was what there was before language. Before things were written down. Language in the time when men and animals did talk to one another, when a man could sit down with an ape and the two converse; when a tiger and a man could share the same tree, and each understood the other; when men ran with wolves, not from or after them” (Song of Solomon [New York: Penguin Books, 1977], p. 278). In other words, interspeciesistic relationships are possible at the level of the sensible and sensuous, which is the locus of the bodily. See David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996), and Morris Berman, Coming to Our Senses (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989). 30.  See my “To Save the Earth,” Philosophy Today, 19 (1975): 108–17 and “Heidegger’s Way with Sinitic Thinking,” in Heidegger and Asian Thought, ed. Graham Parkes (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987), pp. 217–44. 31. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 205. 32.  See my “Difference and Responsibility,” Phänomenologische Forschungen, special issue (1999): Phänomenologie der Natur, eds. Kah Kyung Cho and YoungHo Lee, pp. 129–66. See also two classical works on the post-metaphysical or anti-foundational subject of responsibility: Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), and Werner Marx, Towards a Phenomenological Ethics, trans. Stefaan Heyvaert (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). “Difference and Responsibility” also explores the invaluable contribution of feminism based on “feminine difference” to geophilosophy. The heteronomic ethics of care or “earthcare,” as Carolyn Merchant calls it in her Earthcare (New York: Routledge, 1996), marks “gynesis,” which is coined by Alice A. Jardine in her Gynesis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985) both to valorize the feminine and to trace the genesis of things and ideas in the feminine. It is neither trite nor commonplace to emphasize the fact that feminism itself is a multiple phenomenon. For example, see Barbara Johnson, The Feminist Difference (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). She writes that “conflicts among feminists require women to pay attention to each other, to take each other’s reality seriously, to face each other. This requirement . . . places difference among women rather than exclusively between the sexes. Of course, patriarchy has always played women off against each other and manipulated differences among women for its own purposes. Nevertheless, feminists have to take the risk of confronting and

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negotiating differences among women if we are ever to transform such differences into positive rather than negative forces in women’s lives” (p. 194). 33.  Because of its “enlightened” faith and optimism in the infinite progress of humanity even at the expense of nature, e.g., its economism and productivism, Marxism fares no better than its counterpart, possessive individualism. Both ideologies intend to milk nature to death, and the only difference between the two is the question of distributing the wealth which both intend to accumulate. Both capitalism and Marxism equally failed miserably in ecology. So far, Marxian socialism failed to compete and outpace capitalism which is called by Francis Fukuyama “the end of history.” See my “Marxism and Deep Ecology in Postmodernity: From Homo Oeconomicus to Homo Ecologicus, Thesis Eleven, no. 28 (1991): 86–99. 34.  Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk (New York: Free Press, 1991), p. 76. 35.  Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). 36. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau’s Political Writings, ed. Alan Ritter and Julia Conaway Bondanella and trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella (New York: Norton, 1988), p. 24. 37.  Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955), pp. 119–20.

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Chapter Three

The Task of Public Philosophy in the Transversal World of Politics

1. IN THE BEGINNING This essay attempts to define by way of transversality the role of public philosophy in the globalizing world of multiculturalism. What, then, is public philosophy? It is a philosophical discourse on “public issues” (res publica in Latin: things public or “re(s) public”). To be sure, there is an array of public things: We speak of “public reason,” “public opinion,” “public affairs,” “public culture,” “public interests,” “public administration,” “public international law,” “public safety,” “public schools,” “public parks,” “public philanthropy,” “public corporations,” even “public happiness,” ad infinitum.1 Customarily, the “public” is distinguished from the “private” that relates to matters personal in nature. However, the boundary between the public and the private overlaps and becomes blurred when the personal itself is sloganized as political. It also has a variation from one culture to another: For example, the question of age is something public in Korea, whereas it is something private or privately guarded information in the United States. Broadly defined, moreover, the human is the simultaneous happening of the internalization of the external and the externalization of the internal, which is chiasmic or transversal. The body itself, which defines our existential condition of being in the world, is a two-dimensional, double-bound being: It is at once private and public. It interweaves and interlocks the private (e.g., in nudity and sexuality) and the public (e.g., in playing sports). The public is usually something political or governmental that refers to activities of homo politicus. In her classic work The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt makes the distinction between the public and the private. Following the classical tradition of Aristotle, she identifies the public with what is political.2 Political action is action par excellence, which is distinct from the 59

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“labor” of biological nature (animal laborans) on the one hand, and the “work” of fabricating or manufacturing (homo faber or homo oeconomicus) on the other. It is true that the ascendancy of economic categories in John Locke’s liberalism and Karl Marx’s socialism in Western modernity downgrades political categories and subordinates them to economic ones. However, it is unrealistic today to identify the public with the political, because this ignores the “publicness” of the economic. Thus, the Aristotelian way of defining the political solely as public at the expense of the economic, i.e., matters of the household (oikos) activities assigned to slaves in ancient Greece is far short of demarcating legitimately what constitutes the public. It became outmoded in the beginning of Western modernity. The question of citizenship, democratic or otherwise, is a public issue. It is a “re(s)publican” principle that pertains to an aggregate body of citizens as a “natural” whole: According to Aristotle, man (in the sense of the male gender) is by nature a political animal. The American constitution was meant by its Founding Fathers to be republican as opposed to the monarchical regime. The republican principle refers to that form of government, which is ruled by the populace. Public philosophy as a republican principle in that world of multiculturalism, which has increasingly been becoming globalized, must be predicated upon the minimum of three preconditions or prerequisites.3 (1) The public as an association of citizens has its allegiance to both the polis and the cosmopolis. The polis is a fait accompli (accomplished fact) and the cosmopolis is something generative in nature within our reach. In the world of multiculturalism, we are not one but many. Interestingly, according to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “we” are neither “people” nor “masses” but a “multitude.” The idea of “people” for them reduces many to a single or unitary entity while “masses” is driven to uniformity or conformity. Both “people” and “masses” fail to take into account difference or diversity and, thus, plurality.4 To accentuate diversity in the idea of “we,” “multitude” is preferred to describe social reality which is nothing but a multiple web of relationships as well as a multiplicity of experiential realities. “Multitude” for its name sake, moreover, is a particularly fitting response to both the phenomenon of multiculturalism and the advent of globalization. Globalization might better be termed “glocalization” for the simple reason that in globalization, the global without the local is empty and the local without the global is myopic. The basic grammar of “multitude” is inscribed in the notion that without distinction it is a faceless crowd. Writing The Present Age in the midnineteenth century, Søren Kierkegaard was prophetic in observing the age’s “apathy” and “indolence” which loses “enthusiasm and sincerity in politics.”5 In other words, Kierkegaard’s “present age” lost “the riches of inwardness,” which is likened to “squandering money upon luxuries and dispensing with

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necessities,” or “selling one’s breeches to buy a wig.” For him, it is not the distinct individual but the collective masses who are the enemies of the social. His voice was echoed loudly by Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, José Ortega y Gasset, Gabriel Marcel, Nicolas Berdyaev, and Hannah Arendt in the twentieth century, which is the age of totalitarianism as the unprecedented political regime sui generis. The psychopathology of the faceless and atomized crowd is conducive to a mass movement, as in Nazism. The American sociologist David Riesman characterized this phenomenon as “lonely crowd” whose “other-directed” rather than “inner-directed” disposition is susceptible to an instant mobilization.6 Heidegger, too, spoke of it as the phenomenon of das Man or the anonymous “they.” Das Man is Dasein without “resoluteness” (Entschlossenheit)7 or—to borrow the term from Jean Baudrillard— “hyperconformity,” which is “the end of the social.” In the ideology of the mass media, according to Baudrillard, “the masses are a stronger medium than all the media” (italics original): “Mass(age) is the message”—a wordplay on Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message.”8 (2) Public philosophy is and must be eminently practical. It cannot be otherwise. In this respect, Stephen Toulmin’s essay “The Recovery of Practical Philosophy” deserves our attention.9 It is most poignant in informing the nature and formation of public philosophy as practical philosophy. John Dewey, according to Toulmin, argued that “since the 1630s [the era of Cartesian epistemocracy] the philosophical debate has rested on too passive a view of the human mind and on inappropriate demands for geometrical certainty.” Ludwig Wittgenstein in the 1940s, too, echoed Dewey in showing “how endemic confusions over the ‘grammar’ of language mislead us into vacuous speculations” which cauterize and “distract us from the important issues in life.” Since Descartes, philosophy turned its attention to “theory-minded” rather than “practice-oriented” ideas. What is “in” in philosophy are formal logic, general principles, abstract axioms, and the permanent, and what is “out” of it are rhetoric, particular cases, concrete diversity, and the transitory. In other words, practical philosophy has indeed taken “a back seat.” Philosophy has opted for what is poetic, unusual, and uncommon at the expense of what is prosaic, usual, and common. Toulmin perceptively observes that “philosophers turned ethics into abstract theory, ignoring the concrete problems of moral practice. The modern philosophers assumed that God and Freedom, Mind and Matter, Good and Justice, are governed by timeless, universal ‘principles,’ and regarded writers who focus on particular cases, or types of cases limited by specific conditions, as either underphilosophical or dishonest. So, seventeenth-century philosophy again limited its own scope, excluding the examination of ‘particular practical cases’ by definition.” Toulmin intimates that the “recovery of practical philosophy” is “a pendulum swing” or what Thomas S. Kuhn calls “a paradigm shift.” To be

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practical, public philosophy is aligned with the Aristotelian notion of phronesis, prudence, or experiential/commonsense knowledge that is joined with politics. Giambattista Vico’s notion of sensus communis defines the practical nature of public philosophy. Sensus communis is, according to him, “judgment without reflection, shared by an entire class, an entire people, an entire nation, or the entire human race.”10 By the same token, he emphasizes the order of public institutions coming into being before the order of ideas: ideas that tailgate institutional realities are by necessity pragmatic. Vico is a practically minded or juris/prudential philosopher who speaks of the jus gentium or the law of the people. For Hannah Arendt, too, judgment—unlike the contemplative life of the mind (vita contemplativa)—is that form of practical wisdom necessary to public philosophy that requires a fitting or concrete response to “a particular situation in its particularity” on matters of humanity’s vita activa (life of action). As such, it is a gray zone of ambiguity between thinking and acting or theory and practice which has been a perennial and thorny issue in the history of philosophizing ethics and politics. William James was straightforward and businesslike, if not unrefined, when he spoke of the “cash value” of philosophy or pragmatism that is capable of bringing about cultural changes, i.e., “philosophy as cultural politics.”11 The dictum that “in the beginning was the Deed” also characterizes the worldly wisdom of the versatile Goethe who sings in Faust the song of the “greenness” of life or deed against the “grayness” of theory. He is audacious enough to lash out at the venerable Delphic/Socratic dictum “Know theyself” as “a ruse of a cabal of priests” who seek to draw us into “a false inner contemplation.”12 For the worldly Goethe, to be alone is not to be: Humans only know themselves insofar as they know the world—the world that they only come to know in themselves and themselves in the world. For Goethe, moreover, what the self is to the other, the West is to the East: As the horizon of the self is expanded because of the other, so is the horizon of the West widened by way of contact with the East. The cogito (the “I think”) exalts in thinking of an individual in solitude or isolation from the world, whereas the “I do” is an unconditional affirmation of being social. Thus Merleau-Ponty argues that sociality scandalizes the Cartesian cogito (ergo sum) because the self inheres in the other both human and natural, and vice versa. The ex/change of ideas and values in dialogue with the other beyond self-closure or self-sufficiency brings about radical transformation.13 The Confucian/Sinic tradition of philosophizing has been manifestly thisworldly, practical, concrete, and particular rather than otherworldly, speculative, abstract, and general. It accentuates the utmost importance of politics cum ethics in philosophizing, i.e., the pragmatics of coexistence. The sinogram

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“ruler” signifies the unifier of heaven, humanity, and earth. The Analects of Confucius is the standard-bearer of this pragmatic tradition, which honors and sustains the importance of performance in human conduct, e.g., we mean what we say, and we say what we mean. The Confucian notion of sincerity—that cardinal virtue that measures the depth of the Sinic moral soul—exemplifies the importance of pragmatics. It transliterally means “word-achieved.” What is so unusual about sincerity is the fact that it even honors the “nobility of failure,” not just of success.14 In the Analects, Confucius iterates the noble virtue of sincerity: “without knowing the power of words, it is impossible to know men”; when the superior man “is heard to speak, his language is firm and decided”; “the wise err neither in regard to their men nor to their words”; “the virtuous will be sure to speak correctly, but those whose speech is good may not always be virtuous”; “the superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his action”; and friendship with “the glib-tongued” is injurious. (3) To be efficacious, public philosophy needs to be a deconstructive critique. The grammar of deconstruction tells us that it is both destructive and constructive at the same time. It is, according to Heidegger, “a critical process in which the traditional concepts, which at first must necessarily be employed, are de-constructed down to the sources from which they were drawn.”15 Foucault, who was influenced by Heidegger, links critique to the nexus of knowledge and power: “Critique is the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its effects of power and question power on its discourses of truth.”16 As the truth of power and the power of truth are inseparable, so are philosophy and politics in public philosophy. Public philosophy contains within itself the element of “critical resistance”—to borrow David Couzens Hoy’s term—to the existing power structure.17 Critical resistance refutes all forms of cooptation, which tends to absorb intellectuals/philosophers into power structures. A public philosopher is, in short, a heretic or heresiarch—a nonconformist, like Martin Luther in the West or the Buddha in the East, who dissents from the power of establishment and refuses to accept an established doctrine. Let me call critical resistance “jesterly” as opposed to “priestly” by drawing insights from Leszek Kolakowski. He is incontrovertible when he observes that throughout the ages there is an incurable antagonism between “a philosophy that perpetuates the absolute” and “a philosophy that questions accepted absolutes,” that is, there is the antagonism between the “priestly” and the “jesterly,” which are the two most general forms of intellectual culture at any given period of time in history.18 Harvey Cox contends that the carnivalesque imagination is indispensable to the survival and periodic rejuvenation of human civilizations, including its political institutions. He contends, however, that when it becomes an instrument of ideology or a

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particular political program, it loses a critical edge of resistance and becomes shriveled into a caged bird or a toothless tiger.19 Ralph Waldo Emerson, who is a consummate and unrivaled American essayist whose pithy words and passages are often quoted and misquoted in American intellectual circles, is called the first American “public intellectual.” It is his designation of “scholars” as “priests” with which I would disagree. “Priests” are authoritative and ceremonious guardians of the absolutes, while “jesters” are those vigilantes who distrust the absolute and a stabilized system and intend to deconstruct it. The carnivalesque is the “jesterly” play of difference that aims at the creation of an alternative or “reversible world” order. As a ludic form of transgression and subversion, it intends to transform a “real” world into a “possible” world. In the Bruegelian and Rabelaisian themes of Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogical body politics, which contains a hidden critique of Stalin’s absolute and totalitarian politics based on the Hegelian and Marxian dialectic, to carnivalize the world is to dialogize it: in them carnivalization and dialogization go hand in hand. As a protest against the monological “misrule” of (Soviet) officialdom, the carnivalesque model of life transgresses and transforms the canonical order of truth and the official order of reality. As Bakhtin writes forcefully: [it] is past millennia’s way of sensing the world as one great communal performance. This sense of the world, liberating one from fear, bringing one person maximally close to another (everything is drawn into the zone of free familiar contact), with its joy at change and its joyful relativity, is opposed to that onesided and gloomy official seriousness which is dogmatic and hostile to evolution and change, which seeks to absolutize a given condition of existence or a given social order. From precisely that sort of seriousness did the carnival sense of the world liberate man. But there is not a grain of nihilism in it, nor a grain of empty frivolity or vulgar bohemian individualism.20

As it is exemplary of dis/sensus, the carnivalesque, which is the opposite of carnage, celebrates dialogue and community; it liberates a multitude and brings them together and invites them to participate in communal living. In this light, the scholar is a jester rather than a priest. He/she means to change the world by first changing the conception of it. Bakhtin is quintessentially a public philosopher and his thought is an exemplar of public philosophy. 2. IN THE MIDDLE (1): THE TRIPTYCH OF TRANSVERSALITY, GLOBALIZATION, AND PUBLIC PHILOSOPHY It is worth speculating about the role of public philosophy in the brave new world of multiculturalism that is being ushered into a rooted cosmopolis.

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Here I wish to put to work the practical wisdom of phenomenology, which was initiated by Edmund Husserl and continued, modified, and extended by many others. As a philosophical movement, phenomenology is not a permanently stagnant and fixed set of dogmas. Its vitality is revealed in its capacity to transform itself, and its radicality is measured by its readiness to explore everything that is both experienced and experienceable. It is ready to sing “Songs of Experience” (the title of William Blake’s illuminated book of poems).21 For very good reason, phenomenology is called a radical philosophy of experience, or “radical empiricism” (William James’s term), which not only means to encounter the actually given or the real but also exercises the freedom of trying its luck on the high seas of the human intellect. In short, it keeps its constant vigilance on history à venir, or the future as history.22 The buzzword globalization is a new adventure in the civilizational history of humankind everywhere. It is a movement toward the creation of a new world. At the moment, globalization is really “glocalization” because it is still and in the foreseeable future rooted in the local/national/regional. As we are living in the midst of the world that is constituted by a plurality of life-worlds, the neologism glocalization signifies the interdependence of the global and the local or the rootedness of the global in the local: The global without the local is abstract, and the local without the global is myopic.23 The end of globalization is neither to hold on to national/cultural identities nor to establish “one world” with “one government.” Rather, it fosters a non-polar middle path between the global and the local that shuns “faceless universalism” on the one hand and “ethnocentric chauvinism” on the other—to borrow the fitting expression of Cornel West.24 Reiterating Diogenes’s old cosmopolitan ideal (i.e., “I am a citizen of the world”), Virginia Woolf declares that “my country is the whole world”—the mixed metaphor that erases the polarity between, and bolsters the interdependence of, “country” and “world.”25 In this setting, public philosophy as practical philosophy is in need of relating and debating about momentous issues of the local/national and global/international at the same time. In the context of globalization or the globalizing world, it is well to invoke Husserl, for whom philosophers are “civil servants of humanity” (Funktionäre der Menschheit), of not just European but all humanity without exception.26 His ideal matches Confucian humanism based on ren which, as an all-encompassing virtue in life-worldly practice, blankets the region of the global called East Asia (China, Korea, and Japan). For, as the old saying goes, I am human and thus nothing human is foreign to me—that ideal which Kwame Anthony Appiah calls “the golden rule of cosmopolitanism.”27 The sinophile Ezra Pound would call Confucian ren a poetics of cosmopolitanism. For those who disregard ren—the humane quality of being human—as too archaic to be relevant to today’s newly forming world of multiculturalism and

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globalization, what the late Russian dialogical philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin has to say is instructive: The past, distant or near, is never past. For him, the recycling of past meanings for today and tomorrow is open-ended and infinite. He is immensely profound when he writes: There is neither a first nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless future). Even past meanings, that is, those born in the dialogue of past centuries, can never be stable (finalized, ended once and for all)—they will always change (be renewed) in the process of subsequent, future development of the dialogue . . . . Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming festival.28

Indeed, Bakhtin’s dialogism, which is infinitized but not totalized, transcends the facile ideological quarrel between “conservatism” (the preservation and conservation of the past tradition at all cost) and “radicalism” (change for the future by abandoning the past altogether) because radical changes can be made by the use of the past or past meanings. The appropriation of the past for the future as well as for the present is a repetition that is never repetitive but a variant (with a difference).29 The institution of Western thought called “Eurocentrism” as well as the practice of political imperialism is that habitus of mind that privileges Europe or the West as the cultural, technological, political, economic, and moral capital of the entire globe. “Modernization” is nothing but the all-encompassing catchword given to the totalizing and hegemonizing process of this Eurocentric phenomenon. As the astute interpreter and critic of Western modernity Zygmunt Bauman remarks: From at least the seventeenth century and well into the twentieth, the writing elite of Western Europe and its footholds on other continents considered its own way of life as a radical break in universal history. Virtually unchallenged faith in the superiority of its own mode over all alternative forms of life—contemporaneous or past—allowed it to take itself as the reference point for the interpretation of the telos of history. This was a novelty in the experience of objective time; for most of the history of Christian Europe, time-reckoning was organized around a fixed point in the slowly receding past. “Now, . . . Europe set the reference point of objective time in motion, attaching it firmly to its own thrust toward colonizing the future (italics added) in the same way as it had colonized the surrounding space.”30

Indeed, this Eurocentric idea of colonizing the future gives new meaning to the conception of modernity as an unfinished project (by Jürgen Habermas) or the end of history (by Francis Fukuyama).

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It is important to emphasize that all understanding, all thinking, is more or less comparative, that is, intertextual—the very lesson I learned from studying comparative politics as a student. Comparison is the source for discovering the limits of one’s own discourse in light of the other, which is not one but always plural. Speaking of the arrival of comparative literature, Jonathan Culler wisely prods his literary colleagues “to abandon its traditional Eurocentrism and turn global.”31 The Chinese American literary critic Rey Chow argues that the study of the non-West is strongly justified in exploring and questioning the very limits of Western discourse. It is instructive for aspiring comparative political theorists to learn from literary comparativists about how to fashion a “world literature” (Weltliteratur)— the endearing term that Goethe coined in 1827—since comparative political theory as a discipline is at best in its infancy. A few words of caution: understanding the other (the “foreign” other in particular), as anthropology as well as psychoanalysis has shown, is a difficult and demanding undertaking for no other reason than that the other as a moving target is always other than itself. Indeed, the other is the “black hole” of all understanding, all conceptualization, and all relationships. At a moment of frustration and despair, the existential phenomenologist Jean-Paul Sartre faced a real moment of this black hole: “Hell is other people.” Furthermore, comparativists should be aware of Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon, which presents four different but equally plausible accounts of the same murder. The intriguing question is: Which is the true version of the murder? The philosopher begins anew by inventing concepts to come to grips with the world always in transition. In today’s multicultural and globalizing world, public philosophy is in need of inventing new concepts to explore changing realities. I suggest that transversality is such a revolutionary concept. It is conceived of as a practical response befitting for the exigency of our time, that is, for the transforming world of multiculturalism and globalization. Husserl invoked in the mid-1930s the metaphor of the phoenix rising from the ashes. Transversality is proposed here as a new paradigm or sea change in the conceptualization of the world.32 In the kindred spirit of Husserl, Calvin O. Schrag boldly declares that “[t]ransversal logos replaces the universal logos as the lynch-pin for the philosophy of the new millennium” (italics added).33 The image of the newly emerging face of transversality may be likened to the rustic and incomparable wooden statue of the priest Hoshi (Baozi) at a Zen temple in Kyoto, Japan, whose face marks a new dawn of awakening (satori) or signals the beginning of a new global or mondial regime of ontology, culture, politics, and ethics. From the crack in the middle of the old face of the Buddha, there emerges an interstitial, liminal face that signifies a new transfiguration and transvaluation of the existing world. The icon of the emerging

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new face symbolizes the arrival of Maitreya (the future “Awakened One”) or Middle Way—that third enabling term of transversality that is destined to navigate the stormy waters of intercultural border crossings. Transversality means to overcome and go beyond (trans) the clash of ethnocentrisms both “Orientalist” and “Occidentalist.” We are warned not to take it simply as a middle point between bipolar opposites. Rather, it breaks through bipolarity itself (theory and practice, philosophy and non-philosophy, mind and body, femininity and masculinity, humanity and nature, Europe and non-Europe, etc.). What must be recognized as important here is the fact that transversality is the paradigmatic way of overcoming all polarizing dichotomies.34 The momentous discovery of transversality, of a new intercontinent of conceptualization, is Schrag’s seminal contribution to philosophy in general and to phenomenological hermeneutics in particular. Inspired directly and indirectly by the philosophical insights of Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard, and Foucault, he has developed transversality as diagonal/ dialogical engagement and enrichment across differences and embraces the conception of truth as the spatio-temporal way of communicability, which, as I appropriate it, would be intercultural, interspeciesistic, intersexual, intersensorial, and, above all, interdisciplinary. Schrag contends that transversality moves “beyond the constraints of the metaphysical oppositions of universality versus particularity and identity versus difference. Transversal unity is an achievement of communication as it visits a multiplicity of viewpoints, perspectives, belief systems, and regions of concern.” As a refiguration of rationality, transversality is for Schrag a passageway between modernity and postmodernity, that is to say, between the modernist overdetermination and the postmodernist underdetermination of reason and its claims. His transversal shifter is meant to scale the continental divide between modernity and postmodernity. It intends to dissolve, as it were, their difference(s). By so doing, it keeps open, as he puts it, “the prospect for invention, intervention, transgression, re-creation, etc.” (italics added).35 By way of transversality, Schrag means to subvert and transgress the dichotomy between modernism and postmodernism by splitting diagonally the difference between the pure verticality of modernist “transcendealism” and the pure horizontality of postmodernist “historicism.” By administering a double-edged pharmakon to both, transversality as a paradigm shifter between the two extreme tendencies of modernity and postmodernity for Schrag is analogous to the above-mentioned Maitreyan middle way: Between the “Scylla of a hegemonic unification” on the one hand and “the Charybdis of a chaotic pluralism” on the other. It, in other words, unlocks the deadlock between the two. In the very words of Schrag himself:

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Thus truth as communicability [i.e., transversality] . . . is at once a disclosure of similarity and difference, unity and multiplicity, the commensurable and the incommensurable. Historicism forgets similarity, unity, and commensurability; transcendentalism forgets difference, multiplicity, and incommensurability. And each forgets the other because both decontextualize the intentionality of communicative praxis.36

Within the phenomenological movement, Schrag’s formulations of transversality or “transversal universals” are, as he himself acknowledges, “somewhat reminiscent” of the “lateral universals” of Merleau-Ponty, for whom history with an ambiguous plurality (Vielseitigkeit) of cultural ethos is likened to be an open or unwritten notebook. Transversality advances the cause of cross-cultural fertilization or hybridization as well as cross-disciplinary engagement in which truth as communicability privileges, and is monopolized by, neither the West nor philosophy alone. Here we cannot resist comparing Schrag’s construction of truth as communicative praxis with the dialogism of Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian literary theorist and philosopher (see Bakhtin, 1981). Listen to the deep and prodigious voice of Bakhtin. Speaking of Dostoevsky, who is his philosophical protagonist, he writes without equivocation: At the center of Dostoevsky’s artistic worlds must lie dialogue, and dialogue not as a means but as an end itself. Dialogue here is not the threshold to action, it is the action itself. It is not a means for revealing, for bringing to the surface the already ready-made character of a person; no, in dialogue a person not only shows himself outwardly, but he becomes for the first time that which he is—and, we repeat, not only for others but for himself as well. To be means to communicate dialogically. When dialogue ends, everything ends. Thus dialogue, by its very essence, cannot and must not come to an end. At the level of his religious-utopian world-view Dostoevsky carries dialogue into eternity, conceiving of it as eternal co-rejoicing, co-admiration, con-cord. At the level of the novel, it is presented as the unfinalizability of dialogue, although originally as dialogue’s vicious circle (italics added).37

As the disenchantment of the status quo calls for transcendence, transversality is necessarily a deconstructive concept. It first dismantles or unpacks the status quo and then goes beyond what is given, received, or established by constructing a new formation of concepts. It, in short, attempts to challenge the assumed transparency of truth as universal and overcome the limits of universality as the Eurocentric canon of truth in Western modernity. It means to decenter Europe as the site of “universal truth” whose “identitarian” and “unitarian” motivation fails to take into account the world of multiculturalism. The pluralist Johann Gottfried von Herder challenges: “I find myself

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unable to comprehend how reason can be presented so universally as the single summit and purpose of all human culture, all happiness, all good. Is the whole body just one big eye?”38 The French philosopher and sinologist François Jullien calls the effort of this decentering Eurocentrism or Western modernity—with Kant in mind— “a new ‘Copernican reversal.’”39 He contends that in “shaking up” Western modernity, China becomes a “philosophical tool,” that is, he uses Chinese thought to interrogate Western philosophy and to liberate it from its own “mental cage.” Most radically, he wishes to replace the very concept of “truth” itself with that of “intelligibility” because “truth” is bound up with the history of Western philosophy. Jullien puts Michel Foucault to the test in order to vindicate the Eurocentric “legislation” of truth for all global humanity. In his 1978 visit to Japan, the vintage Foucault remarked that as the warp of knowledge and the woof of political power are interwoven as one fabric, European imperialism and the era of Western philosophy together have come to an end. Foucault is not alone in conjecturing that philosophy of the future must be born “outside Europe” or in the “meetings and impacts” between Europe and non-Europe.40 To be true to the spirit of multiculturalism or of a plurality of diverse cultures, there cannot and must not be one hegemonic center. Unfortunately, there is a propensity in all cultures to inscribe “the universal in the singular,”41 not in the plural. Transversality as a paradigm shifter challenges the assumed transparency of truth as universal and overcomes the limits of universality as the Eurocentric canon of truth in Western modernity: it should be spelled “trans(uni)versality.” Thus, the end of transversality is to decenter Europe as the site of universal truth whose identitarian and unitarian motivation fails to take into account the changing world of multiculturalism and globalization. As Merleau-Ponty relates it forcefully, “There is not a philosophy which contains all philosophies; philosophy as a whole is at certain moments in each philosophy. To take up the celebrated phrase again, philosophy’s center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.”42 The Eurocentric conception of universality is ignorant of the geography of cultural differences: As the Martiniquan francophone philosopher Edouard Glissant puts it succinctly, “Thinking about One is not thinking about All” (or Many) (La pensée de l’Un ne soit pas la pensée du Tout).43 The latter, in short, cannot be reduced to the former. Merleau-Ponty deserves our special attention here in the context of multiculturalism and globalization because of his biting critique of Eurocentrism manifested in Hegel’s thought whose repetitious sound-bite has been aired not only in Europe but also in non-Europe. Merleau-Ponty’s use of the suggestive term “lateral universal” across geography and history makes him unmistak-

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ably a consummate transversalist avant la lettre. His critique of Hegel’s Eurocentrism by way of the “lateral universal” intimates the possibility of forging a trans-European (and, I might add, trans-ethnocentric) philosophy. Moreover, the lateral universal as a new way of thinking may be likened to digging another hole in a new place rather than digging the same hole (vertically or hierarchically) deeper and deeper with no exit in sight. By so doing, it facilitates lateral border-crossings by decentering all the centers from one culture to another (intercultural/transcultural), from one species to another (interspecific/transspecific), from one discipline to another (interdisciplinary/ transdisciplinary), from one sense to another (intersensorial/transsensorial) with a view of inventing the “new objects” of exploration and investigation.44 In the conceit of his Eurocentrism, Hegel judges the “Oriental philosophy” of China in a cavalier fashion. In his grand narratives of Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1892), he was totally dismissive of Chinese philosophy as “elementary” (infantile); the Chinese yin-yang trigrams and hexagrams are “superficial,” and the Chinese composition of elements (fire, water, wood, metal, and earth) are “all in confusion.” Then he caps his commentary on Confucius and rushes into a hasty prejudgment: “Cicero gives us De Officiis, a book of moral teaching more comprehensive and better than all the books of Confucius” (italics added).45 It is transparent that Hegel’s argument is too judgmental and self-referential in which Europe is his “reference culture,” which is “self-generated and self-sufficient.”46 The concept of truth as universal is West-generated or ethnophilosophically generated, that is, born out of “Western narcissism” and its “ethnocentric ignorance.”47 Hegel’s myopic view of universality may be likened to the East Asian proverbial frog who lived in a deep well, looked up to the sky one day, and squealed with delight: “That’s the universe!” Let also Akira Kurasawa’s famed film Rashoman—to mention again—stand as a parable for the glib universalist Hegel. For Hegel, in sum, philosophical truth as absolute and universal knowledge is certified by the Occidental seal of approval alone.48 For Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s transversal argument against Hegel’s Eurocentrism, on the other hand, all thought—philosophical or otherwise—is part of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) as everyday historical and socio-cultural reality. All philosophies are anthropological types, and none has any special privilege of or monopoly on truth.49 European philosophy is as much “ethnophilosophical” as Chinese thought. However, Hegel’s Eurocentric philosophy assumes that what is ethnophilosophical in the West is universalized, whereas what is ethnophilosophical in China (and India) remains ethnophilosophical. “If Western thought is what it claims to be,” Merleau-Ponty strongly reacts to Hegel’s Eurocentrism, “it must prove it by understanding all ‘life-worlds’” (italics added).50 Truth, universal or otherwise, is in the details. What we need

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to explore Merleau-Ponty’s intimation is to do the anthropology of many if not all life-worlds both Western and non-Western, that is, across geography and history in (lateral) search of universals (i.e., transversals). To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson slightly: the universal does not attract us until it is housed in each individual culture.51 Pan is implicated only in Proteus. For Merleau-Ponty, moreover, the West invented an idea of truth itself and there is no one philosophy that contains all philosophies. Rather, philosophy’s center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere. Thus, truth is concentric/ polycentric, that is, transversal or X-cultural. Merleau-Ponty further contends that the conceited path of Hegel that excludes Chinese thought from universal knowledge and draws a geographical frontier between philosophy and non-philosophy also excludes a good part of the Western past itself. Philosophy as a perpetual beginning is open to examine its own idea of truth again and again because truth is for MerleauPonty “a treasure scattered about in human life prior to all philosophy and not divided among doctrines.”52 Thusly viewed, Western philosophy itself is destined to reexamine not only its own idea of truth but also related matters and institutions such as science, economy, politics, and technology. MerleauPonty writes with unsurpassable poignancy: From this angle, civilizations lacking our philosophical or economic equipment take on an instructive value. It is not a matter of going in search of truth or salvation in what falls short of science or philosophical awareness, or of dragging chunks of mythology as such into our philosophy, but acquiring—in the presence of these variants of humanity that we are so far from a sense of the theoretical and practical problems our institutions are faced with, and of rediscovering the existential field that they are born in and that their long success has led us to forget. The Orient’s “childishness” has something to teach us, if it were nothing more than the narrowness [and rigidity, I might add] of our adult ideas. The relationships between Orient and Occident, like that between child and adult, is not that of ignorance to knowledge or non-philosophy to philosophy; it is much more subtle, making room on the part of the Orient for all anticipations and “prematurations.” Simply rallying and subordinating “non-philosophy” to true philosophy will not create the unity of the human spirit. It already exists in each culture’s lateral relationships to the others, in the echoes one awakes in the other (italics added).53

Italo Calvino defines the very notion of multiplicity as an “inability to find an ending”: Multiplicity multiplies itself.54 Ambiguity comes with the territory of multiplicity: The former is a territorial imperative of the latter.55 The same cannot be said of Hegel’s dialectic, which dictates the Eurocentric march of history. The ultimate synthesis of his dialectic of history is in fact the identity of identity (affirmation) and difference (negation). In mapping

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connections, Gilles Deleuze contends that his philosophy of multiplicity based on the “repetitive” logic of difference is “nondialectizable.”56 In support of Max Weber’s conception of sociality (l’intermonde) as reconcilable or transversal multiplicity of perspectives, Merleau-Ponty argues that the dialectic is inherently “unstable” and that the only “good dialectic” is “hyperdialectic,” i.e., “dialectic without synthesis.” Hyperdialectic, he intimates, is “a thought that . . . is capable of reaching truth because it envisages without restriction the plurality of the relationships and what has been called ambiguity” (italics added).57 Here we would be remiss if, in light of Merleau-Ponty’s above-mentioned “lateral universal” including a critique of Hegel’s Eurocentrism, we fail to acknowledge the distinct contribution of the Caribbean francophone Edouard Glissant to the making of the transversal world. Educated in philosophy and ethnography in France, he is a philosopher, a poet, and a novelist whose “poetics of relation” shaped Caribbean (antillais) discourse on “diversality” and “créolité” (creoleness). Glissant has an uncanny convergence in the name of transversality with Merleau-Ponty in his critique of Hegel when he articulates without equivocation that transversal relation means to replace “the old concept of the universal.” Speaking of Hegel’s conception of history, he writes: History is a highly functional fantasy of the West, originating at precisely the time when it alone “made” the history of the world. If Hegel relegated African peoples to the ahistorical, Amerindian peoples to the prehistorical, in order to reserve History for European people exclusively, it appears that it is not because these African or Amerindian peoples “have entered History” that we can conclude today that such a hierarchical conception of “the march of History” is no longer relevant.58

Glissant unpacks Hegel’s history by dissolving it as irrelevant or passé in the postcolonial world of diverse cultures that rejects “the linear, hierarchical vision of a single History.” 3. IN THE MIDDLE (2): IDENTITY, ALTERITY, AND RESPONSIBLE POLITICS Kishore Mahbubani, who is a protégé of Lee Kuan Yew, asked quite a few years ago an intriguing question: “Can Asians think?”59 The most obvious answer would be “Yes, indeed, they can.” However, what he really meant to ask was whether Asians can think independently of Western influence. Although transversality as hybrid or creolized thinking would dissolve Mahbubani’s question, what I call relational ontology or Interbeing,60 I submit,

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characterizes the distinction of East Asian thinking and doing. The human in Japanese and Korean sinography, for example, is spelled with two characters: nin/gen and in/gan. Nin/in stands for the “human,” which depicts his/her “upright posture” pointing to moral rectitude and gen/gan symbolizes “betweenness” or “in-betweenness.” Thus ningen/ingan signifies the idea that to be human is to be interhuman: To be alone is not to be. The human is nothing but a web of relationships.61 In his recent study The Geography of Thought,62 the American cultural psychologist Richard E. Nisbett shows convincingly, I think, that East Asians (the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese), whose daily linguistic diet is wholly or partly sinographic, think and do things qualitatively differently from their Western counterparts. He confesses that he is no longer a “universalist” but a “pluralist.” His work is a decisive empirical evidence that supports the veracity of East-Asian relational ontology or makes it credible. Pluralism is a philosophy of difference: in it we make connections in the face of difference. To invoke Heidegger’s wordplay, Differenz is indeed Unter/schied. Pluralism is a repository of differences: but for difference, there would be no plurality or multiplicity. Thus, the politics of difference refutes and supersedes the politics of identity in the world of multiculturalism. In his On Toleration, Michael Walzer rightly contends that difference makes toleration necessary, while toleration makes difference possible.63 For the late French-Jewish phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas, who is regarded by many as the most important moral philosopher of the twentieth century, ethics is “first philosophy” (philosophie première or prima philosophia). As such, it precedes both epistemology (Descartes) and ontology (Heidegger). “When I speak of first philosophy,” he emphasizes, “I am referring to a philosophy of dialogue that cannot not be an ethics.”64 For him, heteronomy alone is the site of responsibility if not ethics itself. By heteronomy, he means to favor the other in an asymmetrical relationship. The heteronomic ethics of responsibility is anchored in the primacy of the other (alterity) over the self (ipseity).65 Altruism for its name sake, therefore, is exemplary of responsibility. The ethics of responsibility based on the other-centeredness (heteronomy) is a radical shift from Anglo-American “rights talk” whose center is the self in everything we do and think. The former is “otherwise” than the latter. What “rights talk” is to Ptolemaic geocentrism, the heteronomic ethics of responsibility is to Copernican heliocentrism. Responsibility thusly defined is a Copernican reversal of social and ethical thought which began with the nineteenth-century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach who discovered “Thou” at the center of human dialogue for the future of philosophy. Principle 59 of his Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft (1843), reads: “The single man for himself possesses the essence of man neither in himself

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as a moral being nor in himself as a thinking being. The essence of man is contained only in the community and unity of man with man; it is a unity, however, which rests only on the reality of the distinction between I and thou.”66 In this connection, it is of utmost importance to recall that Hannah Arendt’s controversial reportage concerning Adolf Eichmann’s “banality of evil” was identified with “thoughtlessness.” By “thoughtlessness,” she meant Eichmann’s utter inability to think from the standpoint of an Other, i.e., the amnesia or erasure of the other’s difference. Eichmann’s “banality of evil” is indeed a sobering reminder that the politics of identity or the abolition of the other’s difference results in the inhumane politics of cruelty, suffering, violence, and extermination as well as the politics of racism and colonialism. The infliction of violence and terror by an invisible enemy was transparent in the faces of Americans on the fateful day of September 11 (9/11), 2001. September 11 and its ensuing events unmistakably prove that violence has its own vicious cycle. Shashi Tharoor, who was a high senior United Nations official, summed up the magnitude of the demolition of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center as the birthing of the twenty-first century. For him, then, the twenty-first century, like the other preceding centuries, began with violence. The famous or infamous dictum of Karl Clausewitz’s Realpolitik may be incontrovertibly true. It pertains to the inseparability of violence from politics since for him “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” In his Humanism and Terror (1947 in French),67 Maurice Merleau-Ponty declared that “humanism”—Machiavellianism notwithstanding—is not immune to violence. He asserted with firm conviction that one who abstains from violence toward the violent is an accomplice of violence itself. Not only is violence the common origin of all political regimes, but also violence is our lot, as long as we humans are incarnate beings. Violence is without doubt an utter failure of human dialogue, of communication. It eschews responsibility: It is intrinsically an irresponsible act because it intends to efface, harm, or kill an Other. As a freshman in college in 1954, I was introduced to Alfred North Whitehead’s inspiring work Adventures of Ideas (1954),68 which left an indelible impression on me. It taught me an unforgettable lesson on the endearing idea that human civilization, human civility, is the victory of persuasion over force. As a measured failure of persuasion, violence takes a heavy toll on humans and nonhumans alike in abolishing differences.69 The breach of civility is predicated upon one’s epistemological infallibility and moral inculpability, which is a deadly mix: I can never err and do nothing wrong. J. Glenn Gray’s (1959) The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle is a deeply phenomenological study of homo furens (warriors). Among the issues that Gray observes such as the appeals of battle, camaraderie, death, guilt, and even a delight of “fearful beauty” in

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destruction, there stands out the “abstract” image of the enemy that anesthetizes man the fighter. It is the monstrous—totally dehumanized—image of the enemy who is at best “subhuman.” To repeat: violence is an irresponsible act because it intends to eradicate the other’s differences. I would be remiss if I fail to bring Václav Havel into my discussion here. He is a playwright who turned into a statesman of extraordinary courage, sagacity, and moral tenacity in coping with the political exigency of his time: he is truly a public philosopher-statesmen of our time. He has been the most prominent voice of post-Communist Eastern Europe. Havel was deeply influenced by Jan Patočka, who was a student of phenomenology, an admirer of Masaryk’s democratic humanism and Comenius’s pansophic humanism, and an active political dissident who died in 1977 during a police interrogation. From the side of conservatives, Havel represents the death of communism as a totalitarian political system and the “end” of ideology and history as the transparent triumph of American liberalism. From the side of political radicalism, he is a champion of the powerless. He is, in short, a statesman for all seasons. Havel is, above all, a Levinasian. He closely read Levinas during his prison years in Czechoslovakia. Following Levinas, he considered responsibility as the innermost secret of moral humanity. Havel’s is an ethics of responsibility as “first politics.” For Havel, freedom and responsibility are interlocked. Freedom is a requisite element of responsibility. The former, however, is not independent from the latter. Responsibility is more inclusive than freedom because humans can be free without being responsible, but they cannot be responsible without being free. In the words of Levinas, “the presence of the Other, a privileged heteronomy, does not clash with freedom but invests it” (italics added).70 Responsibility, in sum, is the primary ethical condition for heterotopia. Havel’s signature idea of “living in truth” marks the heart of his conception of morality. He may also be likened to Bakhtin’s dialogist who transgresses and subverts the canonical or “priestly” order of truth and the monological “misrule” of hierarchized officialdom. Havel’s “dissident” is first and foremost Camus’s “rebel,” who is a critic of Marxism as the dialectical metaphysics and eschatological politics of revolutionary violence. For the rebel is one who justifies the existentialist thesis that the human is the only creature who refuses to be what he/she is. He/she protests against death as well as tyranny, brutality, terror, and servitude.71 Havel’s dissident is a true rebel who senses and cultivates his allegiance to human solidarity with no intention of obliterating the other. He is able to say that I rebel, therefore we exist. In an interview published as “The Politics of Hope,” Havel also talked about the role of an intellectual as a perpetually “irritant” rebel (or gadfly) who is self-consciously capable of detaching himself/herself from the established

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order of any kind and who is vigilant to and suspicious of belonging to the “winning side.” Havel shows that—to borrow the eloquent language of Roger Scruton (1990: 88) in writing about Masaryk and Patočka—“the individual soul is the foundation of social order and . . . the care of the soul, and the care of the polis, are two aspects of a single concern.”72 For Havel, in conclusion, morals are the basic stuff of all politics. Thus, politics is never a tetragrammaton (or four-letter word) precisely because it is deeply rooted in and inseparable from the moral makeup of humanity. Here Havel follows Levinas for whom not only is ethics “first philosophy,” but also politics without ethics “bears a tyranny within itself.” Havel speaks of politics as “morality in practice,” “practical morality,” and even “the art of the impossible,”73 against Machiavelli’s immoral politics as the “art of the possible.” For Havel, Machiavellian politics promotes “living in untruth,” that is, in manipulation, image-making, deception, and, above all, violence. In the end, the heteronomic ethics of responsibility is for Havel the postmodern alternative to Realpolitik as the modern “art of the possible.” He is determined to make politics as the “art of the impossible” possible.74 The politics of reconciliation and peace is and should be a genre of the politics of responsibility. As “talking to death” is preferred to “fighting to death,” dialogue is a precondition that aids reconciliation and peace. The Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel, who is a staunch critic of Eurocentrism, calls for “global dialogue as one of the initial and central tasks of the twenty-first century.”75 Dialogue is a genuine ex/change and possible resolution of differences involving a balanced circulation of the yang of “talking” and the yin of “listening.” The dialogical philosopher Martin Buber for whom Daoism, not Confucianism, is the soul of Sinism, once registered the complaint that what is wrong with the world today is the poverty of “listening.” Dialogue requires listening as much as talking because without listening dialogue ends up with a series of monologues. In recent years, the issue of reconciliation has become a weighty and outstanding issue since the South African Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission chaired by the Nobel Peace laureate Desmond Tutu was submitted to President Nelson Mandela in October 1998. As the future of post-apartheid South Africa hanged in the balance, Desmond Tutu pleaded for racial, political, and juridical reconciliation.76 Elie Wiesel, who is a Holocaust survivor and a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, has been a strong voice of reconciliation. The mission of Jews, he emphasizes, is “never to make the world Jewish but, rather, to make it more human.”77 The Nazi Holocaust was tagged as “crimes against humanity” (hostis generis humani)—an unprecedented concept in the history of humankind under which the Eichmann trial was carried out by the Israeli Supreme Court in Jerusalem.78

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In East Asia, too, there is a thorny question of reconciliation between Japan, China, and Korea whose irresolution hinders its intra-regional relationships. It is the question of reparation and/or issuing a public apology by the Japanese government acknowledging, for example, the massacre of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Nanking and the “slavery” of Korean and Chinese “comfort women” during the Second World War. Recently the new Democratic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi from California, even introduced a resolution to force the Japanese government to issue a public apology for the wrongdoings or criminal acts against which it reportedly lobbied. The obduracy by the Japanese government to issue a public apology not only creates tensions in intraregional relationships but also can be interpreted as an act of irresponsibility. During the prolonged occupation by Japan of Korea (and Taiwan) including its assimilation policy fully being implemented during my elementary school days, there had been the incarceration, torture, and death of Koreans. The Jung clan was forced to adopt at an emergency meeting the Japanese surname Umiyama in two kanji by giving up the traditional Korean way of spelling Jung with one kanji. In the true spirit of the Confucian “rectification of names,” however, my clan wished to retain after a long deliberation a trace of its Korean distinction with part of the name of the city Haeju (now in North Korea) where the clan genealogy began. Haeju in Korean has two sinograms (kanji): “sea” and “city.” Umiyama is spelled with two kanji in Japanese: “sea” and “mountain.” Hae (in Korean) and umi (in Japanese) are spelled with exactly the same sinogram sea. Parenthetically, the founder of the Jung clan, Jung Moon Boo (1565–1624) was a scholar-official and poet who volunteered to become a general to fight against the invading Toyotomi Hideyoshi forces at the close of the sixteenth century. I was told by my grandfather that for the reason of his “courageous” action, the Jung clan acquired recognition as a family of yangban or gentry. The “insensitive” visit of the prime minister Koizumi to the Yasukuni jinja was an act of absolving, as it were, the unabsolved sense of Japanese guilt that exacerbated the anguish and resentment of Koreans or the victimized. For it, many Americans cringed, and many Koreans became enraged. The victimized are not expected to be angels. Several years ago, I stumbled on the curious information that the tombstone of the founder of the Jung clan was removed from his gravesite in Korea to the Yasukuni jinja.79 With the help of a friend, I looked up the jinja’s website whose inscription is an unadulterated manifestation incarnate of Japanese militant nationalism prior to and during World War II. In light of this website, the admission of guilt by issuing a public apology would be a defacement of the Japanese national ego, and being compelled to feel shame would be an insult. The hope of reconciliation

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would disappear, to be sure, like a small island sieged and swept away by the enraged sea of East Asian politics. The magnitude of the Nanking massacre in China has recently been characterized by a Chinese American journalist Iris Chang as “the forgotten holocaust of World War II.”80 The expression “forgotten holocaust” is meant to be a plain contrast to the Nazi Holocaust of the Jewish people which has been well remembered. The question of forgiveness and thus of reconciliation interlocks the three cases of the South African apartheid and its aftermath, the Nazi Holocaust, and the Japanese atrocities committed during the Japanese invasion and occupation of Korea and China. Thus far, the Japanese effort to “defactualize”— despite the unimpeachable and overwhelming evidence—and minimize atrocities in absolving guilt perhaps for the fear of reprisals, whatever forms it may take, renders reconciliation difficult if not impossible. The fact that the atrocities committed by Japan under its colonialism are scarcely noted in the writing of Japanese history, particularly textbook writings for public schools, has infuriated the Koreans and Chinese alike. Forgetting obliterates the warning that past mistakes will haunt us and be repeated. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem and the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, are sober reminders that a holocaust should never happen again. They are vivid signposts to make the world safe for global humanity, not just for Jews, everywhere and forever. In those two memorial museums, which my Jewish-American wife and I visited together, the most moving scene was a pile of the worn-out shoes—not unlike van Gogh’s painting— which symbolized the embodied presence of the countless victimized bodies perished in Nazi concentration camps. The conspicuous absence of the bodies in those shoes accentuates the eternal presence of the dead. In the context of the preceding discussion, we may ask: Should the Japanese be forgiven? In her classic work The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt, who is also the author of the controversial reportage Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), underscores the temporal dimensions of human action. First, since the past and its mistakes or wrongdoings are irreversible, that is, what is done cannot be undone, forgiving is required. Second, action is also in need of promising simply because it is unpredictable. She further contends that like the British social contract theorists such as Hobbes and Locke, promising is declared to be void when its original conditions cease to exist or expire. Hobbes, for example, argues that social contract itself relies on the human ability to promise in words. Jacques Derrida, I think, is most radical and most forgiving on the question of forgiveness. As a Jew, he raises the question of the “unforgivable Holocaust” among, of course, other unforgivables. For him, “true forgive-

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ness” is “forgiving the unforgivable,” however strange if not contradictory it may sound, simply because something unforgivable cannot be forgiven. To put it in another way: for Derrida,81 “forgiving only [or ultimately] means something if it is forgiving the unforgivable.” In the case of the South African “national reconciliation,” Tutu pleaded to forgive something unforgivable.82 In the case of reconciliation in East Asia, would forgiving be one of those unforgivables? If so, let Derrida’s argument be a lesson for it. Setting aside the theological argument that “God alone can forgive; I don’t have the right to forgive,” let us dwell on the mundane interhuman, political, or moral configuration of commissioning a crime or wrongdoing since none of us is divine. Interhumanly speaking, forgiving involves the reconciliation of two parties: one who forgives and the other who is forgiven. Unlike Derrida’s “forgiving the unforgivable,” which is a unilateral and unconditional gift-giving without reciprocity or with “no strings attached,” gift-giving may be conditional and bilateral: The admission of guilt by perpetrators for a wrongdoing is a precondition for victims to forgive. Otherwise, there would be no reason for forgiving since there is nothing to forgive or no one asks for forgiveness. Forgiveness is a choice of the victimized, not a right to be claimed by the perpetrator. Thus, the French philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch poses the right question: “Has anyone asked us [Jews] for forgiveness?” To put it differently, has anyone admitted a wrong-doing or crime? Here the question of forgiving is conditioned by or predicted upon a request rather than the unconditional forgiving that Derrida discusses. In his most comprehensive phenomenological analysis of forgiveness, in his work called Memory, History, Forgetting, Paul Ricoeur argues that “on the level of practice . . . there does exist something like a correlation between forgiveness requested and forgiveness granted.”83 This belief shifts fault form the unilateral sphere of guilt and punishment into the bilateral sphere of exchange. When the question of forgiveness enters into the “circle of exchange,” it changes into the bilateral rather than the unilateral relation between the request for and the offer of forgiveness which is conditional. In the case of atrocities the Japanese government inflicted on the Chinese and Korean populace, I would argue with Ricoeur: It is an exchange—an exchange in the fullest etymological sense of the term. It is a bilateral exchange between the Japanese perpetrators requesting forgiveness based on the professed admission or confession of their guilt and the Korean and Chinese victims granting it. Moreover, this bilateral act will bring about changes in the tripartite relationships and elevate them to a higher and nobler plateau of morals and politics, which is a desideratum of reconciliation in East Asian politics. In his Nobel Lecture “Hope, Despair and Memory” in 1986, Elie

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Wiesel insisted that forgetting the Nazi Holocaust or “crimes against humanity” was not an option, and hope beyond despair was a possibility. Invoking the Old Testament figure of Job, Wiesel said movingly: “The source of his hope was memory, as it must be ours. Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair. I remember the killers, I remember the victims, even as I struggle to invent a thousand and one reasons to hope.” In East Asia, the day of reckoning, of true reconciliation will and must come. To use Wiesel’s Hebrew reference here: Rosh Hashana (New Year’s Day), which is also called Yom Nazikaron (the day of memory), will and must come in East Asia. 4. IN THE END It should again be stressed, in closing, that globalization or mondialisation makes the world shrink in time and space. This new shrinking world is a consequence of transversals of time and space or chronotopic crossings. It is turned into a “village”—to use Marshall McLuhan’s metaphor of communicative proximity as a return to a kind of the Homeric or preliterate society— which would be an eminently hospitable place for all beings and things to live together. We dwell convivially with other human beings and connaturally with nonhuman things, the deed of which calls for compassion across all the species. Speaking of the “sacrament of coexistence,” Henry G. Bugbee Jr. movingly expresses: “We all stand only together, not only all men, but all things.”84 Nature cannot speak for itself because it is a being-in-itself (en-soi/ an-sich), not a being-for-itself (pour-soi/für-sich): it can only react by way of mutiny (silent revolt) to the action of human beings against it. Cosmopolitanism is a lateral, not a vertical/hierarchized, movement. It attempts to planetarize our consciousness and conscience.85 It begins with that cultivation and habituation of an attitude or disposition (Stimmung) which is readily attuned to the heartbeat of making a new world with the hopes of gradually reducing ethnocentric ignorance. It resides in a fidelity—hsin in sinography, which means literally or etymologically “the human standing by his/her word”—in the reversibility of “strangers as ourselves” and “ourselves as strangers.” Viewed as such, the elemental opposite of cosmopolitanism is xenophobia. The end of cosmopolitanism is to create not “one world” with “one government” but a civil hetero-cosmopolis, which is necessarily both heterogeneous and heteronomic rather than homogeneous and egocentric. By pre/ serving the geography of cultural differences, the global is rooted in, but

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not uprooted from, the national and the local in the foreseeable future. To put it differently, the national and the local are in but not of the global. As the old saying goes, there’s no place like home, and cosmopolitanism is that new phenomenon which makes us feel at home in and with the world. For the eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, who was a counter-Enlightenment transversalist and consummate etymologist, polity, civility and humanity are all synonymous.86 Nation as birthplace (nascimento) is an umbilical cord to cosmopolitanism. Civility (civilitas), which is the epicenter of this triangular relationship, is nothing other than—to use the propitious language of Zygmunt Bauman—“the ability to interact with strangers without holding their strangeness against them and without pressing them to surrender it or to renounce some or all the traits that made them strangers in the first place.”87 For Levinas whose footsteps Derrida follows, “the essence of language is friendship and hospitality” (l’essence du langage est amitié et hospitalité).88 Levinas’s hospitality as a gesture of welcoming (bienvenue) the stranger or foreigner (l’étranger, xenos) as a guest (hostis) but not as an “enemy” is a noble elevation of his ethical preoccupation with the other (l’autre) deeply rooted in the Hebraic tradition. “The Torah,” Derrida comments, “demands . . . concern for the stranger, the widow and the orphan, a preoccupation with the other person” (italics original).89 Thus the ethics of hospitality or hospitality as ethics is thoroughly heteronomic.90 The fear of foreigners or strangers would inevitably lead us to the “essentialization” or Balkanization of humanity into the two hardened if not irreconcilable camps of universal US and particular THEM whose apartheid norms or “clashes” render impossible the confluence of differences, the hybridization/creolization of different ethnicities and cultural values. If globalization or mondialisation makes us more and more worldly, it would reduce if not remedy xenophobia. Ultimately, the function of public philosophy is to inculcate and distill in the mind and heart of the public the idea that philosophy begins to transform the world the moment it invents new concepts (e.g., transversality, multiculturalism, globalization, and cosmopolitanism) and that, accordingly, theory without practice in mind is a fatal abstraction for public philosophy. In phenomenology as a philosophical movement, “possibility always surpasses actuality”—to borrow the expression of Jean-Luc Marion91—and will serve as “a nourishing ground” based on responsible politics for the world à venir or the arrival of a new world. The end of public philosophy in the age of globalization is not to fiddle while the world burns, and we must avoid at all cost becoming like the proverbial owl of Minerva that takes its untimely flight only at dusk or a dinosaur in a philosophical Jurassic Park.

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NOTES 1.  Public philosophy is an applied philosophy with an emphasis on practice rather than theory. There are words of caution: Theory and practice cannot be separated since they enhance each other in the sense that theory without practice is empty and practice without theory is blind. Only in this sense, must we understand the spirit of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s following pronouncement when he spoke of Socrates: “The philosophy placed in books [alone] has ceased to challenge men” (“la philosophie mise en livres a cessé d’interpeller les homes”). See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy, trans. John Wild and James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1963), p. 34. I am eternally grateful for John Wild, who sent me an autographed copy of the Inaugural Lecture of Merleau Ponty as soon as his translation with James M. Edie was published. Without hesitation, Merleau-Ponty has since been the most influential thinker in my academic career. 2.  Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). Our attention is drawn here to John Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems (New York: Henry Holt, 1927), Walter Lippmann’s Essays in the Public Philosophy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1955), and Michael J. Sandel’s Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005) in particular, for no other reason than that their titles clearly show their interests in and their concerns with the notion of the “public” or “public philosophy” in the context of American democracy, and James Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key, 2 vols. (Cambridge: University Press, 2008). Some practitioners of “public philosophy” have been interviewed by Herlinde Pauer-Studer in the name of Kant’s “practical reason.” See Herlinde Pauer-Studer (ed.), Constructions of Practical Reason: Interviews on Moral and Practical Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). Sandel comments that his essays “blur the line between political commentary and political philosophy. They constitute a venture in public philosophy, in two senses: they find in the political and legal controversies of our day an occasion for philosophy, and they represent an attempt to do philosophy in public—to bring moral and political philosophy to bear on contemporary public discourse,” Public Philosophy, p. 5. Many of these published essays “aimed at an audience beyond the academy” and thus appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic, the New York Times, and the New York Review of Books. Sandel does not mention Lippmann at all, while he devotes an essay to Dewey’s liberal thought in light of liberalism today. See Public Philosophy, pp. 183–295. Dewey, Lippmann, and Sandel are concerned with the danger of mass conformism, as John Stuart Mill and Alex de Tocqueville were. What is often neglected to be mentioned is Dewey’s insight that vision is spectatorial, whereas hearing is a participatory sense, which is needed for “face-to-face relationships by means of direct give and take,” that is, for dialogues necessary to the “creation of a true public.” See The Public and Its Problems, pp. 218–19. In this regard, Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) is thoroughly Deweyan. As Rorty himself confesses, his is a work not on epistemology but on hermeneutics. “One way to see edifying philosophy as the love of wisdom,” Rorty declares, “is to see it as the attempt to prevent conversation

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from degenerating into inquiry, into an exchange of views. Edifying philosophers can never end philosophy, but they can help prevent it from attaining the secure path of a science” (italics added) (ibid.), p. 372. Hwa Yol Jung, The Power of Language and the Technology of Communication: A Phenomenological Genealogy, in Political Discourse: Exploration in Indian and Western Political Thought, ed. Bhikhu Parekh and Thomas Pantham (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1987), pp. 47–54. 3.  Jean-Paul Sartre delivered three lectures in Tokyo and Kyoto in 1965 entitled “A Plea for Intellectuals” that touch some of the points I am making in the following pages. See Between Existentialism and Marxism, trans. John Matthews (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), pp. 229–85. 4. See Multitude (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), p. xv. 5.  Trans. Alexander Dru (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). 6.  The Lonely Crowd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950). 7.  Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). 8. See In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, or, The End of the Social and Other Essays, trans. Paul Foss, John Johnston, and Paul Patton (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983), p. 44. 9.  See “The Recovery of Practical Philosophy,” American Scholar, 57 (1988): 337–52, at 339–40. 10.  The New Science, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 63, par. 142. 11.  Richard Rorty writes that “In an exuberant moment, James compared pragmatism’s potential for producing radical cultural change to that of the Protestant Reformation.” See Philosophical Papers, Vol. 4: Philosophy as Cultural Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. x. The merit of pragmatism lies in the fact that thinking is the beginning of doing and doing is the completion of thinking. As Giles Gunn puts it concisely, “pragmatism maintains that we actually begin to change the world the moment we begin to interpret it.” Thinking across the American Grain: Ideology, Intellect, and the New Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 4. We may call it the circular unity of thinking and doing. 12.  See Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), p. vii. 13.  Cf. Martin Jay, who writes judiciously that “the subject of experience, rather than being a sovereign, narcissistic ego, is always dependent to a significant degree on the other—both human and natural—beyond his or her interiority. Experience is never created entirely by intentional action, many of our commentators have realized, but instead involves a kind of surrender to or dependency on what is not, a willingness to risk losing the safety of self-sufficiency and going on a perilous journey of discovery” (italics added). Songs of Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 405. 14.  See Ivan Morris, The Nobility of Failure (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975). 15.  The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 22–23.

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16.  The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Lysa Hochroch (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997), p. 32. 17. See Critical Resistance (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004). 18. See Toward a Marxist Humanism, trans. Jane Zielonko Peel (New York: Grove Press, 1968), pp. 9–37. 19.  The Feast of Fools (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969). 20.  Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 160. 21.  See also the title of Martin Jay’s work, Songs of Experience (2005). 22.  My own motto on the matter of the future as history is the paradoxical saying of a Zen koan: “When you get to the top of the mountain, keep climbing.” The speculation of the future as history is an exercise of imaginary variations. Charles Taylor defines “social imaginary” in practice as follows: “By social imaginary, I mean something much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode. I am thinking, rather, of the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.” Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 23. 23.  See Appiah, The Ethics of Identity, 2, pp. 13–72. 24.  “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” p. 36. 25. See Kitaro Nishida, Fundamental Problems of Philosophy, trans. David A. Dilworth (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1970), and Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965, pp. 271–84). They discuss the question concerning “universal civilization” and “national cultures.” While Ricoeur writes from a standpoint of European cultures, Nishida speculates from a perspective of Asian cultures. Ricoeur is overly optimistic about the emergence of “a single world civilization.” Whatever shape it may take, according to him, it is based on the foundation that “only a living culture, at once faithful to its origins and ready for creativity on the levels of art, literature, philosophy and spirituality, is capable of sustaining but also of giving meaning to that encounter.” It is true that “in order to confront a self other than one’s own self, one must first have a self.” However, it is also true that a self as social is always in transition and that he/she changes in dialogue with other selves. Nishida, too, remarks: “Cultures may be said to be realized contents of the historical world, which is individual-qua-universal and universal-qua-individual determination. Cultures, of course, are plural. They cannot be reduced to unity, for when they lose their specificity they cease to be cultures. But the process of development of a unique culture from the standpoint of unique culture cannot be a merely abstract advance in an individual direction. That would amount to the negation of culture. A true world culture will be formed only by various cultures preserving their own respective viewpoints, but simultaneously developing themselves through the mediation of the world. In that respect, first deeply considering the individual ground of each culture, we must clarify on what basis and in what relation to other cultures each individual stands. How do Eastern and Western cultures differ in their roots? Its strong points are at once its weak points. We can learn that path

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along which we should truly advance only as we both deeply fathom our own depths and attain . . . a profound understanding of other cultures.” 26.  The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 17. 27.  Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), p. 111. 28.  Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee and ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 170. 29. In The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1954), Mircea Eliade engage in a critique of “historicism” that “terrorizes” nature. The “eternal return” is never repetitive, that is, he demythologizes the “myth of the eternal return.” 30.  Legislators and Interpreters (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), p. 110. 31. “Comparative Literature at Last!” in Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, ed. Charles Bernheimer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 117–21. 32. Cf. Jean-Luc Nancy explores globalization/mondialisation as the new “creation of the world” in La Creation du Monde ou la Mondialisation (Paris: Editions Galilée, 202). 33.  Philosophical Papers: Betwixt and Between (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 7. 34.  Here Heidegger’s notion of the Fourfold (das Geviert), too, comes in handy and tells us the “whereabouts” of Being’s presence as the transversal crossing of sky, earth, gods, and mortals whose geometric figuration is drawn by David Farrell Krell in a rectangle with two diagonal/chiasmic (X-ing after the fashion of the Greek letter chi) lines that connect the four elements with Being as their X-ing center. Heidegger’s Being (X-ed Being) is really that Interbeing which symbolizes the middle as intersecting “in-betweenness” [see Jung, “Heidegger’s Way of Sinitic Thinking,” in Heidegger and Asian Thoughts, ed. Graham Parkes (Honolulu: Hawaii University Press, 1987, pp. 217–44)]. Heidegger is still bound by the philosophical language of the West since the time of Heraclitus. 35.  Experiences between Philosophy and Communication, ed. Ramsey Eric Ramsey and David James Miller (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), p. 26. 36.  Philosophical Papers, p. 26. 37.  Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 252. 38.  J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, ed. and trans. F. M. Barnard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 199. 39. See “Did Philosophers Have to Become Fixated on Truth?” (trans. Janet Lloyd), Critical Inquiry 28 (2002): 803–24, and “China as Philosophical Tool,” Diogenes, No. 50 (2003): 15–21. 40.  See “Michel Foucault and Zen: A Stay in a Zen Temple (1978)” (trans. Richard Townsend), in Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 110–14.

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41.  Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Nass (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), p. 73. 42.  Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 128. 43.  Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 33. 44.  See Edward de Bono, New Think (New York: Basic Books, 1968). For the use of transversality as an interdisciplinary approach to religion and science, see J. Wentzel van Huysstein, The Shaping of Rationality (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdamans, 1999). I am grateful to Calvin O. Schrag for drawing my attention to Huysstein’s work. Jacques Derrida in Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 241, mentions in passing transversality as an interdisciplinary (“interscientific”) approach. It is instructive for us to read what Roland Barthes says about the nature of interdisciplinarity: “Interdisciplinary studies, of which we hear so much, do not merely confront already constituted disciplines (none of which, as a matter of fact, consents to leave off). In order to do interdisciplinary work, it is not enough to take a ‘subject’ (a theme) and to arrange two or three sciences around it. Interdisciplinary study consists in creating a new object [italics added], which belongs to no one. The Text is, I believe, one such object.” So is the hybrid product of what might be called transversal or intercontinental philosophy, which is the crossing of two or more continental philosophies. 45.  G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. 1, trans. E. S. Haldane (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1892), p. 121. 46.  Zhang Longxi, “Ambivalence of Translation in a ‘Reference Culture’: The Case of Ancient China.” A paper presented at the conference on “Translation and Cultural Appropriation in the Ancient World” at Columbia University, March 3–4, 2006. 47. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 353. 48.  Speaking of Hegel’s rationalism, which is “inveterately wedded to the conceptual decomposition of life,” the pluralist William James contends that “Hegel was dominated by the notion of a truth that should prove incontrovertible, binding on every one, and certain which should be the truth, one, indivisible, eternal, objective, and necessary, to which all our particular thinking must lead as to its consummation. This the dogmatic ideal, the postulate, uncriticised, undoubted, and unchallenged, of all rationalizers in philosophy ‘I have never doubted,’ a recent Oxford writer says, that truth is universal and single and timeless, a single content or significance, one and whole and complete. Advance in thinking, in the Hegelian universe, has, in short, to proceed by the apodictic words must be rather than by those inferior hypothetic words may be, which are all that empiricists can use.” A Pluralistic Universe (New York: Longmans, Green, 1909), pp. 100–101. 49.  John Wild envisions four different kinds of phenomena in the life-world (Lebenswelt), “each of which requires a distinct mode of scientific investigation: man himself, the realm of nature, other men and the realm of human culture, and, finally, the transcendent.” “Interrogation of John Wild,” conducted by Henry B. Veatch, in Philosophical Interrogations, eds. Sydney and Beatrice Rome (New York: Holt,

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Rinehart and Winston, 1964), p. 177. It is instructive to read Merleau-Ponty’s remarks on Husserl’s reference to China and India: “Even at the end of his career, and just when he is laying bare the crisis of Western knowledge, Husserl writes that ‘China . . . [and] India . . . are empirical or anthropological specimens [Typus].’ Thus he seems to be setting out again on Hegel’s way. But even though he retains the privileged position of Western philosophy, he does so not by virtue of its right to it—as if its possession of the principles of all possible cultures were absolutely evident—but in the name of a fact, and in order to assign a task to it. Husserl admitted that all thought is part of an historical whole or a ‘life-world’: thus in principle all philosophies are ‘anthropological specimens,’ and none has any special rights [italics added]. He also admits that so-called primitive cultures play an important role in the exploration of the ‘life-world,’ in that they offer us variations of this world without which we would remain enmeshed in our preconceptions and would not even see the meaning of our own lives. Yet the fact remains that the West has invented an idea of truth which requires and authorizes it to understand other cultures, and thus to recover them as aspects of a total truth. There has in fact been this miraculous turning back upon itself of an historical formation, through which Western thought has emerged from its particularity and ‘locality.’ A presumption and an intention which are still awaiting their fulfillment” (italics added). Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 137–38. 50.  Signs, p. 138. 51.  Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, eds. Robert E. Spiller and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 127. 52.  Signs, p. 133. 53.  Ibid., p. 139. 54.  Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 110. 55.  See David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity (New York: Harper and Row, 1987). 56.  See John Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 50. 57.  Martin Hollis writes gleefully or in the manner of “I got you!” or “in your face!”: “I am tempted to slip into the clever-clever mode which relativists hate and their critics love: Universalism is ethnocentric only if ethnocentricity is universal.” In “Is Universalism Ethnocentric?” in Multicultural Questions, ed. Christian Joppke and Steven Lukes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 42. However, what cannot be ignored is his intolerance of ambiguity (ambi/guity) in the etymological sense of the term. The universalist Hegel, for example, is Eurocentric simply because he prejudges non-Western philosophy (e.g., Indian and Chinese) as non-philosophy. In addition, the relational ontology of Sinism may be distinguished from relativism both cognitive and moral. Relational ontology is the affirmation of reality as social process which precedes the judgment about the truth of cognition and morals. In Language and Relation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), Christopher Fynsk explores the idea of relation with a focus on language as the “materiality of all relationality.” See also Rodolphe Gasché, Of Minimal Things: Studies on the Notion of Relation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). According to Ulrich Beck and Johannes

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Willms, Conversations with Ulrich Beck, trans. Michael Pollak (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), p. 183: “[T]he Enlightenment concept of cosmopolitanism has to be freed from its origins in imperial universalism, such as we find in Kant and many others. It has to be opened up to the recognition of multiplicity. It has to become the core of the concept.” Risk, he contends, is, moreover, “a modern European phenomenon.” What is radically new or paradigmatic in the contemporary world, however, is that risk has become global, that is, it deterritorizes national boundaries. In sum, the scope of risk society has become truly global or planetary. Beck speaks of “the inescapability of the transnational dynamic.” “A cosmopolitan sociology,” he contends, “posits globality as the experience of a deterritorized culture” (ibid., p. 38). He is willing to abandon the universal in favor of the cosmopolitan since cosmopolitanism recognizes multiplicity whereas universal “globalism” denies it. In The Cosmopolitan Vision, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), pp. 48–71, Beck further argues that there are two kinds of universalism: the “universalism of sameness” and the “universalism of difference,” in which difference is not translated into superiority or inferiority—for instance, the difference of the West as superior to the non-West or the difference of the non-West as inferior to the West. Be that as it may, it stands to reason to argue, as does Geoffrey Harrison in “Relativism and Tolerance,” in Relativism: Cognitive and Moral, ed. Michael Krausz and Jack W. Meiland (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), pp. 229–43, that the philosophy of relativism in practice is a philosophy of tolerance. 58. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), p. 64. 59. See Can Asians Think? (Singapore: Times Editions, 1998). 60. See Thich Nhat Hanh, Interbeing: Fourteen Guidelines for Engaged Buddhism, rev. ed., ed. Fred Eppsteiner (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1993). 61. See Jung, “Interbeing and Geophilosophy in the Cultural Topography of Watsuji Tetsuro’s Thought,” in Why Japan Matters!, 2 vols., ed. Joseph F. Kess and Helen Lansdowne (Victoria: Centre for Asian-Pacific Initiatives, University of Victoria, 2005), Vol. 2: 691–702. 62.  See Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought (New York: Free Press, 2003). 63.  Michael Walzer, On Toleration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. xii. 64.  Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 97. 65. In The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 280–82, Mikhail Bakhtin also writes: “Every word is directed toward an answer and cannot escape the profound influence of the answering word that anticipates. . . . Primacy belongs to the response, as the activating principle: it creates the ground for understanding, it prepares the ground for an active and engaged understanding. Understanding comes to fruition only in the response. Understanding and response are dialectically merged and mutually condition each other; one is impossible without the other.” Essentially Bakhtin’s dialogism is a celebration of alterity.

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66.  Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, trans. Manfred H. Vogel (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), p. 71. 67.  Trans. John O’Neill (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). 68.  Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Macmillan). 69.  Reading Jonathan Glover gives us the definite impression that the twentieth century is littered with all kinds of violence (e.g., two world wars and the Holocaust). Thus, it may be called a century of moral laxity. See Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). J. Glenn Gray contends rightly, I think, that “What is missing so often in modern men is a basic piety, the recognition of dependence on the natural realm. And they feel the need of this piety without possessing it. There is no dearth of religions in our time, and they fulfill certain needs, but there is a general absence of religious passion for belonging to an order infinitely transcending the human. Separated from close association with nature and intimacy with her ways, we find it difficult to do homage to nature’s god.” See The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (New York: Harper and Row, 1959). Erazim Kohák, too, observes that “It was more with a sense of relief than of regret that the West welcomed the new gospel, proclaimed on the authority of science, that humans are not human after all. The generic naturalism of the Western philosophical tradition broke down, I would submit, because the Western conception and effective experience of nature broke down first. To recover the moral sense of our humanity, we would need to recover first the moral sense of nature.” See The Embers and Stars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 13. 70.  Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 88. 71. Cf. Albert Camus in The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1956, pp. 293–94) writes: “Dialogue on the level of mankind is less costly than the gospel preached by totalitarian regimes in the form of monologue dictated from the top of a lonely mountain. On the stage as in reality, the monologue precedes death. Every rebel, solely by the movement that sets him in opposition to the oppressor, therefore pleads for life, undertakes to struggle against servitude, falsehood, and terror, and affirms, in a flash, that these three afflictions are the cause of silence between men, that they obscure them from one another and prevent them from rediscovering themselves in the only value that can save them from nihilism—the long complicity of men at grips with their destiny.” 72.  The Philosopher on Dover Beach (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), p. 88. 73.  The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice, trans. Paul Wilson and others (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997). 74. In Living in Truth, ed. Jan Vladislav (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), p 155, Havel writes that “I favour politics as practical morality, as service to the truth, as essentially human and humanly measured care four our fellow humans.” His conscience extends to the realm of nature when he (ibid., p. 136) writes: “I used to walk to school in a nearby village along a cart track through the fields and, on the way, see on the horizon a huge smokestack of some hurriedly built factory, in all likelihood in the service of war. It spewed dense brown smoke and scattered it across the sky. Each time I saw it, I had an intense sense of something profoundly wrong, of humans soiling

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the heavens. I have no idea whether there was something like a science of ecology in those days; if there was, I certainly knew nothing of it. Still that ‘soiling the heavens’ offended me spontaneously. . . . If a medieval man were to see something like that suddenly in the horizon—say, while out hunting—he would probably think it the work of the Devil and would fall on his knees and pray that he and his kin be saved.” 75.  “Philosophy in Latin America in the Twentieth Century: Problems and Currents,” in Latin American Philosophy, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), p. 34. 76. See No Future without Forgiveness (New York: Doubleday, 1999). 77.  A Jew Today, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 13. 78. See Eichmann in Jerusalem, rev. and enl. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1963). 79.  In July 2007 I went to a conference at Tokyo University. While I was there, I decided to visit the Yasukuni jinja in the hopes of finding my ancestral tombstone. A friend of mine at Waseda University was going to accompany me to the jinja since he himself had never been there. Before our visit, he decided to call a jinja official who informed him that my ancestral tombstone was no longer there. My friend found out that the tombstone called Hokkan Taisho Hi in Japanese was sent back to Korea in 2005. It was returned to North Korea, my nephew told me, which was Jung Moon Boo’s birthplace or his original homeland. 80. See The Rape of Nanking (New York: Basic Books, 1997). The famed poet W. H. Auden composed in 1939 the poem called “Sonnets from China,” which concludes: “Where life is evil now. / Nanking. Dachau.” The full work can be accessed at: http://bigtype.com/Jung/3_Note_80_Auden.pdf. 81.  See “A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event (trans. Gila Walker), Critical Inquiry, 33 (2007): 441–61 and On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 276. 82.  No Future without Forgiveness. 83.  Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 478. 84.  The Inward Morning (State College: Bald Eagle Press, 1958), p. 159. 85.  See Dane Rudhyar, The Planetarization of Consciousness (New York: Harper and Row, 1970). 86. See Hwa Yol Jung, “Vico and Etymosinology Revisited,” Rivista di Studi Italiani, 23 (2005): 119–46. 87.  Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), pp. 104–105. 88.  Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 305. 89.  Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Mass (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 123. See also Derrida, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). For reflections on Levinas and Derrida concerning the ethics of hospitality, see Hent De Vries, Religion and Violence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), Chapter 4: “Hospitable Thought before and beyond Cosmopolitanism,” pp. 293–398. De Vries even entertains the idea that Levinas’s ethics of hospitality is both pre-political and post-political.

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90. Derrida’s elaboration of cosmopolitanism and responsibility is consistent with and an extension of Levinas’s “ethics as first philosophy” (l’éthique comme philosophie première). After the fashion of Levinas, I call “responsibility as first ethics.” Interestingly, “responsibility” (ahariout) and “other” (aher) have the same etymological root in Hebrew. See Catherine Chalier, “The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and the Hebraic Tradition,” in Ethics as First Philosophy, ed. Adriaan T. Peperezak (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 3–12. For me, heteronomy defines the most radical profundity of Levinas’s philosophy. It is interesting to note, I think, that unlike Heidegger, for whom death is the defining moment of Dasein’s Existenz as “self-oriented” (eigentlich), Levinas defines it in terms of one’s dialogical existence or coexistence with the other, i.e., “death is the without-response” (Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, p. 130 n. 20). As I mourned the death of my wife, I discovered the depth-chart of Levinas’s philosophy: Her death means the total absence of her response and the absolution of her “response-ability.” 91.  Reduction and Givenness, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), p. 166.

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Chapter Four

Edward O. Wilson’s Theory of Consilience A Hermeneutical Critique

1. THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE PHILOSOPHICAL TEMPERAMENT OF WILSON’S CONSILIENCE It is most important for the students of politics in both learning and teaching to know the fundamental philosophical issues involved in the disciplinary nature of the social sciences in general, and political science in particular. The question of how to study (methodology) depends on the nature of what to study (ontology), and not the other way around. Simply because the sciences of nature (e.g., physics) have proven successful since the time of Galileo’s mathematization of nature, it is highly problematic to assume that their methodology with the increasing power of prediction may indiscriminately or equally be applied to the sciences of human social behavior without committing a methodolatry. This chapter attempts to show the long-standing philosophical dispute between scientism and hermeneutics concerning the disciplinary nature of the social and natural sciences by way of a hermeneutical critique of Edward O. Wilson’s “paradigm hunting” of Consilience (hereafter cited as “C-theory”).1 Following his earlier controversial effort to integrate sociology with biology (sociobiology), Wilson’s C-theory attempts to unify or hegemonizes all knowledge under the scientific credo of biology and genetics (biogenetics for short) that, he himself admits, hold a short leash on the study of human culture and society. The entomologist Edward Osborne Wilson is a paradigm hunter. In 1975 he published his controversial magnum opus called Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.2 Defined as “the study of the biological basis of social behavior,” C. J. Lumsden and E. O. Wilson contend, “it [sociobiology] carries evolu93

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tionary theory into the previously un-Darwinized fields of psychology and the social sciences.”3 Not unlike many accomplished intellectuals in history who excel in their chosen fields of specialization, most recently Wilson ventured into a terra nuova of theorizing. In 1998, he wrote a highly challenging, most provocative, and ambitious work Consilience, whose subtitle, “the unity of knowledge,” unveils his intention and intimates its raison d’être.4 To use the alluring metaphor drawn from the Greek poet Archilochus by the late British historian of cultural ideas Isaiah Berlin: He is a “hedgehog” who has the unitary vision of the world rather than a “fox” who has a pluralist vision.5 Wilson bemoans the fact that “academic theorists have paid little attention to biology, [and] consilience is not in their vocabulary” (p. 214). He offers Ariadne’s thread— to use his own metaphorical expression—to guide us out of the labyrinth of knowledge. In the genealogy of his thought, his theory of consilience is in retrospect not totally unanticipated, that is, it is more or less a logical extension or natural evolution of his sociobiology and later works on “human nature.”6 He explains and justifies his adventure into consilience as follows: The search for consilience might seem at first to imprison creativity. The opposite is true. A united system of knowledge is the surest means of identifying the still unexplored domains of reality. It provides a clear map of what is known, and it frames the most productive questions for further inquiry. Historians of science often observe that asking the right question is more important than producing the right answer. The right answer to a trivial question is also trivial, but the right question, even when insoluble in exact form, is a guide to major discovery. And so it will ever be in the future excursions of science and imaginative flights of the arts (p. 298).

We can hardly disagree with Wilson when he likens his venture into consilience to an artistic endeavor. His is professedly a creative art of discovering “wisdom” rather than “information.” With his C-theory, Wilson is definitely on the trail of paradigm hunting. “The more forbidding the task,” he challenges his readers, “the greater the prize for those who dare to undertake it” (p. 209). Etymologically, the term consilience combines the Latin “con” (together) and “salire” (to jump or leap). The term was used by William Whewell and John Stuart Mill in the mid-nineteenth century as the inductive way of putting different classes of facts together in establishing theories where one theory corroborates and verifies the other. We may ask: How many disciplines can jump together on the head of Wilson’s C-theory? More than two, to be sure: Wilson’s earlier sociobiology itself is leaping together and harvesting of biology and sociology into a new discipline or a new synthesis. This new discipline of his C-theory

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is by nature interdisciplinary or pansophic, and it purports to go beyond or transcend the limits of any one normal discipline. In the history of Western thought, the “unity of knowledge” movement finds its precursors in Aristotle in ancient Greece, the birthplace of Western philosophy, and Kant in the Age of the Enlightenment. Aristotle was the first synthesizer of all knowledge with the metaphysical assumption that humans by nature desire to know. Kant, who represents the apogee of the “enlightened” Age of Reason, attempted to consociate in a trio of critiques the theoretical, the practical, and the aesthetic. Most interestingly, however, it was the French encyclopedists or philosophes (e.g., Diderot and d’Alembert) in the mid-eighteenth century who championed Enlightenment rationality with an emphasis on scientific determination. It is worth noting that the project of the French encyclopedists continues to influence the direction of twentieth-century thought embodied in the “International Encyclopedia of Unified Science” movement and now Wilson’s C-theory. The “Unified Science” movement is the collaborative undertaking under the aegis of logical empiricism, which is an emporium, as it were, of general semiotics, linguistics of science, logic and mathematics, physics, cosmology, the social sciences including psychology, art, theory of valuation, and biology. Physicalism, in which physics becomes the disciplinary matrix of all the other sciences including the social sciences, constituted the epicenter of the “Unified Science” movement (see also pp. 62–63). Wilson’s C-theory is guided and underwritten by the lumen naturalis, as it were, of biologism cum geneticism, i.e., as he calls it, the biological “worldview” (Weltanschauung). He lists in biology evolutionary biology, ecology, organismic biology, cellular biology, molecular biology, neurobiology, and biochemistry. With their differences notwithstanding, one would be remiss if one fails to notice the fact that Wilson’s C-theory inherited its physicalism from the “Unified Science” movement: As he stresses, “The central idea of the consilience worldview is that all tangible phenomena, from the birth of stars to the workings of social institutions, are based on material processes that are ultimately reducible, however long and tortuous the sequences, to the laws of physics” (italics added) (p. 266). Physicalism embarks on discovering causal explanation whose quintessence is the scientific power of prediction. It is in short scientism pure and simple—that school of thought that uses the model of the natural sciences, particularly physics, to legitimatize the epistemological validity of all knowledge.7 The disciplinary landscape of Wilson’s C-theory is encompassing. It includes the social sciences (the sciences of social behavior) such as psychology, anthropology, and sociology, the arts, ethics, and religion whose validity or legitimacy is measured by the rationality of biogenetics. However, the

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philosophical legacy of the Enlightenment, which inspirits the technoscience and technoculture of Western modernity, guides Wilson’s paradigm hunting. Kant defined and distilled the philosophical tempo of modernity and apotheosized its movement as “enlightening.” The unbridled optimism of the Enlightenment, which was meant to promote humanity’s, that is, Western humanity’s infinite progress based on the cultivation of pure and applied reason, is the grandest narrative or lingua franca of Western modernity. To put the Enlightenment cult of progress in Wilson’s own terms, it is “the potential of indefinite human progress” (p. 8). Scientific progress, in particular, depends on “original discoveries” or “prospecting” the “virgin land” of the world. Kant spelled out the motto of the Enlightenment in the clearest and simplest terms: The autonomy of reason purportedly rescues and emancipates humanity from the dark cave of self-incurred tutelage or immaturity (selbstverschuldeten Unmündigkeit), i.e., the deep slumber of reason. By so doing, he institutionalized the major agenda of European modernity. Ultimately, the autonomy of reason guarantees (Western) humanity’s progress in perpetuity. Kant’s critique of pure reason as an autonomous epistemological subject is certainly indebted to Descartes’s cogito (ergo sum) whose logocentrism sums up and unifies the combined characteristics of being disembodied, monologic, and ocularcentric. Descartes’s cogito in pursuit of “clear and distinct ideas” is as “enlightening” as Kant’s disputation of the Enlightenment and critique of pure reason. Wilson’s scientific humanism or his embracing of the Enlightenment as paradigmatic to scientific inquiry is exemplified in two areas of his discourse: (1) critique of religion and (2) postmodern philosophy. In the first place, he acknowledges that the power of religion lodges in its alliance with the tribal instinct of survival in the background of xenophobia and symbolic immortality out of the fear of death. While the competition between religious “transcendentalism” and scientific “empiricism” demands “open discussion” and “an atmosphere of mutual respect” (p. 265), Wilson is convinced that the secularization of religion is inevitable in the progression of human civilization. “Material reality discovered by science,” he holds, “already possesses more content and grandeur than all religious cosmologies combined” (p. 265). His overzealousness to render credence to scientific explanation concerning religion, Wilson advances a strange if not naïve and uninformative analogy between religion and biology: “Religions are analogous to superorganisms. They have a life cycle. They are born, they grow, they compete, they reproduce, and. in the fullness of time, most [why not all?] die. In each of these phases religions reflect the human organisms that nourish them. They express a primary rule of human existence, that whatever is necessary to sustain life is also ultimately biological” (p. 256). When it reaches the ultimate edge of progress, the mind or soul enters “a mystical union with the whole” or “enlightenment” (that is,

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false Enlightenment) expressed in religious consciousness by “the Hindu samadhi, Buddhist Zen Satori, Sufi fana, Taoist wu-wei, and Pentecostal Christian rebirth” as well as hallucinating preliterate shamanism (p. 260). In the second place, it comes as no surprise that Wilson unleashes his critique on what he calls “philosophical postmodernism” as “the ultimate polar antithesis of the Enlightenment” (p. 40) especially on the “poststructuralism” of Michel Foucault and its political and sociological agenda, which Wilson, unfortunately, neither specifies nor details. The Enlightenment and postmodern philosophy or poststructuralism are a stark contrast between the “splendid feast of reason”—to borrow the title of the molecular biologist S. Jonathan Singer8—and what Wilson calls the “celebrants of corybantic Romanticism” (p. 44). Of course, postmodern “geophilosophy” deconstructs the Enlightenment as the soul of European modernity whose scientific, technological, economic, and industrial complex has resulted in ecological irrationality and pushes all humanity and its habitat to the brink of total destruction. The Enlightenment is “the serpent”—to use Wilson’s own metaphor—that bites and consumes its own tail and body. The Enlightenment’s reason was never seriously and systematically challenged until the birth or advent of postmodern philosophy in Friedrich Nietzsche whose progenies are Martin Heidegger, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and his “Gallic obscurantism”—as Wilson alleges—Paul de Man, Richard Rorty, as well as Foucault. For many, including Wilson himself, postmodern philosophy is a thorny disruption of Western scientific reason and technological progress. Wilson accuses postmodern philosophy of confusing the “atmosphere of chaos” with “creative ferment” (p. 182). From the vantage point of Wilson’s C-theory, postmodern philosophy embodies the epistemological “black flag of anarchy,” multiculturalism, which hails “the flag of cultural relativism to the mast” (p. 184), and, above all, mental “constructivism,” which disregards the universal grammar of neurobiological and genetic “reality.” “Human nature exists,” Wilson claims, “and it is both deep and highly structured” (p. 216). It irks Wilson to no end because postmodern philosophy conceives of science as just another way of thinking or viewing the world, i.e., of a Weltanschauung. In the end, Wilson is oblivious to the leitmotif of postmodern philosophy which, not unlike his C-theory, plays the role of the “trickster” (clown, jester, or clever fool) (p. 224) who makes a mockery of and subverts the established regime of knowledge by pointing the way to an alternative course of thinking and acting. There is no reason why, I think, Wilson cannot tolerate multiculturalism or cultural pluralism while he celebrates “biodiversity”9 and “biophilia.”10 Moreover, while he attempts to advance his C-theory, he forgets the postmodernist theory of “intertextuality,” which is interdisciplinary and intercultural

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at the same time. It is no accident that Wilson misconstrues the real intent of postmodern constructivism, which attempts to subvert unchanging and tightly structured “essences” (physis) or “human nature.” Postmodern philosophy is, in other words, thoroughly (ontologically, epistemologically, ethically, and politically) anti-foundationalist, that is, against “human nature” as a fixed set of traits which comes in different guises—in physicalism and biogeneticism. 2. WILSON’S DARWINIAN BIOLOGISM Wilson’s C-theory is tightly locked in the Darwinized “coevolution of the genes and culture.” “Evolution by natural selection,” he emphasizes, “is not an idle hypothesis” (p. 128). The evolutionary “coupling” or hybridity of the genes and culture has a conceptual grid on his C-theory. Indeed, Darwinized biologism is destiny. And humans are “a biological species born of natural selection” (p. 223). As far as humans are biological organisms, they obey the Darwinized laws of evolutionary biology and genetics. The apex of evolutionary creation is, without question, homo sapiens in whom the animal instincts of survival and reproduction were transformed into “the epigenetic algorithms of human nature” (p. 225) that guide their behavior. The genes hold a “leash” on humans and their culture. Human sensory and cerebral physiology, intelligence, and personality are functions of genetics. It should be clear that Wilson’s Darwinized biologism is not the resurgence of the old ideology of social Darwinism. Rather, it bioiogizes and geneticizes society and culture, whereas the earlier social Darwinists such as William Graham Sumner “sociologized” Darwin’s evolutionary biology of natural selection. What, we may ask, are epigenetic rules? For Wilson, they are “hereditary regularities” in human mental and physical development. “Epigenesis,” Lumsden and Wilson explain, “is a biological term that means the sum of all the interactions between the genes and the environment that create the distinctive traits of an organism.”11 Wilson sums up the double helix, as it were, of his gene/culture coevolution as follows: Genes prescribe epigenetic rules, which are the regularities of sensory perception and mental development that animate and channel the acquisition of culture. Culture helps to determine which of the prescribing genes survive and multiply from one generation to the next. Successful new genes alter the epigenetic rules of populations. The altered epigenetic rules change the direction and effectiveness of the channels of cultural acquisition (italics original) (p. 157).

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Wilson insists his C-theory as well as sociobiology is neither deterministic nor ideological. In the first place, the social existence of humans, unlike that of animals, cannot eschew their “genetic propensity” in forming their moral precepts and law. He asserts: “We are entering a new era of existentialism, not the old absurdist existentialism of Kierkegaard and Sartre [who declared that “man is condemned to freedom”], giving complete autonomy to the individual, but the concept that only unified learning, universally shared, makes accurate foresight and wise choice possible” (p. 297). In the second place, Wilson is fully aware of the danger of the use, misuse, or abuse of sociobiology by an ideologue. Many centuries ago, Plato approved the practice of eugenics in order to build an ideal “republic” by philosopher-kings. In the past, Darwinized biogeneticism was turned into the ideology of racism where the so-called intelligence of homo sapiens was converted into the ugly bestiality of homo insapiens, that is, into the racist Holocaust under Hitler’s Nazism. The rise and fall of Lycenkoism, too, should not escape our notice. The Russian biologist T. D. Lycenko’s environmental determinism of the genes, which is the diametrical opposite of biogeneticism, played the role of an ideological pawn under the totalitarian regime of Stalin to promote the creation of the “new Soviet man.” As what nature is to culture, according to Wilson, “hereditarians” are to “nurturists.” Hereditarians, like him, hold that the genetic leash on culture is short, although he does not tell how short it is, and nurturists contend that it is long. From the vantage point of Wilson as a hereditarian, he is critical of social scientists and philosophers for ignoring the consilience of biology with the social sciences: “Social scientists as a whole,” he contends, “have paid little attention to the foundations of human nature, and they have had almost no interest in its deep origins” (p. 184). For instance, Wilson is critical of America’s foremost and influential social philosopher John Rawls for not providing any evidence as to how justice as fairness is consistent with biogenetically based “human nature.” While Wilson applauds and approves of “biological anthropologists” for their efforts to explain culture as “a product of the genetic history of humanity,” he accuses particularly American “cultural anthropologists,” i.e., Franz Boas and his “descendants”—Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead—of courting and promoting the politics of cultural relativism (p. 185). Wilson rightly or wrongly considers the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM) as “the sovereign doctrine of twentieth-century social theory” (p. 188). He is critical of the “chimeric origin” of the SSSM and its claim for the “irreducibility” of social behavior to a set of biological elements because social behavior is said to be “the product of environment and historical antecedents” (ibid.). Ulti-

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mately, Wilson accuses the SSSM of turning “causation upside down” and “the slighting or outright denial of a biologically based human nature” (ibid.). As for Marxism, Wilson enigmatically declares that it is “sociobiology without biology.”12 It is, according to him, “now mortally threatened by the discoveries of human sociobiology.”13 Is it a “pseudo-sociobiology” or unscientific sociology? As a sociology without biology, Marxism regards the mind or consciousness as “biologically unstructured” and denies the existence of “human nature” or as having no biological essences. Marx sums up the sociological roots of humanity when he defines humanity as an ensemble of social relations. According to Lumsden and Wilson, Marx saw the movement of history as the result of economic change that precipitates revolution toward a classless society.14 They draw the reader’s attention to Marx’s often-quoted passage in German Ideology that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”15 Marxism was professedly a critique of ideology as “false consciousness” or a system of ideas that masks material reality. Marx contended that his ideology-critique is to unmask the mask. On account of Wilson, Marx’s sociology and Wilson’s sociobiology are strange bedfellows who are bound by the infrastructure of materialism: what the genetic is to Wilson, the economic is to Marx. In this respect, they are two different colors of reductionism and determinism. Above all, both Marx and Wilson are children of the Enlightenment who believe in technoscientific progress for the salvation of humanity. Wilson also blames Freud’s psychoanalysis for ignoring the biological and genetic foundations of mind, social existence, and society. Wilson, however, is blind to Freud’s effort to make psychoanalysis as “scientific” as possible by searching out the biological and physiological basis of human consciousness or the unconscious with the unwavering conviction that anatomy is human destiny.16 Wilson is too quick to dismiss Freud’s theory of Oedipus complex in favor of the Finnish anthropologist Edward A. Westermarck’s findings of human marriage (or the “Westermarck effect”): “Mothers and sons almost never copulate” (p. 174) because of their close association in early life. In essence, according to Wilson, Freud’s incest taboos are cultural, whereas the “Westermarck effect” is biological; Freud argues that societies invent taboos, whereas Westermarck finds that “people avoid incest because of a hereditary epigenetic rule of human nature that they have translated into taboos” (p. 178). There is, furthermore, an important contrast between the sociobiologist Wilson, who contends that biology is the infrastructure of human behavior, and the psychological behaviorist B. F. Skinner, whose psychology as science is committed to the experimentation and technology of observable behavior.

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The science of human behavior, according to Skinner, includes two basic areas: genetic endowments and manipulable environment.17 He relegates the former and the latter to biology and psychology, respectively. In recent decades, according to Lumsden and Wilson, the advancement of the brain sciences and cognitive psychology is ready to break “the iron grip of behaviorism” whose “principal modern architect” is Skinner.18 Skinner is criticized for practicing “a severe form of scientific reductionism” that rejects all conceptions of allegedly experimentally untestable mental phenomena. Despite the relentless effort of both Wilson and Skinner to make the study of human behavior scientific in complementing biology and genetics with environmentalism and forging genetic (or “mechanical”) engineering on the one hand and social engineering on the other, Wilson criticizes Skinner’s disavowal of “human nature.” Wilson endorses Noam Chomsky’s critique of Skinner’s “verbal behavior” on the grounds that language acquisition is innate or inborn, not environmental. Wilson’s sociobiology and Skinner’s behavioral psychology appear to complement each other and are a perfect fit toward consilience. Skinner’s invocation of “natural selection,” too, is unnoticed by Wilson when Skinner writes without equivocation: the environment not only prods or lashes. It selects. Its role is similar to that in natural selection, though on a very different time scale, and was overlooked for the same reason. It is now clear that we must take into account what the environment does to an organism not only before but after it responds. Behavior is shaped and maintained by its consequences. Once this fact is recognized, we can formulate the interaction between organism and environment in a much more comprehensive way.19

Wilson’s questioning of the fitness of Skinner’s behaviorism into his C-theory simply because of Skinner’s disavowal of “human nature” is Wilson’s myopia or misreading. 3. WILSON’S C-THEORY AND THE PARADIGM OF HERMENEUTICS Wilson’s C-theory is in search of a new paradigm under the spell of geneculture coevolution. In its unitary or “hedgehoggish” endeavor, it accepts as a matter of course the validity of C. P. Snow’s classic contestation of “two cultures” (i.e., scientific and literary) and against “the overspecialization of the educated elite,” who, according to Wilson, have been trained in the humanities and social sciences and thus are ignorant of the relevance of genetically determined human nature and the natural sciences to behavior and policy

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(p. 126). The infrastructure of Wilson’s C-theory is underwritten with the rules of epigenesis which are—to restate—the sum total of an organism’s distinctive traits resulting from the interactions of the genes and their environment. Wilson’s “hereditarian” C-theory, unlike nurturists, is chained to the iron law of genetics because in it the genes hold culture on a short leash; that is, they determine the evolution and structure of culture. His search for universals defined in terms of the Enlightenment’s reason clashes with postmodernism whose “identity politics,” Wilson contends, promotes cultural relativism and “culture wars.” Here, paradoxically, there is no room for consilience between postmodernism and Wilson’s C-theory.20 How “satisficing” is Wilson’s C-theory based on the thesis of gene-culture coevolution? As he explains that “satisficing” is a Scottish term that combines “satisfying” and “sufficing,” it is not at all “satisficing” simply because it is hitched to evolutionary biogenetics by interlocking causal explanation across academic disciplines whose quintessence is said to be the power of prediction. In other words, gene-culture coevolution in pursuit of epigenetic rules is reduced to the causal chain of evolutionary biology. It favors and fosters what we might call the “under-labor” conception of the social sciences— that is, in essence, it short-circuits them. It may be said that Wilson cons the prefix con in consilience and co in coevolution. Nature and culture are neither coeval nor confluential. Nature is deep, whereas culture is shallow. In other words, culture is simply epiphenomenal. It is Odyssey’s slave girl, as it were, in the evolutionary journey of humanity. In Wilson’s C-theory, biology and the social sciences (or the humanities) are not on an equal footing: They are not equal co-partners or co-participants. Instead, they are in the dialectical relationship of the domineering master and the submissive slave: One is subservient to the other. Wilson extols the virtue of reductionism as “the primary and essential activity of science,” although he is critical of Skinner’s “extreme reductionism” (p. 54). Reductionism is for Wilson the mantra of science or, as he puts it, “the cutting edge of science” (ibid.). “The love of complexity without reductionism,” he remarks, “makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science” (ibid.). The simplification of complexity is what makes science an “elegant” activity. In contrast to the “holistic” approach of the ancient Chinese who failed to develop the scientific construction of the physical world, Wilson contends that the unmitigated success of Western science since the seventeenth century is attributed to reductionism.21 However, Wilson’s reductionism is far more than the methodological strategy of science. Indeed, the monochromatic credo of his scientism is ontological: it is the conception not only of science but also of reality itself. Wilson’s conception of biogenetically determined human nature has the air of evolutionary inevitability, that

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is, we are condemned to biogeneticism when—to reiterate—what is human is reduced to the physical and when the mind is reduced to a machine. To emphasize: Wilson’s reductionism as the methodological strategy of science is cloaked or masked as a crudely formulated mechanistic materialism.22 Without doubt nature and culture are two of the most complex and controversial terms in human thought across cultural differences. Without defining each clearly, the consilience of the two is a “forbiddingly difficult” task—to borrow Wilson’s own expression in another context (p. 68). He, however, naively assumes or takes it for granted that human nature defined in terms of evolutionary biology and genetics is something invariable within Western thought and across the boundaries of different cultures. When Aristotle, for example, declared that man is by nature (physis) a political animal or he/she by nature desires to know, he did not have in mind evolutionary biology but ontology. Confucius is most judicious when he said in the Analects that “by nature, men are nearly alike; by practice, they get to be wide apart.” Nature or human nature, in other words, is never unequivocal. Even ethologists such as Jane Goodall, Konrad Lorenz, and Frans de Waal, who specialize in (nonhuman) animal behavior, reach different conclusions about or put different spins on their subjects (chimpanzees). Lorenz finds the instinct of aggression in animals due to its territorial imperative, while Waal, as well as Goodall, discovers in them a “peace-making” instinct.23 It is worth noting that it was John Stuart Mill in his A System of Logic (originally published in 1843)24 who used the term ethology as “the exact science of human nature” or “the formation of character” to which Wilson attributes the biologically or genetically determinable study of “personality” as well as “intelligence.” Here Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan must not escape our attention concerning the nature/culture nexus. Like Plato, he was a great political thinker of prodigious imagination. He posits that man is by nature an anti-social or asociable animal. Aggression (polemos) governs the behavior of humanity in the “state of nature,” where every man is at war with all other men (bellum omnium contra omnes). The dawn of civility comes by a social contract, which requires the specifically human capacity of (1) language (speaking and writing) and (2) making promises.25 The theory of contract, whether it be “social” (interhuman) or “natural” (interspecific), is a human contrivance or a construct of imagination regardless of its purpose or consequences. It is as inventive or contrived as the “selfish gene.” The theory of contract and individualism possessive or otherwise interlock each other. It was the late Canadian political theorist C. B. Macpherson who criticized Hobbes’s (as well as John Locke’s) political theory of “possessive individualism,” which “naturalizes” the competitive (i.e., capitalist) society of his own time.26 Wilson, too, maintains that humans are “decidedly a territorial

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species,” the condition of which defines their “possessive” nature. He contends that war is an “epigenetic rule” in that it “arises from both genes and culture.” Furthermore, he has no hesitation to use the term “contractual agreement,” which “so thoroughly pervades human social behavior, virtually like the air we breathe, that it attracts no special notice—until it goes bad” (p. 171). The formation of a contract is for Wilson not only “a cultural universal” but also the natural trait of humanity as species-being. The knowledge of humanity presupposes the ontological question of human specificity or the specific difference (differentia specifica) of humanity. Ontology precedes epistemology, not the other way around. As the German philosophical anthropologist Max Scheler puts it with unusual eloquence: “Man can be either more or less than an animal, but never an animal.”27 Human specificity is as much ontological as genetic. In her discussion of “polemology” (the human science of aggressiveness), Hannah Arendt warns us—judiciously, I should add—of “anthropomorphizing” on the one hand and “theriomorphizing” on the other—the two phases of the same mistake.28 One is prejudging animal behavior in the human mold, while the other is the way of characterizing human behavior in the mode of animals. Both commit what I would call the naturalistic fallacy of misplaced identity. Make no mistake: To invoke human specificity is not to deny the biological roots of being human. To biologize or Darwinize the human order, however, is to explain the whole by one of its substrates. The psychologist Jerome Bruner, who refuses to biologize culture, is most discerningly levelheaded in criticizing the naturalistic fallacy of misplaced identity between nature and culture, which, he contends, has its origin in the nineteenth-century social sciences: culture was conceived as an “overlay” in biologically determined human nature. The causes of human behavior were assumed to lie in that biological substrate. What I want to argue instead is that culture and the question for meaning within culture are the proper causes of human action. The biological substrate, the so-called universals of human nature, is not a cause of action but, at most, a constraint upon it or a condition for it.29

The cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz, too, takes the side of culture rather than of (biological) nature. He sums up his position by emphasizing the fact that we are “incomplete animals” who complete ourselves by way of culture, which he defines as an interwoven web of meanings and values. He puts his view bluntly and emphatically: There is no such thing as a human nature independent of culture. . . . As our central nervous system—and most particularly its crowning curse and glory, the neo-cortex—grew up in great part in interaction with culture, it is incapable

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of directing our behavior or organizing our experience without the guidance provided by systems of significant symbols. . . . To supply the additional information necessary to be able to act, we were forced, in turn, to rely more and more heavily on cultural sources—the accumulated fund of significant symbols. Such symbols are thus not mere expressions, instrumentalities, or correlates of our biological, psychological, and social existence; they are prerequisites of it. Without men, no culture, certainly; but equally, and more significantly, without culture, no men.30

Language signifies the defining moment of human specificity. Man is his/ her language, and for a very good reason he/she is called homo symbolicus above everything else. Language as a system of symbols is the most fundamental way of characterizing human specificity.31 Wilson, too, concurs that it makes human different from nonhuman animals. He speaks approvingly of Chomsky’s “universal grammar” of language encoded in the human genes. What is most interesting about language, however, is not its universal grammaticality but its cultural specificity that proliferates into the Tower of Babel from Egyptian hieroglyphics, Chinese ideography (or sinography), and Greek, Latin, English, Sanskrit, and Korean alphabets—to name only a few out of several thousand languages. Language is culture-specific: It is the primary producer and product of culture at the same time. The scanning of the brain even shows that the brain that digests Chinese sinography works differently from that which uses the English alphabet. The art of interpretation with a focus on language or homo symbolicus is known as hermeneutics with which Wilson seems to get acquainted by reading the American neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty, who identifies hermeneutics with all that is not epistemological.32 From a standpoint of hermeneutics, language, whether it be theoretical or everyday life–worldly, is the “ancestral palace” (Walter Benjamin’s expression) of truth. For Wilson, Rorty’s hermeneutics is neither “causal” nor “consilient” and therefore ends up with diminishing academic credibility and devaluing intellect itself. As a matter of fact, Wilson forgets to entertain the possibility that the language of his own C-theory is hermeneutical. For example, his C-theory includes the consilience of biology with semiotics. Semiotics is the term that the late American philosopher Charles W. Morris used to advance the cause of the “Unified Science” movement in the United States. Be that as it may, Wilson uses highly suggestive metaphors in advancing his C-theory: He speaks of paradigm hunters as the “prospectors” of “virgin land,” the genes holding culture on a “leash,” consilience as “the mother’s milk” of the natural sciences, the natural scientists who are not “conquistadors to melt the Inca gold,” ecological economists as putting “a green thumb on the invisible hand of economics,” hereditarians who do not hold “their conferences in the nude,” and, of course, many more.

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Hermeneutics is meant to honor for its name’s sake the Greek god Hermes as the messenger of Zeus, who, as the legend goes, was the friendliest of all gods to humankind. It has its relevance to the humanities and the social sciences in defining their disciplinary specificity in contradiction to the natural sciences as the paradigm of objectively universal knowledge (i.e., “scientism”). In other words, hermeneutics as the art of interpretation is meant to be a counter-discourse to the hubris of scientism as the epistemological model of universal knowledge.33 Indeed, it means to untie the Gordian knot of biogenetics that strangles the human and social sciences. German scholars categorized their academic disciplines into two broad clusters: Geisteswissenschaften (human sciences) and Naturwissenschaften (natural sciences). Wilson’s C-theory belongs to the “naturalization of culture,” while hermeneutics is aligned with its opposite—the “culturalization of nature.” In short, hermeneutics attempts to unleash culture from the conceptual grid of scientism, e.g., biogeneticism. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins perceptively observes that we do not seem to break away from the polarizing or warring cycle—not unlike the eternal cycle of seasons from “hot” to “cold” and “mild” in between—of the “naturalization of culture” on the one hand and the “culturalization of nature” on the other.34 The exchange of accusation, Wilson’s own C-theory notwithstanding, between the two camps flares up from time to time: Wilson would call hermeneutics a scandal of interpretive/unscientific banality, while the hermeneuticist would call Wilson’s C-theory a “scientific totemism.”35 The interpretive approach to the study of the humanities and the social sciences finds its modern origin in the eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico who authored the Scienza Nuova,36 which pays a great deal of attention to language—particularly etymology and the bodily roots of symbolic and metaphorical expressions. Vico complained that scholars of his own time paid excessive attention to the natural sciences at the expense of the humanities (ethics) and the social sciences (politics). His hermeneutics is grounded in the simple principle: verum ipsum factum, that is to say, we have access to the truth (verum) of history, culture, and society only because we ourselves make, unmake, and remake them (factum)—the idea of which, it is interesting to note, is echoed in postmodern constructivism in recent years. It is no mere accident that Berlin enlists Vico as a “fox” in the forefront of the “Counter-Enlightenment” who, unlike “hedgehoggish” Wilson, sees the world as a pluralistic mosaic.37 The hermeneutical approach to the social sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) is based on the ontological assumption of human specificity, that is, the principal idea that humans are language animals or homo symbolicus. Only because of language can it be said that humans are “self-interpreting” or “self-

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defining” animals. The “interpretive” method of human social behavior, just as the operation of Max Weber’s verstehende Soziologie, which makes the distinction between interpretive “understanding” and causal “explanation,” is often misunderstood or misconstrued as “subjective” or having no “objective” validity whatsoever. In essence, it is not (social-) scientific. On the contrary, the interpretive approach insists that because every action has a meaning-structure constructed by the actor himself/herself on the social scene, the role of the social scientist, unlike that of the natural scientist, is first to investigate the “subjective” or “intersubjective” meaning-structure of social action. Indeed, we homo symbolicus—actors and theorists alike—are consigned to meaning from which there is no escape. Alfred Schutz forcefully states: The concept of Nature, . . . with which the natural sciences have to deal, is . . . an idealizing abstraction from the Lebenswelt [life-world which constitutes the prescientific or preconceptual world as social reality], an abstraction which, on principle and of course legitimately, excludes persons with their personal life and all objects of culture which originate as such in practical human activity. Exactly this [socio-cultural] layer of the Lebenswelt, however, from which the natural sciences have to abstract, is the social reality which the social sciences have to investigate.38

Seen in this light, social-scientific investigation is the second-degree construct of the first order commonsense construct of the world by living and thinking actors themselves.39 Accordingly, all forms of scientism—Wilson’s biologism notwithstanding—however scandalous it may sound, commit empiricide. Moreover, the hope for increasing predictive power in the social sciences is a dream world in which, according to Wilson himself, science meets mysticism. Precisely because humans are self-interpreting or selfdefining animals, their events and affairs—unlike natural phenomena—are not easily amenable to prediction. In the jargon of the social sciences, the consequence of self-interpreting animals is known as self-fulfilling or selfdefeating prophecy. Instead of prediction, therefore, many social scientists less pretentiously and perhaps more precisely speak of “postdiction,” “retrodiction,” “conjecture,” or “stochasticity.”40 The stumbling block of Wilson’s C-theory based on the principles of evolution by natural selection lies in the fact that it is proposed prematurely. The trajectory of his C-theory does not rely on known facts. Instead, it banks on something conjectural or yet to be known. We are reminded here of Henrik Ibsen’s play The Master Builder, whose main plot is the story of a man who, having dreamt of building a church tower that “points straight up in the free air—with the vane at a dizzy height” and “a real castle-in-the-air” on a firm

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foundation, plunges in the end into a ghastly death because he has built too tall a house on too shallow a foundation. Wilson claims that what he calls “the genetic fitness hypothesis” has been “reasonably well borne out by the evidence” (p. 172). Nonetheless, Wilson is willing to admit frankly that in it there are “many weaknesses” the most serious of which is not “contradictory evidence” but “a scarcity of relevant information.” “Because human behavioral genetics is still in its infancy,” he concedes, “there is a near-absence of direct links between particular genes and behavior underlying the universal culture traits” (italics added) (pp. 172 and 154–55). The survival of Wilson’s C-theory is in double jeopardy or danger because it, like a human infant, is susceptible to life-threatening organ failures and consilience as “the mother’s milk” for the unity of knowledge would be dried out from the start to nurture the prematurely born infant. Wilson’s C-theory is in a ditch, as it were.41 The metaphor ditch is alluded to the “star-gazing” of Thales of Miletus in ancient Greece in selfless pursuit of timeless truth who lost his footing and fell into a ditch. An old woman who saw Thales’s fall wondered how he could expect to understand the heavens when he knew nothing about what lay at his own feet. Adding to the insult of his fall into a ditch was the fact that he could not see many stars from the bottom of the ditch. What is the “footing” of Wilson’s C-theory? It is, I submit, the community or communities of inquirers or truth-seekers, i.e., natural scientists, social scientists, humanists, aestheticians, ethicists, and scholars of religion since the professed aim of consilience or the unity of knowledge is by necessity to seek the corroboration of all of these specialists. As science itself is a social process,42 the acceptance or rejection of Wilson’s C-theory as a new paradigm is in their hands. It is indeed a challenging and formidable task. Science as human activity constitutes a significant subculture of humanity—a culture within culture. The development of technoscience since the Enlightenment is a cultural but not genetic progress. The exponential growth of technoscientific knowledge from Ptolemy to Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and Heisenberg is a cultural achievement of European humanity. The famous or infamous question “Why does China have no science?”, too, is not a genetic but a cultural and social question. Or is it a scandalous question of banality? I think not. Of course, it is possible for someone to apply the “Bell curve” and say that the Chinese are genetically not intelligent enough to develop Copernican astronomy, Galilean physics, Newtonian mechanics, the Einsteinian theory of relativity, and Heisenberg’s quantum physics. But it is proven otherwise. Most paradoxically, the technocultural eutrophication of the earth that contributes significantly to the brink of its total destruction, including the extinction of the human species as well as “the death of nature” seems to contradict Wilson’s “genetic fitness hypothesis” or the logic of his

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epigenetic rules concerning the survival of the fittest by natural selection, that is, the human species, unless, of course, the propensity of collective suicide is encoded in the human genes. In the final analysis, I would submit that the cultural hermeneutics of science as a social process is an alternative to Wilson’s theory of consilience based on biogeneticism. Almost five decades ago, Schutz discussed the formation of concept and theory in the social sciences and dared to propose the seminal idea as a critique of the positivist “Unified Science” movement that the social-scientific approach would be better suited than the naturalscientific one to discover “the general principles which govern all human knowledge.”43 The phenomenological philosopher Aron Gurwitsch, too, comes to a similar conclusion in discussing Edmund Husserl’s critique of modern “scientism,” particularly the Galilean mathematization of nature and its ontological implications.44 According to Husserl, scientism, which begins with the Galilean mathematization of nature, is fallacious because it is foremost a conceptual garb (Ideenkleid) whereby what once was (or was intended to be) true in the mathematical formalization of nature as a method has gradually been taken or mistaken for reality itself: as Husserl himself puts it. “[i]t is through the garb of ideas that we take for true being what is actually a method—a method which is designed for the purpose of progressively improving, in infinitum, through ‘scientific’ predictions, those rough predictions which is actually experienced and experienceable in the life-world.”45 To quote Aron Gurwitsch in reference to Husserl’s seminal insight: the cultural or human sciences prove to be all-encompassing, since they also comprise the natural sciences, since nature as conceived of and constructed in modern natural science, i.e., mathematized nature, is itself a mental accomplishment, that is, a cultural phenomenon. The converse, however, is not true. The cultural sciences cannot be given a place among the natural sciences, any more than the cultural world can be reached beginning from mathematized nature or, for that matter, from the thing-world, while, . . . by taking one’s departure from the cultural world, one can arrive at the thing-world and the mathematized universe by means of abstraction, idealization, and formalization. In general, then, there is a possible transition from the concrete to the abstract, but not the reverse [and, I might add, from the inclusive to the exclusive, but not the reverse] (italics added).46

Schutz’s and Gurwitsch’s social scientific critique of knowledge is corroborated by such contemporary philosophers of science as Gaston Bechelard, Thomas S. Kuhn, Stephen Toulmin, Michael Polanyi, Norwood R. Hanseon, and Mary Hesse. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,47 which was originally written in 1962 as a contribution to the International Encyclopedia

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of Unified Science, deserves special attention here. His theory of paradigmmaking and -unmaking has had enormous influence on the disciplinary inquiry of humanists and social scientists for a span of several decades. Curiously enough, however, Wilson neither discusses nor criticizes Kuhn’s work in fashioning his C-theory, even though his ultimate goal is to create the new paradigm called consilience. It is worth noting that a crucial difference between Wilson’s C-theory and Kuhn’s theory of scientific paradigm-formation is that Wilson, true to his evolutionary view of nature and culture or their “coevolution,” considers the growth of scientific knowledge as evolutionary or “accretionary” (his own term), while for Kuhn paradigm making and unmaking is revolutionary or a series of radical shifts. Kuhn explicitly acknowledges the role of hermeneutics or the hermeneutical method in the interpretation of the natural sciences.48 He puts sociohistorical consciousness back into the philosophy of science. His analysis of science is intrinsically historical and psycho-sociological: the structure of scientific knowledge is sought from the historical development of science and in the context of an existing community of scientific practitioners. While Kuhn recognizes the role of hermeneutics in the interpretation of science, Hans-Georg Gadamer, who is the leading and most influential hermeneuticist today, embraces the role of history or historical consciousness in philosophical hermeneutics. In both instances, the centerpiece is history or historical consciousness, which provides a point of intersection between Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and Kuhn’s philosophy of science. It is not surprising at all, therefore, that at the symposium held at Boston College in April of 1974 on the topic of hermeneutics and social science, Gadamer openly welcomed Kuhn’s work as supporting his view, and Gadamer considered it as further evidence of the “universality” of the hermeneutical method or the universal applicability of the hermeneutical method to all the sciences both social and natural. In an attempt to clarify his position in response to his critics, Kuhn wrote a postscript to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1969. In its concluding remarks, there is a revealing passage whose idea has repeatedly been emphasized in his later writings: “Scientific knowledge, like language, is intrinsically the common property of a group or else nothing at all. To understand it we shall need to know the special characteristics of the groups that create and use it.”49 For Kuhn, therefore, science is a public institution or “republic” (res public) whose significance, just as much as that of language, lies in its socio-political dimension. Like language, science is an act of communication among its practitioners, and the acquisition of scientific knowledge is the product of the exchange of their communication. The importance of viewing science as an open and public institution or “republic,” in brief, is principally

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fourfold. First, scientific knowledge is the product of socio-political process, or what Kuhn calls a “group” activity both consilient or otherwise. Second, science as a group activity inextricably involves a “constellation of beliefs, values, techniques, and so on shared by the members of a given community.” Third, the underlying knowledge of what Husserl calls the (pre-scientific) life-world, which is subsumed in building the body of scientific knowledge, is also called “tacit knowledge” by Kuhn drawing the philosophical insights of Michael Polanyi.50 Tacit knowledge is the enabling precondition of doing science. As Kuhn puts it concisely, it is that knowledge which is “learned by doing science rather than by acquiring rules for doing it” (italics original).51 Fourth, like language as the hermeneutical instrument of communication and knowledge, scientific truth is not “value-free,” or devoid of normative judgments whose validity may be rejected by Wilson as “ideological.” On the contrary, Kuhn insists that scientific theorizing always involves “an inextricable mixture” of explanatory and normative judgments. After all, neither power nor value is an ideological tetragammaton.52 In closing my argument against Wilson’s C-theory, it must be stressed that hermeneutical critique is an indispensable tool for understanding the disciplinary nature of the social sciences in learning and teaching the nature of social reality. It is erected in the conception of language as the edifice of human specificity. Wilson’s C-theory is built on the questionable foundation of a mechanistic or materialistic ontology in which the mind itself, for example, is reduced to the brain and then to a capacious machine for the professed purpose of promoting the scientific power of prediction. However, Wilson’s attempt to fashion prediction as the quintessence of social-scientific research is doomed to fail from the start simply because, from the perspective of hermeneutical critique, humans are self-interpreting creatures. In the end, methodological reductionism, which has been admittedly useful to the advancement of the natural sciences, transforms the social sciences into a branch of neuroscience. Wilson’s C-theory is nothing but a species of scientism pure and simple, where what is originally conceived as a scientific method is not taken or mistaken for reality itself. In contrast, hermeneutical critique is introduced and proposed as a genuine and meaningful alternative to Wilson’s C-theory. It is applicable to the social and natural sciences alike because they both are socio-cultural phenomena and products. Hermeneutical critique is a far more suitable model for validating truth-claims than Wilson’s C-theory with its one-sided emphasis on prematurely conceived evolutionary biogeneticism. The validation of Wilson’s C-theory depends, at least partially, upon how it competes with and responds to the hermeneutical philosophy of knowledge both theoretical and practical. Doing science—both social and natural—assumes the existing community

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of practicing scientists who openly communicate and exchange their truthclaims with one another solely by way of language, which marks the “natural light” of human specificity in contradistinction to organic and inorganic nature on the one hand and man-made machines on the other. Indeed, this makes all the human difference. NOTES 1.  Consilience (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998). Hereafter all the pagination in the text refers to this work. 2. See Sociobiology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975). 3.  Promethean Fire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 170. 4. However, it should be noted that Wilson forgets to mention the theory of “biopolitics” in the study of politics, which is an attempt to link politics with biology or nurture with nature. See, for example, R. D. Masters, The Nature of Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 5. See The Hedgehog and the Fox (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986). 6.  For a collection of essays on the controversy of Wilson’s sociobiology, see The Sociobiology Debate, ed. A. L. Caplan (New York: Harper and Row, 1978) and a comparable volume on Wilson’s theory of consilience is yet to appear. See also Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). 7.  For a phenomenological account of scientism, see Hwa Yol Jung, Rethinking Political Theory (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1993), particularly pp. 33–35, 96–98, and 152–57. 8. See The Splendid Feast of Reason (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). 9.  E. O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). 10.  E. O. Wilson, Biophililia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). 11.  Promethean Fire, pp. 70–71. 12.  On Human Nature, p. 191. The bioethicist Peter Singer recently suggests that the political left should take Darwinian evolutionary biology seriously because it teaches us cooperation as well as competition. As such it may even be beneficial to the weak and poor. See his commentary on Wilson’s “ethical premises,” A Darwinian Left (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 12–14. 13.  On Human Nature, p. 191. 14.  Promethean Fire, p. 169. 15. Ibid. 16. Curiously, Wilson mentions the social historian Frank J. Sulloway, but he forgets Sulloway’s work on Freud as a “biologist of the mind.” Sulloway maintains that “in my historical appraisal, Freud stands squarely within an intellectual lineage where he is, at once, a principal scientific heir of Charles Darwin and other evolutionary thinkers in the nineteenth century and a major forerunner of the ethologists

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and sociobiologists of the twentieth century.” See Freud: Biologist of the Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1979), p. 5. 17. See Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971). 18.  Promethean Fire, p. 209n 19. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, p. 18. 20.  The author proposes the idea of transversality in place of Eurocentric universality in the age of globalization in the multicultural world. Following the motto of postmodernism is to “decenter the center,” the idea of transversality as a decentering effort of being intercultural, interspecific, interdisciplinary, etc., shuns all types of centrism. 21.  The zoologist Richard Lewontin, who is no intellectual companion of Wilson’s sociobiology, concedes that “Whatever the faults of reductionism, we have accomplished a great deal by employing reduction as a methodological strategy” (italics added). See The Triple Helix (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). 22.  W. Berry, who prefers to call himself a “non-academician,” wrote a scathing critique of Wilson’s theory of consilience with a focus on reductionism and materialism. See Life Is a Miracle (Washington: Counterpoint, 2000). 23.  Cf. Wilson, who comments on the subject of ethology from the perspective of his “epigenesist”: “To recapitulate the total argument human aggression cannot be explained as either a dark-angelic flaw or a bestial instinct. Nor is it the pathological symptom of upbringing in a cruel environment. Human beings are strongly predisposed to respond with unreasoning hatred to external threats and to escape their hostility sufficiently to overwhelming the source of the threat by a respectable wide margin of safety. Our brains do appear to be programmed to the following extent: we are inclined to partition other people into friends and aliens, in the same sense that birds are inclined to learn territorial songs and to navigate by the polar constellations. We tend to fear deeply the actions of strangers to solve conflict by aggression. These learning rules are most likely to have evolved during the past hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution and, thus, to have conferred a biological advantage on those who conformed to them with the greatest fidelity” (see On Human Nature, p. 119). It appears that his above reasoning is better explained by Skinner’s “behaviorism” rather than by his “biogenetics” or “epigenesis.” 24.  John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic (London: Longmans, Green, 1925). 25.  Hannah Arendt considers action as the defining moment of human specificity. She writes: “What makes man a political being is his faculty of action; it enables him to get together with his peers, to act in concert, and to reach out for goals and enterprises that would never enter his mind, let alone the desires of his heart, had he not been given this gift to embark on something new. Philosophically speaking, to act is the human answer to the condition of natality. Since we all come into the world by virtue of birth, as newcomers and beginners, we are able to start something new; without the fact of birth we would not even know what novelty is, all ‘action’ would be either mere behavior or preservation.” See The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 179. 26.  For an anthropological critique of Wilson’s sociobiology in relation to Hobbes, see M. Sahlins, The Use and Abuse of Biology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976), pp. 101–106.

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27. See Man’s Place in Nature, trans. H. Meyerhoff (New York: Noonday Press, 1961), p. 20. 28.  Crises of the Republic (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), pp. 156–57. 29.  Acts of Meaning (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 20–21. 30.  The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 49. 31. The anthropologist Sahlins also emphasizes: “Human society is cultural, unique in virtue of its construction by symbolic means. . . . If we were to disregard language, culture would differ from animal tradition only in degree. But precisely because of this ‘involvement with language’—a phrase hardly befitting serious scientific discourse—cultural social life differs from the animal in kind.” The Use and Abuse of Biology, p. 61. 32. See Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). 33.  See particularly Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” The Review of Metaphysics, 25 (September 1971): 3–51. 34.  The Use and Abuse of Biology, p. 105. 35.  Ibid., p. 106, in which he explains: “The net effect is a curious form of totemism of which scientific sociobiology is the latest incarnation. For it totemism is, as Lévi-Strauss says, the explication of differences between human groups by reference to the distinction between natural species, such that clan A is related to and distinct from clan B as the eagle hawk is to the crow, then sociobiology merits classification as the highest form of the totemic philosophy. For its sophistication and advance over the primitive societies, both in the West and abroad, it does seem to merit a special name, one in keeping with its own synthetic pretensions as the latest branch of the sciences and the principal hope of civilization. Give it its due: sociobiology is a Scientific Totemism.” 36. See The New Science, trans. T. G. Bergin and M. H. Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). 37. In Three Critics of the Enlightenment, ed. H. Hardy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), Isaiah Berlin enlists Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Georg Hamann in addition to Vico in the “Counter-Enlightenment” movement. Berlin characterizes the Enlightenment as “[t]he proclamation of the autonomy of reason and the methods of the natural sciences, based on observation as the sole reliable method of revelation, sacred writings and their accepted interpreters, tradition, prescription, and every forum of non-rational and transcendent source of knowledge.” See Against the Current (New York: Viking Press, 1980), p. 1. It is worth noting that the entire corpus of Foucault’s writings on “biopolitics,” which, according to Wilson, embodies the essence of postmodernism, inherits the “Counter-Enlightenment” tradition. 38.  Collected Papers, Vol. 1: The Problem of Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), p. 58. 39.  In his opus magnum Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), p. viii, Maurice Merleau-Ponty also makes the same point with clarity: “The whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced, and if we want to subject science itself to rigorous scrutiny and arrive

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at a precise assessment of its meaning and scope, we must begin by reawakening the basic experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression.” 40. In The Psychology of Science (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1966), p. 30, Abraham H. Maslow comments that “it seems . . . that these ‘good,’ ‘nice’ scientific words—prediction, control, rigor, certainty, exactness, preciseness, neatness, orderliness, lawfulness, quantification, proof, explanation, validation, reliability, rationality, organization, etc.—are all capable of being pathologized when pushed to the extreme. All of them may be pressed into the service of safety needs, i.e., they may become primarily anxiety-avoiding and anxiety-controlling mechanisms.” I wonder if these safety needs are encoded in Wilson’s epigenetic rules. 41. In his Time in the Ditch (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2001), John McCumber discusses the politics of philosophy and the impact of politics on philosophy during the McCarthy era in the United States. I am indebted to his allusion to Thales’s fall into a ditch, which he recounts in the beginning of his work. “Thales,” McCumber remarks, “was not the last philosopher to lose his footing so badly that his quest for truth was impeded or even ended. Much of the time, the footing involved is political” (see ibid., p. xv). It is, therefore, naïve to assume that science as human activity, as well as philosophy, is purely scientific in pursuit of truth. Here we should take heed of Michel Foucault, whom Wilson regards as one of the foremost postmodern philosophers and who makes us pause and reflect, when Foucault contends that “critique is the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its effects of power and question power on its discourse of truth.” See The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth [New York: Semiotext(e), 1997], p. 32. It is worth commenting that Wilson’s Consilience or C-theory is not a scientific inquiry but belongs to the meta-scientific realm called the philosophy of science. Thus, it belongs to the broad genre of what Foucault calls “critique” (see further Michel Foucault, Essential Works of Foucault, Vol. 3: Power, ed. J. D. Faubion and trans. R. Hurly and others (New York: New Press, 2000). 42. In The New Scientific Spirit, trans. A. Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984, p. 12, Gaston Bachelard, who is a forerunner of Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm making and unmaking, cogently comments that “objectivity cannot be separated from the social aspects of proof.” 43.  Collected Papers, Vol. 1: The Problem of Social Reality, pp. 65–66. 44. In Il Saggiatore, Galileo wrote: “Philosophy is written in that vast book which stands forever open before our eyes, I mean the universe; but it cannot be read until we have learned the language and becomes familiar with the characters in which it was written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word.” See the author’s Rethinking Political Theory: Essays in Phenomenology and the Study of Politics (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1993), p. 76, the passage of which is quoted from Colin Murray Turbayne, The Myth of Metaphor, rev. ed. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1970), pp. 101–102. 45.  The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 50–51.

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46. See Phenomenology and the Theory of Science, ed. Lester Embree (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), pp. 148–49. 47.  Second and enl. edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). 48.  The Essential Tension (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). 49.  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 210. At the international colloquium in the philosophy of science in London in 1965, Kuhn stated without equivocation: “Already it should be clear that the explanation must, in the final analysis, be psychological or sociological. It must, that is, be a description of a value system, an ideology, together with an analysis of the institutions through which the system is transmitted and enforced. Knowing what scientists value, we may hope to understand what problems they will undertake and what choices they will make in particular circumstances of conflict. I doubt that there is another sort of answer to be found.” See Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research? in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 210. 50. See Knowing and Being, ed. M. Green (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 207–212. 51.  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 101. 52.  Charles Taylor comes to view that the hermeneutical sciences of man cannot be measured or judged by their predictive power as is propounded by Wilson in his C-theory. “These sciences,” Taylor contends, “cannot be wertfrei; they are moral sciences in a more radical sense than the eighteenth century understood. Finally, their successful prosecution requires a high degree of self-knowledge, a freedom from illusion, in the sense of error which is rooted and expressed in one’s way of life; for our incapacity to understand is rooted in our own self-definitions, hence in what we are. To say this is not to say anything new: Aristotle makes a similar point in Book I of the Ethics. But it is still radically shocking and unassimilable to the mainstream of modern science [and, I might add, Wilson’s C-theory notwithstanding].” See “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” p. 51.

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Part II

TWO ELEMENTAL PRECONDITIONS OF WORLD PHILOSOPHY

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Chapter Five

Transversality, Harmony, and Humanity between Heaven and Earth

We are not one, but many. We are living in the world of multitude, which is both interhuman and interspeciesistic. This is the world of multiculturalism, which has been ushered into globalization and into a brave new world. The task of public philosophy, as I see it, is to engage in dialogue concerning the national and global issues of exigency at public forums. The most exigent issue of our time is the question of seeking and establishing peace in the midst of different cultures or civilizations on the one hand and between global humanity and nature on the other. This essay explores the role of transversality as a radically new way of thinking in the face of multiculturalism and globalization, where no one culture, no one species, no one academic discipline, or no one sense (aisthesis in Greek) should play a hegemonic role over the others, whether it be empire-building or anthropocentricism over the nonhuman earth (speciesism). The philosopher begins anew by inventing new concepts to come to grips with the world always in transition. In today’s multicultural and globalizing world, public philosophy is in dire need of inventing new concepts to explore changing realities. New concepts are always already implicated in changing realities themselves. I suggest that transversality is a seminal concept. It is conceived of as a practical response befitting for transforming the world of multiculturalism and globalization in the spirit of Gilles Deleuze for whom “true theory” does not totalize but instead multiplies. Ambiguity in the etymological sense of “bothness” rather than “either/or” comes with the conceptual territory of multitude that had no ending or is “unfinalizable.” In the spirit of Husserl, who invoked in the mid-1930s the metaphor of the phoenix rising from the ashes in describing his seminal phenomenology of the everyday socio-cultural life-world (Lebenswelt), Calvin O. Schrag conceives of transversality as replacing universality for our new millennium. As a radically new way of thinking, it may be likened to digging (laterally) a new hole in another 119

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place rather than digging (vertically) the same hole deeper and deeper with no exit in sight. To sum up: By way of transversality, I take “stakes” as golden opportunities for the creation of a new ontology, a new culture, a new ethics, and a new politics, that is, of a new Weltanschauung. In its origin, transversality is a geometric concept that refers to the crossing (X-ing as in the crossing sign of railroad tracks) of two diagonal lines in any given rectangle that are symbolized in the Greek letter χ (chi), from which the word “chiasm” in the sense of intertwining originates. As a philosophical matrix, transversality contextualizes “truth” both across and beyond the boundaries of individual cultures, individual species (human and nonhuman), individual disciplines, and individual sensorium. In the new paradigm of transversality, the question of “truth” is sought cross-culturally. Thus, transversality is spelled “trans(uni)versality.” The face of universality is often veiled or masked in European ethnocentrism. It cannot be otherwise, because all philosophy, European or otherwise, invents universality or universal truth as cultural hermeneutics or cultural politics. Taking the cue from Michel Foucault in his 1978 visit to Japan, a new philosophy for the future will emerge from the meeting or confluence without coincidence of the East and the West. By maximizing the global cross(X)-flow and ex/change of ideas and values, transversality also dif/fuses globalization as a non-reductive and non-ethnocentric process, i.e., a non-predatory event that results in the hybridity or creolization of ideas and values. Hybridity will be neither entirely Eastern nor entirely Western but something in-between (naka, in Japanese). In other words, it will be intercultural. In addition, it will be interspeciesistic, interdisciplinary, and intersensorial. The most befitting image of the newly emerging face of transversality may be the famous rustic wooden statue of the Buddhist priest Hoshi, now housed in Kyoto National Museum, whose face marks a new dawn of awakening (satori) that signals the beginning of a new global regime of ontology, culture, ethics, and politics. From the crack of the middle (naka) of the old face of the Hoshi statue, there emerges an interstitial, liminal face that signifies a new transmutation and transvaluation of the existing world. The icon of the emerging new face symbolizes the arrival of Maitreya (the future “Awakened One”) or Middle Way—that third enabling term of transversality that is destined to navigate the turbulent waters of intercultural border crossings. Harmony actively promotes peace. In other words, as music fosters harmony, peace is a music of harmony. By way of harmony, we promote peace, that is, the harmonics of relationships both interhuman and interspeciesistic, that is what might be called Buddhistic “earth democracy.” The following formula sketches the tripartite relationships of transversality, harmony, and humanity: Transversality ↔ Harmony ↔ Humanity between Heaven and Earth

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The acoustic is what characterizes the sound of music. It is inherently simultaneous, globalizing, synthesizing, and socializing, whereas the visual is sequential, localizing, analytic, and isolating. So color and sound are two radically different modalities of organizing the human sensorium and the world. There is a qualitative difference in human experience between the visual and the acoustic. As music is the organized movement of sound, the spatiality of sound (soundscape) is most fully actualized in the tones of music. Color does not separate itself from the object, whereas sound separates itself from its source. In other words, color is a dependent attribute of an object, whereas sound is not. Color is locatable and localizable in one single position with the object, whereas sound, once separated from its source, has no definite topological property or determination although its source is locatable. Sound travels in no one direction, it travels in all directions. It is neither “here” nor “there” but everywhere (i.e., placeless or ubiquitous). To distinguish between color (seeing) and sound (hearing) is not to say that they are disconnected. For example, we speak of the coloration of tones and the tonality of colors. In fact, there is the sociability, or synaesthesia, of the senses. According to Helen Keller, who was born deaf and blind, it is difficult for us to keep separate the “tuned-in” functions of the five senses, since they assist and reinforce one another. We hear views, see tones, taste music, smell storms, etc. Only in terms of the body as the participatory locus of perception do we come to understand Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s deep notion that the world is made of the same stuff as the bodily perception. In each act of perception, the body participates in the world. Each perception is an instance or moment of the sensuous unity (i.e., synaesthesia), and it is enclosed in the synergic work of the body, that is, intersensorial. The body is the carnal field in which perception becomes localized as seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting this or that in particular. The body is a sentient subject, never an inert mass. As such, the body as flesh is capable of “authoring” the world first before “answering” it. Harmony promotes the sacrament of peaceful coexistence among not only all men and women but also all nonhuman beings and things in the cosmos. The idea of peaceful coexistence may be called synchronicity or the continuum of Interbeing. By synchronicity or Interbeing, I mean that in the cosmos everything is connected to everything else and nothing exists and can exist in isolation. Harmony is the quintessence of music, which is consummately aesthetic because all other arts or performing arts (mousike in Greek) aspire to attain or emulate the condition of music. In his work on phenomenological aesthetics, Mikel Dufrenne argues that harmony is “the primary condition of musical being.”1 In his Chinese classic Book of Rites (Liji), Confucius regards benevolence (ren) as “akin to music.”2 The great composer Beethoven, who

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loved a tree more than a man, went so far as to claim that music is higher revelation than all philosophy and wisdom put together. For Robert Burton, whose seventeenth-century work The Anatomy of Melancholy is encyclopedic, music is a tonic for the malady of the saddened soul and sorrowful heart. Music therapy, according to him, surpasses the prescription of philosophers and physicians. In his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy, the youthful Friedrich Nietzsche, who was trained in Greek philology, valorized music— perhaps in the ancient Greek sense of μουσική (performing arts) that includes oral poetry, drama, dance, and music—as the consummate aesthetic. For him, music alone can justify the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. In this sense, the world is “measured” (in the musical sense of μΣτρον) by the aesthetic of music, whose primary condition of being is to attune ourselves to the rhythm of the world both human and nonhuman. By way of mood (Stimmung)— which is related to Stimme (voice)—humans, according to Heidegger, find themselves as “Being-in-the-world” (in-der-Welt-sein), which is both the world with other humans (Mitwelt) and the environing world (Umwelt). The Greek sense of the mathematical, too, was tied to music. In the Pythagorean genre, the musical and the mathematical work together toward the unifying concept of harmony. For Pythagoras and ancient Pythagoreans, the idea that “all is number” or “number is all things” was meant to be the perfect order of the universe (uni-verse) in terms of invisible and temporal harmonia. In the Renaissance, too, the Vitruvian figure inscribed in a square and a circle was a symbol of symphonia between microcosm and macrocosm, and Leonardo da Vinci obtains a harmonious smile in the Gioconda (Mona Lisa) by means of the geometry of a circle. So with Pythagoras, the ratio or harmonic proportionality of the octave (2:1), of the fourth (4:3), and of the fifth (3:2) was meant to perfect the ordering of the mathematical. The sum of the numbers in these ratios—1, 2, 3, and 4—is 10, which is for Pythagoras the perfect number. To Pythagoras, this mathematical order came as a revelation of the harmonia of the natural (heavenly) and the moral world—each individually and both together known as the “music of the spheres.” Ancient Pythagoreans also spoke of the “holy fourfoldness” of water, air, earth, and fire—the union of the spheres. What is most interesting and relevant to our discussion here is that harmony is an ultimate pitch of musicality: It constitutes the keyboard of understanding reality as social process (i.e., Interbeing), for only where there is sociality, is there reality and where there is no sociality, there is no reality. This is the quintessential ontological principle of Sinism that includes Confucianism, Daoism, and Chan/Zen Buddhism in China, Korea, and Japan. I have been using the term relational ontology to characterize the Sinic way of doing and thinking. As music is a “family” of sounds, harmony as a musical

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pitch is not the unitariness of the undifferentiated but a polyphonic chord or orchestration of the differentiated many. As the loftiest virtue of Confucian virtue ethics, ren is to harmonize the whole of humanity. Thus ren has a cosmopolitan outlook. By virtue ethics, I mean that ethics which is neither deontological (Kantian) nor utilitarian (Benthamite). As the aesthetic is the harmony between humanity and nature, so is the good the harmonious relationship between one person and another: not only is the ethical grounded in the aesthetic, but also harmony combines the theme of the aesthetic and the ethical. Harmony, therefore, is the principium not only of the aesthetic but also of the social. There is indeed a kinship between ren and music. We can speak of the “music of humanity”—to borrow the most well-chosen expression of Herbert Fingarette. However, the cosmopolitanism of ren is rooted in filial piety (xiao), that is, ren is a “rooted cosmopolitanism.” If the “music of filial piety” may be likened to playing a duet, trio, quartet or quintet, then the “music of humanity” is comparable to playing a full orchestra. Filial piety exemplifies the tonality of Confucian virtue ethics as well as relational ontology. Among five relationships (wuxing) in Confucianism, filiality is most basic and primary. Before ren is fully played out, one must first fulfill filial piety. Indeed, they are not separate but two aspects of a single concern. To use the language of Confucius’s justification of the primacy of filial piety, one must start from a place that is near in order to travel a far distance or one must begin from the lower ground in order to scale a lofty height. While I was reading the nature of Greco-Roman religion many years ago, I stumbled on the interesting and appealing way of defining piety (pietas) as “absolute reciprocity.” The story of piety goes as follows: A mother was doing her time in a prison which was built on the ruins of an old temple. Her “faithful” daughter was breast-feeding to nourish her mother as she was nourished once by her mother when she was an infant. This act of reciprocity is called piety. The Welcome Institute and Museum of the History of Medicine in London houses a collection of twenty-four ivory engravings that illustrate twenty-four exemplary deeds of filial piety or the piety of filius (son in Latin). One of them is the specter in which a “faithful” daughter is breast-feeding her aged father while her two little children are looking on. This embodied act of nourishing is an exemplar of filial piety that incorporates the spirituality of giving in return. From a Sinic perspective, all moral deeds are performative, that is to say, they are embodied acts when they are prescribed and performed particularly in rituals. Filial piety is no exception. In our discussion of harmonia mundi (world harmony), there are two genres: interhuman and interspeciesistic relationships (homopiety and geopiety), which form an interrelated circle. So much for homopiety. Now we

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move to geopiety, which is concerned with questions of ecology or the environment (Umwelt). Ecology or the science of the earth as a household has rightly become our “ultimate concern.” It has a religious magnitude. It has turned into the question of “to be or not to be.” The ecological crisis may be seen as nature’s mutiny (silent revolt) against humanity. It persists: There is no waning sign to it. It is a permanent fixture of the human condition everywhere. Alarmingly this earth, our dwelling place, has progressively become an inhospitable, precarious, ruinous, unsustainable, and even deadly place for all earthlings both large and small, human and nonhuman. Now it manifests itself in the form of global warming. The ancient Hindu scriptural saying of Bhagavad Gita captures the dire predicament of the earthly condition today: “I am become death.” Most generally speaking, it is the arrogance of the human species (speciesism)3 over the rest of creation that must be blamed for the end of nature or earth. In such condition, the ethics of geopiety precedes that of homopiety, simply because the end of the earth necessarily signifies the end of history but not the other way round. What Rodin’s sculptural masterpiece The Cathedral is to the sacrament of interhuman coexistence, M. C. Escher’s Verbum is to the sanctity of interspeciesistic relationships. It signifies the biblical notion that “in the beginning was the word,” and that word was Interbeing or the ecological continuum of Being. Thus the “first law” of ecology is predicated upon the idea that in the cosmos everything is connected to everything else. According to the Homeric “Hymn to Hermes” in ancient Greek thought, the god Hermes invented the lyre out of a tortoise shell, the meaning of whose myth is synonymous with the discovery of the universe as the sounding orbit and harmony. Music as the epitome of an aesthetic phenomenon in relation to ecology is embodied in the voice of Orpheus, which is the combined voice of music and (oral) poetry at once. As the legend goes, Orpheus was a musician or a player of the lyre (i.e., a ‘lyricist’ par excellence). With his music, Orpheus was able to make the whole of nature or —to use the Sinic expression—“ten thousand things” enchant (en/chant) and dance in delight (de/light). Orpheus the Thracian musician made rocks, mountains, streams, trees, forests, animals, and birds dance. His voice makes ecology efficacious. His musical instrument—lyre—carries a promise of the eternity of our harmony with nature. In his Sonnets to Orpheus, Rainer Maria Rilke declares (or de/clears) that “das Gesang ist Dasein” (singing is existence). Shakespeare’s “song” in King Henry VIII (Act III, Scene I) honors Orpheus: Orpheus with his lute made trees, And the mountain tops that freeze, Bow themselves when he did sing: To his music plants and flowers

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Ever sprung, as sun showers There had made a lasting spring. Every thing that heard him play, Even the billows of the sea, Hung their heads, and then lay by. In sweet music is such art, Killing care and grief of heart Fall asleep, or hearing die.

It is the same legend of Orpheus that inspired Claudio Monteverdi to compose an opera (Orfeo)—that integral art form that infuses, after the fashion of Greek singing, orchestration, drama, and dance. Later, Christoph W. Gluck and Jacques Offenbach followed the footsteps of Monteverdi. Franz Liszt composed a symphonic poem called Orpheus, and Igor Stravinsky celebrated Orpheus in a ballet form that is paradigmatic to what we have above called the model of Orphean dance. Above all, Symphony No. 6, the Pastoral Symphony, of Beethoven is, I think, most telling. It is Beethoven’s animated portrayal of nature and the life of the countryside: the fields, meadows, woods, and streams; a chorus of the nightingale, quail, cuckoo, and yellowhammer; a storm; a peasant’s festival (a village dance or fair); and a shepherd’s hymn of thanking at the passing of the storm. It is irresistible to insert here that Botticelli’s Primavera in its artistic content takes after the rhythmic modality of music and dance. In Japanese culture, there is no lack of the musicality of soundscape. Take the example of a famous haiku by the seventeenth-century Japanese poet, who studied Zen and also revolutionized the modern Japanese haiku in the condensed and elegant 5-7-5 syllabic formula only in its Japanese original, not in its English translation: Furu ike ya! Kawazu tomikomu Mizu no oto.

The old pond A frog jumps in, The sound of the water.

Indeed, “small” is elegant and beautiful. The sonorous ubiquity of the water when the frog jumps is truly metaphysical: It signifies a concordant continuum of all the cosmic elements. So, the simplicity and wilderness of oto (sound) is the most elemental, all-encompassing principium of the haiku. The Zenish splendor of the simple and wild in this Basho’s haiku airs and echoes the sonorous mood of “serenity” (or what Heidegger calls Gelassenheit in contrast to Gestell)—the seasonal serenade of Being or Nature/“that which is as it is” (shi zen). The harmony of the elements is the great continuum of Being where the reverberation of the water’s sound is perceived by the poet

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in the little creature’s consonance with nature or the whole cosmos as the background of tranquility, serenity, or “beatific repose.” Furthermore, there is a Japanese counterpart to the Greek legend of Orpheus the musician: It is extraordinarily interesting to discover that the Japanese legend of Semimaru parallels the legend of Orpheus. Semimaru is an archetype of the performing artist and a “patron saint” of the performing arts in Japan, and he inspired the mood of composing many poems, tales, and plays in the history of Japanese literature. As the legend goes, Semimaru was a blind beggar lutenist whose gift for music compensates for his blindness. Thus this legendary “composite individual” personifies the spiritual “sight” of the blind. The most allusive part of Semimaru is the name itself. Etymologically, it is a composite of semi and maru. Semi is the Japanese word for the singing insect called cicada whose chorus in summer delights the young and maru indicates the round or spherical as in the encirclement of sound or the image of “round” that Aldo Leopold creates in his Round River. Maru is also used in a second component of male names and ending of the names of ships. In his conceptualization of Interbeing, Watsuji Tetsuro integrates interhuman relationships (Rinrigaku: Ethics) with their environing (climactic) milieu (Fudo: “wind”/“land”) after the fashion of feng-shui (“wind,” “water,” or geomancy), which may be called a Sinic eco-art. What Being and time are to Heidegger, Interbeing and space are to Watsuji. This does not mean that for Watsuji time does not exist. Nor does this mean that space does not exist for Heidegger either. On the contrary, Watsuji’s basic premise is that time and space take place together. They are a sort of double helix, as it were: human existence is neither exclusively temporal nor exclusively spatial; it is both, that is, chronotopical. In human existence, time and space are coeval. For Watsuji, human existence is infused with time and space. Ningen, the human, has one foot in the Mitwelt and the other in the Umwelt. Watsuji insists that the climate does not exist apart from history. Nor does history exist apart from the climate. He plays out the concept of ningen or being human as it is composed of two sinograms: “human” (nin or hito) and “betweenness” (gen or aidagara): etymologically, to be human is to be necessarily relational or interhuman (Mitmenschlichkeit). Watsuji’s philosophy of ningen is close to Martin Buber’s formulation of the interhuman (das Zwischenmenschliche). In Buber’s relational ontology, it is important to note that the “I” of “I-Thou” and the “I” of “I-It” can never be the same “I” because the “I” in these two primary relationships is always and necessarily defined in relation to and in interaction with the “Thou” or “It,” never by itself alone. From the standpoint of relational ontology, moreover, culture underwrites ningen or interhuman relationships. Humans create culture, and conversely culture molds humans. The question of “what the human is”

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and that of “what culture is” cannot be separated: One implicates the other. The American cultural anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, sees that discovering heaven in a grain of sand is not a feat only poets (e.g., the poet William Blake) can achieve. To put it briefly: There is no human nature independent of culture—without men and women, no culture but, equally, without culture, no men and women. What is said about the Mitwelt should also be said about the Umwelt in defining ningen. The environmental crisis today intimates that not only does the climate (e.g., global warming) affect human existence and culture, but also humans terribly affect the climate to the extent that Watsuji would have never imagined. The earth is a “bodyword” as much as the body is an “earthword.” The damage that the Cartesian disembodied cogito (ergo sum or “I think therefore I am”) has done to the social, political, and ethical thinking of Western modernity is extensive and immeasurable. One does not have to be a woman or feminist to realize its effects. The body and the earth inscribe each other in/as one fleshfold. As such the body is quintessentially a place name, a name of location. But for the body, we would have no conception of space at all. There is the Sinic saying that the body and the land are not two. They are relational through and through. The American ecophilosopher Aldo Leopold equates his “land ethic” with the soul and body of conservationism, with “an aesthetic harvest” of things natural, wild, and free. As the mindscape is rooted in the landscape, the quality of wilderness is not only of outward nature but also of the moral vision of our inward soul. Herein lies the profound and prophetic vision of Leopold in defense of geopiety and more importantly the reason why the moral vision of nature must precede that of humanity, or they complement each other. Leopold, I think, echoes the cosmological and moral vision of Zhang Zai (1022–1077), who lived in China across the Pacific Ocean over nine centuries ago. I find the following classic inscription of Zhang most interesting and stunningly beautiful because they are not only cosmological in defining “humanity between heaven and earth,” but also framed in the truly Confucian terms of the family as the model of all relationality. That is, Zhang’s passage links or fuses Confucianism and geophilosophy. In the “Western Inscription” (Ximing), he inscribes: “Heaven is my father and Earth is my mother, and even such a small creature as I find an intimate place in their midst. Therefore that which extends throughout the universe I regard as my body and that which directs the universe I consider as my nature. All people are my brothers and sisters, and all things are my companions.”4 As the body is the material condition of human existence, both the social world (Mitwelt) and the natural world (Umwelt) are embodied phenomena in that we are connected to them by way of the body as the most basic medium of all relationships even prior to language. The body is not just the medium

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of communication, but it is communication. Ningen is not an incorporeal substance. The earth is a bodyword as much as the body is an earthword. The contemporary Chinese philosopher Li Zehou coined the neologism “subjectality” (zhu/ ti/xing, in three sinograms) which is distinguished from “subjectivity”—to the delight of Merleau-Ponty, I might add—in that the former is embodied/aesthetic, while the latter is idealized/epistemological. The aesthetic and embodiment are familial terms because the former is the discourse of the latter. It is also worth noting that “lived experience” (Erlebnis) in Japanese phenomenology is translated as taiken. The Chinese ti and the Japanese tai are one and the same sinogram “body.” In conclusion: We come to a full circle. As Merleau-Ponty says, the end of a philosophy is the account of its beginning. We are living in the world of multitude that is both interhuman and interspeciesistic. We live in a web of relationships to which I gave the name “Interbeing.” The task of public philosophy—to reiterate—is to engage in dialogue concerning the public issues of exigency that I have identified as peace cum harmony for both interhuman and interspeciesistic relationships. In the globalizing world of multiculturalism, the value of transversality points to the lateral or cross-cultural exchange (ex/change) of ideas and values hopefully to transform the world into a better place to live for all humanity as earth-dwellers in peace and harmony not just among humans but with nonhumans, as well. The task of public philosophy, in sum, is to cultivate the public mind concerning the contemporary issues of exigency and to awaken and heighten their urgent sense of responsibility for others both human and nonhuman. NOTES 1. See The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward S. Casey, Albert A. Anderson, Willis Domingo, and Leo Jacobson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 255. 2. See Li Chi (Liji): Book of Rites, trans. James Legge, Vol. 2 (New Hyde Park: University Books, 1967), p. 103. I translate ren as the following two meanings folding into one: (1) the human quality of being humane and (2) humanity as a collectivity. Let me quote a passage with an analogy to music as a performing art from Herbert Fingarette (Confucius—The Secular as Sacred, New York: Harper and Row, 1972, p. 53): “Acts that are li are not mere rote, formula-conforming performances; they are subtle and intelligent acts exhibiting more or less sensitivity to context, more or less integrity in performance. We would do well to take music, of which Confucius was a devotee, as our model here. We distinguish sensitive and intelligent musical performances from dull and unperceptive ones; and we detect in the performance confidence and integrity, or perhaps hesitation, conflict, ‘faking,’ ‘sentimentalizing.’ We

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detect all this in the performance; we do not have to look into the psyche or personality of the performer. It is all ‘there,’ public. Although it is there in the performance, it is apparent to us when we consider the performance not as ‘the Beethoven Opus 3’ (that is, from the composer perspective), nor as a ‘public concert’ (the li perspective), nor as a ‘post-Mozartian opus’ (the style perspective), but primarily as this particular person’s performance (the personal perspective).” 3.  It is interesting to note that speciesism has a double significance. In the first place, the idea of species as in the “human species” is a visual one that comes from the Latin specio (to look or behold) and is related to the Greek idea, which comes from νοšώ (“to see”), and to the Latin videre. In the second place, it is prejudice of the human species against other species. Speciesism is clearly manifested in human manipulation, exploitation, and domination of nature that culminates in the technological Weltanschauung of modern humanity. 4.  Wing-tsit Chan (ed. and trans.), A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 497.

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Chapter Six

Phenomenology and Body Politics

1. Phenomenology is that philosophical movement that was initiated by Edmund Husserl and continued, modified, and extended by his followers. It has thus far gone through transcendental, existential, hermeneutical, deconstruction, and ethical stages. As a philosophical movement, phenomenology is not a school of thought that propagates a fixed set of unchanging dogmas. Its true vitality is preserved and resides in its capacity to transform itself. As a perpetual beginner, the phenomenologist is one who maintains the constant vigilance that would not let us forget the source and resource of all knowledge and action in life-worldly experience. The end of phenomenology is, indeed, the endless account of its beginning. On the momentous occasion of discovering the importance of the life-world (Lebenswelt) for the mission of philosophy to overcome the crisis of European humanity and sciences, Husserl himself invoked in the mid-1930s the metaphor of the phoenix rising from the ashes. For good reason, phenomenology is called a radical philosophy of experience that not only means to encounter the actually given or the real, but also exercises the freedom of trying its luck on the high seas of the human intellect.1 By way of body politics, phenomenology and postmodernism are inextricably linked. Jean-François Lyotard, who wrote a critical essay on phenomenology in 1954, defines the postmodern condition in bold and broad strokes: “Postmodern knowledge is not simply a tool of authorities; it refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable. Its principle is not the expert’s homology, but the inventor’s paralogy.”2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who is one of the major figures whom Lyotard studied, was also suspicious, from the start, of any 131

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phenomenological attempt to provide an apodictic foundation of knowledge and action and was ready to confront ambiguity and plurality as a double helix in the very order of things in the world. He promoted phenomenology not as a “rigorous science” but as a “pure interrogation.” Indeed, the shifting scene from modernity to postmodernity may be choreographed as the transition from the fall of “legislators” to the rise of “interpreters,” which is more than “metaphorical” as Zygmunt Bauman3 seems to intimate. HansGeorg Gadamer, who is hardly a self-professed postmodernist, expresses nonetheless the postmodern sentiment when he declares that the soul of hermeneutics is the possibility that the other may be right.4 2. The postmodern convergence of phenomenology and body politics may be called phenomenological aesthetics or carnal hermeneutics.5 First, the aesthetic (aisthesis) is preeminently a carnal or sensual affair. For it is born of the discourse of the body as the (kin)aesthetic site of performance(s). Second, the aesthetic is also the body in revolt against the tyranny of the theoretic (theoria).6 Third, it is a form of meditative thinking that subverts and transcends manipulation and domination by appreciating or “enjoying” things as they are (e.g., Heidegger’s Gelassenheit and Zen’s zazen and archery as autotelic). On these three accounts, Nietzsche occupies a special and unique place in the history of body politics. When Merleau-Ponty speaks of the body as “a work of art,” he is echoing Nietzsche.7 It is no accident that Nietzsche, who was a self-professed “physician” of civilization, declared in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that “body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word of something about the body.”8 And he challenges and transgresses the speculative and specular conundrum of theoria and attempts to replace it with aisthesis. By replacing theoria with aisthesis, the Tantric Nietzsche9 inverts Platonism which seeks eternal ideas (eidos) radiated from the “mind’s eye” or, in the words of Hannah Arendt, “leave[s] the cave of human existence to behold the eternal ideas visible in the sky.”10 Nietzsche’s body politics is an upsurge in opposition to the long-established and continuing tradition of all that theoretic speculation has implied and entailed since the time of Plato. In The Birth of Tragedy, his first major work, the young Nietzsche valorizes music—perhaps in the ancient Greek sense of mousike (performing arts) that includes oral poetry, dance, drama, and music—as the consummate aesthetic; “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified” and that “only music, placed beside the world, can give us an idea of what is meant by the justification of the world as an aesthetic phe-

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nomenon.”11 For Nietzsche, in short, the world is “measured” (in the musical sense of metron) by the aesthetic of music, whose primary condition of being is to attune ourselves to the world both human and nonhuman. The body has by and large been an orphan child of philosophical discourse. The alleged dark grotto or continent of corporeality has almost always been castigated and even “crucified” as an ephemeral and perishable commodity in favor of incorporeal immortality in the mainstream of Western thought— Greek as well as Christian thought. Origen, the stern Christian ascetic and theologian who voluntarily castrated himself—for that matter, castration was not an uncommon practice in his time—depicted corporeality or, more specifically, sexuality as a passing phenomenon and hinted at the eschatological hope of purifying the soul from the flesh—to borrow the inimitably elegant expression of Peter Brown: “Human life [for Origen], lived in a body endowed with sexual characteristics, was but the last dark hour of a long night that would vanish with the dawn. The body was poised on the edge of a transformation so enormous as to make all present notions of identity tied to sexual differences, and all social roles based upon marriage, procreation, and childbirth, seem as fragile as dust dancing in a sunbeam.”12 The modern legacy of Descartes’s “epistemocracy” or his epistemological regime of philosophy in pursuit of the cogito is plagued with disembodiment, egocentricity, and ocularcentricity. For in it the mind becomes transcendentalized from rather than immanentized in the body. Modernists are “like landowners whose source of income is the cogito”—to borrow the expression of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.13 In his self-conscious effort to avoid visual allusions and prevent “edifying” conversation from degenerating into an epistemological exchange of views, the neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty14 embraces the hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer: “Hermes is going to kill Panoptes.”15 The purpose of carnal hermeneutics is to deconstruct Cartesian epistemocracy. By deconstruction, I mean—in the manner of Heidegger—“a critical process in which the traditional concepts, which at first must necessarily be employed, are de-constructed down to the sources from which they were drawn.”16 As it is the act of the mind as “thinking substance” (res cogitans), the cogito is inherently egocentric because it is always and necessarily ego cogito (the “I think”)—the epitome of an “invisible man” in isolation from others, both other minds and other bodies. As a thinking substance, the mind is independent of the body (res extensa); it needs nothing more than itself to exist. The literary hermeneuticist Gerald L. Bruns speaks elegantly and critically of “Descartes’s jealousy of the subject,” i.e., “the subject’s desire to seal itself off or to keep its thinking pure or uncontaminated by the horizon of the other.”17 Descartes himself confessed that any sort of intellectual peregrination (not even to speak

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of globetrotting), real or imaginary, is anathema to philosophizing. For him, instead, the foundational knowledge of philosophy is attained nowhere else but in the philosophizing ego in its disembodied solitude, a sort of philosophical autism that fears the outside world. Once the self and the other are viewed as disembodied substances, two self-contained substances, egocentrism—or even solipsism in extremis—is inescapable. For Descartes, moreover, the mind as cogito erects the privatized, insulated, and echoless chamber of “clear and distinct ideas.” Furthermore, Cartesian metaphysics, whose epicenter is the cogito, is identifiable with the hegemony of vision: As the product of the sovereign gaze of observing kosmotheoros, it is the philosophy of reflection that identifies my being with what I think of it; it is reflective narcissism par excellence. As a matter of fact, visual metaphysics goes hand in hand with the egocentrism of the cogito because vision, unlike audition, which is socializing and heterocentric, is not only isolating and distancing but also anaesthetic in denying the sociability of the (other) senses; there is a social amnesia of and in all vision. In other words, there is an identity between the “I” and the “eye.” As the mind’s I is the mind’s eye, so the cogito is video ergo sum. The cogito is a scopic regime, a visual machine. 3. Too often we take for granted that the body is our placement, our foothold in the world. It is the primordial mode of being in the world both natural and social. The Anglo-Saxons knew the body as dwelling place, and as such, they named it banhus (bonehouse) and lichama (bodyhome).18 The body is then a “geophilosophical” (or territorial) concept.19 By way of body politics, phenomenology is capable of territorializing or reterritorializing philosophy itself. According to Merleau-Ponty: [The body as] flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. To designate it, we should need the old term “element,” in the sense it was used to speak water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being. The flesh is in this sense an “element” of Being. Not a fact or a sum of facts, and yet adherent to location and to the now.20

We exist as body, as flesh. As an existent, the body as flesh is not an idea but a concrete reality. In other words, human existence is not an idea but a concrete reality because of the body, which is rooted in the world, both in the Mitwelt and Umwelt at the same time. Gabriel Marcel, who is the first carnal

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phenomenologist of the body, contends that the body is the central problem of human existence and everything else depends on its solution.21 As such, the body is related to everything we do and think, it is omnipresent, that is, the carnal landscape is the presupposed foundation of all conceptual geography. To put it in the phenomenological language of Merleau-Ponty, perception precedes conception: The perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all knowledge as well as all action since the body is the lived field of perception. There is indeed the “primacy of perception” in everything we do and think. Insofar as perception is a “nascent logos,” there can be no disembodied reason. More radically, Marcel contends that the body belongs to the order of “being” rather than that of “having”: The lived body is not an object among other objects, it is never inert but rather is a sentient subject. We are our body, or we exist as body. As an existing subject, or better, agent, the body as flesh is capable of “authoring” the world before “answering” it. Furthermore, the body is the umbilical cord to the social. To be social is first and foremost to be intercorporeal. Only because of the body are we said to be visible and capable of relating ourselves first to other bodies and then to other minds. The body is our social placement in the world. With the synergic interplay of its senses, the body attunes us to the world as both Mitwelt and Umwelt. The world, as Merleau-Ponty has it, is made of the same stuff as the body presumably because we relate ourselves to the world by the medium of the body, which is the lived field of perception. Since we are always already social, the body cannot be the “origin” but, more properly, of the ambient medium of the social. In defining the social, the phenomenologist Erwin W. Straus favors the body over the mind because “the body of an organism is related to other bodies; it is a part of the physical universe. The mind, however, is related to one body only; it is not directly related to the world, nor to other bodies, nor to other minds.”22 The mind becomes a relatum only because the body is populated in the world with other bodies. It is necessary that we exist as body, as flesh, in order to be social and thus ethical. On the basis of these phenomenological accounts, we find elemental faults in both Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas, who are twin towers of contemporary social and political philosophy and both of whom turn deaf ears to the body as flesh, to the subjective or agentive body. On the one hand, Habermas acknowledges no importance of the body, subjective or objective, and thus undermines his own theory of communicative action. He knows of no “communicative body”23 and remains a logocentrist who means to replace subject-centered reason by reason translated into communicative action. The body is indeed a thorn in the flesh of his theory of communicative action—to use his own metaphorical expression.24 He is even contemptuous of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological philosophy

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of the body. Habermas’s defense of modernity, of logocentric modernity is unreserved and undaunted. On the other hand, in contrast, no one has contributed more than Foucault to the paralogical archaeology of modernity by unearthing the clinical and incarcerated body in the allegedly “enlightened” age of reason, which is “contaminated” by the power politics of the body. Nevertheless, he never came to grips with the body as flesh, the body as agent. He was rather absorbed in the specular display of the body as clinical, punitive, and incarcerated. Despite his later concern for “new forms of subjectivity,” he is haunted by his earlier structuralism, which became a launching pad for his critique of phenomenology as a philosophy of subjectivity. As a result, Foucault never understood the originally Nietzschean idea of initium, which signifies the human potential to embark on and inscribe something new in the face of history.25 Without initium, resistance, which is for Foucault “compatriotic” to power, is a sham and loses its critical and agonistic punch. Thus, corporeal subjectivity must be taken as a new form of subjectivity. 4. It has already been emphasized that by way of body politics, phenomenology and postmodernism have become inseparably intertwined. Today sexual politics or corporeal feminism defines the tenure and landscape of body politics in a significant way. Writing the body as social inter(dis) course is a shifting concern of écriture féminine. “Through writing her body,” Nancy Mairs writes, “woman may reclaim the deed to her dwelling place.”26 The corporeal and phenomenological feminism of Luce Irigaray, I would contend, represents a subversion of the Cartesian phallocracy of the cogito, which is (1) logocentric, (2) egocentric, and (3) ocularcentric. The Cartesian cogito based on the di/vision between res cogitans (mind as mental thing) and res extensa (body as material thing) in search of “clear and distinct ideas” is “a pure masculinization of thought” or a flight from the feminine.27 Although she does not particularly have the Cartesian cogito in mind, the Vichian Elizabeth Sewell contends: The fertility of the body cooperates in the processes of thinking with language. There remains a great unresolved problem behind this, as behind the use of such words as “fertile” or “pregnant” of ideas, of the verb “to conceive” in intellectual terms. To relegate these simply to metaphor is to miss the whole point, for they are clues to something that is going on in this field of myth we are exploring. Grammar maintains that the body is operative there as much as the mind. The human organism thinks as a whole, and our division of it into mind and body is the result of overemphasis on logic and intellect in near isolation which

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has led [or better, misled] us into so one-sided a view of the activity of thought, so gross an underestimation of the body’s forms of thought and knowledge.28

Speaking of “to conceive,” it would not be an exaggeration to say that the masculinization of thought in the Cartesian cogito would lead to the conclusion that man conceives ideas, while woman conceives only babies. Irigaray’s corporeal feminism embodies the philosophy and ethics of “sexual difference” as a paradigmatic “foundation for a new ontology, a new ethics, and a new politics”—to use her own most recent programmatic language.29 It is capable of subverting and transcending Cartesian phallocracy, phallic monism, or the one-sex model, which claims that “man is the measure of all things, and woman does not exist as an ontologically distinct category.”30 Alice A. Jardine’s neologism gynesis follows the letter and spirit of Irigaray’s feminine genealogy and ethics of feminine difference since it refers to the genesis of things and relations in the feminine and valorizes what is feminine.31 In the tradition of phenomenology as in the feminist movement today, the issue of women’s emancipation is contested principally by two camps: First, those who seek the achievement of equality, which is exemplified in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex,32 and second, those who celebrate feminine difference as embodied in Irigaray’s work, which intends to unveil or unmask the “phallacy” of identity. Irigaray contends that the issue of women’s liberation has reached “beyond simply a quest for equality between the sexes.”33 The solution to men’s exploitation of women must come only by means of sexual difference. “Equality between men and women,” she insists, “cannot be achieved without a theory of gender as sexed and a rewriting of the rights and obligations of each sex, qua different, in social rights and obligations.”34 It is a matter of social justice, she suggests, to give cultural values to female sexuality and genealogy for the sake of balancing out the power of one sex over the other. Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference takes place in the postmodern ambience of difference. The unveiling or unmasking the “phallacy” of identity demands a postmodern adventure of difference which signals the end of modernity. Challenged by feminine difference, phallic monism faces an identity crisis. Thus, the issue of women’s liberation is parallel to the uncompromising difference between modernist identity and postmodernist difference. Let us compare the “modernist” Hegel and the “postmodernist” Heidegger on the question of the difference between identity and difference. In its effort to prove the dialectical teleology of history as the march of Reason, of world history or the end of historical progress, the final synthesis of Hegel’s dialectics is the totalized outcome of the identity of identity and difference

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that prompts Gianni Vattimo to conclude that the Hegelian dialectics consummates the long metaphysical tradition of identity in Western philosophy.35 The modernist Marx only inverted the Hegelian dialectics by making it stand on its feet rather than on its head. Contrariwise, Heidegger’s Differenz as Unterschied offers a postmodern alternative to the cultural politics of Hegelian identity.36 Unterschied doubles difference with the between (Unter or inter) that, at once, connects, preserves, and promotes difference and the relational. Unlike the symmetrical notion of Mitsein (interhuman relationships) in Being and Time (1962), difference as dif/ference is capable of embracing the asymmetrical principle of complementarity that negates the Hegelian and Marxian idea of oppositionality as the driving force of history. It is by no means suggested here that Irigaray’s moral genealogy of sexual difference should be traced to Heidegger’s “difference” (Differenz as Unterschied). Rather, it may be traced to Emmanuel Levinas’s “meontology” of radical alterity, of the absolute otherness of the Other that is meant to go beyond Heidegger’s ontologism, that is, to his heteronomic ethics. According to Levinas, the Da of Dasein is not an ontological problem but already an ethical one that is “otherwise than being.”37 As opposed to de Beauvoir’s “egalitarian feminism” while approving its existential thesis that one is not born but made—Vico’s factum as expressed in his radical formulation of verum ipsum factum—or becomes a woman, Irigaray argues for feminine difference as “a taste for intersubjectivity”— to use her own expression. Sexual difference is a substrate of radical alterity, but this feminine substrate is not just a “fig leaf”–hiding difference.38 Irigaray’s feminist philosophy of sexual difference is indeed the “subversion of identity.” She, however, favors the restoration of subjectivity while the very question of subjectivity has been challenged and reached its critical and twilight zone.39 Indeed, her corporeal feminism is in need of affirming subjectivity, which is capable of activating and instituting transformation in resisting and subverting the phallocratic monism. Without difference, the very notion of subjectivity itself becomes undermined while without radical alterity, intersubjectivity becomes suspect.40 Here Irigaray would agree with Levinas in asserting that each subjectivity is different because it is unique, not the other way around. She further insists that subjective experience is no anathema to cognition. For Irigaray, there is neither “first” nor “second” in the feminist philosophy of sexual difference. Instead, there are two—one of whom is woman as Other who is “an autonomous and different subject” (je or I). The model without sexual difference in which man and woman become alike or same is a singular model of subjectivity which has been historically masculine and hierarchical—man on top and woman at bottom. Against privileging a universal egalitarian model valid for all men and all women, Irigaray proposes

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the paradigmatic model of two different subjectivities in order to ensure and promote intersubjectivity (inter/subjectivity)—that is, to develop a “taste” for their cohabitation and dialogue. As she writes: we must move on to the model of the two, a two which is not replication of the same, nor one large and the other small, but made up of two which are truly different. The paradigm of the two lies in sexual difference. Why there? Because it is there that two subjects exist who should not be placed in a hierarchical relationship, and because these two subjects share the common goal of preserving the human species and developing its culture, while granting respect to their difference.41

5. Without difference, sexual or otherwise, there is no genuine intersubjectivity or relationship. No doubt difference is a delicate and fragile fabric that is woven out of the warp of nature and the woof of culture. There are ways of knowing and doing that are distinctly feminine, and feminine heteronomy is marked by an ethic of proximity which demands the “consent” of the body as flesh. The principal term of proximity is contact, which, being consociational, is necessarily a sharing of spatial contiguity and the flow and duration of lived time. Contact is engendered, for its namesake, by a touch of intimacy, and complete contact—a handshake, for example—requires the chiasmic or reversible reciprocity of touching and being touched. The family of synonyms for touching includes hugging, embracing, and caressing, while body parts necessary to proximity, intimacy and “confrontation” are the face, the skin, and the hand. Interested in feminine genealogy or the history of feminine difference, Irigaray celebrates the virtue of Aphrodite who symbolizes the embodiment of philotes—tenderness—which combines carnal eros and spiritual agape.42 Giving birth and mothering, which are integral to the feminine “calendar of the flesh,” exemplify feminine tenderness. The intimacy of contact is engendered by touch. When it is initiated by a touch of the hand, contact becomes a “manual concept.” Of course, there is no skinless touch.43 The skin is the sentient sentinel, though peripheral, of human contact. It is no accident that sociology, which is the study of interhuman relationships, is called “a skin trade.”44 So the social outcast is called an “untouchable.” The question of why we cannot tickle ourselves is intriguing and tells us a great deal about the morphology of the skin as the site of social contact. The answer for why we cannot tickle ourselves may be that tickling is a contact sport. Tickling requires “the enacted recognition of the other,” and we cannot produce the pleasure of being tickled in the absence of the

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Other; we can produce it only in the presence of and contact with the Other.45 Irigaray, too, speaks of “aporia of a tactility” that cannot caress itself but needs the Other to touch it.46 In Thinking the Difference, Irigaray makes an interesting allusion when she refers to taking on the male identity as “slip[ping] into men’s skin.”47 The color of one’s epidermis or the sur/face of one’s body, which determines the racial denominations of white, black, yellow, and red, is a social phenomenon. So are visibility and invisibility social, as well. Indeed, the skin is a social inscription.48 Lorenz Oken at the University of Zurich wrote a book on “physiophilosophy” in the mid-nineteenth century in which he classified five types of men or races according to their physiological characteristics: for example, the “skin-man” is the black African and the “eye-man” is the white European.49 Ralph Ellison’s incomparable Invisible Man, originally published in 1952, is a social ontology of the skin. It begins with the denial that his invisibility is “a matter of a biochemical accident” to his skin. “I am,” he writes in the prologue: an invisible man. . . . I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.50

The hand is an agent of touch. In celebrating the African American flesh in Beloved, Toni Morrison writes: “And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ‘cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it, you!”51 Heidegger’s What Is Called Thinking?, too, contains a stunning, eloquent and profound passage on thinking as chirosophic or “manual concept.”52 I say “stunning” because the sense of touch is traditionally denigrated and castigated as the least intellectual of all the senses and the philosopher, being an “eye-man,” is supposed to celebrate the aristocracy of vision and insight! Be that as it may, the hand, according to Heidegger, is a peculiarly human institution. There is an abyss of difference between the hand and such grasping organs as paws, claws, and fangs. The hand signifies the humanity of humans in its sensuousness, its sociability, its speaking, its thinking. “Every motion of the hand in every one of its works,” Heidegger writes, “carries itself through the element of thinking, every bearing of the hand bears

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itself in that element. All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking.”53 The “thinking hand” confers upon us the work of the hand as embodied conduct. As such, the hand is not just an “extension” of the body, but is the body incorporated. It is the lived body; it is an organized “corporation.” As embodied conduct, the hand is pansensory. It activates the works of the other senses such as hearing, seeing, saying, and singing. Indeed, it incarnates the sociability of the senses. The condition of feeling no pain in the skin is called cutaneous alagia, which puts us out of touch with our inside and outside world, with the world of our thought and the world of other people and other things. The infliction of cutaneous alagia results in “thoughtlessness” and “anti-sociability,” that is, in what Hannah Arendt calls the “banality of evil.” The sculptor Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker, which is in itself the artistic creation of two hands and the intimate sense of touch, is the exemplar of the body as an organized corporation as well as embodied thinking. In essence, Rodin’s The Thinker symbolizes the “cathedral” of human thinking, of embodied thinking.54 Moreover, his The Cathedral, the sculptural masterpiece that depicts two right (rite) hands tenderly coming together, overtakes all other artistic renditions in sanctifying kinaesthetically the embodied reciprocity of humanity, that is, in affirming and certifying the sacrament of human coexistence. 6. Gynesis as jouissance (carnal enjoyment) signifies not only the aesthetic appreciation of body politics or things carnal but also—as jouissance is sometimes spelled playfully “j’ouïs sens” (“I hear meaning”)—the subversion of ocularcentrism, which, as has already been pointed out, is implicated in the Cartesian cogito as an epistemocratic pursuit of “clear and distinct ideas.” Here the goddess of “enchantment” is ready to subvert and overtake the god of “enlightenment.”55 Jouissance auscultates the voice of the feminine; it is bliss or even eroticism of hearing and voicing, but not of seeing or voyeurism which is a masculine trait. Feminine jouissance is rightly a revolt against and an attempt to defenestrate the visual regime of phallocracy. Jouissance may be said to be the Tantric principle of femininity and the principium of corporeal feminism. As it empowers the feminine, it is also feminine puissance—the power of the feminine Je. Incorporating the fertility of the body in our thinking and doing, it denounces the false dichotomy between the mind (con/ception) and the body (per/ception) as a phallocratic bifurcation. As the conceptual or morphological locus of feminine difference, jouissance is not singular and oppositional but multiple and complementary.56

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For Irigaray, the advocacy of the feminine is an inter/ruption of the enduring scopic regimes of Western philosophy including of course the Cartesian cogito. She writes forcefully: Investments in the look is not privileged in women as in men. More than the other senses, the eye objectifies and masters. It sets at a distance, maintains the distance. In our culture, the predominance of the look over smell, taste, touch, hearing, has brought about an impoverishment of bodily relations. . . . The moment the look dominates, the body loses its materiality.57

In this regard, the British utilitarian Jeremy Bentham’s grand design of panvisualism serves as a feminist parable of Western philosophy.58 It was a meticulous, architectural plan of observation and surveillance in the last quarter of the eighteenth century—of the Enlightenment—for the Panopticon or Inspection House. As a Cartesian architectural plot, the Panopticon is literally a prison-house of visualism and a panvisualist technique. Its prisoners in perpetual solitude in the “islands” of cells protractedly partitioned by impregnable walls may be likened to those victims who become incarcerated under the panoptic surveillance of the cogito. Moreover, the Panopticon epitomizes the inextricable link between visualism and the iron-clad network of what Foucault calls “disciplinary technologies.”59 It is, as the term Panopticon implies, the all-encompassing or -encircling prison-house of visualism, whose surveillance mechanism or “discipline principle” puts to use the Cartesian oracle of clarity and certitude: It is the interlocking of the life in perpetual solitude of the “hypnotized” prisoner and the mechanism of total control. Inspection is control. In the very words of Bentham himself: “Solitude thus applied, especially if accompanied with darkness and low diet, is torture in effect, without being obnoxious to the name.”60 The grand design of the Cartesian cogito intends to make the prima philosophia a peculiarly panoptic, phallocratic institution. Indeed, Cartesianism is the panopticism par excellence in which absolute knowledge or knowledge with absolute clarity and certainty is a private possession of and by sight. The keyword of the Panopticon is inspection—the double idea of perpetual vision and vigilance in which the prisoner is never out of the inspector’s sight. The idea of inspection is regarded as control by the omnipotent and omnipresent vigilance of “seeing without being seen” in which seeing and being seen are undialectically identified. To put it slightly differently, the inspector who controls has “the unbounded faculty [and physical facility] of seeing without being seen” and the prisoner is “awed to silence by an invisible eye.”61 Undoubtedly there is in the Panopticon the undialectical welding of visibility and invisibility, for, as Foucault puts it, it is “a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad;

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in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.”62 The “opticized” or “objectivized” prisoner in the Panopticon is a passive and powerless onlooker who is the de-subjectivized object of observation and surveillance. Many feminists today hold not only that women speak with a “different voice” but also that femininity is allied with the sense of touch more closely than that of sight. There is indeed a stark contradiction between the voyeurism of the “mind’s seeing” (eye or I) and the communal intimacy and contact of the “body’s touch.” Feminists contend that the hegemony of vision is a peculiarly phallocratic, patriarchal, and matrophobic institution, and the logic of voyeurism is uniquely a male logic. Touch or caress epitomizes the sense of proximity, while vision embodies the sense of distance. The “participatory” sense of touch valorizes the feminine, while the “spectatorial” sense of vision as in the Greek theoria glorifies the masculine. To feminize body politics means to accent the sense of proximity (touching, hearing, and tasting) and to decenter or de-panopticize the haunting spectre of vision in our thinking and doing. By so doing, we loosen up the global or panoptic grip on, and bring the communal sense of proximity to, the oversighted or overtelevised world. Gynesis, when translated into tactility, intervenes and fleshes out masculine ocularcentrism. And that makes all the difference. In the final analysis, we may conclude that hearing (sound) socializes by decentering its effects, while sight isolates by centering its one-directional focus. 7. The body as flesh has an ethical dimension. As a carnal ethic of proximity, care—always tender—not only has a touch of feminine difference but also belongs to a feminine genealogy. It is also a feminine response to and resolution for egocentrism (Cartesian or otherwise) and liberalism (possessive or otherwise). Since care is a participial act,63 the term caring is preferred. What “being” is to “becoming,” “care” is to “caring.” Unfortunately, however, being, like becoming, is a participial gerund whereas care is not. Caring refers to that social or, more specifically, consociational process, which is active, ongoing, and unfinished. It is, therefore, the consociational prototype of responsibility as heteronomic. In the academic discourse of the American feminist movement, Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice birthed the ethic of caring as the privileged marker of feminine difference. She contends that Lawrence Kohlberg’s influential psychology of human moral development, which has been well received by such philosophers as John Rawls and Habermas, is

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prejudiced and flawed in method and substance and as such fell far short of the universal moral point of view he purports to advance and promote. Gilligan sums up women’s moral orientation which is radically different from its male counterpart as formulated by Kohlberg: the moral problem arises from conflicting responsibilities rather than from competing rights and requires for its resolution a mode of thinking that is contextual and narrative rather than formal and abstract. This conception of morality as concerned with the activity of care centers moral development around the understanding of responsibility and relationships, just as the conception of morality as fairness ties moral development to the understanding of rights and rules.64

As opposed to Kohlberg’s focus on abstract rights and formal rules for the development of moral conduct, Gilligan centers her ethical concern on the basis of relationships and responsibility. Caring is heteronomic, a relational ethic for others, while rights are self-centered. Indeed, the ethic of caring has a distinctly feminine face; it is uniquely a feminine ethic. In the tradition of phenomenological philosophizing, it is Heidegger who defines human existence (Dasein) as care (Sorge, cura which is a feminine category) in his seminal work, Being and Time.65 Invoking the Latin fable of Hyginus, Heidegger intimates that human existence is inspirited with care that shapes homo with its body (corpus) as the gift of humus (earth). However, Heidegger’s conception of care is autocentric or self-centered (eigentlich), and thus care authenticates only existential “autocracy.” Hans Jonas, who was a student of Heidegger, maintains that “parental responsibility” toward children, which is nonconsenting and nonreciprocal, is “the archetype of all responsible action.” This elementary type of responsibility, according to Jonas, “fortunately requires no deduction from a principle, because it is powerfully implanted in us by nature or at least in the childbearing part of humanity,”66 i.e., maternal humanity. Maternal responsibility, in other words, is deemed to be “selfless care.” Heteronomy is the heartland of Levinas’s ethics as first philosophy or—to use his own neologism—“meontology,” which confirms ethics as the “negation” (the Greek me) of ontology. His influence on the views of Irigaray should not be denied or ignored67 although at times she speaks somewhat pejoratively of women’s interest in and concern for others—men and children—in, for example, preparing food and maintaining the household. By heteronomy, Levinas means the primacy of the Other as alterity, i.e., the Other which conditions and defines the ethical. For him, language is an instantiation of the ethical rather than, as Heidegger formulates it, the house of Being. Levinas declares that he is “radically opposed to Heidegger who subordinates the relation with the Other to ontology.”68 No one, I think, is

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more daring than Levinas in challenging Heidegger by showing that the ethical cannot be inscribed or subscribed as a sequel to existential ontology alone. The ontological framework of existential “authenticity” (Eigentlichkeit) or “inauthenticity” (Uneigenlichkeit) cannot prescribe an ethical concern since an ethics worthy of its name is constructed on the basis not of self-centered (eigentlich) absorption but of heteronomic appeal. Alterity is the ethical site of responsibility. First, the discovery of heteronomy, of a “Thou” as alterity, is the Copernican revolution of social philosophy introduced in the mid-nineteenth century by Ludwig Feuerbach, who influenced many thinkers of different philosophical persuasions in varying degrees from Karl Marx to William James, through Martin Buber, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Levinas. Feuerbach’s radical and seminal insight is iterated forcefully in principle 59 of his “philosophy of the future,” which may be called the “Copernican revolution” of social and ethical philosophy. He writes: The single man for himself possesses the essence of man neither in himself as a moral being nor in himself as a thinking being. The essence of man is contained only in the community and unity of man with man; it is a unity, however, which rests only on the reality of the distinction between I and thou.69

In order to uphold the ethical principle of alterity, it might very well be spelled “altarity”— to use Mark C. Taylor’s newly coined word after a fashion of Jacques Derrida.70 What difference is to différance in Derrida, alterity is to altarity in Taylor. The term altar is derived from the Latin altare which signifies “a high place.” By confirming the primacy of the Other as a singular subjectivity, the idea of “altarity” elevates the Other to the altar of interhuman relationships. Second, the ethical is necessarily heterocentric or self-transcendent. Only by way of heterocentricity or self-transcendence is an ethic possible in which the Other is not only not an alter ego but is primary to the self. The ethical is the concept of the self or subjectivity whose center is “elsewhere” or “otherwise”; the ethical self is a responsible self. Because heterocentricity becomes hamstrung in much of contemporary ethical and political thought, responsibility remains trivialized and reduced to blamelessness or remorse. Levinas’s meditations on the primacy of the ethical and the heteronomic ethic of responsibility were inspired, according to his own admission, by the “heteronomic” heritage of “Jerusalem” which is a stark contrast to the “autarchic” heritage of “Athens” in Heidegger’s ontology. Levinas acknowledges that the prime importance of the ethical is the Jewish contribution to the history of Western philosophy, and he turns to Judaic texts for his (heteronomic) ethic of responsibility. The “you” or “we” for Levinas is not a plural of the “I”s (eyes). Ipseity alone makes the ethical

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implausible. Indeed, it defaces or effaces the ethical. It is only the presence of the Other, alterity, that makes the ethical possible. For the ethical is not self-absorption but self-transcendence. By the same token, the absence of the Other annihilates the ethical. Thus, Levinas maintains that human plurality is not a multiplicity of numbers, but it is predicated upon a radical alterity of the Other. In the elevated ethic of alterity (“altarity”), responsibility does not negate but precedes freedom: it is to heterocentricity what freedom (autonomy) is to egocentricity. In Levinas, whose ethical epicenter is responsibility, subjectivity is affirmed never for itself but for another. Subjectivity comes into being as heteronomic: “It is my inescapable and incontrovertible answerability to the other that makes me an individual ‘I.’”71 Thus the notion of responsibility that coincides with the ethical is, first and foremost, the confirmation of the “I,” which is for Levinas the “meontological version of subjectivity.” He writes that responsibility is “the essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity. For I describe subjectivity in ethical terms. Ethics, here, does not supplement a preceding existential base; the very node of the subjective is knotted in ethics understood as responsibility.”72 Since each subjectivity is unique and thus different from others, moreover, its responsibility is accordingly untransferable. Third, the most basic modus of the meontological version of subjectivity is the face. The ethic of proximity as a fidelity to incarnation is characteristic of Levinas’s meontology of the face, which is an ethic of the “I” (ipseity) who is capable of facing or “confronting” the Other as “you” (alterity). The face is an ethic, a human ethic: “The epiphany of the face is ethical.”73 The face is, as Ludwig Wittgenstein puts it well, the “soul of the body,” (die Seele des Körpers),74 and it is the most exposed, expressive, and interesting surface of the human body and the entire earth. Levinas thus speaks of the face as “defenseless nakedness.”75 This naked sur/face of the body is as telling as the depth of the soul. The face, moreover, is a heteronomic idea because one’s face is a mirror image of the Other since one does not see one’s face without the aid of the Other as mirror. The face as the soul of the body gives a new meaning to the very idea of human ex/istence, which has been profoundly misunderstood among its antagonists as well as its protagonists: As its etymology shows, what is really central to it is not the centrality but the eccentricity (ex-centricity) of the self toward the world of others both human and nonhuman. The human is ec(ex)centric: S/He is a being who is exposed to and reaches out to the outside world or what Levinas simply calls “exteriority.” Thus, the ethical motto of existence or humanity must be: do not go inside, go outside! Do not be egocentric but heterocentric! The authenticity of human existence is guaranteed not by egocentricity but only heterocentricity or dialogue of excentric agents.

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8. To recapitulate: The question of the body has been an odd marginalis or a thorn in the flesh of ongoing Western philosophical discourses due mainly to the hegemony and prejudice of logocentrism or epistemocracy. Despite the fact that writing the body has become rather modish and proliferated in recent years, the philosophical question of the body still remains fragmentary and escapes any systematic inquiry, falling far behind the disputation of other philosophical topics.76 Phenomenological aesthetics or carnal hermeneutics deserves, I submit, to be prima philosophia. Body politics is characteristically a postmodern affair. By way of it, postmodernity shows its deep discontent with the logocentric and theoretic tendencies of modernity, particularly with the legacy of Cartesian epistemocracy based on the cogito that is plagued with disembodiment, egocentrism, ocularcentrism, and phallocracy. By attending to the performative life of the body, carnal hermeneutics is meant to be that philosophical discipline of radical interpretation that is capable of deconstructing the fixed boundaries of modernity. It is carnal not only because it attends to “body work” as flesh, but also because the reading of body politics itself is a carnal act in which the word—for that matter, the world—becomes flesh, becomes embodied or incarnated. Carnal hemeneutics, to be sure, covers a wide range of issues: from silence and gesture to language, from nudity to tattoo and clothing, from eating or feasting to fasting, from foot binding to torture, genital mutilation and cannibalism, from handicap and autism to racism and feminism, from leprosy to cancer to AIDS, from birth to copulation, death and immortality, and more. In sum, carnal hermeneutics attempts to think with, through and about the body as an aesthetic work of art, as the site of multiple performances. The primary aim of carnal hermeneutics here is to deconstruct epistemocracy. It is worth attending, however, to the fashionable and even cryptic term deconstruction, which is not, contrary to the opinion of many, a nihilistic gesture but is rather a hybrid of two words in one: destruction and construction whose simultaneous endeavor constitutes the agency of interruption for the sake of transformation. The body—like air and water—escapes our serious attention, I suspect, simply because it is too common, too ordinary, and too near. Its value is likely to be felt and appreciated deeply only when it becomes afflicted with diseases, injuries, disabilities, abuses, and killings. The body will not disappear, contrary to Origen, like “dust dancing in a sunbeam.” A phenomenological accent on the body or embodiment is primarily twofold. In the first place, the body is the original mode of being in the world with others both human and nonhuman. From the standpoint of sociality, the body has ontological primacy over the mind. While the mind tends to be

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monologic, the body is indelibly dialogic and thusly is nothing but a relatum, not a substance (res). As to be social or interhuman is first and foremost intercorporeal, so is the death of the body the end of the social itself. In the second place, the concept of the body as flesh or embodiment is one of the most original and privileged features of phenomenology. By embodiment, we not only mean the inseparability of mind and body but also affirm the body as a sentient or, better, “consenting” subject. As “I am my body,” the body of mine is a subjective or an agentive modality of “being,” not just an objective modality of “having.” The body, therefore, is never just an object among other objects. Nor is it a machine in any form or shape—metaphorically or analogically. It is a living subject, or better, agent. Corporeal feminism is integral to body politics and carnal hermeneutics as postmodern endeavors. What identity is to modernity, difference is to postmodernity. Sexual or feminine difference is the subversion of homogenizing identity, of phallocratic monism. As a matter of fact, corporeal feminism is a pharmakon, as it were, for epistemocracy based on disembodied reason, which is dualistic, egocentric, and ocularcentric. That is to say, it is phallocratic. The carnal ethic of proximity exemplified in Irigaray in alliance with Levinasian heteronomy may be translated into an ethic of contact, of caring, as the participial act of performing the ethical has a tender touch of feminine difference. As an elementary archetype of responsibility, Levinas’s meontology sets the stage for performing caring as a heteronomic ethic, an ethic of self-transcendence, not self-absorption. Caring is the supportive ambience of everything we do and think—the good, the true, and the beautiful. The resurrection of body politics whose heart is the carnal ethic of caring may be the “prelude to a philosophy of the future”—to use the subtitle of the Tantric Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil—in preserving and nourishing the earth, including the human species.77 The future of this resurrection will be placed in the hand of the Muse, not the Owl of Minerva that takes its flight only at dusk. NOTES 1.  Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, trans. Bridget McDonald (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 20. 2. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. xxv. 3. See Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters (Oxford: Polity Press, 1987). 4. See Jean Grondin, Introduction in Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. Joel Weinsheimer (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 124.

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5.  See Hwa Yol Jung, “Writing the Body as Social Discourse: Prolegomena to Carnal Hermeneutics,” in Stephen Barker (ed.), Signs of Change (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 261–79 and 394–416. 6.  Terry Eagleton proposes the thesis that the aesthetic is born of the discourse of the body and aisthesis is a revolt against the tyranny of theoria. In Body Work (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 25, Peter Brooks also speaks of an “esthetics [sic] of narrative embodiment.” For the most comprehensive philosophical and epistemological history of aisthesis in Western culture, see Constance Classen (series editor), A Cultural History of the Senses, 6 vols. (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). It would be interesting to see somebody in the future to take on the taxing task of writing a world history of aisthesis. 7. See Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), p. 151. 8.  The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1959), p. 146. 9. Nietzsche is Tantric because, according to Herbert V. Guenther, “the body is not some thing that man has, but man is his body.” See The Tantric View of Life (Boulder: Shambhala, 1976), p. 9. For two of the highly relevant works on Nietzsche’s body politics in recent years, see Georg Stauth and Bryan S. Turner, Nietzsche’s Dance (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988) and Eric Blondel, Nietzsche, trans. Séan Hand (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). 10.  The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 292. 11.  Trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), pp. 52 and 141. The British literary critic Walter Pater regards music as the consummate art when he writes: “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” (italics original). The Renaissance (the 1893 text), ed. Donald L. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 106. 12.  The Body and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 168. In Carnal Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), Daniel Boyarin advances a definitive and discerning discussion on “Israel in the flesh” or “eternal carnality,” which the Christian St. Augustine attributes to Jews. In the Middle Ages, there was the alleged “conspiracy” (which is itself a bodily or carnal term) against Christian spirituality by witches, lepers, and Jews. See Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies (New York: Pantheon Books, 191), pp. 33–86. Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), pp. 212–57, discusses the Jewish ghetto in Renaissance Venice in relation to the “fear of touching,” i.e., the idea of Jews as “untouchables.” 13.  What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 104. 14. See Philosophy and Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). 15.  Michel Serres, “Panoptic Theory,” in Thomas M. Kavanah (ed.), The Limits of Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 25–47. 16.  Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 23. 17.  “What Is Tradition?” New Literary History, 22 (1991): 1–21.

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18.  See Nancy Mairs, Remembering the Bone House (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), p. 7. 19.  Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? pp. 85–113. 20.  The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort and trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 139–40. 21.  Metaphysical Journal, trans. Bernard Wall (London: Salisbury Square, 1952), p. 126. 22.  Phenomenological Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1966), p. 211. 23.  John O’Neill’s The Communicative Body (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989), which draws from the phenomenological insights of Merleau-Ponty, is an antidote to Habermas. 24. Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), p. 47. 25. In The Human Condition, p. 200, Arendt sums up the specificity of power as initium when she writes with eloquence: “Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.” In the same vein, she approves of Nietzsche, who discloses the uniquely human faculty of making promises in his theory of the will to power. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty introduces the extremely important conceptual difference between “institution” and “constitution.” That is to say, he introduces the idea of “instituting subject” in order to avoid the egological predicament of the “constituting subject”: If the subject where taken not as a constituting but an instituting subject, it might be understood that the subject does not exist instantaneously and that the other person does not exist simply as a negative of myself. What I have begun at certain decisive moments would exist neither far off in the past as an objective memory nor be present like a memory revived, but really between the two as the field of my becoming during that period. Likewise my relation to another person would not be reducible to a disjunction: an instituting subject could coexist with another because the one instituted is not the immediate reflection of the activity of the former and can be regained by himself or by others without involving anything like a total recreation. Thus the instituted subject exists between others and myself, between me and myself, like a hinge, the consequence and the guarantee of our belonging to a common world.

Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France, 1952–1960, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 40. 26.  Remembering the Bone House, p. 7. 27.  Karl Stern, The Flight from Woman (New York: Noonday Press, 1965), p. 104. 28.  The Orphic Voice (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), pp. 35–6. 29.  Luce Irigaray, “The Question of the Other,” trans. Noah Guynn, in Lynne Huffer (ed.), Another Look, Another Woman, Yale French Studies, no. 87 (1995), p. 19. 30.  Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 62. 31. See Gynesis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).

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32.  Trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953). 33.  “The Question of the Other,” p. 11. 34.  Je, Tu, Nous, trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 13. In his 1869 landmark essay entitled The Subjection of Women, John Stuart Mill is critical of “one person in law” in English jurisprudence, which may be comparable to the biblical notion of marriage as “one flesh,” because it prevents married women from possessing their own property among other things. It is an example of phallocartic monism or the “phallacy” of identity in practice. See On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 117–217. 35. See The Adventure of Difference, trans. Cyprian Blamires (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 160. 36. See Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. 202–3. 37. See Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 48. 38. Françoise Collin, “Philosophical Differences,” trans. Arthur Goldhammer in Françoise Thébaud (ed.), A History of Women in the West, Vol. 5: Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 261–96. 39.  Geneviève Fraisse, Reason’s Muse, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 196. 40.  Francis Jacques’s work Difference and Subjectivity, trans. Andrew Rothwell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991) advances the “primacy of the relation” (primum relationis) without denigrating either subjectivity or difference. 41.  “The Question of the Other,” pp. 11–12. 42.  Thinking the Difference, trans. Karin Montin (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 94–5. It is worth mentioning the recent fascinating study of women in Tantric Buddhism, of yogini-tantra by Miranda Shaw entitled Passionate Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). In the first place, Tantric Buddhism eulogizes the body or flesh as an “abode of bliss” by embracing sexual desire and pleasure for liberation or enlightenment. In the second place, it is a gynocenric view of Tantrism, where women present the idea of blissful intimacy as a path to enlightenment. In so doing, Shaw (ibid., p. 196) assumes methodologically that “regardless of how men may view them, women experience and interpret their own lives as the subject of their lives.” On the genealogical study of feminine difference in recent years, two works of Caroline Walker Bynum should be singled out: First, Jesus as Mother (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), and second, Fragmentation and Redemption (New York: Zone Books, 1992). 43. In Intercourse (New York: Free Press, 1987), pp. 211–34, Andrea Dworkin examines the works of the Japanese novelist Kobo Abe on the interesting question of intimacy in relation to the skin and the sense of touch. 44.  See John O’Neill, Sociology as a Skin Trade (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). 45.  Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 5.

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46.  Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 204. 47.  Thinking the Difference, p. 79. 48.  It is worth singling out the work of Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986) as a sophisticated and imaginative study of body politics that is concerned with osphresiology—body smell in particular—and the regulation of the social order. 49. See Elements of Physiophilosophy, trans. Alfred Tulk (London: Ray Society, 1847), and see also Sander L. Gilman, Inscribing the Other (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), p. 20. 50.  Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1982), p. 3. 51.  Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Penguin Books), p. 88. 52.  See Heidegger’s work What Is Called Thinking? trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968). The idea of “manual concepts” was first developed in 1892 by the American anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing and later noticed by Lucien Lévy-Bruhl whose anthropology reportedly influenced Heidegger’s formulation of primitive Dasein in Being and Time. Lévy-Bruhl writes: The progress of civilization was brought about by reciprocal influence of mind upon hand and vice versa. To reconstitute the primitives’ mentality, he [Cushing] had to rediscover the movements of their hands, movements in which their language and their thought were inseparably united. Hence the daring yet significant expression “manual concepts.” The primitive who did not speak without his hands and did not think without them either.

See How Natives Think, trans. Lilian A. Clare (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925), p. 161. It should be noted that when we speak, but not when we think, we invariably gesticulate—some more than others. Italians are known to be more gesticulators than other ethnic groups or nationals. For the deaf, the hand or gesticulation is their languages. There are as many languages of gesticulation as there are deaf ethnic or national groups. 53.  What Is Called Thinking? p. 16. 54.  See Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin, trans. Jessie Lemont and Hans Trausil (London: Grey Walls Press, 1946). 55.  Martin Jay’s work Downcast Eyes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) is the most comprehensive and definitive study of the denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought. 56. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). In his essay “Panoptic Theory,” in Thomas M. Kavanagh, ed., The Limits of Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 25–47 at 40, Michel Serres writes: “Sight is local; hearing is global. Far more than the ichnography, which is geometric for the subject or the object, hearing is marked by ubiquity, by an almost divine power to capture the universal. The optical is singular; the acoustical is total.” 57.  Quoted in Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition, ed. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tilman, and Jane Weinstack (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 179.

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58. See Jeremy Bentham, The [11-volume] Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. 4 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962). 59.  There is an interesting description and informative critique by Michel Foucault of Bentham’s panopticism as “disciplinary technologies.” See Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), pp. 195–228. For my brief critical account of Cartesian epistemology and Bentham’s panopticism, see “The Genealogy of Technological Rationality in the Human Sciences,” in Research in Philosophy and Technology, ed. Frederick Ferré, Vol. 9: Ethics and Technology, guest ed. Carl Mitcham (Greenwich: JAI Press, 1980), specifically pp. 64–66. 60. Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, 4: 74. 61.  Ibid., 4: 44, 79, 80. 62.  Discipline and Punish, pp. 201–2. 63.  See Elaine Scarry, Resisting Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), and Françoise Loux, Le Corps dans la Société Traditonnelle (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1979). 64.  Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 19. 65.  Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962), p. 198, and cf. History of the Concept of Time, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 302. 66. See The Imperative of Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 39. 67.  Luce Irigaray, “The Fecundity of the Caress: A Reading of Levinas, Totality and Infinity, Section IV, B, ‘The Phenomenology of Eros,’” in Richard A. Cohen (ed.), Face to Face with Levinas (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), pp. 31–56. 68.  Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), p. 52. 69.  Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, trans. Manfred H. Vogel (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966). 70.  See the title of Mark C. Taylor’s work Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Several years ago, Mickey Morales sent me a thoughtful birthday card that contained a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke. It expresses the quintessence of what I call the primacy of the Other, or “alterity,” in the aesthetics of human relationships: “I am so glad that you are here. It helps me to realize how beautiful my world is.”

71. Emmanuel Levinas and Richard Kearney, “Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas,” in Cohen (ed.), Face to Face with Levinas (Albany: State University of New York, 1986), p. 27. 72.  Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1982), p. 95. Particularly three chapters (12, 13, and 14) of this work develop the Levinasian concept of responsibility as first ethics based on the primacy of the other over the self or altarity in both interhuman and interspeciesistic relationships.

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73.  Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 199. 74.  Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright and trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 23, 23e. 75.  Emmanuel Levinas, Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 158. 76.  For the importance of the body in everything we do and think, see my Prolegomena to a Carnal Hermeneutics (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014). 77. See Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Random House, 1966).

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Part III

WORLD LITERATURE AND WORLD PHILOSOPHY

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Zhang Longxi’s Contribution to World Literature in the Globalizing World of Multiculturalism

1. PROLOGUE: THE MEANING OF GOETHE’S WORLD LITERATURE (WELTLITERATUR) This essay honors Zhang Longxi’s1 intellectual and scholarly achievement of and contribution to “world literature” (Weltliteratur), the term of which was coined by the incomparable, versatile, and profound German thinker Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), who also authored the “West-Eastern Divan” (West-Östlicher Divan, 1814–1818). His world literature, the noted German Goethe scholar Gerhart Hoffmeister judiciously remarks, is to promote “a network of communication among intellectuals and peoples across national frontiers.”2 It is not confined to national and ethnic literatures: It is a transnational and transethnic endeavor. It is, as Homi K. Bhabha puts it after the fashion of Martin Heidegger, a “worlding” of literature.3 In so doing, Goethe was far ahead of his own time: he was indeed a visionary. The socalled Age of Goethe continues and perhaps culminates in today’s globalizing world of multiculturalism. The word globalization should properly be spelled glocalization since the global is rooted in the local: The global without the local is empty, and the local without the global is blind or myopic.4 For Goethe, what the self is to the West, the other is to the East. In the literary or, for that matter, academic circle, what is not commonly known is the fact that he was also highly critical of the Delphic/Socratic oracle, “Know thyself,” which has been the most revered and sanctified philosophical canon or “sacred cow” of Western philosophy from Socrates to St. Augustine, Descartes, Freud, Husserl, Foucault—to name only a few notables.5 Goethe was audacious enough to challenge Socrates for seeking “a false contemplation” because humans know themselves insofar as they know others, and they come to know the world in themselves and themselves in it6 in a dialogical 157

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“ex/change,” which is the exact title of Zhang Longxi’s journal. When we add Goethe’s famous lines in Faust, that is, “In the beginning was the deed!” (Im Anfang war die Tat!), the “grayness” of theory, and “greenness” of life, Goethe reminds us not of the reclusive and narcissistic life of solitary contemplation preached by the hedgehogs of Western philosophy, but the great Confucian sages of public and cosmopolitan ren (humanity both as a collective term and as, more importantly, the quality of being human). The Confucian conception of ren—etymologically understood, “the human” standing by side and side with “two”—ranges from the dialogue between the self and the other to cosmopolitanism. It can also be argued that “Know thyself” is for centuries the cradle and sanctuary, as it were, of what the late French literary savant Roland Barthes calls “Western narcissism.” There are notable literary authors who wholly or partly follow Goethe’s great tradition of world literature. Among them are Ernst Robert Curtius, Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, René Wellek, Edward W. Said, Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Rey Chow, Pascale Casanova, and David Damrosch, in addition to Zhang Longxi. The ultimate telos of world literature is to create and achieve the Goethean sense of global humanity (Humanität). Unfortunately, however, the East for Auerbach ends in Istanbul, Turkey, which is only a crossroads of the Orient and the Occident, as is with Said, whose horizon of the Orient in his seminal Foucauldian Orientalism7 (1978) stops at the Eastern end of the Middle East, although Zhang Longxi believes, as I do, that its core thesis of Goethe is applicable and relevant to China or, as Zhang calls it, the “ultimate other” of the West. Zhang’s works fill a huge lacuna left in what is unsaid in Said.8 Be that as it may, what Auerbach confesses in the following passage in writing his monumental literary and philosophical work Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (English trans. in 1958) is, I think, most telling and instructive especially for Eastern scholars who traveled to the West to learn their scholarly profession: Our philological home is the earth: it can no longer be the national. The most priceless and indispensable part of a philologist’s home is still his own nation’s culture and language [for Auerbach it is German]. Only when he is first separated from this heritage, however, and then transcend it does it become truly effective.9

The above passage of Auerbach is a sober reminder that globalization as glocalization is the synchronic unity between the global and the local, where one without the other is an empty and meaningless abstraction. Furthermore, for the “effective” role of philology as a “historicist discipline” reminds us of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutical principle of “historically effective consciousness” (wirkungsgeschlichliches Bewusstsein)

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by which the historical distance between the present and the past is reduced by the interpreter’s twofold awareness of the “effect” of the past on the present and his/her self-awareness of it as such. Gadamer’s idea of “historically effective consciousness” hinges on the philosophical principium of Giambattista Vico’s verum ipsum factum, i.e., we understand truth (verum, Wahrheit) because we make, un-make, and re-make it (i.e., factum), which can equally be applied to the cross-cultural or transversal understanding and fusing two radically different cultures, literatures, philosophies, etc. In addition, what is said in the above-quoted passage can be invaluable in understanding the Spanish-American philosopher Ernest Fenollosa’s portmanteau word etymosinology, the importance of which is the topic of discussion in Section 2 of this essay, as philosophy and etymology share their family resemblances and belong to a special family of linguistics. In short, it is a wise advice for comparativists of all kinds who wish to be self-conscious of what they are doing. In the end, it should be said that to honor the old spirit of Goethe and that of Fenollosa’s etymosinology in particular is to honor the kindred spirit of Zhang Longxi, who traveled to the terra incognito of the United States and refuses to build another “Great Wall” between China—his birthplace, which he calls “the ultimate other” of the West—and the rest of the world. Instead, he builds a bridge—to use the felicitous cliché—between the East and the West. 2. ZHANG LONGXI’S ORIENT/ATION IN LITERARY HERMENEUTICS Zhang’s literary theory, particularly comparative literature, is deeply immersed in philosophy both Eastern and Western. In the age of disciplinary overspecialization, he is a rare talent. The sustained approach he uses can be characterized as the combined and reversible formula of “literature as philosophy” and “philosophy as literature.” Since he is immersed primarily in literature, the most judicious approach to understand him is literature cum philosophy, or the fusion of literature and philosophy. In this respect, he inherits the spirit of Goethe and sustains the tradition of Goethe’s project of world literature cherished by other Goethean literary luminaries. In this essay, I will give a close hearing to what I regard as the most fruitful part of Zhang’s literary theory, which infuses Hans-Georg Gadamer’s “philosophical hermeneutics” and its “application” (applicandi), of which is “literary hermeneutics.” Broadly formulated, comparative literature is “intercultural hermeneutics,” whose prerequisite is “translation.” A few words of caution are in order: For Gadamer, philosophical hermeneutics and its applications are not two separate condominia, but two tiers of hermeneutics. In

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his philosophical magnum opus, Wahrheit und Methode,10 discusses, for instance, such issues as (Aristotle’s) phronesis (prudence or practical wisdom), which are relevant to ethics and politics (applied hermeneutical disciplines) and Vico’s sensus communis which, too, is related to the quotidian and communal side of human conduct, i.e., praxis. In other words, Gadamer shows a keen interest in Goethe’s “philosophy” of literature, particularly of Dichtung und Wahrheit (1809), which “poetizes” Goethe’s own life. Moreover, Gadamer mentions in passing Goethe’s “West-Eastern Divan.” In my knowledge, however, Gadamer—unlike his mentor, Heidegger—has not extended or “applied” his hermeneutics to the study of non-Western foreign or Sinic others, that is, the philosophical and literary capital of intercultural matters. Reading together Zhang’s literary work and Gadamer’s hermeneutics both philosophical and applied would, I am convinced, benefit both philosophy and literature. That is to say, dovetailing both would advance the cause of comparative literature as well as of comparative philosophy. It is worth noting that what literary criticism and philosophical hermeneutics share in common and focus on is language or, I should say, the linguisticality (Sprachlichkeit) of language. Hermeneutics is, of course, the basic “matrix” of all academic disciplines both social-scientific and naturalscientific. First of all, language is intrinsic to the humanity of humans: It is the human specificity or eccentric and ecstatic quality of being human. As Heidegger—the mentor of Gadamer—put it, language is “the house of Being” or Being is the house of language. Second, language is inseparable from our conception of reality: Since reality is the sum total of events with and within language, language neither just refers to reality, nor is it just a mirror to reflect on reality or represent it. Rather, it is congenital with reality. Third, correlatively, the dialogical structure of language as a privileged human phenomenon demonstrates reality itself as social construction and process. Fourth, language is the primary medium of human communication as well as maieutic mediation between human consciousness and the environing world. Last but not least, language is an embodied phenomenon, that is, for good reason it is also called a tongue. There is an enormously important lesson we learn from Gadamer’s hermeneutical approach to the study of non-European alterity, although he, unlike his mentor Martin Heidegger, discusses—as far as I am aware of—no non-Western thought in general or Sinism in particular. Charles Taylor, who is one of the most perceptive interpreters of Gadamer’s hermeneutics, poignantly sums up the enormously important relevance of Gadamer’s hermeneutics to comparative literature and philosophy when he writes: Gadamer’s account of the challenge of the other and the fusion of horizons applies also to our attempt to understand quite alien societies and epochs. The

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claim here comes not from their place within our identity, but precisely from their challenge to it. They present us difference and often disconcerting ways of being human. The challenge is to be able to acknowledge the humanity of their way, while still being able to live ours. That this may be difficult to achieve, that it will almost certainly involve a change in our self-understanding and hence in our way, has emerged from the above discussion. . . . Meeting this challenge is becoming ever more urgent in our intensely inter-communication world.11

Taylor ends his remarks by saluting Gadamer for helping us “so immensely to conceive this challenge clearly and readily.” Dialogue between “us” and “them” is the way of facing or interfacing the human condition of plurality. To be meaningful, dialogue requires to be open-ended: As Italo Calvino puts it, multiplicity itself is defined as our “inability to find an ending”: Multiplicity multiplies itself.12 The Gadamerian Zhang advocates the open-endedness of dialogue that is compatible with his conception of literary hermeneutics. He puts his view forthrightly that “Contrary to the totalizing discourse in much of contemporary theory and criticism, literary hermeneutics . . . has its inevitable consequence the advocacy of interpretative pluralism [italics added], the emphasis on the importance of an open-ended and truly reciprocal dialogue as the paradigm of communication,”13 which ethnocentrism cannot afford to embrace or practice. Open dialogue brings “mutual change and enrichment” between or among the parties involved. In “Afterword” of Truth and Method, Gadamer draws a conclusion on the openness of his philosophical hermeneutics based on dialogue when he writes with modesty: “The ongoing dialogue permits no final conclusion. I would be a poor hermeneuticist who thought he could have, or had to have, the last word.”14 There is also the radical dialogism of the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, which goes beyond and even against the long and cherished tradition of dialogue in the West from Socrates/Plato to Hegel and Marx. Bakhtin’s dialogism deserves our close attention as it uncovers the postmodern dispositif of multiplicity as having no end. His dialogicality is opposed particularly to Hegel’s and Marx’s dialectics. It has a family resemblance to the ancient Sinic yin-yang logic, which has no temporal ending. In fact, Hegel’s finite succession of sublations or syntheses (Aufhebungen) becomes “finalized” in the creation of the State as the identity (synthesis) of identity (thesis) and difference (anti-thesis). Bakhtin’s dialogicality based on the reading of his compatriot Dostoevsky’s poetics both trespasses and surpasses Hegel’s and Marx’s dialectics. Listen to Bakhtin’s voice in his note in 1970–71: “Dialogue and dialectics. Take a dialogue and remove the voices . . . remove intonations . . . carve out abstract concepts and judgments from living words and responses, cram everything into one abstract consciousness—and that’s how

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you get dialectics.”15 This is a kind of Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel’s conceptual castle-building where it is so abstract that nobody can live. Bakhtin’s dialogism is indeed an existentialist critique of Hegel’s dialectics, in which the élan vital of the sum is reduced to the “abstract” conceptualization of philosophy in the cogito. In mapping connections, Gilles Deleuze contends that his “repetitive” logic of difference is “nondialectizable.” In support of Max Weber’s conception of sociality (l’intermonde) as a reconcilable multiplicity of perspectives or manysidedness (Vielseitigkeit), the existential phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, who is a severe critic of Hegel’s Eurocentrism or “Orientalism,” also argues that the dialectic is inherently “unstable” and that the only “good dialectic” is “hyperdialectic,” i.e., “dialectic without synthesis.” Hyperdialectic, MerleauPonty intimates, is “a thought that . . . is capable of reaching truth because it envisages without restriction the plurality of the relationships and what has been called ambiguity” (italics added).16 Ambiguity comes with the territory of multiplicity: The former is a territorial imperative of the latter. The same cannot be said of Hegel’s dialectic, which dictates the Eurocentric march of history culminating in the State. The ultimate synthesis of his dialectic of history is the synthesis of affirmation and negation. Marx’s dialectic is neither different from nor better than Hegel’s, because even if it stands on its feet rather than on its head, it ends up with the final synthesis as Communism. Let me quote, in conclusion, the following unsurpassable passage of Mikhail Bakhtin on his dialogism as the heralded way of life in which he plays a “jesterly” role against the long and cherished “priestly” tradition of “Know thyself,” which, as Goethe saw it, is the life of false contemplation. Plato’s dialogue is merely the means, not the end, of acquiring the eternally unchanging truth or the governmentality of a philosopher-king: . . . at the center of Dostoevsky’s artistic worlds [i.e., poetics] must lie dialogue, and dialogue not as a means but as end itself. Dialogue here is not the threshold to action, it is the action itself. It is not a means for revealing, for bringing to the surface the already ready-made character of a person; no, in dialogue a person not only knows himself outwardly, but he becomes for the first time that which he is—and, we repeat, not only for others but for himself as well. To be means to communicate dialogically. When dialogue ends, everything ends. Thus dialogue, by its very essence, cannot and must not come to an end. At the level of his religious-utopian world-view Dostoevsky carries dialogue into eternity, conceiving of it as eternal co-rejoicing, co-admiration, con-cord. At the level of the novel, it is presented as the unfinalizability of dialogue. . . . (italics added).17

To sum up: Bakhtin’s dialogical principle based on Dostoevsky’s poetics, as opposed to Plato’s dialogics and Hegel’s/Marx’s dialectics, is predicated

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upon the infinity of both time and space, i.e., it is both infinite “chronopolitics” and “geopolitics” which are both politically temporal and spatial. In Bakhtin’s dialogism, there is neither a first nor a last word. Every past meaning thus has its homecoming festival: It is never finished. It can be retrieved, renewed or replenished for the present. Hegel, who rebukes the “eternal yesterday” of Chinese thought and culture, knows no homecoming festival of the past. Gadamer’s invocation of the openness of tradition for the future as well as for the present is close to Bakhtin’s dialogism and gives a new meaning to it. In this light, Gadamer does not just conserve and perpetuate the past or tradition, but by appropriating or reappropriating it, he radicalizes it. Now I will briefly focus here on the implications of Gadamer’s “fusion of horizons” (Horizontschmelzung), especially the disciplinary fusion between philosophy and literature which is the result of Zhang Longxi’s application or appropriation of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. I will reserve a fuller discussion of the topic as transversality in the “Epilogue” of this essay. Zhang’s contribution to the nouvelle cuisine of philosophy and literature is immense and impressive. By scaling the Continental divide between the East (China, in particular) and the West, he has gone global. His literary hermeneutics threads a needle in the intersecting middle of China and the West in which the difference of their cultural politics can be negotiated and compromised so that the facile binary opposition between the two is skirted and dissolved. In comparative literature as well as comparative philosophy for which the problematics of translation or translatability are the first and foremost issue, their truth is found, not lost in translation. When Zhang approvingly quotes George Steiner that “inside or between languages, human communication equals translation” (italics original),18 he emphasizes the importance of “translation” in the broadest sense of the term. It would be a grave mistake, I think, to regard translation merely as a means for them because in it and by itself belongs to the legitimate zone of any comparative study. When I was a youngster under the Japanese colonial educational system, my senior friends tried to convince me that Japanese translation is so good that it is better than the original! There is some truth in it. There is a catch, however, in the problematics of translation: for non-Sinic scholars, particularly Western philosophers who are willing to learn European languages to advance their scholarly careers rather than sinography, the learning of which is professedly a difficult and taxing task. Four decades ago, the prominent Anglo-American literary critic I. A. Richards, who wrote a fine book on Mencius, addressed himself to the difficult question of translating Sinic concepts into English: “We have here indeed what may probably be the most complex type of event yet produced in the evolution of the cosmos” (italics added).19 This difficulty is compounded because in translation

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the question of meaning is doubled, that is, it has to decipher and configure “the meaning of meaning,” which is the title of the book Richards coauthored. The most difficult part for Western scholars in learning Chinese is caused by, I would venture to guess, a breakdown or lack of their willpower to learn Chinese, whereas we non-Western comparativists, learn by necessity difficult foreign languages such as English, French, German, Latin, and Greek. Take, for example, the German word Horizontverschmelzung that Gadamer uses, for example, is one windy, “paralyzing” (Fenollosa’s term), and multisyllabic word East-Asian students, who are accustomed to read monosyllabic sinograms, must master and remember. As the useful cliché goes, where there is the will, there is the way. The truth of this cliché is evident in the fact that there is now an increasing number of Westerners who are interested in China, including learning Chinese not because of its intellectual heritage but because of its growing economic and political power in recent years. This was the same phenomenon we witnessed a few decades ago when Westerners flocked to Japan to learn Japanese that is a hybrid of sinography (kanji) and the Japanese alphabet (in hirakana and katakana). Quite a few Western economists now forecast that by the middle of this century China will overtake the United States in economic growth and power—second to none in the world. 3. FENOLLOSA’S ETYMOSINOLOGY AS AN EXERCISE IN LITERARY/CULTURAL HERMENEUTICS Ernest Fenollosa was educated at Harvard College, which he regarded as his “whaleship” alluding to the work of Herman Melville in the era of the “American Renaissance” or the “Golden Age” of American literature. After studying philosophy, Fenollosa sailed and arrived in Japan in 1878 to teach philosophy, particularly Hegel and Herbert Spencer, at the Imperial University of Tokyo during the Meiji Restoration in the latter part of the nineteenth century when Japan, after a two-year soul-searching exploration, implemented full-scale modernization or Westernization under the motto of “Eastern morality and Western technology.” In 1898, Fenollosa wrote an essay entitled “The Coming Fusion of East and West,” which begins with “Western Ignorance of the Ultimate Issue,” whose Emersonian vision of globalism is far ahead of his own time. Indeed, it was truly visionary: today in East Asia, it is quite common to speak of and practice “fusion medicine,” “fusion philosophy,” “fusion music/fusion orchestras,” and “fusion food,” etc.20 Fenollosa’s essay was unquestionably a forerunner of Marshall McLuhan’s depiction of the shrinking world as “a

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global village.” The “fusion” of the East and West or a new dawn of the world as “a global village” for both Fenollosa and McLuhan begins with the East (the land of the sunrise) and ends in the West (the land of the sunset). Perhaps, only perhaps, the German grand philosopher of history, Oswald Spengler, had in mind this image of the West when he published The Decline of the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes in two volumes 1918 and 1922). The twentieth century was for Fenollosa “a time of re-union” for human civilizations. The sense of “world community” led him to reject cultural parochialism or ethnocentrism for the sake of cosmopolitanism. He anticipated the “relational patterns of thinking,” which happens to be the quintessential structure of Sinism. With his passage to Japan, “he was prepared to find the cosmos in a blade of grass and to seek cosmopolis in every village and town.”21 In 1946, the Yale philosopher F. S. C. Northrop penned the exploratory work, The Meeting of East and West, in which he pleaded for the need of “cross-cultural understanding” by rejecting explicitly Rudyard Kipling’s famous or infamous separatist traditional voice of the Orient and Occident: “Oh, East is East and West is West,/And never the twain shall meet.”22 Most recently, the resourceful but fully untapped notion of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s “fusion of horizons” (Horizontverschmelzung) in his magnum opus entitled Wahrheit und Methode.23 His seminal notion is an open invitation to infinite dialogue in the conversation of humanity across the globe. In dialogical communication, it has several meanings at once. First and foremost, dialogical communication is “unfinalizable”—to borrow the phrase that the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin uses to characterize his dialogism. Second, it means a disciplinary fusion, i.e., interdisciplinarity. Third, it gives the other party in dialogue the benefit of doubt, that is, he or she may very well be right, the open-ended attitude of which Gadamer calls the “soul of hermeneutics.”24 Fourth, and last but not least, is the fact that no hermeneuticist can and will be able to say that he or she uttered the last word, that is, in genuine dialogue there is neither first nor last word. The last sentence of “Afterword” of Gadamer’s Truth and Method reads: “It would be a poor hermeneuticist who thought he could have, or had to have, the last word.”25 Despite the above-mentioned avant-garde works of Fenollosa, Northrop, and Gadamer, the idea of or full-scale globalization is a relatively new intellectual venture in the history of human civilization. It is a movement to create a brave new world, and it also defines the intellectual climate of our time. It is the process where the “ex/change” (the timely title of Zhang Longxi’s journal) of ideas and values takes place across national/ethnic boundaries. Since everything, including globalization, is a matter of communication, the late Canadian communication theorist, Marshall McLuhan, who was trained in literature at Cambridge University, coined the phrase

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“a global village” to describe the rapidly shrinking world in time and space created by the electronic mass media, which superseded the Gutenberg era of printing technology or typography. The expression “a global village” has become so commonplace that a vast majority of us forget who coined it. Without understanding its intended meaning, the expression may sound as if it would contradict the popular idea that the world today is moving toward a cosmopolis which is the end result of globalization. McLuhan’s faithful followers have now “digitalized” the global village, the phenomenon of which might be called “McLuhan 2.0.” Interestingly, McLuhan fancied writing his magnum opus The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) in a galaxy, as it were, of sinograms which, according to him, generate “a vortex of corporate [bodily and collective] energy [qi]” and arouse the audio-tactile sense rather than that of sight in typography. Furthermore, he had an unerring sense of the flow and rhythm of Western thought since the Homeric oral culture of ancient preliterate or pre-alphabetic Greece. In addition to being an innovative and provocative theorist of communication, he should join the ranks of great philosophers of history such as Arnold Toynbee, Oswald Spengler, and William McNeill. With McLuhan’s death on the last day of 1980, the world lost the most eloquent and iconic herald (keryx) of communication theory whose literary legacy is encoded in the “spellbinding” message (kerygma) that “the medium is the message” or “the electric light is pure information” in which there is no spatial distance or “in-betweenness” of the message or information and the medium. His kerygma is even more prophetic today than ever before. He was truly a vanguard of electronic technoculture, which, for better or worse, rules and will rule the world as “a global village.” Log on, Professor McLuhan, therefore we are! It would be the highest accolade in his honor if we call him the “Homer” of communication theory in the twentieth century and beyond. Following the exploratory spirit of his compatriot, Harold A. Innis, McLuhan has the gift of interpreting the course of Western civilization in terms of the changing medium of communication. His controversial assertion that “the medium is the message” scales the progression of Western history in the broadest possible strokes as much as does his communication theory. He proposes the way of conceptualizing the interplay between the medium and the sensorium by which Western civilization is periodized: (1) tribalization in oral and auditory culture before the invention of the Greek alphabet in the mid-eighth century B.C., (2) detribalization in alphabetic and typographic (i.e., hegemonically visual or “popeyed”) culture, which had been deepened and accentuated by the Gutenberg revolution, and (3) retribalization in electronic culture, which, he claims, is quintessentially tactile without leaving any space between the human skin and the surface of an object, e.g., television.

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Indeed, electronic culture is a “skin trade.” As an apostle of the electronic technology of communication, McLuhan’s thought embraces a retrieval of oral and auditory culture and thus a reversal of the visualist, typographic culture. He even associates himself with the anti-cybernetist Martin Heidegger, who, according to McLuhan, surfs on the electronic waves and weaves Eastern, Sinic thought into his planetary thinking. Heidegger brings thinking and the hand—the primary agency of tactility—together into a reciprocal relationship, i.e., thinking is likened to a handicraft. Hayden White,26 who is known for developing his philosophy of history based on the four “poetic tropes” of Giambattista Vico (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony), invented the neologism diatactics to avoid the over-conceptualization of Hegel’s speculative metaphysics (idealism or rationalism, which is “hypotactical”) on the one hand and the under-conceptualization of Marx’s ideological materialism or praxeology, which is “paratactical” on the other. I accent on a tactile dimension of “diatactics” by splitting/writing it into two parts, dia/tactics. As McLuhan retrieves and retribalizes ancient Greek pre-literate culture for his theory of electronic culture, it is worth exploring further how his idol of the electronic medium and thus of today’s world as “a global village” is fashioned after Greek Homeric culture. In the collective personate of Homer, we find the “first stage of European thought.”27 He was an “oral poet,” and his poetry was “oral poetry” whose winged words were sung. In ancient Greece, mousike is a family of four elements: oral poetry, drama, dance, and music as “performing arts.” In Homeric poetry, therefore, the mouth and the ear were the main organs of communication. Oral poetry was the primary way of transmitting the Greek cultural messages from one generation to another. In the pioneering spirit of Fenollosa’s globalism, McLuhan declares that in the electronic age, “we wear all mankind as our skin” (italics added).28 For him, electronic technology challenges and deconstructs the hegemony of vision, and acoustic space is round/global, whereas visual space is linear/ local. Sound or acoustic space is itself all relational: It is a transversal field of simultaneous relationships. In The Medium is the Message, McLuhan and Quentin Fiore pungently remark: The ear favors no particular “point of view.” We are enveloped by sound. It forms a seamless web around us. We say, “Music shall fill the air.” We never say, “Music shall fill a particular segment of air.” We hear sounds from everywhere, without ever having to focus. Sounds come from “above,” from “below,” from in “front” of us, from “behind” us, from our “right,” from our “left.” We can’t shut our sound automatically. We simply are not equipped with earlids. Where a visual space is an organized continuum of a uniformed connected kind, the ear world is a world of simultaneous relationships (italics added).29

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In Homer as a “tribal encyclopedist” or an “encyclopedic minstrel,” speech and music became syn/aesthetic. They were integrated into the acoustic culture of ancient Greece. They had their common ancestry in songs. Homer’s poetry or epic embodied in the Iliad and the Odyssey was a “river of song” whose vibrant melody soaked the earth like rain. In oral poetry, composition is spontaneous performance and just as McLuhan’s electronic formula of communication is “the medium is the message.” Homeric oral poetry is improvised, pretty much like today’s performance of jazz, which is associated with the French jaser (chat). In this respect, oral poetry is not like written poetry in that in oral poetry composition and performance are never separated but happen simultaneously. “For the oral poet,” Albert B. Lord stresses, “the moment of composition is the performance. In the case of a literary poem there is a gap in time between composition and reading or performance; in the case of the oral poem this gap does not exist, because composition and performance are two aspects of the same moment. . . . An oral poem is not composed for but in performance.”30 After all, the Muses— altogether nine in number—were the daughters of Mnemosyne (auditory Memory), who was the supreme ruler of the Homeric oral or acoustic culture and the guardian of the aesthetic delight of poetry. The oral or acoustic world is indeed “a globe of memory” (italics added). The dynamic flow of Homeric oral culture was preserved and conserved in the cornucopia of poetry, that is, in its repetition, redundancy, and verboseness. Likewise, even the visual geometry of Greek art echoes the oral acoustics of poetry, not vice versa, and correspondingly, the sense of rhythm depicts the Greek sense of beauty in architecture and sculpture as well as poetry. As James Joyce would say, it is “Greekly perfect.” The dynamic flow of oral poetry as a medium of transmitting Greek cultural messages may be summed up in a few words of Eric A. Havelock, which enhance the validity of McLuhan’s electronic medium of communication (i.e., “the electric light is pure information”): “The poetized word acts as a kind of electricity in the atmosphere.”31 Now we understand how McLuhan’s catch-phrase, “the medium is the message” is fashioned after how Homeric oral poetry is performed as the medium of transmitting its cultural messages. The eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, whose hermeneutical principle is “verum ipsum factum,” regards etymology as the primordial form of the aesthetic. As a work on ars poetica, it is worth invoking here the words of Norman O. Brown, who also wrote about the poetic language of Vico, which would heavily weigh the importance of Fenollosa’s literary work as etymosinology: “In the beginning was the word. In the beginning was the deed; in the resurrection, in the awakening, these two are one: poetry.”32 No wonder, Fenollosa’s work as ars poetica attracted poetic per-

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sonages such as Ezra Pound, the author of the Cantos (1969); T. S. Eliot, who called Pound the (Western) “inventor” of Chinese poetry in our time; and, of course, Marshall McLuhan. Etymosinology adds another elegant poetic voice to the conversation of humankind. The ultimate significance of Fenollosa’s etymosinology is for me the fact (factum) that it is the aesthetic Rosetta stone of (hermeneutically) deciphering sinography and thus Sinism. What, we may ask, is Sinism and how should it be characterized? It is the term that was coined by the American sinologist H. G. Creel to specify that cluster of characteristics that are peculiarly Chinese or the Chinese habitus of thinking and doing.33 It blankets the geographical region called East Asia— Korea and Japan, as well as China—where sinography has wholly or partly been their daily linguistic diet. The sinographic disposition is embedded and exemplified in Confucianism, Daoism, and the hybrid religion of Chan/ Seon/Zen Buddhism. Sinism is manifestly this-worldly, practical, concrete, perceptual, and particular rather than otherworldly, speculative, abstract, conceptual, and general.34 Sinism may be summed up in two interrelated theses. First, it defines reality as social process, that is, where there is no social process, there is no reality. Since the mid-1980s, I have been using the phrases “relational ontology” and, later, a philosophy of “Interbeing” (Tiep Hien)—the term I adopted from the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh, who used it to designate his new religious order.35 Sinic (relational) “ontology” is a “weak” one because it aids “strong” ethics as prima philosophia. According to the Yijing (the oracular Chinese Book of Changes), everything is connected to everything else in the cosmos, the synchronistic principle, which may be called the “first law” of ecology. There is the lepidopterian principle, commonly known as the “butterfly effect,” which is a belief that as everything in the world or cosmos is interrelated: The flapping of a butterfly’s wings in one place will trigger, for example, a tsunami thousands of miles away. Second, the body is the material condition of our being (or inter-being) in the world, and thus reality as social process is first and foremost an embodied and intercorporeal phenomenon.36 What Emerson saw in hieroglyphics is what Fenollosa saw in sinograms. Fenollosa’s youthful literary environment was the “American Renaissance” whose masters were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. The American hypnotic fascination with Egyptian hieroglyphics came from the work of Jean-François Champollion—the Frenchman who deciphered it with the aid of the Rosetta stone in the 1830s. We do not have to stretch our imagination too far to connect Egyptian hieroglyphics with sinograms. The enthusiasm for one can easily be spilled over to the other. In Fenollosa’s case,

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his etymosinology has been related to Emerson’s conception of nature, language, and poetry. Fenollosa’s fascination with sinograms is certainly comparable to Emerson’s enchantment with Egyptian hieroglyphics: They all are “emblems” of nature beyond whose visual veil there are inscrutable “golden secrets,” which are not readily decipherable to ordinary minds. Whoever unveils the emblems of nature is a “magician” of some sort—like the Egyptian scribe whose secretive and exotic art was capable of generating power both poetic and political. Emerson’s influence on Fenollosa’s conception of poetry seems undeniable and clearly visible. Emerson’s essay “The Poet,”37 one who, etymosinologically speaking, “enshrines words,” is singularly revealing for our discussion of Fenollosa here. There are two issues we must explore and examine: (1) the relationship between poetry as a specialized form of language and language in general, and (2) words are actions. (1). It is not altogether surprising that many poet-critics have come to conclude that poetry is the “first language” of humanity and that the poet is the “first human.” For Fenollosa, poetry and language grew up together as twins. Long before Emerson and Fenollosa, the eighteenth-century Neapolitan Giambattista Vico, who made no distinction between Egyptian hieroglyphics and sinograms, propounded the view that not only is poetry inseparable from language but also poetry is the “origin” (arché) of language itself. Vico also considered etymology is the primordial form of the aesthetic. The following passage from “The Poet,” one of the most eloquent passages in the entire corpus of Emerson’s writings, echoes Vico’s view of etymology and his philosophy of language in general: The poets made all the words, and therefore, language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry (italics added).38

From the standpoint of etymosinology, one does not have to second-guess about the origin (arché) of a sinogram as a brilliant pictogram, which is also aesthetically pleasing. For Emerson, language is the very special gift of humans, that is, it is specifically human. It is the milieu that connects invisible spirit and visible nature: it is the “sign” or “emblem” of nature. Following him, Fenollosa too comes to view that sinograms convert “material images” into “immaterial relations.” In this sense, every sinogram is a metaphor whose function is absolutely indispensable to poetry and poetic imagination. For Emerson, the words that express our intellectual or moral facts are rooted directly in “material appearance”:

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Right originally means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; transgression, the crossing of a line; supercilious, the raising of the eyebrow. We say the heart to express emotion, the head to denote thought; and thought and emotion are, in their turn, words borrowed from sensible things, and now appropriated to spiritual nature.39

(2). Emerson recognizes words as performative utterances and writes a proto-pragmatist statement: “Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words.”40 By the same token, the poet is one who can articulate words in terms of “nouns” and “verbs.” In this Emersonian tradition, Fenollosa describes sinograms as “vivid shorthand pictures of actions and processes in nature.”41 As the sinogram is an idea in action, there is no separation between things and action. Poetry as well as art is concerned not with “the general” and “the abstract” but with the concrete pictures of nature. “Poetry is finer than prose because it gives us more concrete truth in the same compass of words.”42 It brings language close to things. If, in sinography, words are the “concrete pictures” of nature, nouns are “things in motion” and verbs “motion in things.” We can say, furthermore, that gestures (as language) are performative utterances in which “words” and actions are reversible dynamic events, that is, “words” are actions and actions are “words.” The American literary critic R. P. Blackmur is most persuasive in arguing for gesture as indigenous to language. As he writes: Language is made of words, and gesture is made of motion. There is one half the puzzle. The other half is equally self-evident if only because it is an equally familiar part of the baggage of our thought. It is the same statement put the other way around. Words are made of motion, made of action or response, at whatever remove; and gesture is made of language—made of the language beneath or beyond or alongside of the language of words. When the language of words fails we resort to the language of gesture. If we stop there, we stop with the puzzle with which we began by discovering one approach to the central or dead-end mystery of meaningful expression in the language of arts. . . . [G]esture is native to language, and if you cut it out you cut roots and get a sapless and gradually a rotting, if indeed not a petrifying language.43

Gesture is also akin to the sign language of the deaf. In his Seeing Voices, the famed author Oliver Sacks gives a good hearing into the body politics of what he calls “diglossia of the deaf,” or the “conversation of gestures.” In describing the tribal language of the deaf, he comes to the following conclusion: One has only to watch two people signing to see that signing has a playful quality, a style, quite different from that of speech. Signers tend to improvise, to play

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with signs, to bring their humor, their imaginativeness, their personality, into their signing, so that signing is not just the manipulation of symbols according to grammatical rules, but, irreducibly, the voice of the signer—a voice given a special force, because it utters itself, so immediately, with the body. One can have or imagine disembodied speech, but one cannot have disembodied Sign. The body and soul of the signer, his unique human identity, are continually expressed [or “exscribed” (Jean-Luc Nancy’s word)] in the act of signing (italics added).44

Sacks, nonetheless, alludes to the speaking “voice of the deaf”—speaking is most intimately linked with and signifies human communal existence and coexistence. In addition, exquisite “talking hands” for communication are much more performative than ordinary speech-making. Their deftly interweaving hand motions are akin to the performing art of dance. Every “word” a signer “speaks” is performative. The dexterity of signing is as exquisite as Chinese calligraphy as a performative art. Sinography—calligraphy in particular—is a kinetic art: It is the human body in graceful motion. Calligraphy is truly kinesthetic. The Chinese revere the art of calligraphy as much as, if not more than, painting: Calligraphy is the ritualized painting or incorporating performance of sinograms. In the genealogy of form, it precedes painting. In very significant measure, sinography is a choreography of human gestures and, as a family of signifiers, or “a conversation of gestures.” Pablo Picasso’s Swimmer (1929) and Acrobat (1930) are two choreographs of the human body in fluent and rhythmic motion that approach ideography or calligraphy. They are, in essence, balletic and frolicking anthropograms. Their “rhetoric” is indeed performative. There is now a Taiwanese dance company that performs “cursive” dancing, that is, performs calligraphy as the art form of dance. There was a legendary Chinese calligrapher who confided that the “performance” of his calligraphy markedly improved after watching the masterful performance of a great female dancer. Stéphane Mallarmé is telling in characterizing the dance as “corporeal writing” (écriture corporelle) or “hieroglyphy.”45 Paul Valéry also referred to the dance as the “intense festival of the body in the presence of our souls.”46 In the final analysis, Sinic grammatology is an expression of human gestures in many ways. The sinographic “gesture” of human expressivity is indelibly pantomimic and performative. We can concur with R. G. Collingwood that every language is a specialized form of bodily gesture and, as such, the dance is the mother of all languages.47 We can also say that in language as gestures in general and sinography in particular, the spoken and written are identical.48 The body is capable of unleashing what the French sociological thinker Pierre Bourdieu calls “the performative magic of the social” (italics added).49 It is not the body (Körper) that is treated as an object among other objects

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in the world but is what phenomenology calls the “lived body”/(Leib, corps vécu) as subject (or agent) in our everyday life. The lone voice of Vico’s effort to overcome and break away from the Cartesian bifurcation of res cogitans and res extensa in refuting the “hubris of the rational mind” (Drew Leder’s expression) failed a serious hearing in modern Western philosophy, particularly in Enlightenment thought,50 until the German Tantrist Friedrich Nietzsche advanced the radical and paradigmatic thesis in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “Body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word of something about the body.”51 His voice has been echoed, detailed, and refined in the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, and many others. In the following pages, I will argue that Cartesian epistemocracy rooted in the cogito (ergo sum: I think, therefore I am) in pursuit of “clear and distinct ideas” (three visual terms) is at once disembodied, monological (non-social or anti-social), and ocularcentric. It denies the body as the locus of “the performative magic of the social.” Cartesian epistemocracy is monological because it is disembodied, not the other way around. In defining the social, the existential phenomenologist Erwin W. Straus favors the body over the mind because “the body of an organism is related to other bodies; it is a part of the physical universe. The mind, however, is related to one body only; it is not directly related to the world, nor to other bodies, nor to other minds.”52 The mind becomes a relatum only because the body is populated in the world with other bodies. Dogen Kigen, who is the founder of Soto Zen and the most renowned Japanese carnal hermeneuticist, also proclaimed the primacy of the body over the mind in defining all matters of being human. Because we exist as body, as flesh, we become social and then ethical. Some years ago, I wrote an essay entitled “The Body as Social Discourse” in which I introduced the neologism carnal hermeneutics or simply “body politics” (in the plural) in an attempt to account for the importance of the body (as flesh) in human existence as social existence, that is, the notion that to be alone is not to be by encountering Cartesianism head-on. For Descartes, the sum is reduced to the cogito, which is all cerebral and consequently knowledge is nothing but the product of the cerebral mind. As Jean-Luc Nancy puts it in the following well-phrased expression: In Descartes and his cogito, “the head [brain] is detached from the body, without its having to be decapitated.”53 Auguste Rodin’s sculptural masterpiece, The Thinker, tells otherwise. His onetime assistant, the famed German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, carves out a few wise Nietzschean words about The Thinker as one who “sits absorbed and silent, heavy with thought: with all the strength of an acting man he thinks. His whole body has become head and all the blood in his veins has become brain.”54 In another masterpiece, The Cathedral, Rodin

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sculpted the sanctified condition of human coexistence in the form of a cathedral, which is small but the most sacred and spiritual space in the Western world. It, as well as The Thinker, is a deadly critique of a chunk of mythology constructed by Western philosophical hedgehogs, especially by the father of modern Western philosophy, Descartes. In the first place, Descartes’s epistemocracy is ocularcentric. It is evident that ocularcentrism has been ruling the long tradition of Western philosophy since Plato. In this sense, we can say that the history of Western philosophy is nothing but a series of footnotes to Plato’s eidos. Descartes attempted to build a Pantheon or, better, a Panopticon of knowledge—noting that Panopticon (Pan/Opticon) is the term Jeremy Bentham used as his architectural plan to build an ideal prison from which Descartes performs the role of cosmotheoros who can survey the entire cosmos at a single glance. In the Cartesian cogito, there is indeed an indelible identity between the “I” and the “eye”—i.e., “mind’s eye.” If, as Nietzsche contends, the mind is another word for the body, Descartes reduces the body to one gigantic eye or mythological figure of Cyclops. As a matter of fact, “cogito ergo sum” is really “video ergo sum” in which the mind’s “I” is reduced to the mind’s “eye.” The vintage Heidegger the word-player contends that the “I” (or the “eye” of the cogito) as thinking sub/stance becomes the center of thought from which the “I-viewpoint” and the subjectivism of modern Western thought originate: “the subjectivity of the subject is determined by the “I-ness” (Ichheit) of the “I think.”55 For him, the “I-viewpoint” of the Cartesian cogito highlights and heightens the modern age as “the age of the world picture” (Weltbild). Heidegger means to end once and for all the “speculative” or “specular” illusion of Western metaphysics from Plato to Descartes and beyond—Plato who strove “to behold [the truth as] the eternal ideas visible in the [starry] sky.”56 It is noteworthy that the American neo-pragmatist and public philosopher Richard Rorty made in his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) a conscious effort to dispel (or de/spell) and overcome certain illusions of modern Western philosophy and prevent “edifying” conversations from degenerating into an inquiry and exchange of views by embracing the hermeneutics of Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer as well as Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Dewey. By sharpening the distinction between epistemology and hermeneutics, Rorty declares that hermeneutics begins when and where epistemology ends: What is not epistemological is hermeneutical. To edifying “conversation” as opposed to “inquiry,” Rorty’s espousal of hermeneutics constitutes a new “post-metaphysical” and “post-analytical” chapter in the history of American philosophy by deconstructing, if I may use the controversial term, epistemocracy Cartesian or otherwise. To be noted here is that deconstruction is by no means a demolition derby, that is, destruction for the sake of destruc-

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tion. Rather, it is a portmanteau word that has two pockets side by side in a traveling bag, as it were. According to the originator of the term, Heidegger, it means in philosophy (and other disciplines), that construction contains in it destruction—i.e., destruction precedes construction. “Disengagement from practice,” Rorty wrote in Achieving Our Country with the subtitle Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, “produces theoretical hallucinations.”57 I also learned, however, from the British Marxist literary theorist Terry Eagleton that “aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body.”58 Since the body implies the domain of perception and sensation, both of which are carnal fields with a distinction, the espousal of aisthesis amounts to “the body’s long inarticulate rebellion against the tyranny of the theoretical” (theoria), particularly of “speculation” rather than “participation.” Rorty’s American neo-pragmatist exceptionalism with emphasis on anti-theoretical practice is not far distant from Sinism, as I have characterized in the preceding pages. In the second place, far more importantly, the body as we live it (corps vécu) is first and foremost our social placement in the world. Solipsism and/or narcissism may be defined as the estrangement of the mind from the body as the social placement in the world. It signifies the alienation at once of one’s own body, other bodies, other minds, and the world, both social and natural.59 Thus, Merleau-Ponty comes to the conclusion that disembodied Cartesianism scandalizes sociality, and vice versa. Gabriel Marcel, who was one of the first carnal phenomenologists, argues that the body is the central problem of human existence or coexistence with others, and everything else depends on its solution.60 More radically, he contends that the body belongs to the order of “being” rather than to that of “having”: the lived body is not an object among other objects (res) in the world. It is never just an inert but rather is a living, sentient subject. We are our body, or we exist as body. As an existing subject, the body (as flesh) is capable of “authoring” before “answering” the world—to use the most well-chosen expression of Mikhail Bakhtin. For Merleau-Ponty, perception precedes conception: The perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all knowledge as well as action. He vigorously defends his thesis on the “primacy of perception” in everything we do and think. The most radical aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s thesis is that the body as the locus of perception and the world are one inseparable fleshfold. The world, as Merleau-Ponty puts it concisely and precisely, is made of the same stuff as the body presumably because we relate ourselves to the world by the medium of the body as the lived field of perception. He writes with a touch of eloquence: “My body is not an object, for a means, an organization. In and through perception I initially organize the world. With my body and through my body, I inhabit the world. The body is the field [champ] in which

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perceptions localize themselves.”61 In each act of perception, the body participates in the world. Each perception is an instance or moment of the sensuous unity, and it is enclosed in the synergic work of the body, that is, intersensorial. The body is the carnal field in which perception becomes localized as seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting this or that in particular. For Descartes, on the other hand, the disembodied and rational mind as cogito erects the privatized, insulated, and echoless chamber of “clear and distinct ideas.” As a thinking sub/stance (res cogitans), the rational mind is independent of the body (res extensa); it needs no more than itself to exist. It plays an illusionary or hallucinatory trick on itself. Once the self and the other are viewed as disembodied sub/stances, two self-contained entities, monologism—or even solipsism in extremis—is inevitable. With the American literary hermeneuticist Gerald L. Bruns, we can speak critically of the selfimmurement of the cogito as the pure desire to seal itself off from the horizon of the other. In the words of the historian of philosophy, Wolf Leppenies: Descartes’ travels in time and space led him back to the philosophizing ego. Neither imaginary travels in the world of books nor real travels in the book of the world can provide the sound and firm knowledge necessary for the foundation of philosophy. This knowledge the philosopher can only find in himself, alone but secure in a heated room on a cold winter’s day.62

It was indeed Descartes’s idealized way of his philosophical life which may be at best called “narcissistic insouciance.”63 Thusly viewed, the cogito is altogether incapable of performing the magic of the social. Descartes had confessed that any sort of intellectual peregrination (nor even to speak of globetrotting), real or imaginary, is anathema to the sovereignty of the philosophizing ego. By so contemplating, he lost—ironically—the best picture of the invisible soul because, as Wittgenstein wittingly points out, “the human body [Körper] is the best picture [Bild] of the human soul [Seele].”64 The body is, for better or worse, the only “visible” window through which we can peep into the condition of the “invisible” soul. By the same token, we can also say with Wittgenstein that the unveiled face, which is the most interesting surface on earth, is the soul of the body.65 There are and can be no born Cartesians in the land of relational Sinism where everything is said to be “inter-being” with everything else in the cosmos. Thinking is always already an embodied activity in Sinism in East Asia. As hara (abdomen in Japanese) is the “heart” or center of the body, there is the interesting Japanese expression kufu, which is translated as “thinking with abdomen.”66 In Sinism, the disembodied and thus monologic cogito without practice is unthinkable or empty, if not hallucinatory, speculation, and Cartesian epistemocracy is an impossible option for the Sinic mind.

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Sinism has a “weak” epistemology as well as a “weak” ontology as they aid a “strong” ethics as prima philosophia. Cartesianism, which had once been popular in the teaching of philosophy in the academic world of Japan and Korea, is not indigenous to East Asia but imported from the West. One of my favorite Chinese philosophers, the neo-Confucian Wang Yangming, put it long ago: “The great man [sage] regards Heaven and Earth and the myriad things as one body [not one mind]” (italics added).67 It should be noted here that the contemporary Chinese aesthetician Li Zehou coined the ingenious and etymosinological neologism (or tsukuriji in Japanese), “subjectality” (zhu/ti/xing) in contradiction to (Cartesian) “subjectivity” (zhu/quan/xing).68 In sinography, ti stands for “body”/embodiment, whereas quan for “visualizing” (as in touristic “sight-seeing”), that is, “idealized.” Moreover, it is said that in Sinism there are four human “dignities,” which are all bodily postures and movements: standing, walking, lying, and sitting.69 Among these four “dignities,” sitting as in zazen (“seated meditation”) is best known to the Western audience in practicing Zen. Without zazen in Zen, whose sinogram signifies “meditation,” there would be no awakening (satori). When all is said and done, the dialogist and carnal hermeneuticist Bakhtin, who takes the carnivalesque or “jesterly” seriously in order to transform the “priestly” status quo, refutes the Cartesian solitary and disembodied ego, which lives in the prison-house of panopticism. He favors an inter-individual or trans-individual dialogue between different consciousnesses capable of creating new ideas. Dialogue, which is necessarily embodied, is for him the only way of life. As the Confucian “analects” itself is dialogical, Confucianism or its ethics as prima philosophia is unquestionably a form of dialogism. Fenollosa’s etymosinology and Bakhtin’s dialogism are transversally or cross-culturally connected. As the Confucian ren (benevolence or, more broadly, humanity) signifies cosmopolitanism, it is about time for us to talk about dialogue on a global scale in the “glocalizing” world of multiculturalism, which will bring ultimately and hopefully a brave new world of cosmopolitanism. 4. EPILOGUE: THE DAO OF TRANSVERSALITY AND THE FUTURE OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY The institution of Western thought called “Eurocentrism” as well as the practice of political imperialism is that habitus of mind that privileges Europe or the West as the cultural, technological, political, economic, and moral capital of the entire globe. “Modernization,” too, is the allencompassing catchword largely referring to the totalizing and hegemonizing process of this Eurocentric phenomenon. As the astute interpreter and

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critic of Western modernity, Zygmunt Bauman relates: “Now, . . . Europe set the reference point of objective time in motion, attaching it firmly to its own thrust toward colonizing the future [italics added] in the same way as it had colonized the surrounding space.”70 Indeed, this Eurocentric idea of colonizing the future gives a new meaning to the conception of Jürgen Habermas’s “enlightened” modern West as an unfinished project or Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history.” Transversality puts forth in this essay as a constellation of radically new concepts, many of which are drawn from the philosophical insights especially of two phenomenologists: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Calvin O. Schrag. It is for me an expression of disenchantment with Eurocentric universality—for that matter, ethnocentrism in general, whether it be Eurocentrism, Sinocentrism, Indocentrism, or Afrocentrism that “essentializes” a particular culture or ethnicity in any given territory. As transversality is initially a geometric concept that draws two diagonal lines in any given rectangle, it signifies the crossing [X-ing as in the Greek letter “X” (chi)] of two different and seemingly disconnected phenomena: for example, the crossing of the East and the West. This transversal crossing results in hyphenations and hybridities, whether the crossing of cultures, academic disciplines, or species. If hybrid cars are good for ecology and hybrid genes are good for human genetics, it must be good for world literature and philosophy. Hybridity cum fusion will dissolve (in Wittgenstein’s sense) “ethnocentric ignorance.” Transversality is necessarily a de/constructive concept. It first dismantles or unpacks the status quo and then goes beyond what is given, received, or established by constructing a new formation of concepts. In the portmanteau word deconstruction, construction contains in itself destruction. Here transversality is an attempt to challenge the assumed transparency of truth as the Eurocentric canon of truth in Western modernity and to overcome its limits. As a paradigm shifter, it means to decenter Europe as the site of “universal truth,” whose “identitarian” and “unitarian” motivation fails to take into account the globalizing/glocalizing world of multiculturalism. Thus, transversality should be spelled “trans(uni)versality.” The pluralist Johann Gottfried Herder spoke against Western colonialism because it reduces a plurality of nations, which is the ingrained condition of humanity on earth. MerleauPonty, too, forcefully relates against Hegel’s Eurocentric universality: “There is not a philosophy which contains all philosophies; philosophy as a whole is at certain moments in each philosophy. To take up the celebrated phrase again, ‘philosophy’s center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.’”71 The French sinologist and comparative philosopher François Jullien calls the effort of the decentering Eurocentrism or Western modernity “a new ‘Copernican reversal.’”72 He contends that in “shaking up” Western modernity,

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China—Zhang Longxi’s “ultimate other” of the West—becomes a “philosophical tool” or philosophical experiment; that is, he uses Chinese thought to interrogate Western philosophy and to liberate it from its own “mental cage.” Most radically, he wishes to replace the very concept of “truth” itself with that of “intelligibility” because, as Merleau-Ponty before him asserts, “truth” is bound up with the history of Western philosophy or made up (Vico’s sense of factum) by it. Jullien puts his compatriot Michel Foucault to the test in order to challenge the Eurocentric “legislation” of truth for all global humanity. In his 1978 visit to Japan, the vintage Foucault remarked that knowledge and power are one interwoven fabric, and Western imperialism and the era of the dominance of Western philosophy together have come to an end. Foucault is not alone in conjecturing that philosophy of the future must be born “outside Europe” or in the “meetings and impacts” between the West and the nonWest.73 Transversality opts for or takes the side of the latter. We would be remiss if we forget to listen to the Martiniquan francophone Edouard Glissant’s voice of the aesthetics or poetics of relation in the conversation of multiculturalism (“diversality”), transversality, and hybridity (creolization or Caribbeanness) in opposition to Eurocentric universality accompanied by a vision of a single, linear, and hierarchized History that refuses to accept the cultural politics of difference necessary to “the body of world culture.”74 Transversality is the way of subverting and transgressing this Eurocentric vision of a single History. For Glissant, transversality is the way of discovering the already existing reality of Caribbean “subterranean convergence” from within, that frees the Caribbeans from uniformity. Hybridity is a converging middle path of “multiple interconnecting axes of affiliation and differentiation.” Glissant epigrammatizes transversality in one terse sentence: “Thinking about One is not thinking about All” (or Many) (La pensée de l’Un ne soit pas la pensée du Tout). He is an outstanding spokesperson for Caribbeanness that symbolizes its interconnectedness and interdependence, i.e., Interbeing (beings-in-relation) that characterizes Sinism as shown in Section 3 of this chapter. Thinking in and of métissage [translated by Glissant himself as “cross-breeding”] is deeply embedded in the intellectual disposition of the Caribbeans. A Caribbean manifesto in praise of creoleness begins with the sentence: “Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves Creoles.” Indeed, the Caribbean archipelago is a hotbed of cultural, ethnic, and linguistic hybridities. The claims of mono-cultural, mono-ethnic, and mono-lingual purity has already become old-fashioned and out-of-date with the fast-moving world of multiculturalism and globalization. Many years ago, I came across the British author Edward de Bono’s suggestive geometric imageries of “vertical thinking” on the one hand and “lateral thinking” on the other.75 Lateral thinking is a “new think” in that it

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is capable of discovering new ideas. For him, the two modes of thinking are complementary to each other. However, I chose lateral thinking as the alternative to vertical thinking. Lateral thinking is the parallax view of vertical thinking. The former may be likened to digging a new hole in another place, whereas the latter is digging the same hole deeper and deeper with no exit in sight. Vertical thinking is eminently suitable for continuing the Eurocentric march of a single linear History, whereas lateral thinking confronts face-toface the stubborn reality of the globalizing world of a multitude of lifeworlds (Lebenswelten) across time and space, that is, diverse ethnicities, cultures, languages, histories, philosophies, etc., in pursuit of a new continent of ideas and values. The concept of transversality re/places that of universality: In other words, transversality is in, and universality is out. When transversality is in, then and only then China—the “ultimate other” of the West—ceases to be the negative mirror but becomes, instead, the parallax of the West. After all is said and done, the transversalist is a “fox” rather than a “hedgehog.”76 I am alluding here to Isaiah Berlin’s often-quoted line from the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus that reads, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Thus, the transversalist is an interdependent thinker who had both deftness and agility to interweave many things, whereas the universalist has one big magnetizing thought. The history of philosophy, both Eastern and Western, has been overshadowed by hedgehogs. In the world of multiculturalism and globalization, the pendulum should be shifted to the voice of foxes. The newly emerging face of the Maitreyan Middle Way mediates and facilitates cultural, disciplinary, speciesistic, and sensorial border-crossings. It is concerned with those in-between matters that are intercultural, interdisciplinary, interspecific, and interlinguistic (i.e., intertextual) border-crossings. It cannot be otherwise. It is high time to put an end to the metaphor of philosophy as the “owl of Minerva” that takes its flight at dusk. Philosophy and literature should together be metaphorized as the Muse who can play mousike to orchestrate the global harmonics of interhuman and interspecific relationships at the dawn of a new day. Since the orchestration of this global harmonics will be an endless or infinite process, let me quote in conclusion a Japanese koan that I am fond of: “When we climb up to the top of the mountain, keep climbing!”77 Likewise, the conversation of humanity will continue and spread infinitely to every corner of the globe. NOTES 1.  My friendship with Zhang Longxi began in the early 1990s, when I was drawn to his impressive essay entitled “The Myth of the Other: China in the Eyes of the West” in Critical Inquiry (1988), which is the only journal I have personally been

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subscribing to for some time. No sooner than I read it, I sent him a copy of my monograph, The Question of Rationality and the Basic Grammar of Intercultural Texts (1989). As the cliché goes, the rest is history. 2. “Reception in Germany and Abroad,” in The Cambridge Companion to Goethe, ed. Lesley Sharpe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 232. 3.  Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994/2004), p. 17. 4.  See the following essay by Cornel West, which is the best one I have ever come across in understanding the politics of cultural difference: “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990), pp. 19–36. Cf. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), and Cosmopolitanism: Ethics of a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006). 5.  See James Miller, Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). 6.  See Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), p. vii. 7.  Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978). 8. From an Indian point of view on the question of “Orientalism,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Other Asias (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2008); and An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). 9.  See Erich Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” trans. Maire and Edward Said, The Centennial Review, 8 (1969): 17. 10. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1991). 11. Charles Taylor, Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 38. 12.  Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 110. 13.  Zhang Longxi, The Tao and the Logos: Literary Hermeneutics, East and West (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), p. 192. 14.  Truth and Method, p. 579. 15.  Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 147. 16.  The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort and trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 94. 17.  Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 110. See also Marjorie Garber, The Use and Abuse of Literature (New York: Pantheon Books, 2011). 18.  See Zhang Longxi, Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 63. He is quoting the passage from George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 47.

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19. I. R. Richards, “Toward a Theory of Translating,” in Studies in Chinese Thought, ed. Arthur F. Wright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 250. 20.  Concerning “fusion food,” T. R. Reid mentions a list of Asian “delicacies” such as the squid pizza, the curry doughnut, the bean-paste Danish, the kimcheeburger, the green tea milk shake, and the BST (bacon, seaweed, and tomato) sandwich in his Confucius Lives Next Door (New York: Random House, 1999), p. 30. 21.  Lawrence W. Chisolm, Fenollosa: The Far East and American Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 3–32. 22. F. S. C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West: An Inquiry Concerning World Understanding (New York: Macmillan, 1960). 23. See Truth and Method, especially pp. 306–7 et passim. 24.  Quoted in Jean Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. Joel Weinsheimer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 124. 25.  Truth and Method, p. 579. 26. See Hwa Yol Jung, Transversality and Intercultural Texts: Essays in Phenomenology and Comparative Philosophy (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), pp. 32–68. 27.  See Hwa Yol Jung, The Way of Ecopiety: Essays in Transversal Geophilosophy (New York: Global Scholarly Publications, 2009), p. 117. 28. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), p. 47. 29. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Message (New York: Bantam Books, 1967), p. 149 n. 27. 30.  Quoted in Jung, The Way of Ecopiety, p. 117. 31.  Eric A. Havelock is quoted in Jung, ibid. 32. Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (New York: Random House, 1966), pp. 263–64. 33.  See H. G. Creel, Sinism: The Study of the Evolution of the Chinese World-View (Chicago: Open Court, 1929). 34.  Najime Nakamura, Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples, ed. Philip P. Wiener (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1964), pp. 175–294. 35. See Thich Nhat Hanh, Interbeing, rev. ed., ed. Fred Eppsteiner (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1993). 36.  Vico points to what might be called the socialization by humans of things both animate and inanimate. In his greatest work, The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), p. 78, we find the following passage, which is extremely interesting and worth quoting in full: “It is noteworthy that in all languages the greater part of the expressions relating to inanimate things are [sic] formed by metaphor from the human body and its parts and from the human senses and passions. Thus, head for top or beginning; the brow and shoulders of a hill; the eyes of needles and potatoes; mouth for any opening; the lip of a cup or pitcher; the teeth of a rake, a saw, a comb; the beard of wheat; the tongue of a shoe; the gorge of a river; a neck of land; an arm of the sea; the hands of a clock; heart for center (the Latins used umbilicus, navel, in this sense); the belly of a sail; foot for end or bottom; the flesh of fruits; a vein of rock or mineral;

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the blood of grapes for wine; the bowels of the earth. Heaven or the sea smiles; the wind whistles; the waves murmur; a body groans under a great weight. The farmers of Latium used to say the fields were thirsty, bore fruit, were swollen with grain; and our rustics speak of plants making love; vines going mad, reinous trees weeping. Innumerable other examples could be collected from all languages.” Vico sums up: “Words are carried over from bodies and from the properties of bodies to signify the institutions of the mind and spirit.” Emerson, too, is a worthy heir of Vico when he writes: “The human body is the magazine of inventions, the patent office, where are the models from which every hint was taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses.” I find a few examples in sinography which concur with Vico’s samples, for example, in support of Vico’s speculation: The sinogram “mouth” is used to indicate (the openings) of “entrance” and “exit,” and the sinogram “heart” is translated as “center.” A more interesting example, I think is: The mushrooms that grow on trees are called “wood’s ears.” 37.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: Second Series (New York: Lovell, Coryell, n.d.). 38.  Ibid., p. 21. 39.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, eds. Robert E. Spiller and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 28. 40.  Essays: Second Series, p. 10. 41.  The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, p. 21. 42.  Fenollosa, ibid., p. 23. 43.  R. P. Blackmur, Language as Gesture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), pp. 3–4. 44.  Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 119. 45.  Stéphane Mallarmé, Divagations (Paris: Bibliothèque Charpetier, 1949), pp. 180–9. 46. Paul Valéry, Dialogues, trans. William McCausland Steward (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956), pp. 27–52. 47.  R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), pp. 243–44. 48.  Samuel Beckett, “Dante. . . Bruno. Vico. . . Joyce,” in Samuel Beckett et al., Our Examination Round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (London: Shakespeare, 1929), pp. 5–22. 49.  Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice [Le Sense Pratique], trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 57. 50.  Drew Leder, for example, remarks that “This [Cartesian] hierarchical dualism has been used to subserve projects of oppression directed toward women, animals, nature, and other ‘Others.’” The Absent Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 4. We should also add one of the most damaging hierarchized dualisms of the East and the West. 51.  The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Penguin, 1959), p. 146. 52.  Erwin W. Straus, Phenomenological Psychology: Selected Papers (New York: Basic Books, 1966), p. 211.

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53.  Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 167. 54.  Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin, trans. Jessie Lemont and Hans Trausil (London: Grey Wall Press, 1946), p. 33. 55.  Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 115–54. 56.  Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 292. 57.  See Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 94. For Rorty’s Chinese connection, see Yong Huang (ed.), Rorty, Pragmatism and Confucianism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009). 58.  Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 13. 59.  In my recent search for answers to “alterity politics” as opposed to “identity politics,” I discovered the Polish philosopher Father Józef Tischner, who is not well known outside Poland and who is well acquainted with philosophies of Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Gabriel Marcel, and Emmanuel Levinas. Tischner is quoted as having written a revealing Goethean passage in The Philosophy of Drama: “At the start of the origin of awareness of the self lies the presence of you, and perhaps even the presence of a more general we. Only in dialogue, in argument, in opposition, and also in aspiring toward a new community is awareness of my self created, as a self-contained being, separate from another. I know that I am, because I know another is.” See Rysgard Kapściński, The Other, trans. Antonia Lloyd Johnes (London: Verso, 2008), pp. 67–68. I call this a “heterocentric” or “heteronomic” view of human existence or coexistence that was originally discovered by Ludwig Feuerbach in the nineteenth century. In addition, Tischer echoes the famous passage of John Donne’s Devotions XVII in the old English: “No man is an Iland, intire of itself; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” Quoted in Christopher D. Stone, Should Trees Have Standing: Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects (Los Altos: William Kaufmann, 1974), p. 94, n. 2. 60.  Gabriel Marcel, Metaphysical Journal, trans. Bernard Wall (London: Salisbury Square, 1952), p. 126 et passim, and see also Being and Having, trans. Katharine Farrer (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1949). 61. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Husserl et la Notion de Nature (Notes Prises au Cours de Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 70 (1965): 257–69. 62.  Wolf Lepenies, “Interesting Questions in the History of Philosophy and Elsewhere,” in Philosophy in History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy, ed. Richard Rorty, J. R. Scheewind, and Quentin Skinner (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 141–71.

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63.  The phrase of Martin Jay is found in his work Songs of Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 406. 64.  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), p. 178e. 65.  While I was visiting Nanjing University three summers ago, I noticed a small sculpture garden next to the building that houses the Department of Sculpture. A wellknown Chinese sculptor, Wu Weishan, created Confucius, Zhuangzi, and hardworking Chinese laborers, among others. He also created a status of a heavy woman whose face has a blank surface, that is, without contours of the mouth, the nose, and the eyes. Interestingly, it was a statue of, I surmised, an anonymous woman. I have never seen any Western sculptural piece with a blank facial surface for an anonymous person. 66. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1959), p. 104, n. 12. 67.  See Hwa Yol Jung, “Wang Yangming and the Way of World Philosophy,” Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, 12 (2013): 461–86, esp. pp. 467–75. This essay is reprinted as Chapter 8 of the present work. 68.  Li Zehou, “Subjectivity and ‘Subjectality’: A Response,” Philosophy East and West, 49 (1999): 174–83. 69. Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), p. 99. 70. Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), p. 110. 71. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 128. See also Hwa Yol Jung, Transversal Rationality and Intercultural Texts: Essays in Phenomenology and Comparative Philosophy (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), pp. 15–34, esp. 24–26. 72.  See François Jullien, “Did Philosophers Have to Become Fixated on Truth?” (trans. Janet Lloyd), Critical Inquiry, 28 (2002): 803–24, and “China as Philosophical Tool,” Diogenes, No. 50 (2003): 15–21. 73.  See Michel Foucault, “A Stay in a Zen Temple (1978),” in Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 110–14. 74.  See Hwa Yol Jung, “Edouard Glissant’s Aesthetics of Relation as Diversality and Creolization,” in Postcolonialism and Political Theory (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007), pp. 193–225, which is reprinted in this volume as Chapter 9. 75.  See Edward de Bono, New Think: The Use of Lateral Thinking in the Generation of New Ideas (New York: Basic Books, 1968). 76.  Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), p. 1. 77. In The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 96, Martin Heidegger writes that “. . . with the end of philosophy, thinking is not also at its end, but in transition to another beginning.” The end (horismos) is the beginning of something else. The repetitive or transitional “logic” of this process has no ending (horismos). It continues infinitely. The paradoxical logic of the koan is used to train young Zen apprentices to achieve satori (awakening). The best known koan is “when you hear sound of two hands clapping, what is the sound of one

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hand clapping? I would answer: It is the sound of silence. East Asians have propensity or tolerance for paradoxes provided that they bond the relationality of things. I cited the following Zhuangzi’s passage as the epigraph of my essay for a critique of overpsychoanalyzing Mao Zedong’s language and Maoism: “The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you’ve gotten the fish, you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit; once you’ve gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him?” [interestingly, Zhang Longxi cites in The Tao and the Logos: Literary Hermeneutics, East and West, p. 30, a slightly different form to point out that Chinese classical poetry and philosophy echoes this logic of paradox]. In Seoul, Korea, I saw the name of a restaurant called “No-Name Restaurant.” There is the Daoist expression, wei wu wei or “engage in no action.” Is there a difference between the logic of Sinic Dao and that of Western “Logos”? Is one the logic of non-sense and the other the logic of sense?

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Chapter Eight

Wang Yangming and the Way of World Philosophy

1. PROLOGUE As a neophyte in philosophy who had just begun to study in earnest phenomenology and existential philosophy in the era of positivist dominance under the tutelage of the American philosopher John Wild at Northwestern University in the fall of 1961, I wrote an experimental essay on Wang Yangming in the hopes of showing an affinity between him and existential phenomenology, or the “second school” of phenomenology, which hybridizes Søren Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy in the nineteenth century and Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology in the twentieth century.1 The basic philosophical tenets of existential phenomenology were formulated in Martin Heidegger’s seminal work Being and Time (1962) (Sein und Zeit, 1927). He put it simply: “Ontology is possible only as phenomenology” (Ontologie ist nur als Phänomenologie möglich).2 Heidegger’s existential phenomenology continued most prominently in Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Paul Ricoeur in France.3 The major reason for writing this essay on Wang Yangming and existential phenomenology was simply to counteract Eurocentrism prevalent in the long tradition of modern Western philosophy—particularly in Hegel, as it will later be shown—which regards the non-West, e.g., China and India, as nonphilosophy while the West monopolizes the universal truth of philosophy. If I showed, I thought, an affinity between Wang Yangming and existential phenomenology, that is to say, if I elevated the comparable status of the former to the level of the latter, Chinese thought exemplified in Wang Yangming would legitimately be a philosophy, not just a species of intellectual thought. At an East-West philosophical conference, John Wild cogently observed that all the major forms of Western philosophical thought are to be found in a vast 187

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variety of Eastern schools.4 Indeed, the East has the discipline of philosophy that is not singular but plural. From the very outset, it should be made unequivocally clear that the question of rationality in the production of intercultural texts or intertexts is not so much the question of epistemological absolutism and relativism in the tradition of Descartes as how philosophical truth may, indeed, be formulated without being entrapped in ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism (e.g., Eurocentrism, Sinocentrism, Indocentrism, and Afrocentrism) has no place in the globalizing world of multiculturalism. Wang Yangming as a world philosopher in the venerable tradition of Confucius, I submit, he would have never written on “achieving China” after the fashion of the late Richard Rorty’s “achieving America.” He would rather have written on “achieving the world” or “achieving humanity,” that is, he would have played the “music of humanity”5 (ren) on the philosophical keyboard. The institution of the European mindset called Eurocentrism is that hegemonic disposition or propensity of the modern Europe (West), which legislates or legitimizes itself as the anointed guardian of the cultural, scientific/ technological, political, economic, and even moral depository of the entire globe. By constructing a great dividing wall between the East and the West, in other words, Eurocentrism willfully engaged in “a kind of intellectual apartheid regime in which the superior West is quarantined off from the inferior East.”6 By positioning itself as the teleological temple of the world, Eurocentrism becomes a tribal idolatry. As the astute interpreter and critic of Eurocentrism and Western modernity Zygmunt Bauman relates: From at least the seventeenth century and well into the twentieth, the writing elite of Western Europe [had] . . . unchallenged faith in the superiority of its own mode over all alternative forms of life—contemporaneous or past—[which] allowed it to take itself as the reference point for the interpretation of the telos of history. . . . Now . . . Europe set the reference point of objective time in motion, attaching it firmly to its own thrust toward colonizing the future in the same way as it has colonized the surrounding space.7

Indeed, this Eurocentric idea of colonizing the future gives a new meaning to the conception of modernity as an unfinished project or as the end of history. In the conceit of Eurocentrism in Western modernity, Hegel judged the “Oriental philosophy” of China in a cavalier fashion. His grand narratives of Lectures on the History of Philosophy show at times an inexcusable philosophical truancy. He was totally dismissive of the importance of Chinese philosophy in world philosophy as “elementary” (infantile), the Chinese yingyang trigrams and hexagrams as “superficial,” and the Chinese composition

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of five elements (fire, water, wood, metal, and earth) as “all in confusion.” Then he caps his commentary on Confucius: We have conversations between Confucius and his followers in which there is nothing definite further than a commonplace moral put in the form of good, sound doctrine, which may be found as well expressed and better, in every place and amongst every people. Cicero gives us De Officiis, a book of moral teaching more comprehensive and better than all the books of Confucius. He [Confucius] is hence only a man who has a certain amount of practical and worldly wisdom—one with whom there is no speculative philosophy” [emphasis added].8

It is transparent that Hegel’s judgment is too rash in which Europe is his reference culture. The concept of universal truth is a Western invention, that is, born out of “Western narcissism” (Roland Barthes’s expression) and “ethnocentric ignorance” (Pascale Casanova’s phrase). Hegel’s myopic view of universal truth may be likened to the proverbial Korean frog who lived in a deep well, looked up to the blue sky one day, and squealed with delight: “That’s the universe!” As disenchantment calls for transgression and transcendence (i.e., deconstruction), philosophy often begins anew by inventing new concepts to come to grips with the world always already in transition. In today’s multicultural and globalizing world, we are in dire need of inventing new concepts to explore changing realities. I would venture to say that transversality is one of those new concepts that is proposed to replace the outmoded Eurocentric idea of universality in Western modernity. It is, in a manner of speaking, a phoenix rising from the ashes of universality wedded to Eurocentrism. By decentering or deprovincializing Eurocentrism, it intends to go beyond and transfigure the Eurocentric mega-narratives of universality. It is truly an interruption in the etymological sense of the term. Thus, it may be conceived of as a “trans(uni) versality” that goes beyond the hierarchized binary oppositions, for example, between mind (the rational) and body (the sensorial), humanity and nature, femininity and masculinity, and East and West. It leaves behind the essentialized notion that what is particular in the West is universalized or universalizable, whereas what is particular in the East remains forever particular. In sum: Transversality intends to decenter Europe as the singular site of universal truth whose “identitarian” and “unitarian” motivation fails to take into account a plurality of cultures or a world of multiculturalism. “Thinking about One,” the Martiniquan philosopher Edouard Glissant forcefully and concisely states, “is not thinking about All” (La pensée de l’Un ne soit pas la pensée du Tout).9 The American existential phenomenologist Calvin O. Schrag goes further when he declares that “the transversal logos replaces the universal logos as the lynchpin for the philosophy of the new millennium,”10

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or the twenty-first century, which is already here. In other words, transversality deconstructs Eurocentrism, the mission of which is to proselytize the universality of the rational. It first dismantles or unpacks the status quo and then goes beyond what is given, received, or established by constructing a new formulation or constellation of concepts. It challenges the assumed transparency of truth as universal and overcomes the limits of universality as the Eurocentric canon of truth in Western modernity. Insofar as transversality is negotiated or com/promised “middle voice,” it touches the soul and heart of Buddhism. I would not hesitate to suggest that the famous wooden statue with worm-eaten holes of the Japanese Buddhist monk Hoshi at a Zen temple in Kyoto, Japan, which is now housed in the Kyoto National Museum of Art, embodies the mantra of transversality. The Hoshi’s face—the “soul of the body” (Wittgenstein’s expression), which speaks the world in transformation—marks a new dawn of Awakening (satori) or signals the beginning of a new regime of ontology, culture, ethics, and politics. From the crack in the middle of the old face of Hoshi’s statue, there emerges an interstitial, liminal face that signifies a new transfiguration and transvaluation of the existing world. The icon of the emerging face symbolizes the arrival of Maitreya (the “future Awakened One,” Bodhisattva) or Middle Way—the enabling middle term of transversality that is destined to navigate the difficult waters of intercultural border-crossings. We should be warned not to take it as a middle point between two polarities. Rather, it breaks through bipolarity (e.g., mind and body, culture and nature, masculinity and femininity, and East and West). What is important here is the fact that transversality is the paradigmatic rendition of overcoming any bipolarity. The bipolar solids melt into the air of transversality, as it were. In transversality, differences are negotiated and compromised rather than effaced, absorbed, or assimilated into the flatland of sameness or unitariness. In transversal engagement, what is lacking in one is compensated for or supplemented by the other. Here we should take seriously heed of the pluralist Johann Gottfried Herder, a pupil of Kant, who contended that colonialism or, better, imperialism “effaces” cultural differences. As Anthony Pagden points out, Western colonialism is for Herder “an evil because it reduces, or threatens to reduce . . . the number of cultural variants that exist in the world. This is an evil because plurality is part of the way the world is constituted.”11 Herder challenges the mainstream Western conception of universal reason in befittingly bodily metaphors: After dozens of attempts, I find myself unable to comprehend how reason can be presented so universally as the single summit and purpose of all human culture, all happiness, all good. Is the whole body just one big eye? Would it not suffer if every part, the hand and the foot, had to serve as the eye and the brain? Reason,

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too carelessly, too uselessly diffused, may well weaken desire, instincts and vital activity—in fact has already done so (emphasis added).12

Herder’s body metaphor, I think, is most befitting in light of the fact that first, the body has been an orphan child in the mainstream (or “malestream”) thought of Western modernity since Descartes until the advent of postmodernism in the twentieth century and second, sight or vision has been the aristocratic or most preferred sense of Western philosophy since its inception in Socrates/Plato. The transversal exchange of ideas and values would advance a world republic of philosophy in an innovative way beyond national and ethnic boundaries in the increasingly globalizing world of multiculturalism. However, globalization at the moment or in the foreseeable future does not mean effacement of cultural differences into “one world.” Heidegger’s Differenz as Unterschied is most appropriate here because Unterschied (Unter/schied) incorporates at once difference and the relational. But for difference, there would be no need for communication and the world would not be plural or multicultural. In defending Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of “being-in-common” in opposition to sameness or identity, Joan Wallach Scott wisely comes to the conclusion that “our very existence is defined by our difference from others. Paradoxically, it’s difference that is common to us all.” Hans-Georg Gadamer, whose key hermeneutical principle is the “fusion of horizons” (Horizontverschmelzung), goes as far as to say that central to the hermeneutical dialogue is the idea that the other might be right.13 In essence, toleration is the acknowledgment and acceptance of the alterity of the other. For Merleau-Ponty, the West invented an idea of truth itself and there is no one philosophy which contains all philosophies. Rather, philosophy’s center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere. Thus, truth is concentric/ polycentric, that is, transversal. Merleau-Ponty charges that Hegel arbitrarily drew “a geographical frontier between philosophy and non-philosophy,” that is, between the West and the East.14 For Merleau-Ponty, all philosophies are anthropological types, and none has any privilege of, or monopoly on, truth. European philosophy is as much “ethnophilosophical” as Chinese philosophy. However, Hegel’s Eurocentric philosophy assumes that what is ethnophilosophical in the West is universalized, whereas what is ethnophilosophical in China (and India) remains ethnophilosophical. Chinese philosophy is dismembered from the exclusive club of philosophy itself. Philosophy, Merleau-Ponty goes on to argue, is destined to examine its own idea of truth again and again because truth is “a treasure scattered about in human life prior to all philosophy and not divided among doctrines.” If so, Western philosophy is compelled to reexamine not only its own idea of truth but also related matters and institutions such as science, economy, politics,

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and technology. Besides philosophy’s own constant vigilance on what it is doing, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological orientation demands its attention to the ethnography of socio-cultural life-worlds, without which philosophy is a vacuous if not fatal abstraction. Merleau-Ponty contends that while for Hegel philosophical truth as absolute and universal knowledge is notarized and certified by the Occidental seal of approval alone, the Oriental past must also have an honored place in the famed hall of philosophies to celebrate its hitherto “secret, muted contribution to philosophy.”15 He writes resolutely: “Indian and Chinese philosophies have tried not so much to dominate existence as to be the echo or the sounding board of our relationship to being. Western philosophy can learn from them to rediscover the relationships to being and an initial option which gave it birth, and to estimate the possibilities we have shut ourselves off from in becoming ‘Westerners’ and perhaps reopen them.” “If Western thought is what it claims to be,” he challenges further, “it must prove it by understanding all ‘life-worlds’” as multiple geo-sociocultural realities across history. Merleau-Ponty further contends that the conceited path of Hegel that excludes Chinese thought from universal knowledge and draws a geographical frontier between philosophy and non-philosophy also excludes a good part of the Western past itself. Philosophy as a perpetual beginning is open to examine its own idea of truth again and again. As Merleau-Ponty writes, It is not a matter of going in search of truth or salvation in what falls short of science or philosophical awareness, or of dragging chunks of mythology as such into our philosophy, but acquiring—in the presence of these variants of humanity that we are so far from a sense of the theoretical and practical problems our institutions are faced with, and of rediscovering the existential field that they are born in and that their long success has led us to forget. The relationships between Orient and Occident . . . is not that of ignorance to knowledge or nonphilosophy to philosophy. Simply rallying and subordinating “non-philosophy” to true philosophy will not create the unity of the human spirit. It already exists in each culture’s lateral relationships to the others, in the echoes one awakes in the other (emphasis added).16

In Hegel’s thought, in sum, there can be no genuine dialogue between the “philosophy” of the Occident and the “non-philosophy” of the Orient. 2. WANG YANGMING’S UNITY OF KNOWLEDGE AND ACTION: QUINTESSENTIALLY CONFUCIAN The term Sinism was coined by the American sinologist H.G. Creel to specify that cluster of characteristics that are peculiarly Chinese or the Chinese

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habitus of thinking and doing.17 Despite its origin in China, however, it is not confined to China alone. It blankets Korea and Japan as well—namely, the geographical region called East Asia, where sinography is partly or wholly its daily linguistic diet. The sinographic dispostif is exemplified in Confucianism, Daoism, and the hybrid religion of Chan/Seun/Zen Buddhism in Korea and Japan as well as in China. It is manifestly this-worldly, practical, concrete, and particular rather than otherworldly, speculative, abstract, and general. Sinism defines reality as social process:18 (1) where there is no social process, there is no reality, and (2) as the body is the material condition of our interbeing in the world, social reality is necessarily an embodied and intercorporeal phenomenon. Since the mid-1980s, I have been defining Sinism as “relational ontology” and, later, as a philosophy of “Interbeing” (tiep hien), the term of which the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh19 coined to name his new religious order. In a nutshell, what Being is to the West from Heraclitus to Martin Heidegger, Interbeing is to East Asia from Confucius to Wang Yangming, Watsuji Tetsuro, and Mao Zedong. Interbeing points to the differential typography of thinking and doing in East Asia.20 The twofold principium of Interbeing is found in the Yijing (The Chinese Book of Changes): (a) Everything is connected to everything else in the cosmos and nothing exists and can exist in isolation, and (b) everything changes except change itself. This synchronistic principle in chaos theory (a) is called lepidoptery or—to put it simply—the “butterfly effect,” which is the belief that everything is so mysteriously interconnected that the slight flapping of a butterfly’s wing in a single spot on earth can cause a typhoon or tsunami on the other side thousands of miles away. Furthermore, relationality is an “adventure of difference.”21 Heidegger’s wordplay of Differenz as Unterschied, which doubles “difference” with the “inter” (unter) that connects, preserves, and promotes both difference and the relational at the same time. It is the way of “making connections in the face of difference”—to use Carol Gilligan’s most elegant expression. Difference, when it is neither reified nor erased, is capable of conserving the principle of complementarity in interhuman and interspecific relationships. As Nancy Julia Chodorow remarks, “Differentiation is not . . . separateness, but a particular way of being connected to others [both human and nonhuman].”22 In this sense, difference solidifies and advances the conception of a relational self or the self always as relational. Since language is primary in governing all relationships, let me say a few words regarding the importance of corporeal movement of sinograms as performative utterances. As the sinographic syntax itself is action, so are sinograms performative. Indeed, sinography (calligraphy in particular) is a kinetic or “dancing” art: It is the human body in graceful motion. And the Chinese revere the art of calligraphy as much if not more than painting: Calligraphy

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is the painting of sinograms or—to intimate the spiritual and personal dimension of the artist himself—characters. There is now the Taiwanese Cloud Gate Theater under the direction of the choreographer Lin Hai-min, which performs “cursive” (calligraphic) dancing. The ancient Greek genre of mousike (performing arts), too, includes dance in addition to oral poetry, drama, and music. In a very significant measure, the sinogram is indeed “a vortex that responds to lines of force. It is a corporate energy.”23 The eighteenth-century anti-Cartesian Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico24 defines the human as “only mind, body and speech,” and he locates speech as standing “midway between mind and body.” As he writes, the principium of etymology is that “words are carried over from the properties of bodies to signify the institutions of the mind and spirit.” Vico further observes that the human and the natural as well as mind and body are linked together by means of words: We signify inanimate, natural things in terms of metaphors from our body—innumerable examples of which, he claims, could be found in all languages. As a matter of fact, every sinogram is a gesture and as a gesture it is “mute speech.” To put it in another way, it is the quieting or silencing speech into a gesture, into a moving anthropogram. Picasso’s Swimmer (1929) and Acrobat (1930), which are the brilliant and elegant strokes of a genius, are two choreographs of the human body in fluent and rhythmic motion which are approaching sonography, or its calligraphy. They are, in short, dancing anthropograms. The literary theorist R. P. Blackmur insists that “gesture is indigenous to language; and if you cut it out you cut roots and get a sapless and gradually rotting if indeed not a petrifying language.”25 The body speaks, and the “language” it speaks is silence. In the same vein, Norman O. Brown notes: “Silence is the mother tongue,” and “to recover the world of silence . . . is to recover the human body. . . . What is always speaking silently is the body.”26 When Samuel Beckett observes that in language as gestures, the spoken and the written are identical, he sounds as if he is referring to sinography, which may be called the “mother tongue” of all languages. In sum, body language is grounded in the notion of embodiment and incorporation rather than the body merely as object, i.e., I am my body or the body as subject—a unique and momentous discovery of phenomenology in an effort to overcome the dualism of mind and body, which had plagued Western philosophy particularly since Descartes’s dichotomization of res cogitans and res extensae. This phenomenological endeavor confirms and enhances the importance of Wang Yangming’s philosophy on a worldwide scale in which mind and body are correlative, that is, they are “inseparable dancing partners” (Roy Porter’s expressive phrase) in discussing matters both interhuman and interspecific.27

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It should be said here that the influence of Cartesianism is recognized by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari when they write that “the French are like landowners whose source of income is the cogito.”28 As a matter of fact, Cartesian epistemocracy has ruled philosophical institutions throughout the world, including Japan and Korea where the Japanese expression “De-KanScho,” the abbreviated form of “Descartes-Kant-Schopenhauer,” had been used. It expressed the trio’s reputation and popularity in Japan and Korea during the Japanese colonial rule. The epistemocracy of Descartes’s cogito (ergo sum: I think, therefore I am) is by far the worst offender of Sinism as relational ontology in the history of modern Western philosophy. It reduces the sum (“I am”) to the cogito (“I think”). The invisible man of the cogito is at once disembodied, monologic, and ocularcentric. Cartesian epistemocracy valorizes the canonical institution of the mind’s I in pursuit of “clear and distinct ideas,” which are all visual terms. It is the mind transcendentalized from rather than immanentized in the body. For Descartes, “the head [brain] is detached from the body without its having to be decapitated”—to borrow Jean-Luc Nancy’s poignant expression.29 For Descartes, the cogito is the “first principle” of his epistemocracy as prima philosophia. It is associated with the hegemony of vision, i.e., panoptic metaphysics because the effect of the sovereign gaze of kosmotheoros, whose single glance is assured of scanning the entire universe, it is indeed a reflective narcissism. As a matter of fact, panoptic metaphysics goes eyeball to eyeball with the monologism of the cogito because vision is not only isolating and distancing but also anaesthetic in denying the sociability of the other senses: There is indeed a social amnesia as well as a narcissism of panopticism.30 The cogito is really video ergo sum, or the mind’s I is the mind’s eye. It is a visual cyborg, a scopic regime. Heidegger thus contends that the “I” (or the “eye”) of the cogito becomes the center of thought from which the “I-viewpoint” and the subjectivism of modern thought originate: “The subjectivity of the subject is determined by the ‘I-ness’ [Ichheit] of the ‘I think’.”31 For him, the “I-viewpoint” of the Cartesian cogito highlights the modern age as “the age of the world picture” (Weltbild) in which meditative Gelassenheit is overtaken by calculative Gestell (e.g., cybernetics). More importantly, moreover, once the self (ipseity) and the other (alterity) are viewed as disembodied sub/stances (res), two self-contained entities, monologism—or even solipsism in extremis—is inevitable simply because the body is our umbilical cord to the world both social and natural. Without the body, we lose the best picture of the invisible soul because as Ludwig Wittgenstein puts it wisely, “The human body is the best picture of the human soul.” The body is, for better or worse, the only “visible” window through which we can peep into the condition of our “invisible” soul. The

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literary hermeneuticist Gerald L. Bruns judiciously speaks of Descartes’s philosophical immurement: His jealous “subject’s desire to seal itself off or to keep its thinking pure or uncontaminated by the horizon of the other.”32 Descartes himself confessed that any sort of intellectual peregrination (not even to mention globetrotting), real or imaginary, is anathema to philosophizing. For him, instead, the foundational knowledge of philosophy is attained or achieved nowhere else but in the philosophizing ego alone in its disembodied solitude not unlike a clam shell. Descartes is oblivious to the simple fact that to be alone is not to be, that is, human existence is always already coexistence, which is primordially intercorporeal. He totally ignored the notion that the philosopher is not just cerebral, and that to be social is first and foremost to be intercorporeal, both parts of the connected notion are exquisitely depicted in Auguste Rodin’s two sculptural masterpieces The Thinker and The Cathedral, respectively. The famed German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who was a onetime assistant to Rodin, captions The Thinker as follows: “He (“the thinker”) sits absorbed and silent, heavy with thought: with all the strength of an acting man he thinks. His whole body has become head and all the blood in his veins has become brain.”33 For very good reason, the contemporary Chinese aesthetician Li Zehou coined the interesting neologism subjectality [zhu/ti (body)/xing] in contradiction to (Cartesian) subjectivity [zhu/quan (idea or eidos)/xing], that is, the former is “embodied” as “ti” stands for the “body,” whereas the latter is “idealized,” i.e., disembodied.34 All in all, Descartes’s cogito runs counter to Wang Yangming’s philosophy and Sinism as relational ontology because it is disembodied and thus monologic, i.e., non-relational. Sinism as a world philosophy is eminently worldly or, better, life-worldly— to use the language of phenomenology. Being life-worldly is hitched to the concreteness of sinography. Its main concern is hitched to the everyday lifeworld of a multitude. The everyday life-worldly concern of Sinism misguided many Western philosophers, e.g., Hegel, for whom what is real is rational and vice versa, Confucius exemplifies the lack of “speculation” to be called a philosopher. It was Emmanuel Levinas, not unlike Confucius, who indirectly and inadvertently restores the dignity and integrity of Confucianism when he formulated ethics as “first philosophy” (philosophie première). Ethics as first philosophy is the bedrock of Sinic or Confucian “coexistentialism.” Sinism seeks answers to the question of how to live a moral life, that is to say, to cultivate the knowledge and action of moral life. The question of the unity of knowledge and action has been a perennial issue in Chinese moral philosophy as prima philosophia from Confucius and Wang Yangming down to Sun Yat-sen and Mao Zedong. However, Wang was the first Chinese philosopher who fully and systematically developed the

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inseparability of knowledge and action. This unity refutes pure and abstract scholasticism. Knowledge and action, according to Wang, are inseparable: “Knowledge in its genuine and earnest aspect is action, and action in its intelligent and discriminating aspect is knowledge. . . . Knowledge is the direction for action and action the effort of knowledge.”35 As he formulates the circular connectivity between the two, “knowledge is the beginning of action and action is the completion of knowledge.”36 As they are correlative, neither one nor the other is overdetermined or underdetermined. However, the field of action as the completion of knowledge is capable of making us social and interhuman: It is indeed the field of interaction. The circular correlativity of knowledge and action works as in American pragmatism: At the moment we interpret the world, we begin to change it.37 Wang Yangming’s “unity of knowledge and action” is one of the pivotal issues of his philosophy, which, I might add, also happens to be the sinew of Sinism, particularly Confucianism as moral philosophy. Thus, I would be remiss if I fail to respond to David S. Nivison’s contention that since Wang, the problem of Chinese thought has been the continuing dualism or dichotomy between knowledge and action.38 Unfortunately, Nivison not only misconstrues Wang’s thesis, but also challenges the entire tradition of Confucianism. The notion of “unity” would be misleading unless it refers to the integration of knowledge and action as two distinct but not separate conceptual categories as in the correlative logic of yin and yang as two complementary sides of a single existence.39 There is a world of difference between the “distinction” and the alleged “dualism” of knowledge and action. To confuse the two is to commit a categorial mistake. Wang’s “unity of knowledge and action” presupposes that knowledge without action is empty and action without knowledge is blind. In short, his “unity of knowledge and action” may be likened to the “myth of the eternal return” that goes around in a circle. Mao Zedong, albeit couched in the Marxist language, expresses with clarity this circularity of knowledge and action better than anyone else since Wang when Mao writes: “Practice, knowledge, again practice, and again knowledge. This form repeats itself in endless circles, and with each cycle the content of practice and knowledge rises to a higher level. Such is the dialectical-materialist theory of the unity of knowledge and action” (italics added).40 I should add here that when Mao begins first with practice and then knowledge, he is consistent with Marx’s emphasis on praxis. However, when Mao uses the expression “endless circles,” he diverts from Marx’s language but resorts to the Yijing’s correlative logic of yin and yang without the final telos. In this sense, Mao is more Sinic than Marxian: He consciously or unconsciously Sinicizes the Marxian (and Hegelian) dialectic. The Sinic logic of yin and yang is “unfinalizable”—to borrow the term of Mikhail Bakhtin’s

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“dialogism” in contradistinction to Marx’s “dialectic,” whose final telos ends or “finalizes” with the creation of communism. I would further argue that what liangzhi is to Wang Yangming, the preconceptual (for example, prescientific and prephilosophical) is to existential phenomenology. In the first place, both phenomenology and Wang Yangming’s philosophy may be described as an adventure in consciousness (xin). Consciousness as intentionality provides an inseparable linkage between what is internal on the one hand and what is external on the other: They are two sides of the same coin, as it were. “Zu den Sachen selbst” (Back to the things themselves), which is characterized often as the battle cry of phenomenology, means nothing but return to “meaning”(s). As Merleau-Ponty interprets it: “To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, . . . and in relation to which [conceptual] schematization is an abstract and derivative sign-language, as is geography in relation to the country-side in which we have learned before what a forest, a prairie or a river is.”41 For him, in short, life-worldly or preconceptual meaning precedes philosophical or conceptual meaning. Thus, he calls the former “a nascent logos.” This life-world is not the “egocentric” world of thought but the “heterocentric” world of action in which we bodily beings interact with one another. What Merleau-Ponty calls preconceptual is equivalent to what Wang Yangming calls liangzhi (literally translated as “good knowledge” and often translated as “intuitive knowledge”) in the commonly shared everyday life–world (Lebenswelt) as socio-cultural world whose meanings are spatially and temporally constituted. Liangzhi is “knowledge in action.” Thusly viewed, what liangzhi or preconceptual knowledge is to Wang Yangming, phronesis is to Aristotle’s virtue ethics. In his study of Aristotle’s moral philosophy with a focus on phronesis, J. Donald Monan concludes: The reality of [Aristotle’s] moral knowledge is rather a pre-philosophic “given” in a double sense. As an immediate encounter with value in experiential conduct, it is pre-philosophic in the sense that it does not presuppose any systematic metaphysic of the good. But as a genuine encounter with value, it does invite one to evaluate this mysterious encounter critically and to seek its ultimate ground. More important, the features revealed in Aristotle’s description of moral knowledge prescribe that the only method capable of seeking that ground is a reflective, phenomenological one.42

The primacy of the life-world affirms that preconceptual knowledge is primary and prior to the world of theoretical thought: The truth of liangzhi is verified only by action. A recorded episode reveals that Wang’s attempt to discover the truth in external things (e.g., bamboos) was a total failure. Truth

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cannot be attributed as in Zhu Xi only to external things. One day Wang suddenly discovered that the “investigation of things” (ge wu) did not mean the investigation of every bamboo, blade of grass, leaf, or branch of a tree, but that, instead, truth is to be found in consciousness (as intentionality) and its activities. Wang concluded that ge wu really means ge xin (“rectification of mind-and-heart”). Liangzhi itself means the cultivation of personal life: “The rectification of the mind, the sincerity of the will, the extension of knowledge, and the investigation of things are all means of cultivating the personal life.”43 Each of them has its own place, but they are of one thread. They are different only in procedure: “investigating, extending, being sincere, rectifying, and cultivating are the task performed in the procedure.”43 The everyday world of action is a world of moral values. Sincerity (cheng), I suggest, is the moral fiber that produces the fabric of Confucian philosophy or thread that weaves the warp of knowledge and the woof of action in the moral fabric of Confucian philosophy and, for that matter, the Sinic way of thinking and doing things. My suggestion is quite consistent with and an extension of Wang Yangming’s philosophy because for him, we might say, all the (Confucian) moral virtues—humanity (ren), filiality (xiao), righteousness (yi), propriety (li), wisdom (zhi), and fidelity (xin)—are grounded in the “sincerity of the will” (cheng yi), that is, the performance of an existential project. I am more convinced than ever before that sincerity is the most important moral precept that underpins, motivates, and governs the thought and action of a Sinic soul. Many years ago, while I was reading Ivan Morris’s fascinating study of the Japanese mindset and tradition called The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan,44 I was profoundly moved by the fact that this is the quintessence of the Sinic moral soul. This phenomenon emanates from the Confucian moral ideal of sincerity (makoto in Japanese), and one cannot minimize the influence of the philosophy of Wang Yangming or O Yomei in Japanese. The apotheosis of a tragic hero is Saigo Takamori from the Meiji Restoration, who was also influenced by Wang Yangming and is memorialized or immortalized at the entrance to the Ueno Park at the center of Tokyo. Saigo was a corpulent, “death-defying” hero whose eyes, legs, hands, and fingers were depicted as ready “tools for action.” The virtue of sincerity does not depend on success or failure but its performance. Thus, the result is inconsequential or non-utilitarian. Sincerity as a cardinal moral virtue means “walking the talk” (a colloquial English expression) or “we perform in action what we promise in words,” which spells syntactically word-performed or pragmatum. In other words, the word as performed actually embodies an index of value. The keyword in translating the concept sincerity, I suggest, is performance, which has a familiar ring to those of us who read John Austin’s philosophy of speech

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acts as “performative utterances” or his themes on “How to Do Things with Words.” The idea of performance not only denotes the fulfillment of the spoken word in and/or as action but also transcends the dualism of mind and body. For performance as the consummation of one’s deed requires corporeal execution. The Confucian formulation of the “rectification of names” (zheng ming)—calling things by their right (rite) names—exemplifies the ethics of language-in-performance. It is the accountability of speaking as moral performance, which is also affiliated with the idea of fidelity or faithfulness (xin—etymologically speaking, “the human standing by his/her words”). In the Analects, Confucius said: “Without knowing the power of words, it is impossible to know man” (Analects, 20: 2.3). This affirms the following: The human as homo linguisticus for whom language is not merely a transparent medium for representing reality, the centrality of language to human conduct, and the ethics of language embodying the humanity of the human. Take a few more examples of what Confucius says in the Analects: (1) When the superior man “is heard to speak, his language is firm and decided” (19: 9); (2) “the wise err neither in regard to their man nor to their words” (15: 7); (3) “the virtuous will be sure to speak correctly, but those whose speech is good may not always be virtuous” (14: 5); (4) “the superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions” (14: 29); and (5) friendship with the “glib-tongued” is injurious (16: 4). Interestingly, moreover, both sinograms to govern and to rectify are pronounced the same (i.e., zheng) and, in sinography, the former contains the latter as its radical. In the end, the “rectification of names” is an eminently political concept par excellence. Although it is an influential concept in Chinese body politics and the history of Chinese political thought, it is mentioned explicitly and directly only once—in the Analects—in conjunction with the proprietary conduct of the ruler in the affairs of body politics: The first necessary thing the ruler (of Wei) had to do in administering the government, Confucius suggested, is “to rectify names,” for “if names be not rectified, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language is not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success” (Analects, 13: 2). Now, I think, we have begun, just begun, to appreciate earnestly Wang Yangming’s doctrine of the unity of knowledge and action as a profound and momentous idea, which, in turn, attests to the intraphilosophical importance of Sinism. To compare and affiliate his philosophy with existential phenomenology is to edify and celebrate both the momentousness of Wang’s philosophy and its intraphilosophical importance. His is the Great Affirmation that we are, morally and otherwise, what we say and what we do, all as performance grounded in the “sincerity of the will.” It is a confirmation of the personal ethics of responsibility—“personal” in the sense

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of being neither exclusively subjective nor exclusively objective. Let me conclude my remarks by quoting a passage with an analogy to music as a performing art, that is, with an accent on performance as integrating and consummatory from Herbert Fingarette, who is a perceptive American interpreter of Confucius and Confucianism: Acts that are li are not mere rote, formula-conforming performances; they are subtle and intelligent acts exhibiting more or less sensitivity to context, more or less integrity in performance. We would do well to take music, of which Confucius was a devotee, as our model here. We distinguish sensitive and intelligent musical performances from dull and unperceptive ones; and we detect in the performance confidence and integrity, or perhaps hesitation, conflict, “faking,” “sentimentalizing.” We detect all this in the performance; we do not have to look into the psyche or personality of the performer. It is all “there,” public. Although it is there in the performance, it is apparent to us when we consider the performance not as “the Beethoven Opus 3” (that is, from the composer perspective), nor as a “public concert” (the li perspective), nor as a “post-Mozartian opus” (the style perspective), but primarily as this particular person’s performance (the personal perspective).45

3. THE EMBODIED MIND AND GEOPHILOSOPHY IN WANG YANGMING’S THOUGHT It is said, more than once, that the rediscovery by the West of Asian philosophy in the twentieth century is a “second renaissance.”46 In addition to Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Western philosophy, particularly of Hegel’s philosophy, the vintage Michel Foucault remarked in his 1978 visit to Japan that as knowledge and power are interwoven as one fabric, European imperialism and the era of Western philosophy come to an end. Foucault is not alone in conjecturing that philosophy of the future must be born “outside Europe” or in the “meetings and impacts,” i.e., confluence, between Europe and non-Europe.47 The French sinologist François Jullien calls the effort of decentering Eurocentrism or Western modernity—with Kant in mind—“a new ‘Copernican reversal.’”48 He contends that in “shaking up” Western modernity, China becomes a “philosophical tool.” That is to say, he uses Chinese thought to interrogate the limits of Western philosophy and to liberate it from its own “mental cage.” Jullien puts Foucault to the test in order to vindicate the Eurocentric “legislation” of truth for all global humanity. An important aspect of this “second renaissance” in rediscovering Asian philosophy in the West, I suggest, is the concept of embodiment, which dovetails particularly with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the lived body as

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flesh and, moreover, I hope to show in the following pages in both MerleauPonty and Wang Yangming the geophilosophical idea that the body is an “earthword” as much as the earth is a “bodyword.” There is a Sinic saying that “the land and the body are not two (but one).” In so doing, I will show the relevance of Wang Yangming’s geophilosophy as a world philosophy that responds to the deadly challenge of the environmental crisis.49 In the spirited way of Zhuangzi who said that Dao is never “old” although it is “earlier than the earliest time,” the Russian literary dialogist Mikhail Bakhtin argues that the recycling of past meanings for today and tomorrow is infinite, that is, the relevance of past meanings to the human condition of today is never anachronistic or obsolete. To use his own expression, it is “unfinalizable.” The past is never dead. Past meanings can be recouped or recycled for the present and can conserve them for the future, as is the case with the rebirth of Greek culture in the Renaissance. Bakhtin is singularly and immeasurably profound when he writes: There is neither a first nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless future). Even past meanings, that is, those born in the dialogue of past centuries, can never be stable (finalized, ended once and for all)—they will always change (be renewed) in the process of subsequent, future development of the dialogue. . . . Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming festival (emphasis added).50

There are no more important philosophers in the making of the modern West or the modern world as we know it today in the context of the environmental crisis than Francis Bacon and René Descartes, who is regarded as the “founder” of modern (Western) philosophy. They are a stark contrast to Wang Yangming’s philosophy. Descartes viewed the human as the “master” and “possessor” of inert, material, and mechanistic nature. Following Galileo, he asserted that the “book of nature” is written in the mathematical and geometric language of circles, squares, and triangles. Bacon was unquestionably the most eloquent voice of Western modernity at the birth of the age of science, technology, and a quantitative economy. He was a thoroughgoing utilitarian empiricist who advocated the practical and efficacious application and use of science for the sake of what he called the “love of humanity” (philanthropia), rather than scientific knowledge for the sake of knowledge. He lauded the modern experimental and inductive method of science, and he advocated the convergence of theory and practice, the unity of knowledge and utility, and the inseparability of knowing and making—all for the sake of philanthropia. To create and apply technology, there must first be a knowledge of the world, obtained by what he called “the inquisition of nature.” Nature must be “tortured” to reveal her secrets. Experiment is the essence of

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the natural sciences, because it is the only way of discovering the secrets of nature. By positing utility as the end of knowledge, Bacon laid the foundation of humans’ ability to “subdue and overcome the necessities and miseries of humanity.” The framework of modern technology is set forth and justified when he insists on the meeting of human knowledge and power and discovers “in the womb of nature many secrets of excellent use.” As Bacon himself emphasizes, the fruits of science do not grow in books.51 Unlike Descartes, however, the geophilosopher Wang Yangming knows of no dualism between mind and body. Humanity, whose ontological structure is the center of Wang’s philosophical attention, is a unity of mind (or consciousness) and body; mind and body are mutually dependent: “If there is no mind, there will be no body, and if there is no body, there will be no mind.”52 “The great man [or sage],” he writes in another passage, “regards Heaven, Earth, and the myriad things are one body.”53 Although the true self is not “a piece of flesh with blood,” it and the bodily self are not separated. Thus, death terminates mind as well as body. It is uncanny to note that the anti-Cartesian Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, for whom “uniform ideas originating among entire peoples unknown to each other must have a common ground of truth,” declares that “I who think am mind and body, and if thought were the cause of my being, thought would be the cause of the body. Yet there are bodies that do not think so that body and mind united are the cause of thought. For if I were only body, I would not think. If I were only mind, I would have [pure] intelligence. In fact, thinking is the sign, and not the cause of my being mind.”54 Vico’s progeny and the German Tantrist Friedrich Nietzsche is most radical in embracing the body without equivocation when he writes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “Body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word of something about the body.”55 His radicalism is understandable in light of the long tradition of Western tradition from Plato’s idealism and Christian theology to Cartesian epistemocracy, which denounced the materiality and mortality of the body in upholding the spirituality and immortality of the soul. Origen, the stern Christian ascetic and theologian who voluntarily castrated himself—for that matter, castration was not an uncommon practice in his time—depicted corporeality or, more specifically, sexuality as a passing phenomenon and hinted at the eschatological hope of purifying the soul from the flesh: Human life [for him], lived in a body endowed with sexual characteristics, was but the last dark hour of a long night that would vanish with the dawn. The body was poised on the edge of a transformation so enormous as to make all present notions of identity tied to sexual differences, and all social roles based upon marriage, procreation, and childbirth, seem as fragile as dust dancing in a sunbeam.56

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I might add that Origen’s hope of this new dawn contradicts the long venerable tradition of Sinic genealogy, which, some Western writers would say, is the symbolic immortality in Sinism. In the Tantric tradition of Nietzsche, I introduced the neologism carnal hermeneutics as a paradigmatic revolt against the condition of Western modernity for which the body is a philosophical orphan ever since Descartes’s preoccupation with epistemocracy. By carnal hermeneutics, I mean to exalt that interpretive art which reads many ways of embodiment as the factum fundamentum et primus or silent spring of everything we do and think. It reads the body as social inscription in the world. The corporeal dimension of Sinism is inscribed and prescribed in the rituals and rites (li) of, say, performing filial piety (e.g., burial). Without performing rites according to textual prescriptions, filial piety is meaningless or, better, disembodied. Thus, carnal hermeneutics is a way of conceptualizing multiple performative roles of the body. Its arrival posts a sharp turning point in our thinking. As the body is our familiar—often too familiar—and primordial way of inhabiting and mediating the “parliament” of things both human and nonhuman alike in the world, carnal hermeneutics means to celebrate what Pierre Bourdieu calls “the performative magic of the social”57 in, with, and through the body as the inseparable soul mate of the mind.58 The significance of carnal hermeneutics for geophilosophy must be underscored. It provides us with the “aesthetic” appreciation of nature against Francis Bacon’s utilitarian appropriation of it for human use. The British literary critic Terry Eagleton contends that the aesthetic (aisthesis) is born of the discourse of the body and that it is the revolt of the body against “the tyranny of the theoretical” (theoria) in the Greek etymological sense of the term.59 Nietzsche challenges and transgresses the speculative and specular conundrum of theoria and attempts to replace it with the aesthetic. In The Birth of Tragedy, his first major work, the young Nietzsche valorizes music—perhaps in the ancient Greek sense of mousike (performing arts) that includes oral poetry, dance, drama, and music—as consummately aesthetic: “It is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified” and that “only music, placed beside the world, can give us an idea of what is meant by the justification of the world as an aesthetic phenomenon.”60 For Nietzsche, in short, the world is “measured” (in the musical sense of metron) by the aesthetic of music whose primary condition of being is to attune ourselves to the world both human and nonhuman. Music, whose essence is harmony, is the standard-bearer of what is aesthetic to which not just performing arts, but all arts aspire to achieve. As a student of Greek philology in his youth, Nietzsche must have known the legend of Orpheus, whose flute-playing delighted (de/lighted) myriad things in nature, that is,

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animals, birds, and trees. Because of this music-performing legend, Orpheus was a well-known and popular figure in the tradition of Western musical and particularly operatic composition. When Merleau-Ponty speaks of the body as “a work of art,” he is echoing Nietzsche.61 For Confucius, who was an aficionado or devotee of music, music is akin to humanity or benevolence (ren), which is the highest virtue of Confucianism and now a cosmopolitan ideal. I don’t see why benevolence or humaneness as the highest virtue of Confucianism or Sinism cannot be applied to the nonhuman world or “ten thousand things.” It is important to note that in Sinism, harmony consummates what is both aesthetic and ethical at the same time. Let’s make no mistake about harmony: It is not “oneness.” It is a gathering of many differentiated things, e.g., the orchestration of many different sounds and instruments, where distinct individual sounds or instruments come together. Too often we take for granted that the body is our placement, our foothold in the world. It is the primordial mode of being in the world both social and natural. To repeat: The body is an “earthword” as much as the earth is a “bodyword.” It, in brief, stands out as a geophilosophical or territorial concept.62 By way of the body, phenomenology is capable of territorializing or reterritorializing philosophy itself. According to Merleau-Ponty: [The body] as flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. To designate it, we should need the old term “element,” in the sense it was used to speak water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being. The flesh is in this sense an “element” of Being. Not a fact or a sum of facts, and yet adherent to location and to the now.63

Only in terms of the body as the participatory locus of perception do we come to grips with Merleau-Ponty’s profound notion that the world is made of the same stuff as the body. In each act of perception, the body participates in the world. Each perception is an instance or moment of the sensuous unity, and it is enclosed in the synergic or intersensorial work of the body. The body is the carnal field in which perception becomes localized as seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting this or that particular. The synergic organization of perceptual acts is unimaginable without one of the most important and anti-Cartesian discovery of phenomenology: The lived body or the body as subject (corps vécu) rather than as object (res). The lived body is never an inert matter or mass but rather a sentient subject. Both for Merleau-Ponty and Wang Yangming, therefore, the lived body is the connecting tissue of humanity and its environing world both interhuman and interspecific, overcomes the

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Cartesian bifurcation of mind and body. Merleau-Ponty and, for that matter, Wang Yangming would have been thoroughly delighted to know that the term lived experience (Erlebnis, expérience vécue) in Japanese phenomenology is translated as taiken (tai/ken) in two sinograms (kanji), “bodily” or “embodied” (tai) “experience” (ken).64 We exist as body, as flesh. As an existent, the body as flesh is not an idea, but a concrete reality. As such, the natural landscape of the body is the presupposed foundation of conceptual geography. We can say with MerleauPonty that perception precedes conception. There is indeed the “primacy of perception” in everything we do and think. Insofar as perception, whose locus is the body, is a “nascent logos,” there can be no “disembodied reason.” More radically, the body belongs to the order of “being” rather than that of “having”: In other words, I am my body rather than I have a body. This lived body is not an object among other objects; it is never an inert object among other objects, but rather it is a sentient being or subject. We are our body, or we exist as a body. As a sentient subject, the body (as flesh) is capable of “authoring” the world before “answering” it. For Merleau-Ponty, furthermore, to perceive natural things in the world is to sense them as they are or, as the Chinese would say, “that which is” (ziran), i.e., to sense the “wild” (sauvage) nakedness of nature. The act of perception as embodied consciousness is then neither idea nor representation. Rather, perception participates in or inhabits each reality it senses. It intertwines or interlaces the flesh of the body and that of the world: The body and the world form one inseparable fleshfold. Therefore, we can say that the body is an “earthword” as much as the earth is a “bodyword.” Furthermore, the body is the umbilical cord to the social. To be social is first and foremost to be intercorporeal. Only because of the body are we said to be visible and capable of relating ourselves to other bodies, other minds, and other things. Inasmuch as an “element” is matter (chose), the body is said to be the material condition of our being-in-the-world or l’intermonde. There is no “thing” which does not occupy space. Only by way of the body as “our anchorage in a world,”65 are we said to be connected to the world which is both interhuman and interspecific: As we are social through and through, intercorporeality is nothing other than that term which expresses our primordial and primary way of connecting or socializing ourselves to the world, which is inhabited by other bodies. The body, in other words, is our primum relationis in which it and world are correlational: One cannot exist without the other, the factum of which may be symbolized as a yin-yang correlation. Change in one affects the other. We are what surrounds us: We bring about global warming, and in turn, global warming changes us. In defining the social, the existential phenomenologist Erwin W. Straus favors the body

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over the mind because “the body of an organism is related to other bodies; it is of the physical universe. The mind, however, is related to one body only; it is not directly related to the world, nor to other bodies, nor to other minds.”66 It stands to reason to argue that carnal phenomenology of the body is sheerly anti-Cartesian, and it explains why the Cartesian cogito, as Merleau-Ponty put it, is a scandal for sociality. For the Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsuro, who wrote an important geophilosophical treatise on the impact of “climate” or “milieu” (fudo)67 on human civilization, also defines the human in terms of the spatial “betweenness” (aidagara) as the human itself is spelled ningen (nin/gen in two sinograms), that is, (the upright pictogram of) “man” (nin) and “betweenness” (gen).68 For Watsuji, accordingly, the true humanity of humans is located in “betweenness” as spatial relationality. The body is the specific location of human existence (sonzai). As the world is inhabited by other bodies or embodied beings, intercorporeality is an aspect of Interbeing. Watsuji speaks of “a carnal interconnection”69 that constitutes the first order of spatial “betweenness.”70 In Confucianism, there is no absence or lack of geophilosophical ideas. In it, filial piety (interhuman), for example, is connected to geopiety as reverence for “ten thousand things” in nature. To reiterate: Wang Yangming declared that “the great man [or sage] regards Heaven, Earth, and the myriad things as one body.”71 The sage’s feeling of commiseration for a child falling into a well, his inability to bear the suffering of birds and animals, his feeling of pity for broken and destroyed things—all show his “humanity” or humaneness (ren) with all the sentients as they together form one body as the “sensible sentient”—to use Merleau-Ponty’s expression. The feeling of humaneness embraces the sage’s feeling of regrets even to shattered tiles and stones. Although the study of Buddhism in his youth may not be minimized, Wang extends the Confucian notion of humaneness to nonhuman things both animate and inanimate and incorporates the body into the mapping of his geophilosophical ideas. Seven centuries earlier, the Confucianist Zhang Zai envisioned in an encompassing way when he wrote the following reputed passage that begins with the figurative language of Confucian filial piety: “Heaven is my father, and earth is my mother, and even such a small creature as I finds an intimate place in their midst. Therefore that which fills the universe I regard as my body and that which directs the universe I consider as my nature. All people are my brothers and sisters, and all things are my companion”72—etymologically, a companion is one who shares bread with you. I find Zhang’s calling himself “a small creature” or earthling with humility is impressively non-anthropocentric and should be compared with the Cartesian and Baconian arrogance of calling humans masters and possessors of nature. Indeed, Wang and Zhang celebrate the human as quintessentially

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an earthly being or earthling who is interconnected, by way of the body, to other earthlings and things on earth. The mind without the body is not only an abstraction, but it also fails to justify the existential condition of the human as inter/being-in-the-world (in der Welt-sein) with other humans and other nonhuman beings and things. We are able to relate ourselves to them because we first and foremost are corporeal; only because we are intercorporeal are we said to be social and intersubjective. The body, in short, responds to and communicates with the world first by inhabiting it. 4. EPILOGUE The aim of this essay is to review and reexamine the importance of Wang Yangming in world philosophy and place it in the context of transversality, which is one of philosophy’s most inventive concepts today. That is to say, Wang’s philosophy is tested in the globalizing world of multiculturalism as “an asymmetric infinity” whose Many is irreducible to One. By so doing, I attempt to show at the same time how well it performs on the stage of world philosophy. I am mindful of the fact that no old meanings, ideas, and values are obsolete or finished forever: They have, as Bakhtin wisely and relevantly puts it, their “homecoming festivals.” I propose that transversality replace Eurocentrism in modern philosophy, which claims to be the sole possessor of universal truth. In a globalizing world, meanings, ideas, and values do indeed travel and migrate everywhere in all directions—from West to East, from North to South, and above all diagonally—the phenomenon of which would reduce if not eradicate “ethnocentric ignorance.” Ethnocentrism in its garden varieties allows no genuine global dialogue and no fusion of different cultural horizons. The Singaporean intellectual Kishore Mahbubani once asked the challenging question of whether or not “Asians can think.”73 What he really meant to ask was whether or not Asians can think independently of Western influence. In light of the growing global ex/change or confluence of meanings, ideas, and values, his very question has now become meaningless, if not obsolete. In the world of transversal or cross-cultural exchange leading to confluence, transversality allows what is lacking in one culture to be complemented or supplemented by another. By way of confluence, transversality promotes the hybridization or creolization of different cultures. I have now come to the conclusion that Wang Yangming’s philosophy, along with Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology, performs well on the stage of world philosophy and makes an invaluable contribution to it in three areas of philosophical inquiry. Merleau-Ponty and Wang Yangming—for that

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matter, Sinism in general—share the common principle of relational ontology or Interbeing, although they do not use the term. First, Wang Yangming’s philosophy—and Sinism in general—is worldly or life-worldly in the familiar language of phenomenology. Philosophy, then, is not just a series of what Hegel calls (metaphysical) “speculations” independently of or in isolation from “practical living”—to use Wang’s own felicitous expression. Therefore, Wang’s philosophy “existentializes” or “coexistentializes” rather than “essentializes.” Speaking after the manner of Kierkegaard, Hegel is engaged in conceptual castle-building in which no one can live. What is significant in Wang’s “unity of knowledge and action” is the fact that knowledge and action are inseparable or correlative. One cannot exist without the other. The life-world as socio-cultural world is a field of action. Therefore, knowledge in the “unity of knowledge and action” refers not to theoretical knowledge but to commonsense knowledge (sensus communis) necessary to living everyday life. To repeat Merleau-Ponty’s pungent expression: The countryside is the presupposed landscape of geography. Wang Yangming calls this “knowledge in action” (liangzhi), which is knowledge necessary for “practical living.” Liangzhi as pre-theoretical knowledge is what Aristotle calls phronesis. Above all, it is a form of moral knowledge that, as virtuous knowledge, is neither deontological nor utilitarian/consequential. Herein lies the significance of sincerity as a moral performance in Wang Yangming’s philosophy, as in Confucian philosophy in general. This is the reason why I call the virtue ethics of sincerity as the principium of the Sinic moral soul. Secondly, I argue that the Cartesian bifurcation of mind as res cogitans and body as res extensa leads to monologism or egocentrism where the self is said to exist in isolation from the world of others. Only by way of the body is the human capable of relating himself/herself to the environing world both interhuman and interspecific. As Merleau-Ponty points out, the Cartesian cogito is anathema to sociality. The mind is capable of relating itself to the outside world only because it is embodied. In short, we are said to be relational because we are first intercorporeal. Moreover, the Cartesian cogito knows nothing about the idea of the lived body or the body as subject. To put it simply, it has a body, but it is not a body. Thirdly, the most critical contribution of Wang Yangming to world philosophy lies in the depth of his geophilosophical ideas for the world, which is faced with the catastrophic environmental crisis—the crisis that threatens the fate of the human species and possibly the end of the earth itself as we know it today. It is the relevance of Wang’s geophilosophical ideas in the tradition of Sinism to the grim prospect of humanity as a collectivity. The political philosopher Hannah Arendt is indisputably right when she writes: “The earth

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is the very quintessence of the human condition, and earthly nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing human beings with a habitat in which they can move and breathe without effort and without artifice” (italics added).74 It would be too idyllic and perhaps dreaming to think of returning to this original innocent state of humanity. However, it is also true that the environmental degradation began with a suffocating and deadly network of artifacts beyond the imagination of Adam and Eve. The violation of the original state of our habitat would be the true meaning of Original Sin. Relational ontology, or the idea that everything is connected to everything else in the cosmos, is called by some the “first law” of ecology. However, we commonly believe, albeit wrongly, that relational ontology is only interhuman, and we go no further. We often if not invariably forget that it is also interspecific, that is, it is the relationality of humans to nonhuman beings and things on earth. To put it in the language of Wang Yangming, we are capable of feeling regrets even to shattered tiles and stones as well as feeling commiseration for the suffering birds and animals. The most fundamental tenet of Wang Yangming’s geophilosophy and its contribution to world philosophy is the thesis that the sage, as has been noted earlier, regards “Heaven, Earth, and myriad things [or “ten thousand things”] are ONE BODY.” It is deeply and totally aesthetic because the aesthetic (aisthesis) is a discourse of the body. This aesthetic paradigm is capable of breaking loose the conventional grip of given or established reality. It deconstructs the world in that it first destroys a “real” world and then constructs a “possible” world. The Sinic injunction emerging from the “bisociation” of the aesthetic and the ethical is the elegant and frugal catchphrase “small is beautiful” (E. F. Schumacher’s phrase) as well as “small is ethical.” By the same token, the human who is downsized from the arrogance of anthropocentrism in Descartes and Bacon to an “earthling,” too, is beautiful and ethical. The Dao of ecopiety, as I would call it, signifies our attempt to beautify and sustain humanity by “naturalizing” it, that is, by bringing humanity to Mother Nature once again. By so doing, we can proudly pass along “the [green] torch of life”—to borrow the seductive phrase of the ancient poet/philosopher Lucretius—to our posterities in perpetuity. Now is the time for us to pay attention to the abundance of geophilosophical ideas in Sinism, which Wang’s philosophy exemplifies and testifies before the court of world philosophy. Transversality is a difficult act and task to perform and achieve because its territory inevitably comes with ambiguity and promiscuity, which are by no means two contradictory terms. However, I hope that my message is loud enough to be heard throughout East and West. Sinism has been for too long simply the negative mirror of Western philosophy. Instead, it is about time for it to become, I propose, a parallax of Western philosophy.

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Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Wang Yangming have two marks of distinction, respectively. For both the earth is a “bodyword” as much as the body is an “earthword.” Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body as the locus of perception (i.e., “the primacy of perception”) is unrivaled and unsurpassable in modern Western philosophy. His formulation of embodiment and incorporation, I think, lays the groundwork to Wang’s geophilosophy because the body is our social placement in the world, which defines our very existence and coexistence with other humans and other nonhuman beings and things on earth. I have above intimated that Merleau-Ponty’s groundwork is necessary to clarify Wang’s notion that the cosmos as a whole is one body. On the other hand, Wang’s focus, as it is with Sinism in general, is on the domain of moral philosophy or normative ethics, that is, how to treat the “myriad things” both living and nonliving in nature not for utilitarian purposes, but for “letting them be” (ziran or Heidegger’s Gelassenheit) without getting trapped in anthropocentrism, i.e., humans as the masters and possessors of nature. As Sinism defines reality as social process, which is extended to interspecific relationships, the Sinic notion of humaneness or benevolence (ren) as the noblest virtue is also extended to the world of nature both living and nonliving. Transversality as lateral movement opens a floodgate for gathering and ex/ changing the intercultural, interspecific, and interdisciplinary corpus of ideas and values toward the creation of hybridities. Transversality gives credence to the motto of “thinking and acting globally.” Sinism no longer remains as a silent partner of this weighty endeavor. It performs well on the stage of world philosophy. In the end, transversality, which is symbolized as the newly merging face of the Maitreyan Middle Way, mediates and facilitates all matters of the intercultural, the interspecific, and the interdisciplinary at once. It is concerned with those “in-between” matters that are intercultural, interspecific, and interdisciplinary border-crossings. It cannot be otherwise. It is high time to put an end to the metaphor of philosophy as “owl of Minerva,” which takes its flight at dusk. Philosophy should be metaphorized as the Muse who, as a daughter of Mnemosyne, can play mousike to orchestrate the global harmonics of interhuman and interspecific relationships at the dawn of the new millennium and beyond. NOTES 1.  I wish to thank Yong Huang for clarifying the intricate meanings of Chinese philosophical key terms that are related to writing this essay. 2. See Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row), p. 31.

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3.  My essay on “Wang Yangming and Existential Phenomenology” was written as a piece of triptych. See International Philosophical Quarterly, 5 (1965): 612–36. The other two pieces are “Jen [Ren]: An Existential and Phenomenological Problem of Intersubjectivity,” Philosophy East and West, 16.3/4 (1966): 169–88, and “Confucianism and Existentialism: Intersubjectivity as the Way of Man,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 30 (1969): 186–202. Added to the above triptych was “The Unity of Knowledge and Action: A Postscript to Wang Yangming’s Existential Phenomenology,” Journal of Chinese Studies, 3 (1986): 19–38. Later, I wrote “Heidegger’s Way with Sinic Thinking,” in Heidegger and Asian Thought, in Heidegger and Asian Thought, ed. Graham Parkes (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987), pp. 217–44. 4.  See Jung, “Wang Yangming and Existential Phenomenology,” p. 612. 5.  See Herbert Fingarette, “The Music of Humanity in the Conversations [Analects] of Confucius,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 10 (1983): 331–56. 6. John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 283. 7.  Legislators and Interpreters (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), p. 110. 8. See Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol. 1, trans. E. S. Haldane (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trüber, 1892), p. 121. 9.  Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 49. 10.  Convergence Amidst Difference (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), p. 76. 11.  “The Effacement of Difference: Colonialism and the Origins of Nationalism in Diderot and Herder,” in After Colonialism, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 144. 12.  J. G. Herder on Social and Political Cultures, trans. and ed. F. M. Barnard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 199. 13.  See Hwa Yol Jung, “Transversality and Comparative Culture,” Ex/Change, 16 (2006): 11–17. 14.  Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 133–40. 15.  Ibid., pp. 138–39. 16.  Ibid., p. 139. 17. See Sinism (Chicago: Open Court, 1929). 18. Cf. Merleau-Ponty’s following passage epitomizes the existentialist idea of human existence as social existence: [Our] political task is not incompatible with any culture value or literary task, if literature and culture are defined as the progressive awareness of our multiple relationships with other people and the world rather than as extramundane techniques. If all truths are told, none will have to be hidden. In man’s co-existence with man, . . . morals, doctrines, thoughts and customs, laws, works and words all express each other; everything signifies everything. And outside this unique fulguration of existence there is nothing.” Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 152.

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19. See Interbeing, rev. ed., ed. Fred Eppsteiner (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1993). 20.  Cf. Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought (New York: Free Press, 2003). 21.  Cf. “The Ethics of Difference in the Zhuangzi,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 79 (2010): 1–35, and “Respecting Different Ways of Life: A Daoist Ethics of Virtue in the Zhuangzi,” Journal of Asian Studies, 69 (2010): 1049–69. 22.  See “Gender, Relation, and Difference in Psychoanalytic Perspective,” in The Future of Difference, ed. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), p. 137. 23. Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 39. 24. See The New Science of Giambattista Vico, trans Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), passim. 25.  R. P. Blackmur, Language as Gesture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), p. 4. 26. Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (New York: Random House, 1966), pp. 264–65. 27.  For a detailed discussion of what I call “carnal hermeneutics,” see Hwa Yol Jung, Prolegomena to a Carnal Hermeneutics (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014). 28.  See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 27. 29.  Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 17. 30.  In “‘Interesting Questions’ in the History of Philosophy and Elsewhere,” in Philosophy in History: Essays on Historiography of Philosophy, ed. Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 147, Wolf Lepenies comments that “Descartes’ travels in time and space led him back to the philosophizing ego. Neither imaginary travels in the world of books nor real travels in the book of the world can provide the sound and firm knowledge necessary for the foundation of philosophy. This knowledge the philosopher can only find in himself [or in his mind], alone but secure in a heated room on a cold winter’s day [with no contact with either other minds or other bodies].” Indeed, the cogito is the cogitation of an absolutely solitary self. For Descartes, epistemocracy is his prima philosophia whose cogito reads like an “auto-biographilosophy,” which is, according to Jacques Derrida, “the writing of the self as living, the trace of the living for itself, being for itself, the auto-affection or auto-infection as memory or archive of the living, would be an immunizing movement (a movement of safety, of salvage and salvation of the safe, the holy, the immune, the indemnified, of virginal and intact nudity), but an immunizing movement that is always threatened with becoming autoimmunizing, like every autos, every ipseity, every automatic, autonomous, auto-referential movement. Nothing risks becoming more poisonous than an autobiography, poisonous for oneself in the first place, auto-infectious for the presumed signatory who is so auto-affected.” See The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet and trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 47. The cogito is an immuned and immunizing move from any social engagement, from

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both Mitwelt and Umwelt. Drew Leder notes that “one of the compelling reasons to challenge Cartesianism has to do with its far-reaching social effects. This hierarchical dualism has been used to subserve projects of oppression directed toward women, animals, nature, and other ‘Others’.” See The Absent Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 4. It is not far-fetched to imagine Cartesianism in the framework of Michel Foucault’s observation of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon on account of Descartes’s global influence, including Japan and Korea: All those philosophers who live under the influence of Descartes’s epistemocracy live in cells of the prison-house called Panopticon under the total supervision of the warden named Cogito. In Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), p. 205, Foucault comments: “. . . The Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building, it is a diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form. . . . [I]t is in fact a figure of political technology. . . . It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct school children, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is a type of location of bodies in space . . . [defining] the instruments and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, worships, schools, prisoners [and philosophers]” (italics added). If we replace “the location of bodies in space” with “the location of disembodied minds in space,” we must add a large cell of philosophy, of modern philosophy as a figure of political technology under the super/vision of the warden Cogito. This is, I think, a good parable for the worldwide influence of Cartesian epistemocracy! 31. See Heidegger, The Questions Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 115–54. 32.  “What Is Tradition?” New Literary History, 22 (1991): 1–21. 33.  Rodin, trans. Jessie Lemont and Hans Trausil (London: Grey Wall Press, 1946), p. 33. 34.  Gerald L. Bruns, “Subjectivity and ‘Subjectality’: A Response,” Philosophy East and West, 49 (1999): 174–83. 35.  Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writings, trans. Chan Wing-tsit (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), p. 93. 36.  Ibid., p. 30. 37.  See Giles Gunn, Thinking Across the American Grain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 4. 38. See “The Problem of ‘Knowledge’ and ‘Action’ in Chinese Thought since Wang Yang-ming,” in Studies in Chinese Thought, ed. Arthur F. Wright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 112–45. 39.  Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 11. 40.  Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung [Zedong], Vol. 1 (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1975), p. 308. 41.  Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 11.

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42.  Moral Knowledge and Its Methodology in Aristotle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 90. 43.  Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writings, p. 161. 44.  Ibid., p. 277. It is extremely interesting to take note of the following passage in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, p. 28: “Where empiricism was deficient was in any internal connection between the object and the act which it triggers off. What intellectualism lacks is contingency in the occasion of thought. In the first case consciousness is too poor, in the second too rich for any phenomenon to appeal compellingly to it. Empiricism cannot see what we need to know what we are looking for, otherwise we would not be looking for it, and intellectualism fails to see that we need to be ignorant of what we are looking for, or equally again we should not be searching. They are in agreement in that neither can grasp consciousness in the act of learning, and that neither attaches due importance to that circumscribed ignorance, that still ‘empty’ but already determinate intention which is attention itself” (emphasis original). Accordingly, Zhu Xi may be regarded as an “empiricist” (or realist) for whom, with an emphasis on the “investigation of external things,” consciousness is “too poor.” Furthermore, what perception as “a nascent logos” is to Merleau-Ponty, liangzhi is to Wang Yangming. All in all, both Merleau-Ponty and Wang take a “middle way” (entre deux) between “empiricism” and “intellectualism,” that is, the position of existential phenomenology. 45. Herbert Fingarette, Confucius—The Secular as Sacred (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 53. In Collected Papers, II: Studies in Social Theory, ed. Arvid Brodersen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), pp. 159–78, Alfred Schutz discusses “making music together” as the theory of the “tuning-in” social relationship. 46.  See Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), p. 22. 47.  See “Michel Foucault and Zen: A Stay in a Zen Temple (1978),” trans. Richard Townsend, in Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 110–14. In The Tao of Physics (Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1975), p. 4, Fritjof Capra takes to the heart the intimation of physicist Werner Heisenberg who is at least with Chinese Daoism as with modern quantum physics: “It is probably true quite generally that in the history of human thinking the most fruitful developments frequently take place at those points where two different lines of thought meet,” that is, the meeting of Asian mysticism and quantum physics. Two other “popular” works that are on my list of discussing the meeting of Sinism and Western thought are: Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (New York: William Morrow), and E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful (New York: Harper and Row, 1973). 48. See “Did Philosophers Have to Become Fixated on Truth?” (trans. Janet Lloyd), Critical Inquiry, 28 (2002): 803–24, and “‘China as Philosophical Tool’,” Diogenes, No. 50 (2003): 15–21. 49.  See Hwa Yol Jung, “Merleau-Ponty’s Transversal Geophilosophy and Sinic Aesthetics of Nature,” in Merleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy, ed. Suzanne L. Cataldi and William S. Hamrick (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), pp. 235–58; The Way of Ecopiety: Essays in Transversal Geophilosophy (New

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York: Global Scholarly Publications, 2009); and “A Prolegomenon to Transversal Geophilosophy,” Environmental Philosophy, 10. 1 (2013): 83–112. 50.  Speech Genres and Other Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee and eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 170. What Heidegger says about deconstruction is also noteworthy in discussing the relevance of the past or tradition to the present and the future when he writes: “Construction in philosophy is necessarily destruction, that is to say, a de-constructing of traditional concepts carried out in a historical recursion to the tradition. And this is not a negation of the tradition or a condemnation of it as worthless, quite the reverse, it signifies precisely a positive appropriation of tradition. Because destruction belongs to construction, philosophical cognition is essentially at the same time, in a certain sense, historical cognition.” See The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 23. 51.  See Hwa Yol Jung, “Francis Bacon,” in Encyclopedia of Environmental Ethics and Philosophy, Vol. 1, pp. 87–88, ed. J. Baird Callicott and Robert Frodeman (Detroit: Gale, 2008). 52.  Wang Yangming, Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writings, p. 189. 53.  Ibid., p. 272. 54. See On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, trans. L. M. Palmer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 56. 55.  The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1959), p. 146. For the author’s discussions of body politics and its genealogy beginning with Vico, see Prolegomena to a Carnal Hermeneutics. 56.  Peter Brown, The Body and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 168. 57.  The Logic of Practice (Le Sens pratique), trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 57. 58.  Cf. Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), p. 294. 59. See The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 13. 60.  The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), pp. 52 and 141. 61.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 151. 62.  Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? pp. 85–112. 63. See The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort and trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 139–40. 64.  See Yasuo Yuasa, The Body, ed. Thomas P. Kasulis and trans. Shigenori Nagatomo and Thomas P. Kasulis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), p. 48n. 65. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 144. 66. See Erwin W. Straus, Phenomenological Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1966), p. 211. 67. See A Climate: A Philosophical Study, trans. Geoffrey Bowas (Tokyo: Ministry of Education, 1961).

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68.  Watsuji Tetsuro, Rinrigaku [Ethics], trans. Seisaku Yamamoto and Robert E. Carter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 196), pp. 29–45. 69. Yuasa, The Body, p. 47, and see further pp. 37–48. 70. See Hwa Yol Jung, “Interbeing and Geophilosophy in the Cultural Topography of Watsuji Tetsuro’s Thought,” in Why Japan Matters! Vol. 2, ed. Joseph F. Kess and Helen Lansdowne (Victoria: Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives, University of Victoria, 2005), pp. 691–702. 71.  Wang Yangming, Instructions for Practical Living and other Neo-Confucian Writings, p. 272. 72.  See Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 497. 73.  See Kishore Mahbubani, Can Asians Think? (Singapore: Times Books International, 1998). 74.  Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 6.

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Transversality and Fred Dallmayr’s Comparative Political Theory

1. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS This volume is an occasion to honor Fred Dallmayr’s intellectual achievements. For my part, I shall focus on his latest and most timely venture into comparative political theory in the age of global and even planetary politics, what he would now readily call the cosmopolis.1 In the history of Western thought, he is one of those few who echo Diogenes’s advocacy of cosmopolitan citizenship beyond the confines of polis-building of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Dallmayr’s most recent groundbreaking venture casts a new light on comparative political theory as an extension of his past intellectual itinerary. He is the first among practitioners of comparative political theory in his career as an intercontinental globetrotter. It is this aspect that should be cherished and celebrated by like-minded friends. What is philosophizing if not the cleared space enabling the writing that makes friends and keeps friendship alive and intact until the end of their lives?2 To put it simply, philosophizing engages in the cultivation of friendship as well as humanity. For humanity begins at home: the intimate circle of friends. “Globalization” is a mixed blessing: There are its contents and discontents.3 One thing is certain, however: It has the air of inescapability in the migration and exchange of ideas throughout the world, where what really matters is how to make it cosmopolitan rather than predatory. As everything is a matter of communication, the late Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan fashioned the avant-garde buzzword of the world as a “global village” in describing the shrinking world with the “tribal” sense of communicative intimacy in the age of electronic media that supersedes the Gutenberg era of printing technology in the West—particularly television as its exemplar, which his faithful followers update by “digitalizing” it. By way 219

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of media or communication technology, McLuhan had an unerring sense of the flow and rhythm of history since the preliterate or Homeric culture of ancient Greece. His disputed slogan “the medium is the message” scales history as much as communication theory. 2. THE MISSIONARY POSITION: EUROPE ON TOP The Enlightenment is the soul of mainstream Western modernity. Its legacy continues today. Some speak of modernity as an unfinished project, a second modernity, even the modernization of modernity, or the second coming of Enlightenment itself. They have an unflinching faith in it as the absolute end of history. Enlightenment’s unbridled optimism is alleged to promote and crown the Promethean progress of humanity based on the cultivation and universalization of pure and applied reason. Kant, who had a dim view of non-Europe (especially Africa), spelled out the civilizing mission of Enlightenment in the clearest and simplest term: to sanctify the autonomous benefits of reason in rescuing and emancipating humanity—perhaps more accurately European humanity—from its self-incurred immaturity. In so doing, he institutionalized the major agenda of European modernity whose rationality was never seriously challenged until the auspicious advent of postmodernity in Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and others in the twentieth century. While privileging and valorizing the authority of reason for allegedly human progress and emancipation, European modernity unfortunately overlooks, marginalizes, and disempowers the (reason’s) “other,” whether it be the Orient (or so-called non-West), body, woman, or nature at the altar of Enlightenment’s reason. Orient, body, woman, and nature are not isolated at random, but are interconnected issues: Most interestingly, it is no accident that Orient, body, and nature are invariably genderized as feminine, while their counterparts—Occident, mind, and culture—are masculine or “malestream” categories.3 The institution of Western thought called “Eurocentrism” as well as the practice of imperialism is that habitus of mind that privileges Europe or the West as cultural, technological, political, economic, and moral capital of the entire globe. “Modernization” is nothing but the all-encompassing catchword given to the totalizing and hegemonizing process of this Eurocentric phenomenon. As the astute interpreter and critic of modernity Zygmunt Bauman relates: From at least the seventeenth century and well into the twentieth, the writing elite of Western Europe [had] . . . unchallenged faith in the superiority of its own mode over all alternative forms of life—contemporaneous or past—[which] al-

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lowed it to take itself as the reference point for the interpretation of the telos of history. . . . Now . . . Europe set the reference point of objective time in motion, attaching it firmly to its own thrust toward colonizing the future in the same way as it has colonized the surrounding space.4

Indeed, this Eurocentric idea of colonizing the future gives a new meaning to Jürgen Habermas’s conception of modernity as an unfinished project or the end of history. “Oriental despotism” as a political subspecies of Eurocentrism in practice is said to be as old as “Herodotus’s epic account of the struggle of free Greece against Persia’s King of Kings.”5 In the political history of Western modernity, it gripped the fancy of some of its best and brightest minds: John Stuart Mill, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Hegel, Marx, and Karl Wittfogel, the last of whom wrote in 1957 the controversial book called Oriental Despotism,6 based on the simple theme of hydraulic dynamics in which the term “oriental” is synonymous with undeveloped or underdeveloped non-European. For Hegel, who, compared to Kant, is pallid and subtle, “Oriental despotism” meant the most servile stage of world history. Marx—following Hegel—recast it in economic or materialistic terms by standing the dialectics on its feet rather than on its head: “the Asiatic mode of production,” which is the most underdeveloped form of economic life. Marx hoped for working out “class essentialism” and transformed it into the soteriology of the proletariat as “universal class,” the idea of which is given way to or replaced by ethnicity in the world of multiculturalism. In the end, unfortunately, he was unable to free himself from the reign of Hegel’s essentialized logic of identity. Eurocentrism persists in the study of comparative politics today and manifests itself in different forms. In his watershed article, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,”7 which preceded his recent politics of recognition in the world of multiculturalism, Charles Taylor accused the American allegedly value-neutral science of comparative politics—particularly of the influential theory of Gabriel Almond—of Eurocentrism by placing the “Atlantic type of polity at the summit of human political development.” The “normalized” appellation “Third World” itself creates the Eurocentric ideology of ranking Asia, Africa, and Latin America as “underdeveloped”—euphemistically called “developing”—by placing them on the lowest scale of economic development and thus as inferior to the “First World” of Euro-American regions. 3. THE DAO OF TRANSVERSALITY There is nothing trite about emphasizing that all understanding, all thinking, is more or less comparative, that is, it is intertextual. Comparison is the source

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of discovering the limits of one’s discourse in light of the other, which is not one but always plural. In his contribution to the inauguration of comparative literature—“Comparative Literature, At Last!” a slogan worth emulating in political theory—Jonathan Culler prods his literary colleagues “to abandon its traditional Eurocentrism and turn global.”8 The literary critic Rey Chow argues that the study of the non-West is strongly justified in exploring and questioning the limits of Western discourse.9 It is instructive for aspiring comparative political theorists to learn from literary comparativists about how to fashion a “world literature,” since comparative political theory is at best in its infancy. A few words of caution: Understanding the other (the “foreign” other in particular) as anthropology as well as psychoanalysis has shown, is a difficult and demanding undertaking for no other reason than that the other as a moving target is always other than itself. Indeed, the other is the “black hole” of all understanding, all conceptualization, and all relationships. At a moment of frustration and despair, the existential phenomenologist Jean-Paul Sartre faces a real moment of his black hole: “Hell is other people.” Furthermore, comparativists should be aware of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, which presents four different but equally plausible accounts of the same murder. The film raises a red flag for intercultural understandings. There is also the intriguing question of John Hu or Hu Ruowang—the first Chinese in record to travel to the West.10 He sailed to France from Canton (Guagdon) in 1722. Like the Rashomon tale, the question of Hu has an intriguing plot. Because of his “strange” (foreign) behavior that astonished the Parisians, Hu was finally committed to the famous lunatic asylum of Charenton (Sha-lang-don) in 1723 and remained there until 1726, when he was ordered by the French government to return to China. Setting aside for a moment the Foucauldian question of insanity as a sociocultural control mechanism in the age of reason, the relevance of the Hu question here is whether he was committed to the asylum because he was “really mad” or perceived to be mad to the “foreign” Parisians because he was utterly “alien” to them. Either way, the question of Hu poses the scandalous difficulty of translating the dynamic chiasmata of intercultural perception, misperception, and even imperception.11 “Transversality” is a keyword in the existential phenomenology of Calvin O. Schrag as he seeks to discover a “diagonal”12 pathway in resolving the deadlock between Western modernity and postmodernity.13 Sitting in a philosophical cockpit, as it were, it is a balancing act of navigating through the stormy space between the dichotomous poles of the modernist obsession with identity and universalism, on the one hand, and the postmodernist exhaustive drive for difference and pluralism, on the other. Transversality actively seeks a transformation. It is, according to Schrag, the recognition of difference

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that keeps open “the prospect for invention, intervention, transgression, recreation, etc.”14 It looks for “convergence without coincidence”—to use his repeatedly emphasized expression. Thus, it broadens the “in between” for the sake of the “beyond.” Transversality is primarily a derivative concept of geometry. Schrag exacts l’esprit de finesse by way of a geometric configuration: In addition to the two diagonals crossing or intersecting each other at the epicenter of any rectangle, there are also the hermeneutical “circle” and the rhetorical “triangle.” Insofar as it is a negotiated or compromised “middle voice,” transversality touches the soul and heart of Buddhism. By way of the “middle voice” of transversality, he means to subvert and transgress particularly the dichotomy between “the Scylla of a hegemonic unification” (“a vacuous universalism”) on the one hand and “the Charybdis of a chaotic pluralism” (“an anarchic historicism”) on the other.15 The newly emerging face of transversality may be likened to the famous wooden statue of Buddha at a Zen temple in Kyoto, whose face marks a new dawn of awakening (satori) or signals the beginning of a new regime of ontology, ethics, politics, and culture. From the crack in the middle of the old face (i.e., universality) of the priest Hoshi’s statue, which was originally at Saio Temple in Kyoto and is now housed in the Kyoto National Museum, there emerges an interstitial, liminal face that symbolizes the mantra of transversality and the arrival of Maitreya (the “future Awakened One”) or Middle Way—that third enabling term of transversality that is destined to navigate the waters of intercultural and interspecific bordering crossings (X-ings). We are warned not to take it as a middle point between two poles. Rather, it breaks through bipolarity (modernity and postmodernity, nature and society, mind and body, femininity and masculinity, and East and West). What is important here is the fact that transversality is the paradigmatic rendition of overcoming bipolarity itself. The bipolar solids melt into the air of transversality, as it were.16 As disenchantment calls for transcendence, transversality is used here as a deconstructive concept.17 It first dismantles or unpacks the status quo and then goes beyond what is given, received, or established by constructing a new formation of concepts. It, in short, attempts to challenge the assumed transparency of truth as universal and overcome the limits of universality as the Eurocentric canon of truth in Western modernity. It means to decenter Europe as the site of “universal truth” whose “identitarian” and “unitarian” motivation fails to take into account the world of multiculturalism. The pluralist Johann Gottfried Herder challenges: “I find myself unable to comprehend how reason can be presented so universally as the single summit and purpose of all human culture, all happiness, all good. Is the whole body just one big eye?”18 The French philosopher and sinologist François Jullien calls

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the effort of this decentering Eurocentrism or Western modernity—with Kant in mind—“a new ‘Copernican reversal.’” He contends that in “shaking up” Western modernity, China becomes a “philosophical tool,” that is, he uses Chinese thought to interrogate Western philosophy and to liberate it from its own “mental cage.” Most radically, he wishes to replace the very concept of “truth” itself with that of “intelligibility” because “truth” is bound up with the history of Western philosophy. Jullien puts Foucault to test in order to vindicate the Eurocentric “legislation” of truth for all global humanity.19 In his 1978 visit to Japan, the vintage Foucault remarked that as the warp of knowledge and the woof of political power are interwoven as one fabric, European imperialism and the era of Western philosophy together come to an end. Foucault is not alone in conjecturing that philosophy of the future must be born “outside Europe” or in the “meetings and impacts” between Europe and non-Europe.20 Long before Foucault and Jullien, Maurice Merleau-Ponty would speak of the “lateral universal” and the lateral continuity of all humanity both “primitive” and “civilized” across history. He is unmistakably a consummate transversalist avant la lettre. The lateral universal is for him a new paradigm for worldmaking as well as philosophy. “Lateral” rather than “vertical” thinking is paradigmatic in that instead of digging the same hole deeper and deeper in which there is no exit in sight, it digs a new hole in another place.21 For Merleau-Ponty, all history is not only contemporaneous and written in the present tense, but also an open notebook in which a new future can be inscribed. It is unfortunate, I think, that his deconstructive effort for comparative philosophy and his sensitivity to the global scope of philosophy have escaped the attention of comparativists and specialists alike. This inattention is likely due to the same tendencies that inform our Eurocentric propensity and orientation in philosophy. Merleau-Ponty’s deconstructive effort in philosophy, in comparative philosophy, is evidenced in his critique of Hegel’s Eurocentrism.22 He charges that Hegel arbitrarily drew “a geographical frontier between philosophy and non-philosophy,” that is between the West and the East.23 Philosophy, Merleau-Ponty goes on to argue, is destined to examine its own idea of truth again and again because truth is “a treasure scattered about in human life prior to all philosophy and not divided among doctrines.” If so, Western philosophy is compelled to reexamine not only its own idea of truth but also related matters and institutions, such as science, economy, politics, and technology. Besides philosophy’s own constant vigilance on what it is doing, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological orientation demands its attention to the ethnography of the sociocultural life-worlds without which philosophy is a vacuous if not fatal abstraction.

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The way of ethnography’s “thick” description practiced by Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss, who also taught at the Collège de France, provides Merleau-Ponty with the idea of the lateral continuity of humanity between the “primitive” and the “civilized,” that is, with the incessant ethnographic testing of the self by the other and the other by the self, which has a “diacritical value” for humanity’s coexistence and its planetary solidarity. Ethnography redeems Western narcissism precisely because it is the human science of understanding the “foreign other.” Merleau-Ponty contends that while for Hegel philosophical truth as absolute and universal knowledge is notarized and certified by the Occidental seal of approval alone, the Oriental past must also have an honored place in the famed hall of philosophies to celebrate its hitherto “secret, muted contribution to philosophy.” He writes resolutely: “Indian and Chinese philosophies have tried not so much to dominate existence as to be the echo or the sounding board of our relationship to being. Western philosophy can learn from them to rediscover the relationships to being and an initial option which gave it birth, and to estimate the possibilities we have shut ourselves off from in becoming ‘Westerners’ and perhaps reopen them.” “If Western thought is what it claims to be,” he challenges further, “it must prove it by understanding all ‘life-worlds’” as multiple geo-sociocultural realities.24 Thus Merleau-Ponty suggests that in contrast to the “overarching universal” of objective sciences or, we might add, Western metaphysics, the “lateral universal” is acquired through ethnographical experience as the way of “learning to see what is ours as alien and what was alien as our own.” His lateral universal is a passport, as it were, that allows us to cross borders between diverse cultures, enter the zone of intersections and discover crosscultural connections and convergences. While the European geophilosophical politics of identity claims its validity as universal truth, the lateral universal takes into account “local knowledge” prior to planetary knowledge (dubbed by some as “glocalization”) and allows the hermeneutical autonomy of the other who may very well be right. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty’s lateral universal is contextualized as an open-ended and promiscuous web of temporal and spatial (that is, chronotopic) interlacings. The (Eurocentric) universalist has failed to take into account seriously the question of diversity or multiplicity in the world of multiculturalism. He is still entangled in the cobweb of absolute universal truth and cultural relativism. As difference marks multiplicity and all relationships, Heidegger’s Differenz as Unter/schied edifies our discussion here because it plays and feeds on the coupled meaning of the words which connects, preserves, and promotes both difference and the relational in one breath.25 In Differenz as Unterschied, the other is neither assimilated/incorporated nor erased/segregated: The integrity

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of the other is well preserved. Here we would be remiss if, in light of MerleauPonty’s above-mentioned “lateral universal” including a critique of Hegel’s Eurocentrism, we fail to recognize the seminal contribution of the Caribbean francophone Edouard Glissant to the making of the transversal world. Educated in philosophy and ethnography in France, he is a philosopher, a poet, and a novelist whose “poetics of relation” shaped Caribbean (antillais) discourse on “diversality” and “créolité” (“creoleness”).26 In the first place, Glissant has an uncanny convergence in the name of transversality with Merleau-Ponty in his critique of Hegel, when he articulates without equivocation that transversal relation means to replace “the old concept of the universal.” “Thinking about One,” Glissant puts it concisely, “is not thinking about All.”27 Speaking of Hegel’s conception of history, Glissant retorts: History is a highly functional fantasy of the West, originating at precisely the time when it alone “made” the history of the world. If Hegel relegated African peoples to the ahistorical, Amerindian peoples to the prehistorical, in order to reserve History for European people exclusively, it appears that it is not because these African or American peoples “have entered History” that we can conclude today that such a hierarchical conception of “the march of History” is no longer relevant.28

Glissant unpacks Hegel’s history by dissolving it as irrelevant or passé in the postcolonial world of diverse cultures that rejects “the linear, hierarchical vision of a single History.”29 In the second place and more importantly, transversality is proposed and constructed by Glissant in opposition to and as a replacement of universality. For him, it is the “poetics” of cross-cultural encounters. It is the way of crossing and going beyond (that is, to “creolize”) ethnic, lingual, and cultural boundaries. It is indeed the birthplace of hybridity. As Glissant himself puts it, transversality is “the site of converging paths” or the “convergence that frees us from uniformity.”30 The British postcolonial theorist Robert J. C. Young, who regards Eurocentrism as a “white mythology,” makes an interesting and unusually astute observation that “[p]ostcolonialism is neither western nor non-western, but a dialectical product of interaction between the two, articulating new counterpoints of insurgency from the long-running power struggles that predate and post-date colonialism.”31 It may be said that the postcolonial mind works like a double helix. More specifically, Paul Gilroy’s reputed thesis32 of “the black Atlantic” is in favor of hybridity or “double consciousness” that sums up the transcultural intermix of African and European things.33 Hybridity is a converging middle path of “multiple, interconnecting axes of affiliation and differentiation.”34 In the

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final analysis, Gilroy’s “black Atlantic” is constructed quintessentially as “a counter-culture of modernity.”35 The so-called recognition or acknowledgment of difference, which is not one but many, is not the final but only the first step in the making of hybridity. In Éloge de la Créolitié (In Praise of Creoleness)36—a Caribbean manifesto that is purposely written bilingually—“diversality” (la diversalité) in opposition to universality is defined as “the conscious harmonization of preserved diversities” (l’harmonisation consciente des diversités preservées). When harmonization is understood musically, it enriches the tonality and even coloration of “diversality” when two or more tones are put together (that is, orchestrated): there emerges harmonization (or symphony) in which each individual tone is not lost but preserved. But when two colors are mixed together, there is no harmony but another color. In the name of “a polyphonic harmony,” “diversality” frowns upon “the obsessional concern with the Universal.” The above-mentioned Caribbean or “creolized” manifesto begins with the sentence: “Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves Creoles” (“Ni Europeens, ni Africains, ni Asiatiques, nous nous proclamons Créoles”). The Creole (as hybrid) is neither unitarian nor separatist, but is likened to be a hybrid “butterfly” who frees himself/herself by breaking off from an “ethnocentrist cocoon.” Glissant himself describes the principium of creoleness as the end of “diversality”: Diversity, which is neither chaos nor sterility, means the human spirit’s striving for a cross-cultural relationship, without universalist transcendence. Diversity needs the presence of peoples, no longer as objects to be swallowed up, but with the intention of creating a new relationship. Sameness requires fixed Being, Diversity establishes Becoming. Just as Sameness began with expansionist plunder in the West, Diversity came to light through the political and armed resistance of peoples. As Sameness rises within the fascination with the individual, Diversity is spread through the dynamism of communities. As the Other is a source of temptation of Sameness, Wholeness is the demand of Diversity. You cannot become Trinidadian or Quebecois, if you are not; but it is from now on true that if Trinidad and Quebec did not exist as accepted components of Diversity, something would be missing from the body of world culture—that today we would feel that loss. In other words, if it was necessary for Sameness to be revealed in the solitude of individual Being, it is now imperative that Diversity should “pass” through whole communities and peoples. Sameness is sublimated difference; Diversity is accepted difference.37

In the formulation of hybridity as the site of transversality based on unreifiable and unerasable difference in the world of multiculturalism, the dialogical acquires new meanings. In the first place, it is an indispensable element in the harmonics of multiple relationships. Its failure signals the end

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of hybridity, multiculturalism, and transversality itself.38 Thus the dialogical is coeval with the unending process of “Becoming.” Not unlike the Chinese yin-yang logic of correlation, in which everything is said to be changing except change itself, “Becoming” has to go on: The dialogical of multiple differences knows no final ending—no Hegelian and Marxian dialectical or identitarian synthesis that may be identified with the identity of identity and difference. For Hegel, the dialectical consummates in the State (secretarian nation-state or perhaps unitarian world-state) as the march of the Divine in history, whereas for Marx the dialectical is primed for and perfected in “class essentialism,” which favors the utopian and soteriological dream of the proletariats’ becoming one “universal class.” For the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin,39 on the other hand, everything ends when dialogue ends. Thus, dialogue cannot and must not come to an end. Merleau-Ponty, too, speaks of the “hyperdialectic” that is “unstable” or on a constant move. It is the dialectic without the conceptual “trap” of synthesis that is capable of “[envisaging] the plurality of the relationships” or transversing “the spatial and temporal multiplicity of the actual” (la multiplicité spatiale et temporelle de l’actuel) without restriction. The hyperdialectic is not the denial per se of “the idea of surpassing that reassembles” (l’idée du dépassement qui rassemble), but only of synthesis. Furthermore, the dialogical context for Bakhtin knows no limits. Even past meanings are forever unstable and undecidable. They may be retrieved and renewed for the present. The indeterminacy of Bakhtin’s dialogical principle applies to backtracking as well as foretracking. In the end, dialogue is “unfinalizable” (Bakhtin’s own term) or “nondialectizable” (Gilles Deleuze’s expression).40 Bakhtin could not agree more with William Faulkner’s epigram that “the past is never dead; it’s not even past.” The spirit of Bakhtin’s dialogical principle is best expressed in a Zen koan: “When you get to the top of the mountain, keep climbing.” In the second place, Hans-Georg Gadamer, whose influence permeates the writings of Dallmayr particularly on his cosmopolitan effort—declares that the very soul of hermeneutics is the idea that the other may be right; in other words, it is heterocentric. Two monologues do not make one dialogue because dialogue is not a series of self-righteous monologues. In dialogue we must listen to what the other has to say: Dialogue is a “boustrophedonic”41 process of speaking and listening. The heterocentric orientation of dialogue or the primacy of the other in dialogue entails an ethical imperative, the ethics of responsibility that was stipulated by Ludwig Feuerbach in his philosophy of the future—a Copernican revolution in social thought where what Copernicus is to Ptolemy, the other is to the self. Emmanuel Levinas is forthright in declaring: “When I speak of [ethics as] first philosophy, I am referring to a

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philosophy of dialogue that cannot not be an ethics. Even the philosophy that questions the meaning of being does so on the basis of the encounter with the other.”42 It is worth emphasizing repeatedly that ethics is always heterocentric or other-directed and that self-centered ethics is no ethics at all. Hannah Arendt’s discussion of Eichmann’s “banality of evil” is often misguided and misunderstood because banality properly understood as the source of evil is for Arendt one’s inability to think and perform in terms and for the sake of the other. Ultimately, evil (banal or otherwise) is committed because we do not take responsibility seriously.43 No ethics is complete without responsibility. 4. GEOPHILOSOPHY: AN ADDENDUM TO DALLMAYR’S NEW VISION Dallmayr’s vision of philosophy involves the creation and advancement of the cosmopolis in the age of globalization by breaking down existing conceptual barriers. Therefore, it is not at all contrary to his new endeavor to flavor it with the spice of geophilosophical ideas. Being transcultural and transdisciplinary, geophilosophy goes hand in hand with transversality, which is in itself a derivative of measuring the earth (that is, geometry). Global warming and nuclear pollution, for example, know no boundaries separating nations or species. For their solution, we need the unprecedented effort of transnational cooperation, which is at once cultural, religious, political, economic, scientific, and technological. In a nutshell, geophilosophy is our ultimate concern for sustaining all life on earth. There is indeed a greater sense of urgency than ever before in human history. Hannah Arendt begins her magnum opus and all-time classic The Human Condition (1958) with the fundamental premise that “The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition, and earthly nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing human beings with a habitat in which they can move and breathe without effort and without artifice.”44 Geophilosophy is an all-encompassing philosophical inquiry into the nature of Interbeing—both interhuman and interspecific—as if the whole earth really matters. It negotiates “culture” and “nature,” which are perhaps two of the most complex and controversial keywords in human language and history. It is predicated on the regulative principle of Interbeing in which nothing exists in isolation; everything is connected to everything else in the cosmos. Interbeing is “otherwise than Being”: In the beginning was Interbeing, which precedes all matters of Being. As such, the death of nature signifies the death of humanity, not the other way around—the formula that neither Descartes nor Francis Bacon imagined in their undaunted pursuit of the mastery and

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possession of nature for the sole purpose of unabashed philanthropia. The so-called death of nature begins with philanthropia in Western modernity and the widespread propagation of modernization as a global process. For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the eminent domain of their newly coined term “geophilosophy” is the whole earth, which is not just one element among others, but is that all-encompassing element that “brings all the elements in a single embrace.”45 Geophilosophy may thus be called “ecocentric.” The Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess speaks of “deep ecology,” which is at once prescriptive/ethical and descriptive/scientific. The normative discipline of political philosophy is regarded as an integral part of deep ecology.46 Without geophilosophy, cosmopolitan philosophy is incomplete. Risk, according to the German sociologist Erlich Beck, is a modern European phenomenon. What is radically new or paradigmatic in the contemporary world, however, is that risk has become global, that is, it deterritorializes national boundaries. In sum, the scope of risk in society has become truly global or planetary. Beck speaks of “the inescapability of the transnational dynamic.” “A cosmopolitan sociology,” he contends, “posits globality as the experience of a deterritorized culture.”47 He is willing to abandon the universal in favor of the cosmopolitan since cosmopolitanism recognizes multiplicity, whereas universal “globalism” denies it.48 For Beck, the recognition of multiplicity is something good, whereas its denial is something bad. However, he rejects the radical paradigm shift of postmodernism because he has misgivings about its concern with “what is not the case” and its silence about “what is the case.”49 What is needed is not to replace European modernity but to “reform” it in creating “a second modernity.” “Modernity has not vanished,” declares Beck, “we are not past it.”50 Despite his quarrel with postmodernism, what should be noted in Beck’s conception of cosmopolitan or global sociology is the recognition of multiculturalism and the acceptance of the phenomenon of globalization as a topic of sociological inquiry. In his cosmopolitan sociology, geophilosophy converges with the aim of globalization: The former transverses with the latter in their mutual emphasis on interconnectedness. Beck sloganizes the thesis that “smog is democratic,” whereas “poverty is hierarchical.”51 To be sure, the scope of risk society has definitely been globalized. Global or transnational risks such as Chernobyl and HIV/AIDS dissolve and invalidate the received distinction between society and nature on the one hand, and between the body and society on the other. Intercorporeality, however, is always a precondition for sociality. Sociality is ensouled but first and foremost fully embodied: It is intercorporeal. The disembodied mind is incapable of socializing with the other.

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5. EPILOGUE This essay is written in the pioneering spirit of Dallmayr’s vision of cosmopolitanism in the age of globalization. The goal of globalization or planetarization is to achieve cosmopolitanism for and across all humanity. In the pluralization of the world, a multiplicity of cultures across time and space is underscored in his cosmopolitanism. However, he is well aware of the fact that the mere recognition or acknowledgment of cultural differences would be only the first but not the final step toward achieving cosmopolitan humanity. His cosmopolitanism would reject, as Goethe would, Kipling’s separatist approach of “East is East” and “West is West” with the added baggage of “white man’s burden.” Nor would it accept the idea of “culture wars” and Samuel Huntington’s irreconcilable “clash of civilizations” based on the chauvinistic “essentialization” of each civilization involving the reification of its own difference from the rest (for example, “Occidentalizing” Occidental civilization and “Orientalizing” Oriental civilization, each of which is not one but many). Nor would it be receptive to Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of “the end of history,” which is tantamount to the valorization of the “one world” or an “empire” of Western neoliberalism that denies the underlying assumptions of multiculturalism. Transversality lays the groundwork for doing comparative political theory that has yet to heed in earnest Nietzsche’s prophetic dictum over a century ago on the arrival of “the age of comparison.” It holds, I submit, the secret key unlocking the gateway to comparative political theory by defenestrating the unitarian politics of identity in support of the pluralistic politics of difference, which is neither erased nor reified but dialogized. Reified difference results inevitably in what we might call the “agonistic model” of multiculturalism where difference is assumed to be irreconcilable for the sake of transversal relationships. Dialogized difference is a middle path between consummate consensus and total dissensus. Without it, hybridity or cosmopolitanism is unthinkable. Transversality as the site of hybridity52 or cosmopolitanism is an ideal type or heuristic construction to answer what transpires when it deterritorizes national and cultural boundaries, that is, when it allows (diagonal) border-crossings. In the end, transversality in the name of hybridity is capable of dissolving the long-embattled argument concerning the facile dichotomy between universal absolutism and cultural relativism, modernity and postmodernity, commensurability and incommensurability, globalism and nationalism, history and nature, mind and body, and above all East and West. It indeed shows this dichotomy the way out of its bottle.

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NOTES 1. Dallmayr edits the Lexington Books series “Global Encounters: Studies in Comparative Political Theory.” The first volume of the series he edited is titled BorderCrossings: Toward a Comparative Political Theory (Lanham: Lexington Books, 1999). For the theme of Orientalism, globalization, and achieving humanity, see particularly his books Beyond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-Cultural Encounter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), Alternative Visions: Paths in the Global Village (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), Achieving Our World: Toward a Global and Plural Democracy (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), Dialogue among Civilizations: Some Exemplary Voices (London: Palgrave/ Macmillan, 2002), and Peace Talks—Who Will Listen? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004). 2.  This is a modification of Jean Paul’s claim that “[p]hilosophy is the ability to make friends through the medium of a written text.” Quoted in Paul Rabinow, Anthropos Today (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 1, 80-81. 3.  See my “Enlightenment and the Question of the Other: A Postmodern Audition,” Human Studies, 25 (2002): 297–306. 4. Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), p. 110. 5. Martin Malia, Russia under Western Eyes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 6. 6.  Karl Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957). 7.  Charles Taylor, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” Review of Metaphysics, 25 (1971): 3–51. 8.  Jonathan Culler, “Comparative Literature, At Last!” in Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, ed. Charles Bernheimer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 117–21. 9. Rey Chow, “In the Name of Comparative Literature,” in Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, ed. Charles Bernheimer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 107–16. 10.  See Jonathan D. Spence, The Question of Hu (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988). 11.  Zygmunt Bauman makes an interesting point when he writes: “The main point about civility is . . . the ability to interact with strangers without holding their strangeness against them and without pressing to surrender it or to renounce some or all the traits that have made them strangers in the first place.” Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), pp. 104–105. 12.  It is interesting to note that David Farrell Krell sketches das Geviert envisioned by Heidegger in the pictogram of a rectangle that connects sky, earth, gods, and mortals with two diagonal lines having Being at its epicenter: The crossing of Being is not a crossing out (Durchstreichung), but a crossing through (Durchkreuzen). See my “Heidegger’s Way with Sinitic Thinking,” in Heidegger and Asian Thought, ed. Graham Parkes (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987), pp. 217–44, at p. 243 n. 27.

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13.  Schrag’s conception of transversality begins in earnest in The Resources of Rationality: A Response to the Postmodern Challenge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). For my appropriation of Schrag’s transversality for the study of comparative culture, see “The Tao of Transversality as a Global Approach to Truth: A Metacommentary on Calvin O. Schrag,” Man and World, 28 (1995): 11–31. 14.  Experiences Between Philosophy and Communication: Engaging the Philosophical Contributions of Calvin O. Schrag, ed. Ramsey Eric Ramsey and David James Miller (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), p. 26. 15.  See François Jullien, “Did Philosophers Have to Become Fixated on Truth?” (trans. Janet Lloyd), Critical Inquiry, 28 (2002): 803–24; “‘China as Philosophical Tool’,” Diogenes, 50 (2003): 15–21; Detour and Access: Strategies of Meaning in China and Greece, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2000); and (with Thierry Marchaisse), Penser d’un Dehors (la Chine): Entretiens d’Extrême-Orient (Paris: Seuil, 2000). 16.  Abe Masao writes: “The Middle Way . . . should not be taken as a middle point between two poles. On the contrary, the Middle Way breaks through dipolarity; it is the overcoming of dipolarity itself.” Zen and Western Thought, ed. William R. LaFleur (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985), p. 157. The Kyoto school of philosophy should be noted for its transversal or hybrid attempt to incorporate East and West in the writings of Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime, Nishitani Keiji (whose thought is compared by Dallmayr with Heidegger’s), and Suzuki Daisets Teitaro (whose mode of philosophizing is even the envy of Heidegger). This alone justifies Japan as a site of transversal or hybrid culture. 17.  It is worth mentioning in passing the lengthy work of Wolfgang Welsch on “transversal reason” (transversale Vernunft) in Part 2 of Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), whose detailed analysis is beyond the scope of this essay. Transversal reason is another defense of reason against its “death” in contemporary thought, particularly in postmodern philosophy. As “a faculty of transitions,” it is a defense against “the abandonment of reason in favor of a multitude of rationalities.” It is that meta-rationality that is concerned with the highly diverse paradigms of rationality and evaluates their interrelationships. It is highly doubtful that, despite his gallant effort, there is a breakthrough in Welsch’s transversal reason beyond the confines of Eurocentrism. Postcolonial reason is untouched by Welsch’s transversal reason. Whose rationality is it, anyway? Moreover, Welsch’s critique of postmodernism would stand to reason if the postmodern is the defense of “unreason.” Lyotard’s critique of the logic of Hegel’s rationalism, for example, is intact when Lyotard writes: “All that is real is rational, all that is rational is real: ‘Auschwitz’ refutes the speculative doctrine. At least this crime, which is real, is not rational.” See The Postmodern Explained, trans. Don Barry, Bernadette Maher, Julian Pefanis, Virginia Spate, and Morgan Thomas, and eds. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), p. 29. Two short summations of Welsch’s transversal reason are available in English: “Reason and Transition: On the Concept of Transversal Reason,” posted on 11/19/2003 on the Internet http://www2.uni-jena.de/welsch/Papers/reasTrans.html (16 single-spaced pages), and “Rationality and Reason,” in Criticism and Defense of

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Rationality in Contemporary Philosophy, ed. Dane R. Gordon and Józef Niznik (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 17–31. 18.  J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, trans. and ed. F. M. Barnard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 199. The eye as in the “mind’s eye” is a metaphor or symbol for cerebral activity. Mainstream modern Western philosophy (Cartesianism in particular) is ocularcentric or panoptic. In this respect, Herder’s use of the “eye” in this query is well chosen. 19.  See François Jullien, “Did Philosophers Have to Become Fixated on Truth?” (trans. Janet Lloyd), Critical Inquiry, 28 (2002): 803–24; “‘China as Philosophical Tool’,” Diogenes, 50 (2003): 15–21; Detour and Access: Strategies of Meaning in China and Greece, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2000); and (with Thierry Marchaisse), Penser d’un Dehors (la Chine): Entretiens d’Extrême-Orient (Paris: Seuil, 2000). 20.  See “Michel Foucault and Zen: A Stay in a Zen Temple [1978],” trans. Richard Townsend, in Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 110–14. 21.  See Edward de Bono, New Think (New York: Basic Books, 1968). 22.  See “Everywhere and Nowhere,” in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 121–58. Charles Taylor, whose theme of recognition and multiculturalism drew worldwide attention, regards Merleau-Ponty as one of the great twentieth-century deconstructors. See “Heidegger on the Connection Between Nihilism, Art, Technology, and Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles Guignon (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 334, n. 2. 23.  Cf. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 317: “We can no longer afford conceptions of history that stress linear development or Hegelian transcendence, any more than we can accept geographical or territorial assumptions that assign centrality to the Atlantic world and congenital and even delinquent peripherality to non-Western regions.” 24.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Everywhere and Nowhere,” p. 139. Now political theorists began to realize that the study of politics cannot ignore the broad context of the socio-cultural life-world. See, e.g., Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Cultural Studies and Political Theory, ed. Jodi Dean (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). 25. In Intersecting Voices (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), the American feminist political theorist Iris Marion Young uses the expression “asymmetrical reciprocity” to describe when the other’s difference is respected and also used as a “resource” for enlarging the circle of human relationships (see particularly pp. 38–59). 26.  I stumbled across Glissant in reading in 2003 while reading Walter D. Mignolo’s “Rethinking the Colonial Model,” in Rethinking Literary Theory: A Dialogue in Theory, ed. Linda Hutcheon and Mario J. Valdés (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 155–93. In reading Glissant’s work, I came to the realization that he has an important niche in constructing transversality as a critique of Eurocentric

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universalism or as trans(uni)versalism. Particularly, he represents a critique of Eurocentric universalism from the model of postcolonialism along with post-structuralism and deconstructionism. They together constitute what I would broadly call postmodernism as a philosophical movement. The Caribbean—a cluster of small islands surrounded by sea—provides an ideal model of ethnic, lingual, and cultural diversity or a haven of hybridity. 27.  Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 33, 49. 28. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), p. 64. 29.  Ibid., p. 66. 30. Ibid, pp. 66, 67. 31. Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 68. Said makes an important and well-chosen point: “Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, White, or Black, or Western, or Oriental” (Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 336). In his magnum opus, Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty observes that T.E. Lawrence—the famed author of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom—is a hybrid man or “the man who could see things through the veils at once of two customs, two educations, two environments” (pp. 187–88, n. 1). 32.  Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 33.  Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 212. 34.  Quoted in John Jervis, Transgressing the Modern (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 198. 35. Felski, The Gender of Modernity, p. 212. 36. Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, Éloge de la Créolité/In Praise of Creoleness (Paris: Gallimard, 1989 and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). 37. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, p. 98. 38. For Schrag, transversality is a movement “beyond the dialogic”: It is “not a dialogical understanding, which is why it also needs to be beyond hermeneutics since hermeneutics is fundamentally dialogical” (Experience Between Philosophy and Communication, pp. 24–25). Here Schrag has particularly in mind Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. What the dialogical is to the “in-between,” transversality is to the “beyond.” Schrag has “a friendly Auseinandersetzung”—to use his own expression—with Gadamer. Although transversality is not identical with dialogical thinking, there is no reason why the “method” of dialogue should be bracketed off from achieving hybridity or the “fusion” of cultural horizons. To be sure, Gadamer’s hermeneutical insights can be extended to comparative political theory. As his hermeneutics stands as it is, it has yet to break through its Eurocentric shell. 39.  See the author’s Prolegomena to a Carnal Hermeneutics (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014).

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40.  See John Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), p. 50. Speaking of Robert Musil, Italo Calvino wisely observes that the very notion of multiplicity in a tangled web of relationships signifies our “inability to find an ending.” Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 110. 41.  In Greek etymology, boustrophedonic refers to “turn[ing] [strophe] back and forth, as an ox [bous] ploughs a field.” See J. Hillis Miller and Manuel Asensi, Black Holes: J. Hillis Miller; or, Boustrophedonic Reading (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. ix. 42. Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 97. 43. See my “Responsibility as First Ethics: Macmurray and Levinas,” in John Macmurray: Critical Perspectives, eds. David Fergusson and Nigel Dower (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), pp. 173–88; and my “Difference and Responsibility,” in Phänomenologie der Natur, a special issue of Phänomenologische Forschungen, ed. Kah Kyung Cho and Young-Ho Lee (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1999), pp. 129–66. 44.  Second ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago, Press, 1998), p. 2. 45.  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 85. For further details of the connection between transversality and geophilosophy, see my “Transversality and Geophilosophy in the Age of Globalization,” in Calvin O. Schrag and the Task of Philosophy after Postmodernity, eds. Martin Beck Matuštík and William L. McBride (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002), pp. 74–90. 46.  Arne Naess, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary,” Inquiry, 16 (1973): 99. 47. Ulrich Beck and Johannes Willms, Conversations with Ulrich Beck, trans. Michael Pollak (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), p. 38. 48.  Beck writes: “[T]he Enlightenment concept of cosmopolitanism has to be freed from its origins in imperial universalism, such as we find in Kant and many others. It has to be opened up to the recognition of multiplicity. It has to become the core of the concept” (ibid., p. 183). 49.  Ibid., p. 25. 50.  Ibid., p. 29. Beck continues in contentious language: “I am afraid I am somewhat sick of the ‘post-ism,’ ‘de-ism,’ and ‘beyond-ism’ of our times. . . . Modernity is a problem in need of a solution for which Europe bears a special responsibility. Europe invented it, even if it did borrow crucial bits from other cultures. . . . What we need is a fundamental self-critique, a redefinition—we might even say a reformation—of modernity and modern society. Modernity needs to be re-formed in the fullest sense on a global level” (ibid., p. 25). On account of geophilosophical configurations alone, that is, on account of the ecological crisis alone that is truly a modern advent, it is doubtful that “reformed modernity” or “a second modernity” is capable of showing anthropocentrism or what Francis Bacon called “philanthropia” the way out of its bottle. The intimation that since all living creatures are earth-dwellers in sharing and belonging to the same earth, it stands to reason to argue that our sense of humanity and compassion should be extended to nonhuman others. This requires, I think, a

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radical break or discontinuity with rather than a reformation of Western modernity. What if modernity has become in Beck’s own expression—a “zombie category” in the world of all forms of multiplicity? We must attempt to fit concepts into reality rather than reality into concepts. 51.  Ibid., p. 130. 52.  If we wish to taste hybridity in food, try the following list of Asian “delicacies”: the squid pizza, the curry doughnut, the bean-paste Danish, the kimchee burger, the green tea milk shake, the BST (bacon, seaweed, and tomato) sandwich, and so on. See T. R. Reid, Confucius Lives Next Door (New York: Random House, 1999), p. 30. If you like burger but not kimchee, Danish but not bean-paste, milkshake but not green tea, or bacon and tomato but not seaweed, then you must be an agonist or essentialist but not a dialogist! On the other hand, the Whiteheadian Charles Hartshorne once remarked that kimchee, which is spicy, heavily red-peppered Korean pickled cabbage, would dominate and thus destroy all the other flavors. That is to say, kimchee is predatory or a predatory empire-builder that destroys the world as multiflavored or “motley” reality. While recently reading Desmond Morris’s work The Human Animal (New York: Crown, 1994), pp. 26–27, I came across the fascinating traveling gesture of fig (fica)—a slang term in Italian for the female genitalia—which when we were youngsters we learned to use as a gesture of sexual insult during the Japanese occupation of Korea. In fact, the fig gesture originally traveled from Europe to Japan with the Portuguese or the first Europeans in the mid-sixteenth century. Morris comments that the Portuguese must have traded gestures as well as goods on their expeditious visits to Japan. To his amazement, he discovered the fig gesture signifying protection while visiting a geisha house in Kyoto for the purpose of academic research, not of asobi.

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Edouard Glissant’s Aesthetics of Relation as Diversality and Creolization

1. PROLOGUE I want to go everywhere. ―Wiley Jung (two years old)

We are living in interesting times1 because we are challenged by the interconnected buzzwords of multiculturalism and globalization when the exchange and cross-fertilization of diverse cultural ideas and values take place. In a globalizing world, ideas and values do indeed travel and migrate everywhere in all directions—from West to East, from North to South, and also diagonally. The late Canadian philosopher of communication Marshall McLuhan fashioned the idea of the world becoming a “global village” with the aid of electronic technology (e.g., the Internet) as the ruling medium of communication in the late twentieth century.2 We are not one but many, to be sure. According to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “we” are neither “people” nor “masses,” but a “multitude.” The idea of “people” for them reduces many to a single and unitary entity while “masses” is driven to uniformity.3 To conserve diversity, “multitude” is preferred in describing the social world, which is nothing but a multiple network of relationships as well as multiple experiential realities. “Multitude,” for its name’s sake, is a fitting response to both the phenomenon of multiculturalism and the advent of globalization. There is nothing trite about emphasizing that all understanding, all thinking, is more or less comparative, that is, it is intertextual. Comparison is the source and resource of discovering the limits of the self’s discourse in light of the (foreign) Other, which is not one but always plural. For the sake of advancing 239

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comparative literature, Jonathan Culler wisely prods his colleagues “to abandon its traditional Eurocentrism and turn global” or go planetary. The hyphenated American literary and cultural critics Rey Chow contends that the study of the non-West is strongly justified for no other reason than that it questions and explores the very limits of Western discourses.4 2. WESTERN MODERNITY AND THE LEGACY OF EUROCENTRISM The British historian J. M. Roberts delivered in mid-1980s a series of BBC talks that resulted in the publication of The Triumph of the West. In his conclusion, he remarked with confidence: “What seems to be clear is that the story of western civilization is now the story of mankind, its influence so diffused that old oppositions and antitheses are now meaningless. The ‘West’ is hardly now a meaningful term except to historians.”5 As a matter of fact, the idea of “a post-Western world” is for Roberts unthinkable. The grand narrative of Roberts has been echoed later by Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history,” which is nothing short of declaring the global triumph of Anglo-American liberalism.6 Enlightenment thought is the intellectual soul of Western modernity. Its legacy continues, and its project has not yet been finished. The Turkish intellectual Ahmet Davutoglu asked with cogency and urgency: Who will finish it?7 Enlightenment’s unbridled optimism alleges to promote and crown humanity’s progress based on the cultivation of pure and applied reason. Kant is the paragon of Enlightenment thought, and as such he spelled out the motto of its rationalism in the clearest and simplest term: The autonomy of reason was meant to rescue and emancipate humanity—perhaps European humanity—from the dark cave of self-incurred immaturity.8 In so doing, he institutionalized the major agenda of European modernity whose rationality has never been seriously challenged until the auspicious advent of postmodernism in Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jean-François Lyotard, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Gianni Vattimo, and others. While privileging and valorizing the autonomy and authority of reason for allegedly human progress and emancipation, European modernity unfortunately left in the cold the (Reason’s) Other whether it be (1) body, (2) woman, (3) nature, or (4) non-Europe, or “Tricontinents” (the three continents of Asia, Africa, and Latin America).9 Body, woman, nature, and non-West are not randomly isolated but four interconnected issues: Most interestingly, it is no accident that the feminine gender is assigned to body, nature, and non-West, while their (binary) opposites—mind, culture, and West—are masculine or “malestream” categories.

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The institution of Western thought called Eurocentrism, narcissistic or hegemonic, is that habitus of mentalité that privileges the West or Europe as the cultural, political, economic, and moral capital of the globe. It is, in fact, nothing but European ethnophilosophy proclaimed to be universal. What began as provincial in the West becomes universalized, whereas what is provincial in the non-West remains provincial forever. Eurocentrism is tantamount to the blind-sightedness of modern European intellectuals to recognize or accept the otherness of the non-European Other, which is reduced to “transparency”—to use Glissant’s expression. They, or Black people in particular, are condemned to non-historical entities.10 What is truly shocking is the professed racist claims advanced by two of the guiding, “enlightened” paragons of modern Western philosophy: David Hume and Immanuel Kant.11 Hume’s racism against non-whites, particularly Blacks, is blatant and uncontained: “I am apt to suspect the negroes, and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no science.”12 Kant, who championed obligatory moral integrity, universal knowledge, and a “league” of nations for “perpetual peace,” parroted mindlessly Hume’s racism and failed miserably to observe and consign human dignity to nonwhites. He concluded that “so fundamental is the difference between these two races [whites and blacks] of man, and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color” (italics added).13 Hegel, too, castigated the non-European other, and his “ethnocentric ignorance”14 is as glaring and blundering as Hume’s and Kant’s. There is an uncanny convergence in Merleau-Ponty’s and Glissant’s critique of Hegel’s Eurocentric universalism and absolute rationalism replacing “the old concept of the universal.” Speaking of Hegel’s Eurocentric conception of history, Glissant retorts: History is a highly functional fantasy of the West, originating at precisely the time when it alone “made” the history of the world. If Hegel relegated African peoples to the ahistorical, Amerindian peoples to the prehistorical, in order to reserve History for European people exclusively, it appears that it is not because these African or American peoples “have entered History” that we can conclude today that such a hierarchical conception of “the march of History” is no longer relevant.15

Here Glissant echoes Merleau-Ponty on Hegel in his Inaugural Lecture at the Collège de France in 1953. Merleau-Ponty emphasized that “the universal

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history of Hegel is the dream of history. As in our dreams, all that is thought is real, and all that is real is thought. There is nothing at all for men to do who are not already taken up in the system.”16 To use this identity logic of the real and the rational (thought), the non-West is excluded from Hegel’s system of history. Furthermore, the contingency of human events is the precondition of history. Otherwise, according to Merleau-Ponty, “History has no meaning, if this meaning is understood as that of a river which, under the influence of all-powerful causes, flows toward an ocean in which it disappears. Every appeal to universal history cuts off the meaning of the specific event, renders effective history insignificant, and is a nihilism in disguise” (italics added).17 Merleau-Ponty, too, is a radical empiricist who pays attention to particulars before abstract universals. Nothing is prefixed or predetermined in history under the guise of “Universal History.” Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Hegel’s Eurocentrism or Orientalism is found in his introduction (avant-propos) to Les Philsophes célèbres (1956)18 when Glissant was studying philosophy and ethnography in Paris. The edited work is a study on comparative philosophy. In confronting Hegel, Merleau-Ponty addressed the question of Occidental “philosophy” and Oriental “non-philosophy.” Merleau-Ponty puts forcefully his conception of philosophy as the discovery of truth in the lateral from the West to the East or non-West. For Merleau-Ponty, “there is not a philosophy which contains all philosophies; philosophy as a whole is at certain moments in each philosophy. . . . [P]hilosophy’s center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.”19 Hence truth, too, is correlative or lateral rather than linear. Claude Lévi-Strauss spoke of preserving the lateral continuity of all humanity.20 Merleau-Ponty and Lévi-Strauss together sought the “lateral universal,” which, according to Merleau-Ponty, is no longer an “overarching universal.” The lateral universal is acquired through ethnological experience and its incessant testing of the self through the (foreign) Other and the (foreign) Other through the self. Hegel judged the “Oriental thought” of China in a cavalier fashion. In his grand narratives of Lectures on the History of Philosophy, he was totally dismissive of Chinese philosophy as “elementary” (infantile); the Chinese yin-yang trigrams and hexagrams are “superficial,” and the Chinese composition of elements (fire, water, wood, metal, and earth) are “all in confusion.” Then he caps his commentary on Confucius: “Cicero gives us De Officiis, a book of moral teaching more comprehensive and better than all the books of Confucius.”21 To sum up: For Hegel, philosophical truth as absolute and universal knowledge is certified by the Occidental seal of approval alone. NonWestern philosophy lives in the shadow of Western philosophy. It is indeed relegated to the status of non-philosophy or philosophy of inconsequence.22 For Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, all thought is part of the life-world

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(Lebenswelt) as socio-cultural reality. All philosophies are anthropological types, and none has any privilege to truth. European thought is as much “ethnophilosophical” as Chinese thought. However, Hegel’s Eurocentric philosophy assumes that what is ethnophilosophical in the West is universalized or universalizable, whereas what is ethnophilosophical in China remains ethnophilosophical. “If Western thought is what it claims to be,” MerleauPonty challenges the conceit of Hegel’s Eurocentrism, “it must prove it by understanding all ‘life-worlds.’”23 Merleau-Ponty further contends that the arrogant path of Hegel that excludes Chinese thought from universal knowledge and draws “a geographical frontier between philosophy and non-philosophy” also excludes a good part of the Western past. Philosophy as a perpetual beginning is destined to examine its own idea of truth again and again because truth is “a treasure scattered about in human life prior to all philosophy and not divided among doctrines.” Thusly viewed, Western philosophy itself is destined to reexamine not only its own idea of truth but also related matters and institutions such as science, economy, and politics. Merleau-Ponty writes with unsurpassable poignancy: From this angle, civilizations lacking our philosophical or economic equipment take on an instructive value. It is not a matter of going in search of truth or salvation in what falls short of science or philosophical awareness, or of dragging chunks of mythology as such into our philosophy, but acquiring—in the presence of these variants of humanity that we are so far from—a sense of the theoretical and practical problems our institutions are faced with, and of rediscovering the existential field that they are born in and that their long success has led us to forget. The Orient’s “childishness” has something to teach us, if it were nothing more than the narrowness [and rigidity] of our adult ideas. The relationship between Orient and Occident, like that between child and adult, is not that of ignorance to knowledge or non-philosophy to philosophy; it is much more subtle, making room on the part of the Orient for all anticipations and “prematurations.” Simply rallying and subordinating “non-philosophy” to true philosophy will not create the unity of the human spirit. It already exists in each culture’s lateral relationships to the others, in the echoes one awakes in the other (italics added).24

3. GLISSANT’S POETICS OF DIVERSITY: DIFFERENCE AS RELATION The Martiniquan francophone Glissant25 is a poet, novelist, political activist, and, above all, philosopher who speaks of the poetics of relation in the established tradition of Aimé Césaire, Franz Fanon, and Victor Segalen with a difference.26 Indeed, they are the Foursome of the distinctly Caribbean

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(antillais) way of crafting difference, diversity, and Creoleness (Créolité). Glissant acknowledges his special indebtedness to Segalen, who wrote that “it is through difference and in diversity that Existence is elated” (c’est par la différence et dans le divers que s’exalte l’Existence), and Glissant’s work “Poetics of Diversity” (Poétique du Divers) is a deserving homage he pays and an expression of his gratitude to Segalen. Glissant’s writings are a hybrid of poetics, philosophy, and political activism (i.e., they are intertextual, or both intercultural/cross-cultural and interdisciplinary).27 Poetics in particular is a genre of aesthetics in the form of written discourse (écriture), and Glissant uses them as synonyms. In Sinic cultures (China, Korea, Japan, and Singapore) whose daily linguistic diet wholly or partly is sonography, in which the poet is defined (literally or etymologically) as one who “enshrines words” with an economy of words (e.g., Japanese haiku). Glissant’s writings are never prosaic. They often and unmistakably show a haiku-esque, as well as Blakean flavor that is befitting, I think—without any hint of insult or degradation―for Martinique, which is “a speck of dust” (poussière) in the Caribbean archipelago. Glissant writes with a poetic or haiku-esque flair, for example, that “a tree is a country” or “every word is an earth”28 after the style of the Martiniquan saying that “a black man is a century” (an neg sé an sièc). He intimates that his writings on the aesthetics of relation, difference, and Creoleness are deeply rooted in his indigenous soil of Martinique as a small island of the Caribbean archipelago. The idea of Creoleness or hybridity (métissage) based on difference and diversality, I submit, is a “strategy” of leaving the monistic universalism of Western modernity and entering a globalizing world. Glissant discovered the Caribbean/postcolonial singularity in diversity or plurality (Many) that makes métissage (“cross-breeding” or hybridity) possible as opposed to Eurocentric, colonial Sameness (One).29 The conception of diversality as a configuration and confluence of differences “brings back to what is natural in the world, outside the Same (le Même) and the One, . . . [and] it opposes . . . Universality [which refuses to grant] the great opportunity of a world diffracted but recomposed, the conscious harmonization of preserved diversities” (l’harmonisation consciente des diversités preservées).30 In this respect, Glissant addresses and elaborates on the “postcolonial/postmodern difference.” What Western modernity is to identity, postmodernity is to difference. The conception of difference makes all the difference between Western modernity and postmodernity. Difference is a keyword in such postmodern thinkers as Martin Heidegger, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Mikhail Bakhtin, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Gianni Vattimo. Postmodernity is characteristically an “adventure of difference”—to use the

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title of Vattimo’s work. The postmodern “adventure of difference” begins with the end of modernist identity. But for difference, there would be neither relation nor diversity. The former is the “kingpin” of the latter. As Michael Walzer frames it judiciously but minimally, difference makes toleration necessary, while toleration makes difference possible.31 Difference is the defining moment of relation and diversity. But for difference, there would be neither relation nor diversity. Here Heidegger’s (1969) wordplay on Differenz as Unterschied is most suggestive, instructive, and fruitful: It offers, I submit, a postmodern alternative to the cultural politics of modernist identity for the reason that Unter/schied doubles (or hybridizes, if you will) difference (Differenz) with the “between” that connects, preserves, and advances difference and the relational at the same time.32 Merleau-Ponty, too, promotes human communication and sociality in terms of “a non-reductive multiplicity of perspectives” without losing difference or distinction.”33 The feminist Nancy Julia Chodorow brings her psychoanalytical insight to bear on the conception of differentiation that is central to the security and promotion of a relational self. She intimates that “we are all to some degree incorporations and extensions of others” and differentiation itself is “a particular way of being connected to others.”34 In other words, differentiation is none other than the way of making connections in the face of difference.35 Speaking of feminism, it is interesting to note that difference in French (la différence) is a gendered word in favor of or privileging femininity (i.e., Alice Jardine’s neologism “gynesis”). It, in sum, engenders relationships. Vivre la difference! Relation (sociality) is a form of multiplicity that refers to the phenomenon of a labyrinthine and entangled maze of relationships. Indeed, coexistence as multiplicity is an earthword in Glissant’s sense. Its ubiquity and permeability cannot be doubted.36 The American pragmatist George Herbert Mead ably argues that sociality is the capacity of being many things at once. The human mind itself is “the culmination of sociality.” In fact, sociality permeates the entire universe.37 Italo Calvino defines the very notion of multiplicity as an “inability to find an ending”: Multiplicity multiplies itself.38 The same cannot be said of Hegel’s dialectic that dictates the march of history. The ultimate synthesis of Hegel’s dialectic of history or the ultimate telos of dialectical history is, in fact, the identity of identity and difference. In mapping connections, Gilles Deleuze contends that his philosophy of multiplicity based on the logic of difference is “nondialectizable.”39 In supporting Max Weberian conception of sociality (l’intermonde) as reconcilable or transversal multiplicity of perspectives (Vielseitigkeit), Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues that the dialectic is “unstable” and that the only “good dialectic” is “hyperdialectic,” i.e., “dialectic without

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synthesis.” Hyperdialectic, he intimates, is “a thought that . . . is capable of reaching truth because it envisages without restriction the plurality of the relationships and what has been called ambiguity” (italics added).40 It is Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogical principle or dialogism, as opposed to Hegel’s (and Marx’s) dialectic, that deserves our close attention as it uncovers the postmodern dispositif of multiplicity as having no ending. Hegel’s succession of sublations (Aufhebungen) “finalizes” itself in the identity of identity and difference. Bakhtin’s dialogical principle based on Dostoevsky’s poetics is “unfinalizable,” that is, it has no ending. In it there is neither first nor last word. For Bakhtin, “nothing is absolutely dead: every [past] meaning will have its homecoming festival.”41 Speaking of Dostoevsky, Bakhtin writes forcefully: . . . at the center of Dostoevsky’s artistic worlds must lie dialogue, and dialogue not as a means but as an end itself. Dialogue here is not the threshold to action, it is the action itself. It is not a means for revealing, for bringing to the surface the already ready-made character of a person; no, in dialogue a person not only shows himself outwardly, but he becomes for the first time that which he is—and, we repeat, not only for others but for himself as well. To be means to communicate dialogically. When dialogue ends, everything ends. Thus dialogue, by its very essence, cannot and must not come to an end. . . . Dostoevsky carries dialogue into eternity. . . . At the level of the novel, it is presented as the unfinalizability of dialogue. . . . (italics added).42

In the final analysis, Bakhtin’s dialogical principle is predicated upon the eternity of time and the infinity of space, i.e., it is both “chronopolitics” and “geopolitics.” The teleological end of Hegel’s dialectic works in favor of Europe against non-Europe or the Tricontinents. The goal of cross-cultural dialogue is, hopefully, to reduce if not eradicate “ethnocentric ignorance.” However, there can be no genuine cross-cultural dialogue in the logic of Eurocentrism—for that matter, any ethnocentrism, e.g., Sinocentrism, Indocentrism, Afrocentrism, or Latinocentrism—where the “host” culture is conceived of as superior (master) and the “guest” as inferior (slave). In Hegel’s model of the master-slave struggle between the colonizer and the colonized, there is only the irreconcilable opposition of domination and subordination that inevitably end in—to use Hegel’s own language of the ultimatum—the death of the one over the other. In other words, the aim of cross-cultural dialogue is to transgress, i.e., to “turn the world upside down” or go beyond the question of Hegel’s recognition whose ultimate logic leads to the abolition or death of (the other’s) difference. Hegel’s Eurocentrism, as well as Hume’s and Kant’s racism, is wholly or partly, I suspect, due to “ethnocentric ignorance” whose banality engenders the colonial mentality. To overcome it, we need a phenomenological anthro-

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pology of cultural differences.43 There is the “evil of banality” as well as the “banality of evil.” I am alluding here to Hannah Arendt’s controversial reportage of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961, in which banality and evil are mutually implicated and intertwined.44 We often forget to emphasize Arendt’s message concerning banality (or evil). According to Arendt, Eichmann exhibited “extraordinary shallowness” and appeared “terribly and terrifyingly normal.”45 He was not stupid but showed “a curious, quite authentic inability to think” (italics added). To put it simply, Eichmann was banal. Eichmann’s banality is the inability “to think from the standpoint of somebody else,” which ends in the defacement of the Other. Eichmann reduced the other (Jew) to normal transparency, which is tantamount to taking it to be simply a “reflection” of the self.46 Eichmann, for example, took or mistook “obedience” to be Kantian “duty” and identified his own “idealism” with Theodor Herzl’s Zionism. In banality, then, there is the reduction of the other to the self and thus the defacement/effacement of (the Other’s) difference. It was Johann Gottfried Herder, a pupil of Kant, who contended that colonialism “effaces” cultural differences. As Anthony Pagden points out, colonialism for Herder is “an evil because it reduces, or threatens to reduce . . . the number of cultural variants that exist in the world. That is an evil because plurality is part of the way the world is constituted.”47 That will assuredly make Herder a champion of pluralism. It stands to reason to conclude that Herder would have endorsed the mushrooming of tricontinental nationalisms against Western colonialism in the postwar world for multiplying cultural differences and thus diversifying the world. If we follow the logic of Herder’s contention, there is also a nagging and related question concerning Kant’s and Hegel’s rationalism, which, by universalizing European particularity, reduces the non-West or the rest of the world to “non-philosophy.” The idea of postcolonial/postmodern difference makes Europe aware the fact that “it is no longer unquestioned and dominant centre of the world.”48 Here what Herder has to say in the following passage is a critical inquiry into Universal Reason, of the philosophical mainstream of Western modernity since Descartes. To quote Herder in full: After dozens of attempts, I find myself unable to comprehend how reason can be presented so universally as the single summit and purpose of all human culture, all happiness, all good. Is the whole body just one big eye? Would it not suffer if every part, the hand and the foot, had to serve as the eye and the brain? Reason, too carelessly, too uselessly diffused, may well weaken desires, instincts and vital activity—in fact has already done so.49

Against Universal Reason that colonizes the entire globe or earth, the rise of postcolonialism, feminism, and nature’s mutiny is a solidified testimony

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to the decolonization of Universal Reason. Colonialism, for example, is not a temporary anomaly, but a continuous affront for centuries to the nonWestern, Tricontinental world. For Jürgen Habermas,50 who defends modernity as an unfinished project, postmodernity that “undermines” “exacts a high price for taking leave of modernity.” We can easily argue, however, that postmodern/postcolonial gains are greater than its losses.51 Adieu modernity, we have nothing to lose except our shackles. Hume’s and Kant’s white racism privileges the European whites as superior and downcasts the non-European others by the colors of their skin (black, yellow, and red), which should not determine the complexion of their minds, the sources of Reason. 4. THE WAY OF TRANSVERSALITY: BEYOND RECOGNITION AND THE IDENTITY POLITICS OF UNIVERSALISM In the beginning was the Relation: “This changes everything.”52 ―Anonym

As disenchantment calls for transgression and transcendence, the postmodern politics of difference and diversality deconstructs the modern politics of identity. Despite many of its critics, deconstruction is not a demolition derby. Etymologically, rather, it is a hybrid of two words that interrupts the status quo for the sake of reconstruction and transformation.53 Insofar as postmodernity unpacks Eurocentric modernity based on the Manichaean division between Europe and non-Europe, between “philosophy” and “non-philosophy.” The postmodern philosophy of difference converges with the “postcolonial difference,”54 and the difference between the two is not even a turn. It is rather a lane change on a highway or may be likened to two lanes merging into one. Both are a critique of—in the language of the postcolonial theorist Paul Gilroy—an “imperialistic particularism dressed up in a seductive universal garb.”55 What Chris Bongie says of the exiled Cuban writer Antonio BenitezRojo can be applied to the “postcolonial difference,” that is, it “has always contained within it the seeds of a ‘postmodern perspective.’”56 In the end, universalism with a European face (Eurocentrism) is not much different from “ethnocentric chauvinism.”57 The way of transversality is twofold: Two folds are mutually complementary. One fold is to unmake ethnocentric universalism in general, and Eurocentric universalism in particular, in which the particular hegemonizes or colonizes the universal. When in it the (foreign) Other is reduced to the transparency of the self, it is either “assimilated” or “annihilated”—to use

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Glissant’s terms.58 Transversality, in short, strives to minimize if not eradicate “ethnocentric ignorance.” By so doing, it promotes the global miscegenation of ideas and values. The way of transversality is an interesting reorientation or “nouvelle cousine”59—to borrow Homi Bhabha’s phrase—of our thinking about multiculturalism as “asymmetric infinity” in an age of globalization when ideas and values do travel and migrate in all directions—from East to West, from South to North, and above all diagonally.60 Thus transversality is a “social imaginary”61 that allows cultural border crossings. As a cross-cultural transaction, it requires a lateral movement—not unilateral, of course, but bilateral or multilateral. When culture is defined as a particular geographical placement (i.e., location), any cross-cultural endeavor is necessarily a lateral movement. Merleau-Ponty is a quintessential transversalist when he speaks of the “diacritical value” of defining truth as lateral or the “lateral universal.” Transversality is a keyword in the existential phenomenology of Calvin O. Schrag. Inspired directly and indirectly by the philosophical insights of Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Deleuze, and Guattari, Lyotard, and Foucault, Schrag develops transversality as diagonal engagement and enrichment across differences and embraces the conception of truth as the way of communicability. Transversality is for Schrag a concept of transformative refiguration, which traverses what he calls “the Scylla of a hegemonic unification” on the one hand and “the Charybdis of a chaotic pluralism” on the other. While his transversal shifter visits “a multiplicity of viewpoints, perspectives, belief systems, and regions of concern,” it means to scale the continental divide between modernity and postmodernity; that is to say, it means to subvert and transgress the dichotomy or bipolar oppositions between modernism and postmodernism by splitting diagonally the difference between the pure verticality of modern universal “transcendentalism” and the pure horizontality of postmodern historicism. In seeking “convergences,” transversality broadens the “in-between” for the sake of the “beyond.” Here Heidegger’s notion of the Fourfold (das Geviert) comes handy and tells the “whereabouts” of Being’s presence as the intersection of sky, earth, gods, and mortals (humans) whose geometrical figuration is drawn by David Farrell Krell in a rectangle with two diagonal lines that connect each of the four elements with Being as their intersecting middle epicenter. The crossing of Being (or Inter-being) is not a crossing out (Durchstreichung) but a crossing through (Durchkreuzen), thus, the transversal communicability of the four facilitates diagonal crossings with Being at their center. Heidegger’s Being is really Interbeing, which symbolizes the middle as intersecting “in-betweenness.” Transversality as an interstitial, liminal “middle” or “betweenness” signals a new transfiguration and transvaluation of the world. By

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overcoming bipolar oppositions, in other words, it signals the beginning of a new regime of ontology, ethics, politics, and culture. Therefore, truth itself may be defined as concentric: To repeat, philosophy’s center, according to Merleau-Ponty, is everywhere and its circumference nowhere. If Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la Terre, 1961), along with Black Skin, White Masks (Peau Noire, Masques Blancs, 1952), is called the “Bible” of decolonization, then his compatriot Glissant’s Caribbean Discourse (Le Discours Antillais, 1981) along with Poetics of Relation (Poétique de la Relation, 1990) deserves to be called the Caribbean “Bible” of transversality in a globalizing age of multiculturalism. By decolonizing the Blacks—their bodies and minds—from white racism based on “mythologies,” Fanon’s work laid the foundation for Glissant’s transversality. However, Glissant takes us one step further by opening up an opportunity for cross-cultural dialogue and communication, that is, of exchanging ideas and values in the name of Creoleness or Caribbeanness. Unlike Fanon, who was an advocate of revolution, Glissant is Camus’s “rebel” (l’homme révolté), who declares “I rebel, therefore we exist” in promoting dialogue and renouncing violence. For Camus as for Glissant, “words are stronger than bullets.”62 The dehiscence of Glissant’s transversal philosophy would undoubtedly advance the cause of the diacritical cross-pollination and miscegenation of cultural ideas and values. There is an uncanny “convergence” between Schrag and Glissant on the issue of transversality. As a matter of face, according to Glissant, the poetics of diversality seeks “a transversal relation, without any universalist transcendence.”63 Similarly, Schrag remarks that “the transversal logos replaces the universal logos as the lynchpin of the philosophy of the new millennium.”64 In the language of Schrag, the transversal logos explores “convergence without coincidence,” “commonality without identity,” and “cooperation without uniformity”—to select only his three expressions.65 In the first place, the secret of transversality is discovered in Glissant’s epigrammatic statement that “Thinking about One is not thinking about All.” All is not One but Many, that is, diversity. Neither diversity nor Creoleness is an attempt to reduce Many to One: Many cannot be reduced to One, because Many loses its distinct quality of difference. The so-called recognition or acknowledgment of difference, which is not one but many, is not the final but only the first step in the making of Creoleness or hybridity. In Praise of Creoleness/Éloge de la Créolité —a Caribbean manifesto that is purposely written in a bi-language (bilingue) (in French and English), “diversality” (diversalité) in opposition to universality is defined as—to reiterate—“the conscious harmonization of preserved diversities.” It enriches the tonality and even coloration of diversality when two or more

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tones are put together (i.e., orchestrated), there emerges harmonization (or synchronization) in which each individual tone is not lost but preserved, whereas when two colors are mixed together, there is no “harmony” but another color. In the name of “a polyphonic harmony,” diversality frowns upon “the obsessional concern with the Universal.” By the same token, the transversalist is a conductor who knows how to orchestrate, that is, who knows in detail the instrumentation of his orchestra. In the second place, and more importantly, Glissant proposes transversality in opposition to and as a replacement of universality. It embodies the heart of his “aesthetics of relation” as cross-cultural encounters. It is the way of crossing and going beyond (i.e., Creolize) ethnic, lingual, and cultural boundaries. Transversality is for Glissant the way of discovering Caribbean “subterranean convergence” from within.66 Creoleness is indigenous to the Caribbean archipelago: It is the métissage (“cross-breeding”) par excellence of Western and non-Western ethnicity and culture. The converging histories of the Caribbean peoples liberate them from “the linear, hierarchical vision of a single History.” Thus, transversality is “the site of multiple converging paths.” It seeks no “universal transcendence of the sublime.” Caribbean peoples (or “multitudes”) are “the roots of a cross-cultural relationship” (italics added), which mutate culturally, ethnically, and linguistically. Transversality is the way of seeking the dynamic “convergence that frees us [Caribbeans] from uniformity.” Ultimately, it is for Glissant nothing but “a project to relate” (italics added). Paul Gilroy’s reputed thesis of “the black Atlantic,” too, favors hybridity or “double consciousness” that sums up the transcultural intermix of African and European things. Hybridity is a converging middle path of “multiple, interconnecting axes of affiliation and differentiation.” It is worth noting that Gilroy’s “black Atlantic” is constructed as “a counterculture of modernity.” The Foucauldian Edward W. Said cautioned about the “essentializing” of culture, which occasions and spawns “culture wars” and hinders cross-cultural dialogues and conversations. As he puts it, it is the mode of Orientalizing the Orient, Occidentalizing the Occident, Africanizing Africa, Americanizing America, Latin Americanizing Latin America, Caribbeanizing the Caribbean, etc.67 “Essentialization” is the site of “clash.” Samuel Huntington’s controversial “clash of civilizations” exemplifies this cultural “essentialization.” In his new preface to Orientalism (1978) in 2003, Said forthrightly noted: Rather than the manufactured clash of civilizations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together. . . . But for [this] kind of wider perception we need time and patient and skeptical enquiry supported by faith in communities of interpretation that are difficult to sustain in a world demanding instant action and reaction.68

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Recognizing Eurocentrism or “essentializing” Europe as “a kind of intellectual apartheid regime in which the superior West is quarantined off from the inferior East,” John M. Hobson is outspoken about “de-essentializing” the West and discovers and explores “the Oriental West.” As modernization is primarily Westernization throughout the Tricontinents, finding and mapping “the Occidental East” is not a taxing task.69 Only by way of transversality or “the repetition of difference,” according to Schrag,70 do we “keep open the prospect for invention, intervention, transgression, re-creation, etc.”71 Glissant’s transversality for the sake of creating “a new reality” on a global scale is interspersed with the prefix inter (entre in both French and Spanish) with the occasional coupling of “post,” “trans,” and “cross.” It is, in short, interspersed with hyphenations and hybridizations. It is, for instance, post-identitarian, inter-racial/postethnic, definitely post-universal, and absolutely cross-cultural and crosslinguistic. For this reason, Chris Bongie observes with acuity that Caribbean “identity will always be the subject of an ‘impossible search.’”72 Creoleness, or Caribbeanness, dissolves the politics of cultural identity as well as the identity politics of universality into the sea of transversality. The Caribbean archipelago as a constellation of small islands is a supreme symbol of interconnectedness and interdependence, i.e., Interbeing or beings-in-relation. As such Glissant’s “aesthetics of relation” is the “relational ontology” par excellence and an ontology of “global relation” that has not fully realized but is a global imaginary a venir. Thinking in métissage, mestizaje or hybridity is the intellectual dispositif of Caribbeans. The above-mentioned Caribbean or “Creolized” manifesto begins with the sentence: “Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves Creoles” (“Ni Européens, ni Africains, ni Asiatiques, nou nous proclamons Créoles”). Creole (as hybrid) is neither unitarian nor separatist, but it may be likened to a hybrid “butterfly” who frees himself/herself by breaking off from an “ethnocentrist cocoon.” Glissant is an outstanding and unsurpassable spokesman of Creoleness or Caribbeanness. He describes the principium of Creoleness as the end of diversality, which can hardly be paraphrased: Diversity . . . means the human spirit’s striving for a cross-cultural relationship, without universalist transcendence. Diversity needs the presence of peoples, no longer as objects to be swallowed up, but with the intention of creating new relationships. Sameness requires fixed Being, Diversity establishes Becoming. . . . As Sameness rises within the fascination with the individual, Diversity is spread through the dynamism of communities. As the Other is a source of temptation of Sameness, Wholeness is the demand of Diversity. You cannot become Trinidadian or Quebecois, if you are not; but it is from now on true that if Trinidad and Quebec did not exist as accepted components of Diversity, something would

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be missing from the body of world culture—that today we would feel that loss. In other words, if it was necessary for Sameness to be revealed in the solitude of individual Being, it is now imperative that Diversity should “pass” through whole communities and peoples. Sameness is sublimated difference; Diversity is accepted difference.73

5. EPILOGUE Glissant’s poetics of synchronistic relation (poésie fulgurante)74 is what we might call the fulguration of coexistence, of Interbeing after the fashion of Merleau-Ponty.75 Outside it, there is nothing: To be alone is not to be. Merleau-Ponty writes with zest: [Our] political task is not incompatible with any cultural value or literary task, if literature and culture are defined as the progressive awareness of our multiple relationships with other people and the world rather than as extramundane techniques. If all truths are told, none will have to be hidden. In man’s co-existence with man, . . . morals, doctrines, thoughts and customs, laws, works and words all express each other; everything signifies everything. And outside this unique fulguration [my emphasis] of existence there is nothing.76

Glissant’s, as well as Merleau-Ponty’s fulguration of Interbeing, is circular/global and lateral/horizontal (i.e., transversal) rather than linear and vertical (universal). Glissant stresses that Columbus’s discovery of the Americas was also a circular or global historic event.77 Time was conceived of as circular, not linear, in the land that Columbus discovered. Glissant embraces the circular/global fulguration of Interbeing as diversality with difference in perpetuity, that is, it is an “asymmetric reciprocity” that comes to its fruition in métissage (miscegenation, hybridization). Glissant’s aesthetics of diversality with difference or métissage by no means espouses “One World” or globalization in the direction of establishing “One World” for the very simple reason that “One World,” like monistic universality, abolishes or erases difference and diversity. As he emphasizes—to repeat―“Thinking about One is not thinking about All” (italics added).78 “One World” favors homogeneity at the expense of heterogeneity, accepts “sublimated difference” rather than “accepted difference” (Glissant’s expressions), and sacrifices heteroglossia/diglossia for monoglossia. By privileging Europe, Eurocentrism universalizes its particularity as the center of the world. Eurocentrism magnifies Europe in an undue proportion that is called by Paul Valéry a “cape” of the Asian continent and by Nietzsche “a little peninsula of Asia.”79 As a philosopher of difference and diversality,

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Glissant is a “fox”—for that matter, all transversalists are “foxes,” whereas universalists or advocates of “One World” are “hedgehogs.” Here I am alluding to Isaiah Berlin’s (1986) popular appropriation of a line from the fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus. The fox is one who has both deftness and agility to (inter)weave many ideas, whereas the hedgehog has one big thought.80 The transversalist as a “fox” must know—ideally, I might add— many things: many philosophies, many cultures, many languages, many academic disciplines, etc., and above all how to miscegenate or intermix them. Cosmopolitanism embraces globalization: It is a globalizing process that hopefully reduces “ethnocentric ignorance.” Together they make up what Merleau-Ponty above called “a thought traveling a circle.” Like transversality, globalization attempts to make connections in the face of difference. Eurocentric universality tends to reify if not erase the non-European Other who becomes a second citizen in the vertical hierarchy of the globe: Europeans on top and non-Europeans at bottom. By Manichaean “essentialization” of “us” and “them,” Eurocentric universalism builds an unbridgeable gulf between Europe and non-Europe. Natalie Melas points out that “the unquestioned universality of ‘us’ (whites) versus the irreparable particularism of ‘them’ (those ‘marked’ by color or ethnicity or more ambiguously, gender) is an extraordinarily stubborn structure of thought and feeling” (italics added).81 This reification of the non-European Other is not conducive to the spirit of cosmopolitanism propounded by the Cynic Diogenes, Marx, and Virginia Woolf, who called themselves citizens of the world. Cosmopolitanism à venir for Glissant is the world that will become more “Tricontinental” and less European. Cosmopolitanism is eminently a political concept in a globalizing world. All politics, however, are in need of ethics as their travel companion (com/ panion). With Simon Critchley,82 we want to stress that if ethical theory without practical politics is empty, then practical politics without ethical theory is blind. Following Merleau-Ponty’s metaphor of circularity (or “circulating Being”), politics begins as ethics, and ethics ends in politics. I will argue that cosmopolitanism as well as globalization calls for the ethics of responsibility.83 If ethics is the first concern of postmodernism,84 then responsibility is proposed here as the first concern of postmodern ethics. The ethics of responsibility is grounded in the primacy of the Other (i.e., humans and nonhumans alike). Here, the Other (l’autre) means both the Other and difference, that is, the Other with difference. The Other is “otherwise” than the self or exists as the “exteriority” of the self (hors subjet). The primacy of the Other is the site of responsibility if not ethics itself, simply because all ethics exists for the sake of others, not for the self. It is worth noting that Mark C. Taylor made up the neologism “altarity” that defines the primacy of the Other or asymmetric reciprocity that favors the Other.85 It

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places the Other at an altar, that is, a higher ground. As he constructed it, the second letter A in “altarity” stands for “pyramid.” Thus “altarity” is as high as a pyramid. Be that as it may, it was Ludwig Feuerbach who discovered (the primacy) of “Thou” in search of philosophy of the future.86 The future has arrived now. His discovery may be called the “Copernican revolution” of modern Western ethical and social philosophy for the reason that what Copernicus’s heliocentrism is to Ptolemy’s geocentrism, heterocentrism (the primacy of the Other) is to egocentrism (the primacy of the self) (i.e., “rights talk”). Responsibility is “otherwise” than “rights talk” because it is based on “altarity,” whereas “rights talk” is self-centered. Bakhtin argues that dialogue alone gives birth to new ideas, that is, only when the idea “enters into genuine dialogic relationships with other ideas, with the idea of others.”87 The primacy of an anticipated answer or response is for him the “activating principle” of any dialogue. Levinas is more radical than Bakhtin because he means to uproot the established tradition of philosophy in that he defines ethics as “first philosophy” (philosophie première or prima philosophia). Thus, he means to sur/pass (Heidegger’s) ontology. For Levinas, ethics as “first philosophy” needs no grounding in ontology or epistemology. His ethics with a human face based on the primacy of the Other (i.e., “heteronomy” as he calls it) is the ethics of responsibility par excellence. Václav Havel, a philosopher and statesman of the post-totalitarian Czech Republic, read Levinas very closely in his prison years. Levinas’s ethics of responsibility gave him an impetus to formulate what he calls politics as “the art of the impossible” in opposition to Machiavelli’s “immoral” politics as “the art of the possible.” The ethics of responsibility comes to the aid of cosmopolitanism whatever shape and form it may take. Cosmopolitanism as a “social imaginary” exacts the ethics of responsibility à venir. The civility of cosmopolitanism is twofold. In the first place, it means to feel “at home in the world.” As an active principle, civility goes beyond the mere toleration of difference. In the language of Paul Gilroy, it is “the desire to dwell conviviality with difference.”88 Civility is derived from Merleau-Ponty’s principle of reversibility of “ourselves as strangers” and “strangers as ourselves.” Civility is, as Zygmunt Bauman says wisely, “the ability to interact with strangers without holding their strangeness against them and without pressing them to surrender it or to renounce some or all the traits that have made them strangers in the first place.”89 To hold the strangeness of strangers against them is to violate Glissant’s aesthetics of diversality with difference. The ethical term that honors and cherishes the ethics of responsibility based on “altarity” is altruism, whose synonyms are compassion, humaneness, hospitality, generosity, kindness, and caring.90 In the second place, civility demands the renunciation of all forms of violence:

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brutality, cruelty, murder, torture, terror, and servitude. Like the terms “civilization” and “city,” the end of civility is to “civilize” humanity as a multiple configuration of differences. Rebellion91 renounces violence that abolishes or diminishes difference and diversality for the sake of dialogue that invites peaceful coexistence in perpetuity. In conclusion: if we are willing to listen carefully to what Glissant has to say, to globalize is to Creolize or cross-breed racially, culturally, and linguistically with the altruistic sense of civility. His Creolization is rooted92 in his native soil and Caribbean experience. Thus, it does not abdicate locality. To globalize is really to “glocalize.” The entire corpus of his thought contributes to the “Caribbeanization” or “Creolization” of the world “without limits.” Glissant’s aesthetics of relation based on Caribbean specificity advances a global dialogue in which alterity or the difference of the other is neither assimilated nor annihilated but negotiated/compromised toward the creation of a transversal world as “social imaginary.” If we disagree with Glissant, we in fact authenticate him.93 If, moreover, his aesthetics of relation as diversality and creolization appears to have reached the summit of global ethics and politics, we should keep in mind a Zen koan: When we get to the top of the mountain, keep climbing. NOTES 1.  The expression “living in interesting times” is a mixed blessing. It is not just a Chinese curse, but also—as it is derived from Latin interesse—“means to be among and in the midst of things” (see Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray [(New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 5]), or is suggestive of connecting the “essence” of things. 2.  See Marshall McLuhan and B. R. Powers, The Global Village: Transformations in the World Life and Media in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). If we follow the argument of Glissant, everybody will become a “relative” to everybody else in this “global village,” which, according to him, is a village of hyphenated and hybrid “relatives.” First, my lady companion, Mickey, who is a Hispanic American, and myself, who is a Korean American, traveled to Prague and went to a Japanese restaurant for dinner one night, and we were entertained by musicians from Cuba. Second, in 1999 the American journalist Thomas R. Reid wrote the book entitled Confucius Lives Next Door. Third, the anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes the hybrid globality of the world: “‘We,’ here, is the West, as in Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie’s international hit, ‘We Are the World.’ This is not ‘the West’ in a genealogical or territorial sense. The postmodern world has little space left for genealogies, and notions of territoriality are being redefined right before our eyes. . . . It is a world where black American Michael Jackson starts an international tour from Japan and imprints cassettes that mark the rhythm of Haitian peasant families in the Cuban Sierra Maestra; a world where Florida speaks Spanish (once more);

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where a Socialist prime minister in Greece comes by way of New England and an imam of fundamentalist Iran by way of Paris. It is a world where a political leader in reggae-prone Jamaica traces his rots to Arabia, where United States credit cards are processed in Barbados, and Italian designer shoes made in Hong Kong. It is a world where the most enlightened are only part-time citizens of part-time communities of imagination.” See “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness,” in Recapturing Anthropology, ed. Richard G. Fox (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1991), p. 22. 3. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), p. xv. 4.  For Culler’s and Chow’s views, see Editor’s “Introduction,” in Comparative Political Culture in the Age of Globalization, ed. Hwa Yol Jung (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2002), pp. 1–22. 5.  J. M. Roberts, The Triumph of the West (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1985), p. 431. 6.  Here, Francis Fukuyama echoes the theme song of Hegel’s dialectical vision of the world as historical inevitability. In the back jacket of Fukuyama’s work, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), the neo-conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer heralded it as “scandalously brilliant” theory of the “end of history.” Krauthammer not only reiterates Roberts’s “triumph of the West” as an accomplished fact, but also panegyerizes Fukuyama’s work as giving “a deep and highly original meaning” to it. In his most recent work, America at the Crossroads (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), Fukuyama recants his idea that the neoconservative theory of the “end of history” is not a theory in favor of liberalism as its critics allege it, but “an argument about modernization.” I wonder if there is any significant difference between the triumph of Western liberalism and that of modernization as the “end of history.” 7.  Susan Buck-Morss, Thinking Past Terror (London: Verso, 2003), p. 103. 8.  See Hwa Yol Jung, “Enlightenment and the Question of the Other: A Postmodern Audition,” Human Studies, 25 (2002): 297–306. 9. Robert J. C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2001), p. 4. In Transgressing the Modern (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1999), John Jervis discusses some of these follies or blunders of Western modernity. 10.  Arjun Appadurai makes an interesting suggestion concerning the concept of difference as “a useful heuristic that can highlight points of similarity and contrast between all sorts of categories: classes, genders, roles, groups and nations.” See Modernity at Large (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 12. 11.  See Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1997). 12.  See Hwa Yol Jung, “Phenomenology, the Question of Rationality and the Basic Grammar of Intercultural Texts,” in Analecta Husserliana, ed. A.-T. Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1995), pp. 191–72. 13.  Ibid., p. 172. 14. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 353. In reading Amartya Sen’s work,

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Identity and Violence (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), pp. 86–87, I find an interesting and striking parallel between Hegel’s comments on Chinese philosophy and James Mill’s views of India, both of which have influenced the generations of specialists on the subjects: Both Hegel and Mill pontificated their views without ever visiting the countries of their subjects and without reading and understanding their languages. 15. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), p. 64. 16.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy, trans. John Wild and James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1963), p. 49. 17.  Ibid., p. 52–53. 18. See Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), Chapter 5: “Everywhere and Nowhere,” pp. 126–58. 19.  Ibid., p. 128. 20. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, Vol. 2 (New York: Basic Books, 1976), pp. 3–43. 21. See Hwa Yol Jung, “Interbeing and Geophilosophy in the Cultural Topography of Watsuji Tetsuro’s Thought,” in Why Japan Matters! Vol. 2, ed. Joseph F. Kess and Helen Lansdowne (Victoria: Centre for Asia-Pacific Initiatives, University of Victoria), pp. 691–702. 22.  Denys Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea (Edinburgh: University Press, 1957), which traces the emergence of the idea of Europe as the “queen” of cosmographia. More importantly, moreover, Europe is more than a geographical idea. Its emergence is virtually identical with an earlier Christendom. Thus, it is credulous to say that Eurocentric propensity for universality is tied to the Christian notion of monotheism. One might even want to speculate that Nietzsche’s pronouncement of the death of God implicates the death of Eurocentric universality in philosophy. 23. Merleau-Ponty, Signs, p. 138. 24.  Ibid., p. 139. 25.  Not too long ago, I stumbled on Glissant while I was reading Walter D. Mignolo’s essay “Rethinking the Colonial Model,” in Rethinking Literary History, eds. Linda Hutcheon and Mario J. Valdés (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 155–93. 26. Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant, Éloge de la Créolité/In Praise of Creoleness (Paris: Gallimard and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989/1990). 27. See J. Michael Dash, Edouard Glissant (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 28. (Japanese) haiku requires an economy of seventeen syllables (5–7-5). Haiku is a small bundle of earthwords. William Blake wrote “Auguries of Innocence,” whose first stanza reads: 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 a hour.

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29.  Tzvetan Todorov is concerned with the question of the Other and the “conquest of America.” See The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper and Row, 1984). When the Same (identity) is said to be connected to the “expansionist plundering” of the West, which either reduces or abolishes differences, there is no substantial difference between the “postcolonial difference” and the “postmodern difference.” In his primer of postmodernism or of the “postmodern condition,” Jean-François Lyotard makes it abundantly clear that “. . . invention is always born of dissension [dis/sensus]. Postmodern knowledge is not simply a tool of the authorities [existing paradigms]; it refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable. Its principle is not the expert’s homology, but the inventor’s paralogy.” See The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. xxv. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak spells out a formula: Colonialism was modernization/ ism, or the “true” postmodernism; now, only the postmodern postcolonialist is the triumphalist self-declared hybrid. See A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 361. 30.  Bernabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant, Éloge de la Créolité/In Praise of Creoleness, p. 114. 31. Michael Walzer, On Toleration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. xii. 32. See Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1969). 33.  Thomas W. Busch, Circulating Being (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), p. 100. I find that this is the best work in relating Merleau-Ponty to Heidegger. 34.  Nancy Julia Chodorow, “Gender, Relation, and Difference in Psychoanalytic Perspective,” in The Future of Difference, eds. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine (Boston: G. K. Hull, 1980), pp. 10–11. 35.  Thomas Laqueur points out that the “one-sex model” (the masculine politics of identity) refuses to consider woman as “an ontologically distinct category” (the feminine politics of difference). See Making Sex (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 62. The idea of making (factum in G. Vico’s philosophical principle of verum ipsum factum, that is, truth is what we make, unmake and remake) is followed by Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy in The Second Sex that women are not born but made, although she does not emphasize the idea of difference as much as many contemporary feminists, e.g., Luce Irigaray. Be that as it may, sexual difference is for Françoise Collin the paradigmatic case of difference. See “Philosophical Differences” (trans. Arthur Goldhammer), in A History of Women in the West, Vol. 5: Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century, ed. Françoise Thébaud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 261–96. The “phallacy” (the fallacy of phallocentrism) is a faulty reasoning based on the premise that “what is particular in man is universalizable, whereas what is particular in women is merely particular” (ibid., p. 264). I use her same argument to criticize the fallacy of Eurocentric universality against non-European philosophy and culture.

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36. In The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 22, Hannah Arendt, for whom the existential condition of humanity is marked with the primacy of plurality, writes that “no human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature’s wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.” Sharon Marcus entertains the idea of “replacing the classic Kantian version of a universalism based on reason, not with cosmopolitanism, but with a universalism derived from the works of Hannah Arendt, who defines the universal as plurality, the difference from one another that all human beings have in common, and as natality, the human capacity for [a new] beginning [i.e., initium]” (italics added). See “Anne Frank and Hannah Arendt, Universalism and Pathos,” in Cosmopolitan Geographies, ed. Vinay Dharwadker (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 91. 37.  George Herbert Mead, The Philosophy of the Present, ed. Arthur E. Murphy (Chicago: Open Court, 1932), p. 49. 38.  Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 110. 39.  See John Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), p. 50. 40.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort and trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 89–95. 41.  Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern M. McGee and ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 170. 42.  Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 252. 43.  The business of anthropology or ethnography is to understand the (foreign) Other. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Objects (New York: Columbia Press, 1983). 44.  See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1964). 45.  Ibid., p. 49. 46. See Steven Connor, “Introduction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, ed. Steven Connor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 15. 47.  Anthony Pagden, “The Effacement of Difference: Colonialism and the Origins of Nationalism in Diderot and Herder,” in After Colonialism, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 414. 48.  Robert J. C. Young, White Mythologies (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 19. 49. See Herder, J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, trans. ed. F. M. Barnard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 199. 50. See The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), p. 336. 51. John B. Thompson cogently comments that “One is bound to wonder . . . just how Habermas’s theory of social evolution can be applied to the developmental course of societies outside of Europe, just how it can avoid the ethnocentrism and oversimplification which characterize so many evolutionary schemes.” Studies in the Theory of Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 298.

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52.  This is the title of Christina Robb’s recent work on the revolution of “relational psychology.” See This Changes Everything: The Relational Revolution in Psychology (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). Cf. Edouard Glissant, who writes: “Just as Relation is not a pure abstraction to replace the old concept of universal, it also neither implies nor authorizes any ecumenical detachment. The landscape of your word is the world’s landscape. But its frontier is open.” See Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 33. 53.  Martin Heidegger’s formulation of deconstruction reads as “a critical process in which the traditional concepts, which at first must necessarily be employed, are deconstructed down to the sources from which they were drawn.” See Hwa Yol Jung, “John Macmurray and the Postmodern Condition: From Egocentrism to Heterocentrism,” Idealistic Studies, 31 (2001): 105–123. 54.  See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 245–82. 55. Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 4. In her discussion of Glissant in the context of the “postcolonial difference,” Natalie Melas also speaks of “the universal as merely the false generations of one particular culture” (i.e., European culture). See “Re-Imaging the Universal,” in Unpacking Europe, eds. Salah Hassan and Iftikhar Dali (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers and Museum Boijaman van Beuningen, 2001), p. 136. See also Ali A. Mazrui, who comes to the conclusion that the search for universality is a project yet to be completed. See “Pretender to Universalism: Western Culture in a Globalizing Age,” in Unpacking Europe, pp. 96–111. 56.  See Chris Bongie, Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 23. 57.  I have in mind Cornel West, who warns against “ethnocentric chauvinism” on the one hand and “faceless universalism” on the other, in constructing a “new cultural politics of difference.” See “The New Cultural Politics of Difference,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, et al. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 18–36. Of course, he forgets to say that a face could be European. Glissant’s aesthetics of relation can give the European face a face-lifting. 58. See Dipesh Shakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 140. 59. In Confucius Lives Next Door, p. 30, Reid comments that “East is East and West is West, but anybody who still thinks the twain shall never meet has never been to Baskin-Robbins or Burger King on the far side of the Pacific.” Then he mentions the “nouvelle cousine” of Asian hybrid delicacies: “the squid pizza, the curry doughnut, the bean-paste Danish, the rice burger, the kim-chee burger, the tempura hot dog, the green tea milkshake, the sashimi submarine, and ever-popular BST (that’s bacon, seaweed, and tomato) sandwich.” Added to these are the “fusion” of all kinds, e.g., fusion music, fusion orchestras, and fusion medicine. 60. See The Location of Culture, p. 196. Speaking of “global dialogue,” Enrique Dussel asks the following interesting and important question: “Should not the constitution of this first global dialogue (West/East, North/South) between continental philosophical communities be one of the initial and central tasks of the twenty-first

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century?” See “Philosophy in Latin America in the Twentieth Century: Problems and Currents,” in Latin American Philosophy, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), pp. 11–53. 61.  I regard the entire corpus of Glissant’s writings as one big “social imaginary.” Transversality, too, is a “social imaginary” in every sense of the term. “By social imaginary,” Charles Taylor writes, “I mean something much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode. I am thinking, rather, of the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.” Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 23. 62.  Between Reason and Hell, trans. Alexandre de Gramont (Hanover: University Press of New England for Wesleyan University Press, 1991), 140. 63. See Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant, Éloge de la Créolité/In Praise of Creoleness, p. 127. 64.  Convergence Amidst Difference (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), p. 76. 65.  Ibid., p. 77. 66.  Caribbean Discourse, pp. 66–67. 67. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 311. 68.  Quoted in John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 322. Said is intimating an alternative to Huntington’s “clash” model, i.e., the model of dialogue. See the advocate of dialogue Fred Dallmayr, Dialogue Among Civilizations (London: Palgrave, 2002). Having said that, there is Huntington’s important message to political theorists. It is the idea that “culture matters.” In Identity and Violence, Sen recently argues against the “essentialization” of identity—to use the expression of Said, who is not mentioned in his work. For Sen, identity is not one but many: One person or agent has a multiplicity of identities. For him, for example, the “essentialization” of identity leads to the reductionistic theory of civilizational “clashes.” His theory of multiple identities in a person comes close to the theory of relation as difference (see Heidegger’s Differenz as Unterschied), which, too, is not one but many. 69.  The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation, p. 283. Robert J. C. Young points out that “Postcolonialism is neither western nor non-western, but a dialectical product of interaction between the two, articulating new counterpoints of insurgency from the long-running power struggles that pre-date and post-date colonialism.” See Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, p. 68. 70. See Experiences Between Philosophy and Communication, eds. Ramsey Eric Ramsey and David James Miller (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), p. 26. 71.  Calvin O. Schrag, Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature, p. 23.

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72.  Chris Bongie, Caribbean Discourse, p. 98. There is no room here for discussing the interesting idea of translation which is the intersecting twilight zone of two languages and two cultures. Thus, it is tied to the issue of “plurilingualism” (Glissant’s term) versus monolingualism and multiculturalism vs. monoculturalism. For Glissant, “errance” means “to be at home in several languages and cultures while not cutting off the umbilical cord to one’s own native land” [see Ivar Ivask, “Edouard Glissant: The New Discourse of the Caribbean,” World Literature Today 63 (1989): 557–58]. Translation is a zone of transversality including the translatability of one culture into another. In this connection, J. Hillis Miller’s intimation of “boutrophedonic reading” is intriguing. It is the reading that turns back and forth (the Greek strophe) as an ox (the Greek bous) ploughs the fields. Perhaps it may be applied to the “reading” of the foreign Other as reading of “two texts” back and forth. See Black Holes: J. Hillis Miller; or, Boustrophedonic Reading (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 73.  See Ivask, “Edouard Glissant: The New Discourse of the Caribbean,” p. 557. 74.  I cannot emphasize enough a convergence between East Asian “Interbeing” and Glissant’s “Relation.” 75.  Sense and Non-sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 152. 76.  See Ivask, “Edouard Glissant: The New Discourse of the Caribbean,” p. 557. 77.  Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, p. 49. 78.  Most recently, Durham (2001: 293) adds a diminutive description of Europe as “a tiny continent parasitically attached to Asia like a tick on a work-horse.” See “Belief in Europe,” in Unpacking Europe, p. 293. 79. See The Hedgeghog and the Fox (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986). 80. “Re-Imaging the Universal,” p. 150 n. 4. Cf. Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity, p. 140. 81.  Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity (London: Verso, 1999), p. 283. 82.  As far as I am aware of, there are three important “heterocentrists,” or philosophers of responsibility, based on the primacy of the Other (i.e., “altarity”) in the twentieth century: There are the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray, the FrenchJewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, and the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. In addition to Part IV of this volume, see the author’s “John Macmurray and the Postmodern Condition: From Egocentrism to Heterocentrism,” Idealistic Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 31. 2/3 (2001): 105–23, and “Difference and Responsibility,” Phänomenologische Forschungen, Special Issue: Phänomenologie der Natur, eds. Kah Kyung Cho und Young-Ho Lee (Freiburg/München: Verlag Karl Alber, 1999), pp. 129–66. 83.  Robert Eaglestone, “Postmodernism and Ethics Against the Metaphysics of Comprehension,” in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, p. 182. 84. See Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 85. See Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft, 1843), trans. Manfred H. Vogel (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966). 86.  Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 88. 87.  Postcolonial Melancholia, p. 5.

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88.  Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 104–105. 89.  Cf. Jacques Derrida, Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 3–24. 90.  See Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Random House, 1956). 91.  I use the term “rooted” in the same sense that Kwame Anthony Appiah speaks of “rooted cosmopolitanism.” See The Ethics of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 213–72. His conception of cosmopolitanism is rooted in the locality of Ghana, of Africa: It is “glocalized,” indeed. Perhaps his thought reflects the hybridity or Creolization of African (Ghanaian) and Western (English) cultures. 92. Michel Leiris defines the “local color” of Caribbean specificity as “difference in its most striking manifestation.” Quoted in J. Michael Dash, “Caraïbe Fântome: The Play of Difference in the Francophone Caribbean,” Yale French Studies, French and Francophone, ed. Farid Laroussi and Christopher I. Miller, No. 103 (2003): 93–105. As such a transversal world would be the world of “rainbow coalitions.” In his editor’s introduction, Michael Richardson writes that “Some may initially doubt the current relevance of debates that took place half a century ago in the early dawning of the twentieth-century anti-colonialist struggle, believing that they have no more than a historical importance and that, in a post-colonial world, the issues they raise have been confronted and surpassed. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth: Contained in these writings are subtle and complex ideas that have rarely been addressed and they continue to raise important questions with multifarious implications for current debates concerning alterity and communication between cultures” (italics added). See Refusal of the Shadow, trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson and ed. Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 1996), p. 1. To repeat the dictum of Bakhtin’s “unfinalizable” dialogism: Every past meaning has its homecoming festival. 93.  See Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 1.

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Part IV

HETEROTOPIA AND RESPONSIBILITY AS FIRST ETHICS

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Reading Maurice Natanson Reading Alfred Schutz

1. INTRODUCTION Taking a cue from Alfred Schutz, Maurice Natanson intimates that one’s biographical facts are inseparable from and germane to the way of doing one’s philosophy. Thus, it is not inappropriate for me to begin this chapter with Natanson’s academic biography in relation to Schutz.1 Without doubt, Natanson is the most distinguished student of Schutz. He wrote on Schutz’s phenomenology of the social world more than anyone else. He has become, that is, an incomparable spokesman for Schutz. The influence of Schutz on Natanson, in turn, is profound, enormous, and pervasive. Schutz is a constant presence in Natanson’s thought.2 Natanson tells us that during his stay at the New School for Social Research in New York City between 1951 and 1953, he took or audited every course Schutz offered, and that during his young academic career as phenomenologist, he sent Schutz everything he wrote. Together they prepared a paraphrase translation of Husserl’s Ideen II after it had appeared in 1952. It was also Schutz who introduced Natanson to the problematic subject of the social sciences and to the American pragmatic philosopher and social scientist George Herbert Mead, who lived in the shadow of John Dewey and whose patterns of thought crisscross those of Schutz.3 In Anonymity (1986), which is his most original, sustained, and systematic “study” of Schutz’s philosophy, Natanson acknowledges that “Schutz has been my guide to Schutz. Where I have been misguided, I alone led the way.”4 At the end of his “Preface” to the same work, Natanson is candid and unassuming when he writes: “I refuse to end with pious formulae. ‘I shall be satisfied if my efforts lead the reader to my author’s [Schutz’] books.’ I want the reader for my own; read me! But can anyone do so and not find Schutz?”5 Natanson, however, thinks that the influence of Schutz 267

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on both philosophy and the social sciences in this country has been minimal. The lack of his influence may be due to the fact that he is caught in the no-man’s-land in this age of academic specialization, that is, philosophers would see him as a sociologist, whereas sociologists would see him as a philosopher. Whatever influence Schutz’s phenomenology of the social world has had on ethnomethodology, Natanson is of the opinion that Harold Garfinkel’s appropriation of Schutz’s concepts is suspect, that is, “at best restricted and at worst illegitimate.”6 Be that as it may, Natanson is quintessentially and self-professedly Schutzian. Everything he says or writes has a Schutzian accent, intonation, or inflection. It is often quite difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish where Schutz ends and Natanson begins.7 So Schutz lives on in Natanson’s thought, and the latter attests, and is a witness to, the former as a living tradition. Natanson’s thought is the philosophical prism and extension in significant measure of Schutz’s phenomenology of the social world. Reading Natanson reading Schutz may, therefore, be likened to the proverbial saying: catching two birds with one stone or—to use an analogy of business transaction, which was the hub of Schutz’s work world—getting two for the price of one. In the following pages, I will focus on the selected themes on Schutz that have also been highlighted by Natanson: (II) Schutz’s Phenomenology of the Social World, (III) An Ontology of Social Roles, (IV) The Conduct of Social Inquiry, and (V) Critical Continuation with Respect to Intercorporeality and Ethics. 2. SCHUTZ’S PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE SOCIAL WORLD “To speak of the phenomenology of the social world,” Natanson emphasizes, “is to speak of Alfred Schutz.”8 Phenomenology is for Schutz an interdisciplinary undertaking at the point of which philosophy and the social sciences are brought together for the reason that science needs philosophy to justify its raison d’être while at the moment social scientists interpret their facts, they become philosophers. This Schutzian interdisciplinary endeavor is called by Natanson “phenomenology applied,”9 which constitutes a phenomenological introduction to the social sciences or the modus operandi of phenomenological philosophy in the social sciences. Schutz’s first major work Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt (l 932)10 greatly impressed Edmund Husserl. With the English translation of this work as The Phenomenology of the Social World,11 Natanson declared that “phenomenology has finally come of age in America.”12 The work was an attempt to ground Max Weber’s often-misunderstood verstehende Soziologie in the philosophical soil of shared space and

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time based particularly on Henri Bergson’s lived flow of “duration” (durée) and Husserl’s “inner time consciousness” (inneren Zeitbewusstsein), and to graft phenomenological insights with Weber’s sociology.13 In brief, Schutz’s work meant to address, clarify, and justify how the social world as variegated web of relationships is possible at all. Schutz divides the social world into four subworlds according to the shared experience of time and space: (1) the world of consociates (Umwelt), (2) the world of contemporaries (Mitwelt), (3) the world of predecessors (Vorwelt), and (4) the world of successors (Folgewelt).14 The Vorwelt and the Folgewelt have the temporal character of the past and the future respectively. The Umwelt is the social world in which we directly encounter the presence of others as “consociates” (Mitmenschen) hic et nunc, that is, we share the temporal immediacy of the “now” and the spatial proximity of the “here.” Only in “weorientation” (Wirkensbeziehung) do we intimately experience the bodily presence of others in the face-to-face encounter. In the Mitwelt or mitweltische soziale Beziehung, which is organized in terms of “they-orientation” (Ihrbeziehung), we do not directly or immediately experience but understand our “contemporaries” (Nebenmenschen) as “abstract” and “anonymous” types (i.e., social roles). They are the subject matter of the social sciences. Schutz is, according to Natanson, “phenomenology’s spokesman of the Lebenswelt.”15 He is also, I might add, phenomenology’s best ambassador and contributor to the social sciences. The life-world is that seminal concept that was introduced and formulated by Husserl in his “great last work” entitled The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.16 Schutz considers it as “the coronation of his [Husserl’s] life work.”17 Here Husserl “redeems” the mundane life-world, whereas Plato “discounts” it as the cave world.18 With his supreme interest in the interdisciplinary region of philosophy and the social sciences, Schutz encapsulates the life-world as “social reality” and its mundanity or everydayness “hums” incessantly.19 The everyday life-world as social reality is the central focus of Schutz’s works after Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt. The first volume (1962) of Schutz’s posthumously published “Collected Papers,” edited by Natanson, fittingly bears the title The Problem of Social Reality and contains a cluster of Schutz’s most important philosophical and sociological papers. I will focus my attention in the following pages on Schutz’s two-pronged approach to social reality, that is, substantive and methodological. The life-world is, for all practical purposes, social reality. Schutz defines it as “the sum total of objects and occurrences within the social cultural world as experienced by the common-sense thinking of men living their daily lives among their fellow-men, connected with them in manifold relations of interaction.”20 Schutz’s “staccato account”—to use Natanson’s

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expression21—of social reality refers to the very meaning-structures of pregiven social objects and occurrences as they are “phenomenologically derived and phenomenologically realized.”22 It is important to note that as it is a function of phenomenology to investigate “the presuppositions of the natural attitude,”23 the phenomenological analysis of social reality refers to the “epoché of the natural attitude” which is distinguished from transcendental phenomenological epoché. The epoché of the natural attitude is employed by ordinary men and women in the street to suspend doubt itself in the existence of the world, whereas transcendental epoché, in contrast, suspends our very belief in the reality of the world itself. It is an act of what George Santayana calls “animal faith.” Schutz emphasizes that what is put in brackets is “the doubt that the world and its objects might be otherwise than it appears to him [an ordinary man in the street].”24 He comes to the conclusion that Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is unable to provide a solution to the problem of intersubjectivity.25 It appears that Schutz’s epoché of the natural attitude dissolves, as it were, for ordinary men and women the thorny question of whether transcendental subjectivity is intersubjectivity. Defined in terms of (“subjective”) meaning-structure or attention à la vie (Bergson’s expression used by Schutz), there is no one (ultimate) reality as traditional metaphysics would presuppose it. There are rather, according to Schutz, “multiple realities” or multiple subworlds of reality, e.g., the world of dreams, the play world of the child, the world of the insane, etc.26 His conception of “multiple realities” parallels the sociological formation of society as manifold relations of social interaction. Because reality is constituted by the meaning-structure of our experience, we can speak of it as a “finite province of meaning,” which has its own “specific accent,” or a different attention à la vie.27 Each province or level of meaning is called “finite” because it has, within boundaries of its own, a particular cognitive style that appears fictitious, inconsistent, and incompatible with another (finite) province of meaning, i.e., what we might call a “Rashomon” phenomenon after Kurozawa’s Japanese movie. We browse through freely from one province to another. The “paramount reality”—the term borrowed from William James28—is the province of meaning that refers to wide-awake workaday consciousness. Thus, Natanson characterizes “wide-awake adults” as the fully participating29 “citizens” of the life-world as social reality. This reality is called “paramount” because it is the standard-bearer of all other realities. We know, for example, that we had a dream when and only when we wake up. Acting, whether it be theatrical performance on stage or actual doing in life, is “the hermeneutics of the soul”—to use Natanson’s phrase.30 Action or acting in real life certifies the reality of the mundane life-world as social reality, that is, it is the hub or epicenter of the world. Schutz always speaks

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of “the actor on the social scene.” For him, we guarantee intersubjectivity or “interbeing” by way of action, that is, our ineluctable connectedness to the world of others, of other fellow-human beings, whether we are making music together or performing other activities. Since action is an individual’s relation with others, action is synonymous with social action. Motives, whether they be an “in-order-to-motive” (Um-zu-Motiv) or “because-motive” (Weil-Motiv), trigger the performance or completion of action (Handeln). The performance of action has a twofold structure in which one precedes the other temporally. The first is an external, bodily, and overt manifestation of what Schutz calls the “indications” (Anzeichen) or outer manifestations of action. The second, which is, from a standpoint of phenomenology, more important than the first, is “project” (Entwurf). Because of the inclusion of project, the phenomenological conception of action is radically different from that of psychological behaviorism and political behavioralism. Man can have a project because he/she is active, and he/she is active because he/she can have a project. Insofar as action is a structure of meaning, it is an ongoing process based on a preconceived plan. What characterizes the principium of meaningful action is the presence of a project, an internal plan of operations framed in the future perfect tense (modo futuri exacti). Project is the “subjective” dimension of action because it is “visible” only from the inside (i.e., in/sight) and “invisible,” although inferable, from the outside. Meaning is a result of the interpretation that an actor on the social scene gives to his/her own act.31 Unlike performed or completed action by the medium of the body, a project may be changed or even cancelled at will while executed action is irreversible. In essence, the presence of a project makes human action “meaningful,” “purposive,” and “rational.” It makes the human actor distinct from an animal, an artificial machine, or an inert object. 3. AN ONTOLOGY OF SOCIAL ROLES By an ontology of social roles, Natanson means “a domain of order constituted by role-variables which permit the actor to enter into relationship with Others, fellow-men.”32 It is the most persistent and prolific theme in the writings of Natanson. It also constitutes, I think, his most inventive interpretation and resourceful extension of Schutz’s “world of contemporaries” that promotes the phenomenological theory of society as the theatrical arena of action as well as the phenomenological hermeneutics of selfhood. Without question, the world of “consociates,” according to Schutz and Natanson, marks the inception of the social world. In it, each participating

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actor synchronizes with others the intimate proximity of space and the vivid immediacy of time. Schutz remarks: intersubjectivity is not a problem of constitution which can be solved within the transcendental sphere, but is rather a datum (Gegebenheit) of the lifeworld. It is the ontological category of human existence in the world and therefore of all philosophical anthropology. As long as man is born of woman, intersubjectivity and the we-relationship will be the foundation for all other categories of human existence.33

Certainly, this assertion of Schutz is associated with Martin Buber’s classic conception of the interhuman with an accent on the dialogical encounter between “I and Thou” that recognizes the consociational Other as “ontologically prior to the Other as a partner in social relations.”34 In his discerning sociological presentation of music called “Making Music Together,” Schutz unequivocally confirms that “the mutual tuning-in relationship, the experience of the ‘We,’. . . at the foundation of all possible communication.”35 Anonymity, role, and typification are a triptych of the commonsense lifeworld as the theatre of social action and interaction. For Natanson, what “recognition” is to personhood, “anonymity” is to agency. One of the two pairs complements the other. “We may,” he suggests, “distinguish between the person and the agent in role-taking. The person is the human being in his irreducible givenness; the agent is that being acting in accordance with the image and demands of his role [in society].”36 Anonymity and recognition are “polarities” in the ontological spectrum and continuum of the social world. Anonymity is the “emblem” of the mundane world, and it “cannot be written off as a bankrupt before its estate has been properly assessed.”37 Natanson is firmly convinced that anonymity is the master key to unlock the secret gateway of Schutz’s phenomenology of the social world, which is most relevant to the social sciences in understanding the Latinized homunculi called homo politicus, homo sociologicus, and homo oeconomicus. Natanson even characterizes Schutz’s phenomenology of the social world as “making a carnival [not clowning but festivity] of anonymity.”38 In this respect, there is indeed a radical and inerasable gulf between Heidegger’s “fundamental ontology” and Schutz’s phenomenology of the social world whose focus, according to Natanson, is (anonymous) man the (social) actor. In Being and Time, Heidegger proposes that “ontology is possible only as phenomenology.”39 He defines Dasein as “Being-in-the-world” (in-der-Welt-sein), which includes the province of Dasein’s relation with others (Mitsein or Mitwelt). Since “in” in “Being-in-the-world” is ecstatic in the existentialist tradition of Søren Kierkegaard, humans are radically distinct from non-human beings and things in nature. For Heidegger, the “authenticity” (Eigentlichkeit) of Dasein

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as Mitsein or Mitwelt is confined to consociational relationships. As das Man typifies the “nameless crowd” or “anonymous they,” it is a coded word for Dasein’s fallenness to “inauthenticity” (Uneigentlichkeit) from the grace of authenticity or uniqueness. This is opposed to (Schutzian) “typicality.”40 Role is “an ontological constant” of social reality as the open theatre of action: It is the ground of social interaction and transaction, that is, of human sociality. As man is a role-player and a role-taker, anonymity is a Schutzian clue to the social self or selfhood. Natanson explains that the identity of the “journeying self” or homo viator (Gabriel Marcel’s expression) is not irreconcilable with anonymity because the secret of individual identity is locked in the social world.41 The self is even said to be “clothed in the garments of society.”42 This, however, does not mean that the individual is a soulless homunculus or puppet of society because the individual actor is capable of inserting himself/herself actively into the (social) world. Role, in fact, signifies “a nexus of role possibilities.” Here Natanson means to emphasize that it is really “an abbreviation for a constant plural” and stands for “a plethora of performances.”43 In the mundane life-world as a theatrical arena of multiple performances, the Other, too, is conceived by way of rolestructure: the Other as a professor, a student, an administrator, or a secretary. The roles of postal workers are, for a good reason, the most favorite example of Schutz. “Putting a letter in the mailbox,” he writes, “I expect that unknown [anonymous] people, called postmen, will act in a typical way, not quite intelligible to me, with the result that my letter will reach the addressee within typically reasonable time.”44 In the final analysis, common sense or sensus-communis, which, for its name sake, is shared by all men and women, is “a mark of sociality”45 because it actively constructs or “abstracts” the social world into role-types. It is the “matrix of typification,” while typicality, in turn, is “the stuff of roles.”46 As Natanson puts it succinctly, “[r]oles and role-playing are the forms typification takes in moving from the beginnings of intersubjectivity in bodily presence to the schemas and constructs of the public world in the regions of distance and absence.”47 Viewed in this light, typification is indigenous to the common world of everyday life: As sociality is the “ontological a priori” of the mundane world, typification is its “epistemological a priori.”48 In short, to say that the social world is the fabric richly woven with typification is to insist on “the primacy of anonymity.”49 “Far from being a deprivation,” Natanson contends, “the anonymity of our constructions enables us to come into touch with the full scope of the social world, for we can come to know how men lived and acted without being compelled to reconstruct in intimate detail the actuality of their concrete lives—an actuality to which we have no access when we inquire into the ancient past

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[i.e., our distant ‘predecessors’] and which we can only guess at in the case of the future [i.e., our prospective ‘successors’].”50 4. THE CONDUCT OF SOCIAL INQUIRY Schutz’s phenomenology of the social world is inseparably substantive—as we have seen in the preceding section—and methodological—as we will see in the following pages. It is the affirmation of the primacy of ontology, that is, the ontology of social roles, over methodology. Schutz’s phenomenological method of the social sciences as “subjective interpretation,” just as the operation of Weber’s verstehende Soziologie has often and profoundly been misunderstood. It has been criticized that since it is “subjective,” the phenomenological method has no “objective” validity. In other words, it is not (social-)scientific. Schutz’s phenomenological method of the social sciences may easily be defended as follows. In the preceding section, Schutz and Natanson contended that the everyday life–world is the arena of (social) action that is securely grounded in and governed by the rationality of common sense that is by definition both pre-philosophical and pre-scientific. It exists and will exist whether we philosophize or do scientific investigation of it. As the matrix of typicality, commonsense rationality has its own style of abstraction and knowing. By way of commonsense rationality, action has a meaning-structure for the actor on the social scene. Subjective meaning-structure signifies that meaning-structure that is constructed by the actor himself/herself. Now, the role of a social scientist is to “question,” that is, to investigate the “unquestioned” world of ordinary actors in carrying out their daily activities in interaction with one another the totality of which is called by Schutz “social reality.” The social scientist cannot bypass or ignore social reality because it is his/her very observational field. Schutz forcefully writes: The concept of Nature, . . . with which the natural sciences have to deal, is idealizing abstraction from the Lebenswelt, an abstraction which, on principle and of course legitimately, excludes persons with their personal life and all objects of culture which originate as such in practical human activity. Exactly this [sociocultural] layer of the Lebenswelt, however, from which the natural sciences have to abstract, is the social reality which the social sciences have to investigate.51

Phenomenologically viewed, thus, the philosophy of the social sciences is also the philosophy of (the Lebenswelt as) social reality. To put it in a nutshell, in phenomenology social-scientific methodology presupposes and is grounded in the ontology of everyday life-activities.

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Social-scientific investigation is, therefore, the second-degree construct of the first-order commonsense construct of the world by living and thinking actors themselves. “The thought objects constructed by the social scientist, in order to grasp this social reality,” Schutz thus insists, “have to be founded upon the thought objects constructed by the common-sense thinking of men, living their daily life within their social world.”52 Accordingly, all forms of “scientism,” including political behavioralism,53 falsely claim that the method used to investigate natural phenomena is the only scientific method and is equally applicable to the investigation of human social phenomena, affairs, and events. Ultimately, scientism commits empiricide. Of paramount importance is the unexplored point which Schutz advanced in the concluding remarks of his phenomenological critique of me positivist “unity of science” movement in a paper entitled “Concept and Theory Formation in the Social Sciences.”54 Unfortunately, this revisionary suggestion has never been recognized for its full import and is yet to be explored.55 Let me quote Schutz himself fully on this unsurpassable and unimpeachable point: [i]t seems to me that the social scientist can agree with the statement that the principal differences between the social and the natural sciences do not have to be looked for in a different logic governing each branch of knowledge. But this does not involve the admission that the social sciences have to abandon the particular devices they use for exploring social reality for the sake of an ideal unit of methods which is founded on the entirely unwarranted assumption that only methods used by the natural sciences, especially by physics, are scientific ones. So far as I know, no serious attempt has been made by the proponents of the “unity of science” movement to answer or even to ask the question whether the methodological problem of the natural sciences in their present state is not merely a special case of the more general, still unexplored, problem [of] how scientific knowledge is possible at all and what its logical and methodological presuppositions are. It is my personal conviction that phenomenological philosophy has prepared the ground for such an investigation. Its outcome might quite possibly show that the particular methodological devices developed by the social sciences in order to grasp social reality are better suited than those of the natural sciences to lead to the discovery of the general principles which govern all human knowledge.56

This Schutzian phenomenological critique of knowledge is corroborated by such contemporary philosophers of science as Gaston Bachelard, Thomas S. Kuhn, Stephen Toulmin, Michael Polanyi, Norwood R. Hanson, Mary Hesse, and even Paul Feyerabend, whose broadly defined hermeneutical tradition can be taken back to the anti-Cartesian Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico and his idea of verum ipsum factum. Since

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all knowledge—natural-scientific as well as social-scientific—is socially derived, approved, distributed, and consumed, Schutz’s phenomenologically oriented social critique of knowledge would be a far more suitable model for validating truth-claims than is the positivist “unity of science” movement with its emphasis on physicalism. 5. CRITICAL CONTINUATION WITH RESPECT TO INTERCORPOREALITY AND ETHICS Let me begin my concluding remarks with the lasting philosophical legacy which Husserl left for his successors. It is the twofold idea that phenomenology is a philosophy of infinite tasks. In the first place, the philosopher is a perpetual beginner or “introducer.” The practitioners of phenomenology after Husserl have proven again and again that the end of philosophizing is the account and justification of its beginning. It is that precious injunction that calls for the philosopher’s own constant vigilance and self-reflection. In the second place, in phenomenology as a philosophical movement, the “possibility” exceeds and surpasses its “actuality.” What is actual now is only the nourishing or fecund ground of what is possible later, that is, possible for further exploration, investigation, and application.57 Natanson is always and acutely aware of phenomenology as a philosophy of perpetual tasks: It is, as he puts it concisely, “philosophy in process, not philosophy become but philosophy becoming.”58 Indeed, phenomenology is a corporate vocation. Whatever critical remarks I make of Schutz and Natanson on intercorporeality and ethics here should be taken in the spirit of phenomenology as a philosophical movement in which nothing is finished and may be taken for granted. Natanson’s and Schutz’s phenomenology of the social world are ineluctably interlocked. To repeat: Schutz is a constant presence in Natanson, and Natanson is a constant reminder of Schutz as a consummate phenomenologist and a master of philosophy of the social sciences. Throughout his lifelong writings and professional activities, Natanson has tirelessly promoted Schutz as a philosopher cum social scientist who offered us an indestructible “architectonic” of the life-world as social reality by “humming” the mundane and celebrating common sense both as a mark of sociality and as the social matrix of anonymity. First and foremost, Schutz’s phenomenology embodies for Natanson the intrepid spirit and Herculean task of doing phenomenology by attending to that ambiguous and intertextual zone that intersects philosophy and the human cultural sciences. Nevertheless, there are two important areas in particular that have been lacking in and missing from the phenomenological and existential orientation of both Schutz and Natanson, the epicenter of

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which is claimed to be the life-world as the arena of action and interaction both on stage and in real life. They concern the question of minding (1) the intercorporeal and (2) the ethical. Of course, as I have already said above, my critical comments are tempered by the idea of phenomenology as a philosophy of infinite tasks. They should be viewed in the corporate spirit of phenomenology to pursue the question of truth and reality as an unending task, as an ongoing journey. The “relevance” of the body and its performativity to Schutz’s phenomenology of the social world, particularly to the subworld of “working” called “paramount reality” or “home base,” which is the foundation of all sociality and from which all the other subworlds are derived, is undeniable although the various regions of social reality called “multiple realities” are defined primarily in terms of the “field of consciousness” or their “cognitive styles.” Natanson affirms that “[a]cting is the hermeneutics of the soul”59 in the concluding sentence of his analysis of “man as an actor.” There is also no denying that acting, both on stage and in real life, does take place in the material presence of the body. In the venerable tradition, particularly of Bergson, Marcel, and Merleau-Ponty, the reality of the body is viewed as the central problem of human existence and the solution of everything else hinges on the solution of it. Both Schutz and Natanson are well aware of the axial importance of the body in social interaction and transaction. “Working” involves for Schutz bodily movements, and bodily movements “gear”—to borrow the expression that Schutz often uses—us into the world. Working is indeed “bodily performance.” “Working acts” are synonymous with “performances.” Because of the body’s pragmatics, action is said to be performative. The telos or purposiveness of performance is “to bring about the projected state of affairs by bodily movements.”60 Without performance, that is, action without bodily performance, the project would be abortive and no more than “dreaming,” “imagining,” or (Don Quixote’s) phantasm. Indeed, action for Schutz requires the consummation of a project or a preconceived plan in bodily performance. Without bodily performance, action exists only in the mind and would remain as an unfulfilled project, an unaccomplished plan. Only by way of bodily performance is the project made into actum or “the thing done.” In other words, the performance of the body alone empties or vacates, as it were, the project of action. Schutz is also concerned with the “stock of knowledge” in the performance of action or the everyday “business of living.” It is that knowledge that is stored for further use. From the pragmatic standpoint of performing action, knowledge may be said to be “in” or “out of” our reach or grip. Thus, Schutz speaks of the “manipulatory sphere” of knowledge. Etymologically,

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of course, the “manipulation” of knowledge is a manual concept (i.e., I am my hand), in this respect, knowledge may be said to be “in our hand” or “out of our grip.” Schutz reminds us of Heidegger, when he uses the common expression “the stock of knowledge at hand.” One can speak of the stock of knowledge “at hand” (Heidegger’s Zuhandenheit) or “on hand” (Heidegger’s Vorhandenheit’).61 However, Schutz adds another important category: knowledge “in hand,” which may be called Inhandenheit. It is (the stock of) knowledge in our immediate and familiar “manipulatory sphere.” This pen-in-hand among “worldly objects,” for example, is an immediate and familiar tool for my writing here and now. Most importantly, moreover, the body is for Schutz the locus of our inhabitation in the world. As he focuses his attention on the meaning-structure of action from an insider’s view, so is he also concerned with the body for an insider’s lived experience. What the body is to lived space (éspace vécu), consciousness is to lived time. The “body as mine” or lived body inhabits space in the world, whereas the body as a physical object merely occupies it. When he associates the “body as mine” with lived space, Schutz acknowledges his philosophical affinity with Husserl, Bergson, Scheler, Heidegger, Marcel, Sartre, and above all Merleau-Ponty. Schutz contends that to speak of the body merely as an “instrument” is both “dangerous and careless” because the body is, properly speaking, the way of our being in the world.62 Without the lived body or the body as subject, then, our practical or common-sense knowledge of the world would be “handicapped” or impaired. With MerleauPonty, Schutz declares that “space would not at all exist for me if I had no body. The space thus experienced through the intermediary of the body is, first of all, a space of orientation. My body is, so to speak, the center O of the system of coordinates in terms of which I organize the objects surrounding me into left and right, before and behind, above and below.”63 The body is for Schutz, in other words, the “topological organization” that fathoms the intimacy or distance (anonymity) of my being “here” (hic) and another fellow-being “there” (illic). Natanson, too, knows well the body as the material and spatial axis of our social inhabitation of the world, and he speaks of the “existential motility of the body.”64 “In first person terms,” he puts forth forthrightly, “I find myself in a world set forth from the zero point of the coordinates of my spatiotemporal placement.”65 As the (lived) body organizes our (surrounding) world, it is the locus of the “manipulatory sphere” of our thought and action in the mundane “business of living.” We may speak synergistically of “thinking” as “I am my head,” of “speaking” as “I am my mouth,” of “walking” as “I am my legs,” of “standing” as “I am my feet,” of “hearing” as “I am all ears,” and of “existing” as “I am my body.”66

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Both Schutz and Natanson would agree that the body itself—particularly the face67—is the first and primordial discourse of the social. As the body is the ineradicably material condition of sociality, man without a body, that is, an “invisible man,” is only a ghost or phantom, but no “social man.” Inasmuch as it is our firm foothold, and the locus of our material and social inhabitation, in the world, the body is as much a mark of sociality as are common sense, typicality, and anonymity in the everyday life–world as the performative arena of action. Indeed, intersubjectivity or sociality is first and foremost intercorporeal. Without being embodied, it becomes a fatal abstraction. In the household of action, the body cannot be “an absentee landlord”—to use Natanson’s as well as Erwin W. Straus’s favorite metaphor. Nonetheless, there is no systematic phenomenology of the body, of the lived body in either Schutz and Natanson, that is commensurate with their phenomenological theory of social action. Their phenomenological investment in the body is minimal and petite in size. Their emphasis is loud and clear: Temporality is the primary ground of both meaning and action which are mutually bound and imbricated. It is particularly unfortunate because the (lived) body is our social anchorage in the world and our sociality begins first and necessarily as intercorporeality. It is no accident that Schutz defines “lived space” solely in terms of our “biographical” situation. Since social interaction—particularly in such consociational relationships as “making music together”—occurs at the shared coordinates of time and space, the spatial aspect of the body (spatiality) deserves as much attention as does time (temporality). The phenomenological psychologist Straus, who, as Natanson points out,68 is too close to Schutz to risk mutual “infiltration,” speaks of the body as the initial insertion of the self into the world of others, of other fellow-human beings and sociality as always already intercorporeal. The body is indeed the living site of sociality. We are our bodies, and our bodies answer the world by first authoring it. Straus, moreover, favors the body over the mind in dealing with the question of sociality because “the body of an organism is related to other bodies; it is a part of the physical universe. The mind, however, is related to one body only; it is not directly related to the world, nor to other bodies, nor to other minds.”69 The mind becomes a relatum only because the body inhabits the world with other inhabiting bodies.70 In sum, therefore, the phenomenology of the social world is in need of the hermeneutics of the body as well as that of the soul. The theory of the ethical in the phenomenological movement has not been appreciated as much as it should. Schutz’s phenomenology of the social world argues most efficaciously against, and rescues the human cultural sciences from the quicksand of, scientism (including psychological behaviorism and

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political behavioralism), but provides no definitive and counterveiling answer to the “emotive theory” of logical empiricism or the “value-neutrality” of scientism that the political philosophers Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, for example, challenged relentlessly. In The Phenomenology of Moral Experience (1955), which is one of the earliest works on phenomenological ethics in this country, Maurice Mandelbaum judiciously maintains that the “phenomenology” of morals is “eductive,” whereas the “metaphysics” of morals (e.g., Kantian deontological ethics) is “deductive,” because the former takes into account the moral axioms or judgments that common men and women in the street actually make in carrying out their ordinary lives and daily activities, whereas the latter ignores them.71 As the life-world is from the start the world of approvals and disapprovals, value is integral, not a later addition, to the everyday “business of living.”72 The project, which is always “preconceived,” is a blueprint for action and as such determines the “purposiveness” (telos) of action. Despite the fact that the life-world is the most central theme of Schutz’s later phenomenology both substantively and methodologically, and that value may be inserted into the project as an “in-order-to” motive of action, Schutz has left no important systematic writings on formal or normative ethics. His conception of phenomenology as a purely descriptive enterprise—purely theoretical rather than normative—is well in tune with Max Weber’s “value-free” methodology of the social sciences.73 Moreover, Schutz’s study of Scheler, who is the most outstanding phenomenological ethicist, leaves no traces of normative judgments including Scheler’s critique of Kant’s deontological ethics in which facile and non-eductive prescriptivism is susceptible to conceptual gerrymandering and juggernaut. “Scheler,” Schutz concludes, “transformed his theory of perspectivism of values into a new and highly original approach to a sociology of knowledge.”74 Nonetheless, the section on his “applied theory” of phenomenology in Collected Papers, II: Studies in Social Theory is replete with ethical overtones and intimations in dealing particularly with the question of “the well-informed citizen,” “equality,” and “responsibility.”75 Schutz’s lack of concern for normative ethics, most importantly, in no way implies that he had no morals for his personal conduct. On the contrary, Natanson tells us that he learned from Schutz “a lot about human existence.” Schutz was able to inculcate in Natanson the moral notion that whoever we are and whatever we do, we all are fully human beings.76 In contrast to Schutz, Straus who, according to Natanson, preferred Scheler to Heidegger and the later Husserl to the early Husserl and held many ideas in common with Schutz, astutely and elegantly observes that man’s “upright” body posture points to humanity’s uniqueness and ethical gesture.77 We can

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even go further by insisting that the ethical is humanity’s most distinguishing characteristic. Not unlike Schutz’s phenomenology of social action with a focus on the idea of project (Entwurf), Straus holds that human action is purposive because it is directed toward a goal (telos) and that “[a] change is anticipated and realized through movements subserving a preconceived plan. In action, we reach beyond a given situation into the realm of possibilities; within a temporal horizon, open to the future, we busy ourselves producing a new situation. We do not simply react to things as they are, but we act on them—i.e., we move with the intention of modifying things from an actual to a desired condition.”78 Indeed, human beings are the only creatures who can refuse to be what they are here and now. As goal and change are twin brothers of human action with a project, they become a justification for phenomenological ethics. Straus, I think, provides us with a clear phenomenological clue to ethics or the normative theory of morals. Unlike Schutz but like Straus, Natanson is forthrightly normative in dealing with phenomenological theorizing as “a defense of Reason” and “a critique of philosophy.”79 Natanson defends Reason in opposition to the “invisible dragon” of what he calls “conceptual nihilism.” There is the nihilism of the “headless heart” as well as of the “heartless head.” By conceptual nihilism, Natanson means “a root denial of the validity of reason.”80 He is careful in delineating reason as a body of abstract principles and reason as a living matrix within which the individual confronts the meaning of “the central terms of his existence.”81 By so doing, he follows the existentialist path of Kierkegaard, who is a scathing critic of Hegel’s “conceptual imperialism,” which buries the detailed humanity of a singular individual in “an architechtonic of uncentered abstractions.”82 Natanson is a staunch defender of Weber’s thought in general and his “value-neutrality” in particular against critics of Weber such as Leo Strauss for allegedly committing the casterization of value, which is a form of nihilism. By making the distinction between value and fact, Natanson insists that Weber neither denies nor rules out values. The social scientist ought to make value judgments. When he/she makes them, he/she must know where fact ends and value begins.83 Instead of threatening or denying reason and value, Weber recognizes the tension between the two, which, according to Natanson, constitutes “the most fundamental and creative opposition to nihilism.”84 Natanson begins with Weber’s idea of “disenchantment” as “the existential condition for transcendence.”85 By the “disenchantment of the world” (Entzauberung der Welt), Weber originally meant that modernity has abandoned or desacralized the world by taking the “magic” out of it. For Natanson, disenchantment and transcendence are integrally bound to each other because “they spring from that subjectivity which is the source of commitment

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itself.”86 In other words, disenchantment leads to individual choice and commitment to reconstruct our world by way of the orderly “discipline of subjectivity” as both “locus” of and “gateway” to transcendence. Subjectivity is the center of the individual’s identity, which is nothing but the individual’s awareness of his/her uniqueness and of responsibility for his/her action in relation to others and public events. “Man,” Natanson sums up his existentialist ethics, “is understood as a being who is responsible for what he makes of his life and of the world; responsibility presupposes choice by an individuated self; individuation arises out of ethical crisis and the acceptance of fundamental concern for the human community; concern is experienced as anguish before oneself, in the face of history, or before the ultimacy of God; and out of anguish is generated the possibility of freedom.”87 Disenchantment indeed breeds change, and by it we are compelled to change or reenchant the world. Natanson, however, is very critical of Marx’s ideologism or ideological “lalapalooza”—to borrow his New Yorker’s expression. Natanson contends that Marx, who was a philosopher of change, of radical change, for the “reenchantment” of the world, is the philosopher who wrote “the most profoundly antiphilosophical sentence ever written.”88 Here, of course, Natanson is referring to Marx’s famous or—in Natanson’s view—infamous Eleventh Thesis on Ludwig Feuerbach, which reads: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is to change it.”89 Natanson regards it as most antiphilosophical because it is “ideologizing,” not “philosophizing.” Natanson is absolutely incontrovertible in contending that Marx’s thesis for change, also, is necessarily a result of interpretation. What should be added here is that since interpretation is the inescapable task of philosophy, Marxism or otherwise, it becomes the beginning of change or what Natanson calls “transcendence.” Transcendence is an ethical gesture of the first magnitude. Natanson himself is quick to acknowledge that “the philosopher becomes the bridge between the solitude of radical reflection and the community of human action”90—one foot in the former and the other in the latter, as it were. To put it differently, the tension or even contradiction between the egological and the social is so persistent that Schutz calls it “a metaphysical constant.”91 Nevertheless, the philosopher is a human being who cannot and should not separate his radical reflection from his participation in the community of fellow-human beings. In this sense, the ethical for his own conduct cannot be otherwise than that for the community of fellow-human beings.92 To put it negatively, the philosopher cannot prescribe for others something he/she cannot prescribe for and live by himself/herself. In conclusion, let me kidnap Natanson’s idea. In his concluding remarks on “the nature of social man,” he emphasizes that “I am convinced that the

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secret of individual identity is locked in the nature of the social world. If common sense is the region in which our sociality is grounded, it may also be the existential locus of our normative possibilities. And if history is the covenant between man and God, daily life is the record of its fulfillment. There in the unexalted chronicle of the familiar is disclosed the image of what we may still become.”93 In the very “humming” of mundanity, indeed, we find the ethical imperative and redemption, if you will, of humanity’s future. The itinerant or journeying self cannot and should not be inimical but, rather, open by necessity to the ethical or moral. To “reenchant” human action or project, we must put back the “magic” of morals into it and the world. Neither Schutz nor Natanson has reached the promised land of choreographing humanity’s normative possibilities.94 We can only hope that if, as Schutz once told the young Natanson, death and anonymity—the focus of Natanson’s thoughtful analysis of Schutz’s phenomenological philosophy—are one and the same, their lack of discernment for humanity’s normative possibilities will not mean the death of the social. For the ethical or moral is the ultimate existential modality and the guiding torch of the social. NOTES 1.  For Schutz’s intellectual biographies in relation to Natanson, see Steven Galt Crowell, “A Conversation with Maurice Natanson,” in The Prism of the Self, ed. Steven Galt Crowell (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996), pp. 289–334, and Rodman B. Webb, “The Life and Work of Alfred Schutz: A Conversation with Maurice Natanson,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 5 (1992): 283–94. 2.  Several collected volumes edited by Natanson were dedicated to Schutz. See Philosophy of the Social Sciences, ed. Maurice Natanson (New York: Random House, 1963); Essays in Phenomenology, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966); Phenomenology and Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970); and Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, 2 vols., ed. Maurice Natanson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). I was introduced to the writings of Schutz by Natanson at the suggestion of John Wild in the early 1960s. When Natanson accepted my manuscript on a phenomenological critique of political behavioralism for his two-volume collection of essays on phenomenology and the social sciences, I wanted to dedicate it to Wild. Natanson, however, informed me that I could not do so because the entire collection had already been dedicated to “someone else” who turned out to be Schutz. For the author’s article, see “A Critique of the Behavioral Persuasion in Politics: A Phenomenological View,” in Phenomenology and the Social Sciences, ed. Maurice Natanson, Vol. 2 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 133–73. 3.  It appears that Schutz found in Mead the kindred spirit of a thinker who found comfortably his professional career that intersects philosophy and sociology. Natanson

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relates that when Schutz began to teach at the New School, its president—Alvin Johnson—gave friendly advice to Schutz not to teach its American students phenomenology because they would not take it. So “Schutz presented his [phenomenological] ideas in the context of the writings of James, Dewey, Whitehead, Mead, Cooley, and Thomas,” “Foreword,” in The Theory of Social Action, ed. Richard Grathoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), p. xiv. In his landmark essay on “multiple realities” in 1945, Schutz calls for a critical study of Mead (see Collected Papers, I: The Problem of Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), p. 216. Natanson studied Mead with care from a critical perspective of phenomenology in The Social Dynamics of George H. Mead (Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1956). Later, he was still of the opinion that Mead is “the most neglected figure of the great pragmatic tradition in the United States.” See Anonymity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 140. Hans Joas writes that “Alfred Schutz who, while differing from him on many points, had repeatedly called attention to Mead’s importance, gave the direct impetus to Maurice Natanson, whose book The Social Dynamics of G.H. Mead was to influence decisively many sociologists’ and philosophers’ image of Mead.” See G.H. Mead, trans. Raymond Meyer (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), p. 7. 4.  Anonymity, ix. 5.  Ibid., xiv. 6. See Maurice Natanson, Phenomenology, Role, and Reason (Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1974), p. 205. See Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1967). 7. Natanson calls himself an “existential phenomenologist.” See The Erotic Bird (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 9–10. He was also interested in both literature and psychiatry from his student days before he met Schutz. Natanson’s last posthumously published work The Erotic Bird is an exploration of the phenomenological in literature or an aesthetic phenomenology with a focus on Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Interestingly, he ends up with talking about “Action” in the concluding chapter. 8.  Anonymity, p. 1. 9. The idea of “application” does not mean something secondary, added, or supplementary. Rather, “phenomenology applied” is an integral part of phenomenology as philosophy. Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer who speaks of “application” (subtilitas applicandi) as integral part—not an addendum—of hermeneutics. See Truth and Method, trans. rev. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1991), pp. 307ff. 10.  2nd ed. (Wien: Springer-Verlag, 1960). 11.  Trans. George Walsh and Fredrick Lehnert (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967). 12.  Phenomenology, Role, and Reason, 58. 13.  See ibid., 37. 14. Almost two centuries ago, Edmund Burke elegantly put this genealogical continuity of humanity and its social world as “partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those

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who are to be born” [Reflections on the Revolution in France (Indianapolis: BobbsMerill, 1955)], p. 110. 15.  The Erotic Bird, p. 134. Cf. Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, The Structures of the Life-World, trans. Richard M. Zaner and H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), and The Structures of the LifeWorld, Vol. 2, trans. Richard M. Zaner and David J. Parent (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989). 16.  Trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). 17.  “Husserl and His Influence on Me,” in Interdisciplinary Phenomenology, ed. Don Ihde and Richard M. Zaner (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), pp. 124–29. 18.  See Maurice Natanson, Edmund Husserl (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 127. John Wild, too, speaks of inverting Plato’s image of the cave world in philosophizing. See Human Freedom and Social Order (Durham: Duke University Press, 1959), p. 63. 19.  See Natanson, Anonymity, 4. 20.  Collected Papers. I, p. 53, and cf. Natanson, Anonymity, p. 8. 21.  Anonymity, p. 8. 22. Maurice Natanson, Literature, Philosophy, and the Social Sciences (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), p. 166. 23. Natanson, The Social Dynamics of George H. Mead, p. 81. 24.  Collected Papers, I, p. 229, and cf. Natanson, Anonymity, pp. 65–66. 25.  See Natanson, Phenomenology, Role, and Reason, p. 52. Natanson hastens to add the disclaimer that Schutz did not mean to renounce transcendental phenomenology. See Anonymity, p. 92. Cf. Helmut R. Wagner, “Toward an Anthropology of the Life-World: Alfred Schutz’s Quest for the Ontological Justification of the Phenomenological Undertaking,” Human Studies, 6 (1983): 239–46, and “The Limitations of Phenomenology: Alfred Schutz’s Critical Dialogue with Edmund Husserl,” Husserl Studies, l (1984): 179–99. 26. See Collected Papers, I, pp. 207–59. It is worth noting that Mead defines “sociality” as the human “capacity of being several things at once.” Joas, however, cautions us that it is not “an operation of consciousness.” Rather, the principle of sociality is found throughout the universe whose culmination is “the appearance of mind.” See G.H. Mead, p. 183. Despite similarities between Schutz’s “multiple realities” and Mead’s “sociality,” the latter’s formulation is a metaphysical one. In this respect, Mead’s sociality resembles the Whiteheadian metaphysical conception of reality as social process. 27.  Here the influence of William James in addition to Bergson is apparent. In “On Multiple Realities,” which is one of his most seminal essays, Schutz speaks of “James’ genius,” which touches on “one of the most important philosophical questions” by citing the following passage of James: “Each world whilst it is attended to is real after its own fashion; only the reality lapses with the attention,” Collected Papers, I, p. 207. 28.  See Natanson, Anonymity, p. 18. 29.  Natanson points out that “participation” must be distinguished from “observation” when he writes: “[p]articipation rather than observation is the prime moment of

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the dialectic of social life. Accordingly, the task of the social scientist is to honor the pre-interpreted order of common-sense experience by discerning and describing its structure and by trying to illuminate its relevance for the total range of man’s historical and cultural reality,” Phenomenology, Role and Reason, p. 120. 30.  Phenomenology, Role, and Reason, p. 156. With his strong interest and wellversed knowledge in literature and theatre, Natanson would not hesitate to use the metaphor of theatre in characterizing the life-world as the “theatre” of action. The terms acting and actor refer also to theatrical acts as role-performing and role-performer. Indeed, Natanson’s literary style itself invariably has a theatrical flair, while Schutz’s predominant reference is music as performing art. The personal importance of music as performing art, particularly the music of Mozart, for Schutz is undeniable. The following are remarks that Schutz made to Natanson: “[i]n my twenties, it was me and Mozart. In my thirties, it was Mozart and me. Now in my fifties, it is only Mozart,” Natanson, Anonymity, p. xiv. 31. Natanson, Phenomenology, Role, and Reason, p. 115. 32.  Ibid., pp. 172–73. 33.  Collected Papers, III: Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy, ed. I. Schutz (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), p. 82, and see Maurice Natanson, “Alfred Schutz Symposium: The Pregivenness of Sociality,” in Interdisciplinary Phenomenology, p. 110. 34. Natanson, Anonymity, p. 16. 35.  Collected Papers, II: Studies in Social Theory, ed. Arvid Brodersen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), p. 174. 36.  Phenomenology, Role. and Reason, p. 163. 37.  Ibid., p. 201. 38.  Anonymity, p. 137. 39.  Trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 31. 40. Natanson, Anonymity, pp. 82–84. Natanson has in mind the essential difference between Schutz’s “anonymity” and Heidegger’s “authenticity” when he writes that “[a]nonymity is the antonym of authenticity,” Phenomenology. Role, and Reason, p. 201. Nonetheless, interestingly, the mood (Stimmung) or “attunement” (Befindlichkeit) of Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein is on the same wavelength with Schutz’s “making music together” among consociates. Natanson notes that “[a]lthough I disagree with his assertion that Schutz’ concept of the ‘we-relationship’ owes something to Heidegger, Ricoeur is most insightful when he says: ‘Schutz did not, in fact, limit himself to reconciling Husserl and Weber. He integrated their concepts of intersubjectivity and social action with a concept of the we-relationship borrowed from Heidegger, without losing the force of the first two thinkers’ analyses, and without limiting himself to a convenient eclecticism combining all these matters,’” Anonymity, p. 14. 41.  Phenomenology, Role, and Reason, p. 121. 42.  Ibid., p. 17. 43.  The Journeying Self (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1970), p. 34. 44.  Collected Papers, I, p. 17.

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45. Natanson, Phenomenology, Role, and Reason, p. 101. 46.  The Journeying Self, p. 33. 47.  Phenomenology, Role, and Reason, p. 112. 48.  Ibid., p. 251. 49.  Ibid., p. 202. 50.  Ibid., p. 202. 51.  Collected Papers, I, p. 58. 52.  Ibid., p. 59. 53.  See Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers, IV, ed. Helmut Wagner, George Psathas and Fred Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1996), pp. 131–33; Jung, “A Critique of the Behavioral Persuasion in Politics: A Phenomenological View”; Eric Voegelin, “The Origins of Scientism,” Social Research, 15 (1948): 462–94; Natanson, Edmund Husserl, 105–46; and “Philosophy and Social Science: A Phenomenological Approach,” in Foundation of Political Science, ed. Donald M. Freeman (New York: Free Press, 1977), pp. 517–52. 54.  The 1953 version of this essay is “Positivistic Philosophy and the Actual Approach of Interpretative Social Science: An Ineditum of Alfred Schutz from Spring 1953,” ed. Lester Embree, Husserl Studies, 15 (1998): 1–27. 55. See Hwa Yol Jung, Rethinking Political Theory (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1993), pp. 25–41. 56.  Collected Papers, I, pp. 65–66. This passage is not contained in the 1953 version (see n. 54 above). Aron Gurwitsch is more detailed than Schutz in outlining his argument against positivism and extending the relevance of Husserl’s phenomenology of the life-world for the unity of the sciences. See Phenomenology and the Theory of Science, ed. Lester Embree (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), esp. pp. 132–149. Gurwitsch writes: “the cultural or human sciences prove to be all-encompassing, since they also comprise the natural sciences, since nature as conceived of and constructed in modem natural sciences, i.e., mathematized nature, is itself a mental accomplishment, that is, a cultural phenomenon. The converse, however, is not true. The cultural sciences cannot be given a place among the natural sciences, any more than the cultural world can be reached beginning from mathematized nature or, for that matter, from the thing-world, while, as we have seen, by taking one’s departure from the cultural world, one can arrive at the thing-world and the mathematized universe by means of abstraction, idealization, and formalization. In general, then, there is a possible transition from the concrete to the abstract, but not the reverse” (ibid., pp. 148–49). 57. See Jean-Luc Marion, Reduction and Givenness, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), p. 166. 58.  Maurice Natanson, “Foreword,” in Philosophers in Exile, ed. Richard Grathoff and trans. J. Claude Evans (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. ix. 59.  Maurice Natanson, Phenomenology, Role, and Reason, p. 156. 60.  I prefer to speak of the performance of action, which happens to be also a prominent postmodern theme, for several reasons. First, performance is always and necessarily corporeal or embodied. Second, it is the linkage term between Schutz’s phenomenology of the social world and his phenomenological “microsociology” of

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literature (i.e., drama, poetry, and novel). See Alfred Schutz, “A Construction of Alfred Schutz’s ‘Sociological Aspect of Literature,’” in Alfred Schutz’s “Sociological Aspect of Literature,” ed. Lester Embree. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998, 1–71, and Alfred Schutz, Life Forms and Meaning Structure, trans. Helmut R. Wagner. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982, 158–207. Third, Schutz often speaks of social relationships as “mutual tune-in” and thus connects them with music as performing art. Ancient Greeks include in mousike four “performing arts”: oral poetry (poetry recitation), drama, music, and dance. Opera, incidentally, is treated by Schutz as an orchestration of the two “performing arts” of drama and music. Even more importantly, for Schutz—for that matter, for Natanson, too—what the actor on stage is to the playwright, the actor on the social scene is for the social scientist. Cf. Stanford in Lyman, “Dramas, Narratives, and the Postmodern Challenge,” in Alfred Schutz’s “Sociological Aspects of Literature,” 197–218. Both types of the actor are the “puppets” or “homunculi”: One is the creation of the playwright and the other the construct of the social scientist. Fourth, in addition to being theatrical, linguistic, athletic, psychoanalytical, or sexual, performance is a pragmatic and thus moral concept. In other words, it is the elixir or “viagra” of action. Schutz, Collected Papers, I: 215. “Alfred Schutz, Reflections on the Problem of Relevance, ed. Richard M. Zaner. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979,144-45 n. 12. 61.  Heidegger, “What Is Called Thinking?” pp. 16–17. Heidegger’s idea of handicraft is an [2n63] emphasis on the sense of touch or tactility. In Being and Time, he delineates two types of the world in terms of Vorhandenheit and Zuhandenheit. For Hindu music, tala is rhythmic time measured by clapping the hands. For Heidegger, fundamental ontology measured in part by Vorhandenheit and Zuhandenheit is primarily time-oriented. The common English word “beforehand” is a perfect combination of time and tactility. The most comprehensive discussion on tactility in relation to human culture is found in Ashley Montagu, Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973). Montagu mentions the various metaphorical uses of touch: “We speak of ‘rubbing’ people the wrong way, and ‘stroking’ the right way. We say of someone that he has ‘a happy touch,’ of another that he is ‘a soft touch,’ and of still another that he has ‘the human touch.’ We get into ‘touch’ or ‘contact’ with others. Some people have to be ‘handled’ carefully (‘with kid gloves’). Some are ‘thickskinned,’ others are ‘thin-skinned,’ some get ‘under one’s skin,’ while others remain only ‘skin deep,’ and things are either ‘palpably’ or ‘tangibly’ so or not. Some people are ‘touchy,’ that is, oversensitive or easily given to anger. The ‘feel’ of a thing is important to us in more ways than one; and ‘feeling’ for another embodies much of the kind of experience which we have ourselves undergone. We say of some people that they are ‘tactful’ and of others that they are ‘tactless,’ that is, either having or not having the delicate sense of what is fitting and proper in dealing with others. . . . It is strange that, although it is the skin, of all the organs of the body, that has most constantly occupied the forefront of man’s consciousness, he should have paid little more than the most superficial attention to it” (ibid., pp. 4–5). It is important to note that throughout his discussion of human tactility, Montagu alludes to the closeness of the senses of touch and hearing.

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For the ethnomethodological “sociology” of the hand inspired by Heidegger’s conception of thinking as handicraft, see David Sudnow, Ways of the Hand (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). A rewritten account of the same work with “Foreword” by the American Heideggerian philosopher Hubert L. Dreyfus, whose critique of artificial intelligence is unsurpassable, was published by MIT Press, 2001. See also David Sudnow, Talk’s Body (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979). Interestingly, Michel de Montaigne wrote of many expressions of our hands: “We beg, we promise, call, dismiss, threaten, pray, entreat, deny, refuse, question, admire, count, confess, repent, fear, blush, doubt, instruct, command, incite, encourage, swear, testify, accuse, condemn, absolve, insult, despise, defy, vex, flatter, applaud, bless, humiliate, mock, reconcile, commend, exalt, entertain, rejoice, complain, grieve, mope, despair, wonder, exclaim, are silent, and what not, with a variation and multiplication that vie with the tone.” DRAFT Notes, The Complete Works of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1948), p. 332. The French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s discussion of “manual concepts” was based on the original findings of the American anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing. Lévy-Bruhl writes that “With infinite patience he [Cushing] revised the primitive functions of his own hands, living over again with them their expressions of prehistoric days, with the same material and under the same conditions as at that period, when the hands were so at once with the mind that they really formed a part of it. The progress of civilization was brought about by reciprocal influence of mind over hand and vice versa. To reconstitute the primitives’ mentality, he had to rediscover the movement of their hands, movements in which their language and their thoughts were inseparably united. Hence the daring yet significant expression ‘manual concepts.’ The primitive who did not speak without his hands did not think without them either.” How Natives Think, trans. Lilian A. Clare (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), p. 161. For the original essay of Cushing to which Lévy-Bruhl refers, see “Manual Concepts: A Study of the Influence of Hand-Usage on Culture-Growth,” The American Anthropologist, 5 (1892): 289–317. 62.  Ibid., p. 172. 63.  Ibid., p. 173, and Natanson, Anonymity, p. 34, and Phenomenology, Role, and Reason, pp. 104ff. 64.  Phenomenology, Role, and Reason, p. 38. 65.  The Journeying Self, p. 41. 66.  See Hwa Yol Jung, “Phenomenology and Body Politics,” Body and Society, 2 (1996): l–22. 67.  Jean-Paul Sartre writes that “[i]n human societies, faces rule” (The Writing of Jean-Paul Sartre, Vol. 2: Selected Prose, eds. Michei Contat and Michel Rybalka, and trans. Richard McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 67. There is a saying that prosopagnosia, that is, not remembering faces, is worse than forgetting names. 68. “Erwin Straus and Alfred Schutz,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 42 (1982), p. 336. 69. Irwin W. Straus, Phenomenological Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1966), p. 211.

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70.  See Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), and The Fate of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). The logic of corporeal thinking would lead us to see the importance of “habit” in human conduct, in everyday activities in the mundane world. Pierre Bourdieu, for example, writes: “[t]he conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. Objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without being in any way the product of obedience to rules, they can be collectively orchestrated without being the product of the organizing action of a conductor.” The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 53. 71.  The Phenomenology of Moral Experience (Glencoe: Free Press, 1955), pp. 17 and 31. 72. See John Wild, Existence and the World of Freedom (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 54, and “Man as a Responsible Agent,” in Conditio Humana, ed. Walter Ritter von Baeyer and Richard M. Griffith (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1966), pp. 319–33. Based on the phenomenology of the life-world, Wild attempts to develop social and political ethics that is meaningful, free, and responsible. 73.  In his recent discussion of Schutz’s phenomenological microsociology of literature, Lester Embree comes to the conclusion that Schutz’s “theory of literature is . . . very like his theory of action, i.e., value-free.” Alfred Schutz, “A Construction of Alfred Schutz’s ‘Sociological Aspect of Literature,’” in Alfred Schutz’s “Sociological Aspect of Literature,” pp. 1–71. 74.  Collected Papers, II, p. 178. 75.  I choose only the following two statements of Schutz, which contain normative intimations, and which show his attitude of restraint and ambivalence toward value judgments. First, in the conclusion he draws from the discussion of the “wellinformed citizen” in democracy, and he writes: “A certain tendency to misinterpret democracy as a political institution in which the opinion of the uninformed man on the street must predominate increases the danger. It is the duty and the privilege, therefore, of the well-informed citizen in a democratic society to make his private opinion prevail over the public opinion of the man on the street.” Collected Papers, II, p. 134. In drawing his conclusion on responsibility, Schutz who, as a Jew, fled Nazi Germany, writes: “It is one thing, if, in the Nuremberg trials, the Nazi leaders were held responsible by the Allied Powers, and quite another thing if they were held answerable by the German people” (ibid., p. 276). 76.  Crowell, “A Conversation with Maurice Natanson,” p. 301. 77.  Phenomenological Psychology, pp. 137–65. 78.  Ibid., pp. 197–98. 79. See Edmund Husserl, pp. 12–19. 80.  Phenomenology, Role, Reason, p. 330. 81. Ibid.

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82.  Ibid., p. 319. 83.  Ibid., p. 335. 84.  Ibid., p. 343. 85.  Ibid., p. 319. Cf. Schutz, Collected Papers, II, p. 71. 86.  Phenomenology, Role, and Reason, p. 321. 87.  Ibid., p. 310. 88.  Edmund Husserl, p. 203. 89. Ibid. Some anti-Marxist philosophers such as Karl Popper’s clever use of Marx’s own Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach to criticize Marxists by accusing them of interpreting Marx rather than changing him. One may even accuse Marx of conceptual footbinding when he criticized his mentor Hegel for having his dialectics stand on its head rather than standing on its feet since it is true that one cannot stand on one’s head, but it is equally true that one cannot think with one’s feet. In his critique of Hegel, Marx emphasized that in humanity’s emancipation, the “head” of philosophy and the “heart” of the proletariat go together hand in hand. The Italian Marxist phenomenologist Enzo Paci may be called the Erich Fromm of phenomenology, if, according to Natanson (see Edmund Husserl, p. 191), Heidegger is the Carl Jung of phenomenology. Paci holds that Husserl was unaware of the fact that the crisis of the European sciences is the crisis of human existence in capitalist society. The Function of the Sciences and the Meaning of Man, trans. Paul Piccone and James E. Hansen (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), p. 323. 90.  Edmund Husserl, p. 125. 91.  See Natanson, Anonymity, pp. 143–144. 92.  See Herbert Spiegelberg, Steppingstones Toward an Ethics of Fellow Existers (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1986). 93.  Phenomenology, Role, and Reason, p. 121 (my italics). 94.  Gibson Winter’s Elements for Social Ethic (New York: Macmillan, 1966), is, as far as I know, the earliest and perhaps the only attempt to incorporate Schutz’s phenomenology of the social world into ethics, into what Winter calls “an ethic of the social world” with an accent on “an ethic of responsibility.” Unfortunately, it has been completely ignored and forgotten. Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics as “first philosophy.” Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969) extends, and goes beyond the limits of, the tradition of Husserlian constitutive phenomenology. Zygmunt Bauman pays the highest compliment to the achievement of Levinas when he calls him “the greatest moral philosopher of the twentieth century.” Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 214. The face is for Levinas an ethical hermeneutic of humanity. It is the first gesture of the social and thus the moral. His is the ethics of responsibility based on the primacy of the Other over the self in human relationships. In the phenomenological movement, Levinas’s philosophy points to the triumph of the moral over the ontological of Heidegger, who said that ontology is possible only as phenomenology.

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Chapter Twelve

Responsibility as First Ethics John Macmurray and Emmanuel Levinas

Goethe’s idea that “in the beginning was the Deed!” (Im Anfang war die Tat!) marks the genesis of a paradigm shift in contemporary philosophical thought for the celebration of which I wish to invoke the names of two epochal and inimitable philosophers of the twentieth century: John Macmurray and Emmanuel Levinas.1 Both Macmurray and Levinas challenge the logocentric tradition of Western philosophy since its inception in ancient Greece, that is, in Plato whose central importance is encapsulated in Alfred North Whitehead’s view that the history of Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. The logocentrism of ancient Greece reaches its summit in modern philosophy in Descartes’s “epistemophilia” or “epistemocracy” and Hegel’s dialectical theoretism. On the other hand, the philosophical root of Macmurray and Levinas stems from the Judaeo-Christian tradition, that is, the “other” root of Western civilization, which prompted Levinas to declare that heterocentric— or, as he calls it, heteronomic—ethics is the Judaic contribution to Western philosophy. The Hebraic spirituality (nephesh) is embodied in dynamic Movement whereas the Greek psyche is ensouled in timeless Being.2 The Hebraic dabhar became associated with the Deed or the practical, while the Greek logos completes itself in Reason. Goethe dramatized this problematic by frowning upon the theoretic “I think” as “grey” and was determined not to dull the primary colors of the practical “I do.” He was deeply suspicious of the truth of the Delphic oracle—“Know thyself”—which is the principium of Socratic wisdom and synonymous with the beginning of philosophizing in the West as “a device of priests secretly leagued to confuse man by impossible demands and to divert him from activity in the world about him to a false introspection.” For Goethe, “[m]an knows himself only in so far as he knows the world, becoming aware of it only in himself, and of himself only 293

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in it.” Furthermore, he contends that “[o]thers know me much better than I do myself. It is only [through] my relations to the world about me that I can learn to know and appraise correctly.”3 The seminal importance of Macmurray and Levinas lies in their mutual confirmation of the sacrament of coexistence whose unsurpassable and incomparable rendition is handicrafted in Auguste Rodin’s sculptural masterpiece (with the feminine title) La Cathédrale (1908). For Macmurray and Levinas, the Other (l’autrui) or the dialogical “You” after the fashion of Martin Buber’s “Thou” (Du) is the topic of first magnitude, and the primacy of the other over the self is indispensable to and prerequisite for ethics. Indeed, the primacy of the other is the most basic grammar of ethics and responsibility as first ethics. It certifies ethics as heterocentric or, indeed, ethics itself. The contemporary relevance of heterocentric ethics to social and political thought may be translated into the notion of “taking responsibility seriously,” which would reverse and replace the mainstream (even “malestream”) AngloAmerican political and jurisprudential notion of “taking rights seriously.” Western modernity has been hypnotized by the Cartesian cogito with which epistemology has become prima philosophia. The Cartesian cogito is theoretism par excellence and the exemplar of Macmurray’s self as (epistemological) subject, that is, of the “I think” in contradistinction to the “I do.” The theoretic or epistemological subject is by necessity egocentric. As Macmurray puts it forcefully, “[t]he self must be conceived, not theoretically as subject, but practically, as agent. . . . [H]uman behavior is comprehensible only in terms of a dynamic social reference; the isolated, purely individual self is a fiction.” The cogito as theoretism typifies a thinker’s desire to seal himself off from the world and to keep his thinking pure or uncontaminated by the presence of the other.4 The true philosopher is for the inventor of the cogito—Descartes—one who, as he himself characterizes it, is “alone but secure in a heated room on a cold winter’s day”5 and takes infinite delight in the permanent state of solitude, social isolation, and hibernation. The Cartesian mind as res cogitans, in the final analysis, is in the perpetual state of social paralysis and is incapable of socializing. By identifying my existence with what I think of it, the cogito valorizes that mind that is disembodied, monologic, and even ocularcentric. As it is the activity of the mind as “thinking substance,” the cogito is inherently monologic because it is always and necessarily ego cogito (the “I think”)—the epitome of an “invisible man” in total isolation from others, both other minds and other bodies. To use the language of Macmurray, cogito ergo non-sum. As a thinking substance, the mind needs nothing more than itself to think. Once the self and the other are viewed as disembodied substances, two self-contained substances, monologism—or even solipsism in extremis—is

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inevitable. For Descartes, moreover, the mind as cogito erects the privatized, insulated, and echoless chamber of “clear and distinct ideas”—three visual terms—in which nobody else can live. Thus the cogito is identified with ocularcentrism or the panoptic hegemony, with a kind of epistemological prison-house not unlike the Panopticon which Jeremy Bentham designed as a perfect prison system. As a matter of fact, Cartesian panoptic metaphysics goes eyeball to eyeball with the monologism of the cogito because vision is anaesthetic in denying the sociability of the (other) senses: There is indeed a narcissism and social amnesia of and in all vision. To put it simply, there is an identity between the “I” and the “eye.” The cogito is really video ergo sum, or the mind’s I is the mind’s eye. The “eye-viewpoint” of the Cartesian cogito highlights the subjectivism or egocentrism of modern philosophy, of the modern (TV) age itself. Contrary to Descartes for whom the certitude of existence is guaranteed by the solitary cogito, Macmurray verifies the certitude of existence by the social “I do.” The form of the personal, according to Macmurray, is not only relational through and through but also ruled by the dialogical primacy of the other as “You,” by “altarity”6 in which the other as “You” is placed on the altar or above the self.7 In Macmurray’s formulation of the “I do” the self does not and cannot exist in isolation. To be a person means “to be in communication with the Other.”8 The unit of the personal is not the “I” alone but the “You and I” together. We humans are inextricably “enmeshed in [a] network of relation[s] that binds us together to make up human society.”9 In the very concluding sentence of The Self as Agent, Macmurray unequivocally rejects the “atheistic” formulation of Sartre’s existentialism that “hell is other people” (l’enfer, c’est les autres).10 Morality is not only essentially social but also inherent in human action or the “I do.” Macmurray understands well, moreover, that the personal is relational only by way of the agents as bodies. It is first and primordially an embodied relation, that is, it is intercorporeal. We cannot speak of, however, the dialogical primacy of the other without relationality, which is based on the distinction or difference rather than the identity between the self (ipseity) and the other (alterity) both as singulars. Difference in the relationality between the “I” and the “You” is the force that pulls “us” together rather than pulls us apart. For Macmurray, not only is human difference constituted in the “I do,” but he also speaks of the “discrimination of the other.” Without the discrimination of the self from the other, of the “I” from the “You” and vice versa, the field of the personal would be a flatland of the same. The discrimination of the self makes the self open to the other—the process of which is neither homogenizing nor being homogenized. Without differentiation, therefore, communication among humans is unnecessary.11

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By way of relationality, difference, and the primacy of the other, Macmurray continues the Copernican revolution of human thought, which Ludwig Feuerbach enunciated in modern philosophy. It may be called Copernican because what Copernicus’s heliocentrism is to Ptolemy’s geocentrism, heterocentrism is to egocentrism. Feuerbach’s Copernican discovery of “Thou” (or “You”) is promulgated in principle 59 of his Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft), which was originally published in 1843. He wrote decisively and unambiguously: “The single man for himself possesses the essence of man neither in himself as a moral being nor in himself as a thinking being. The essence of man is contained only in the community and unity of man with man; it is a unity, however, which rests only on the reality of the distinction between I and thou.”12 With this enunciation of Feuerbach is the birth of heterocentric thinking and doing. Indeed, the term heterocentric ethics is redundant, because any ethics worth its name is by definition heterocentric, that is, founded on the primacy of the other or for the sake of the other. Levinas, too, continues to trek the path of the Feuerbachian revolution. He attends directly to the question of ethics as first philosophy, which is his paramount contribution to phenomenology as a philosophical movement in the twentieth century. Based on the asymmetrical relation of the self and the other, in which each is different because he/she is unique or singular, not the other way around, the other as other (alterity) is ethically prior to the self (ipseity). Alterity, in other words, is the site of the ethical. It is of utmost importance to emphasize the point that Hannah Arendt’s controversial discourse on Adolph Eichmann’s “banality of evil” is grounded in his “thoughtlessness.” By thoughtlessness Arendt means one’s inability to think from the standpoint of the other. It led Eichmann to commit the ir/ responsible acts of “crimes against humanity” (hostis generis humani) for which he deserved to be hanged.13 Levinas’s ethics as first philosophy is tantamount to the ethics of responsibility, a heteronomic ethics for others or, as he himself puts it, an ethics without concern for (absolute) reciprocation. It is noteworthy that, in Hebrew, responsibility (ahariout) and “other” (aher) share the same etymological root.14 Because each person is singular and thus different from another, moreover, his/her responsibility for the other is also unique and thus non-transferable.15 Cruelty or brutality, in all forms of its manifestation, is condemned because they result from disrespect for the other’s difference, for alterity. No doubt, violence—whether it be war, revolution, or capital punishment—involves cruelty or brutality. It aims at the defacement or complete effacement of the other from the surface of the earth. Thus it may be said that violence is the price we pay for the abolition of differences, of alterity, which signifies

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each person’s integrity and dignity as a human being. Violence results from the intolerant and uncompromising affirmation of the self’s epistemological infallibility and moral inculpability against the other that violates the fundamental principle of human coexistence based on respect for difference. It is ignorant of and oblivious to what Hans-Georg Gadamer16 calls the soul of hermeneutics as the possibility of the other being right. Michael Walzer puts the matter accurately and squarely: “Tolerance makes difference possible; difference makes tolerance necessary.”17 What is, then, the ultimate telos of coexistence based on alterity? For Levinas who witnessed the Holocaust as for Macmurray, who was a Quaker pacifist, it is peace without qualification. With the idea of peace, the question of the ethical merges with that of the political. In merging with the ethical, however, the political does not refer to “a fabulous monster” that Hobbes created as Leviathan with “a terrified imagination” or the purpose of overcoming the state of nature in which we are condemned to the fear of violent death because it is the warlike condition of every man against every other. Here we are reminded of Picasso’s extraordinary and magnificent portrayal in Guernica (1937) of the horror and terror of war painted in the faces of humans and animals that nullifies Rodin’s sacrament of coexistence. Contrary to Karl von Clausewitz, peace—not war or carnage—is the continuation of politics by other means. “Power,” Arendt judiciously declares, “is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.”18 Levinas is particularly concerned with the ethical gridlock in Heidegger’s “fundamental ontology” as phenomenology in Being and Time.19 In his opposition to Heidegger’s ontology, Levinas chooses the term “meontology,” which affirms “a meaning beyond Being, a primary mode of non-Being (meon).”20 Thus “meontology” is proposed both to negate and to transcend Heideggerian ontology. In a nutshell, the ethical is “otherwise than Being” (autrement qu’être).21 “I am trying to show,” Levinas says, “that man’s ethical relation to the other is ultimately prior to his ontological relation to himself (egology) or to the totality of things which we call the world (cosmology).”22 There is, indeed, an ineradicable gulf between Heidegger’s fundamental ontology and Levinas’s ethics as first philosophy. In Being and Time, Heidegger defines Dasein as “Being-in-the-world” (in-der-Welt-sein), which includes the province of Dasein’s relation with others (Mitsein or Mitwelt). Since “in” in “Being-in-the-world” is ecstatic in the existentialist tradition of Kierkegaard, humans are radically distinct from non-human beings and things in nature. For Heidegger, the “authenticity” (Eigentlichkeit, one’s own sphere) of Dasein as Mitsein is distinguished from the “anonymous

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they” (das Man), which implicates Dasein’s fallenness to “inauthenticity” (Uneigentlichkeit) from the grace of authenticity. While Levinas’s ethics as first philosophy is predicated upon the primacy of the other, Heidegger’s Daseinsanlyse is self-centered (eigentlich) and concerned with “interiority,” which is inside the self. Heidegger’s Dasein is never “ec/centric” and as such is not concerned with “exteriority,” which is outside the self. Therefore, Heidegger’s egological “fundamental ontology” is incapable of birthing or fashioning an ethics23—an ethics of responsibility, which is held together not by the “resoluteness” (Entschlossenheit) of “authentic” selves but only by the responsivity of dialogical others. Therefore, Heidegger’s egological “fundamental ontology” is incapable of fashioning an ethics, an ethics of responsibility, which is held together by the resoluteness of “authentic” selves, not of the dialogical others. The face (visage) is for Levinas capable of facing or interfacing the singular other as “You.” It is the ethical surface of humanity: “The epiphany of the face is ethical.”24 Thus the face is the primordial modality of the ethical hermeneutic of “altarity.” Levinas defends vigorously “the defenseless nakedness of the face” as an ethical hermeneutic.25 “The approach to the face,” he emphasizes, “is the most basic mode of responsibility. As such, the face of the other is verticality and uprightness; it spells a relation of rectitude. The face is not in front of me (en face de moi) but above me.”26 The phenomenologist Erwin W. Straus, too, is forthright when he speaks of the “upright posture” of humans that signifies humanity’s ethical posture of rectitude as much as its physiological characteristic.27 By the same token, the look of the face as an ethical gesture in crying, laughing, pain, or joy is not and cannot be determined by the objective color of an eye. As an ethical gesture of first magnitude, the face does not just look but also “speaks” albeit in silence. The language it speaks (i.e., “saying”) is the language of rectitude as “ethical sincerity.”28 Saying, in other words, has an ethical force and fortitude. Here Levinas, consciously or unconsciously, speaks of the language of Confucian ethics, the Confucian ethics of saying as ethical performance, which is plainly called sincerity (cheng). As it is spelled syntactically or composed sinogrammatically of “word” and “performed” in fusion, sincerity stands for rectitude and integrity of “we mean what we say,” “we say what we mean,” and “we perform in action what we promise in words.” In the primacy of the ethical, subjectivity is affirmed never for itself (i.e., never monologic or egocentric), but only for the Other (pour l’autrui) (i.e., heterocentric). Subjectivity comes into being or existence as “heteronomic.” “It is,” Levinas affirms, “my inescapable and incontrovertible answerability to the other that makes me an individual ‘I’.”29 Thus the notion of responsibility (answerability) is, first and foremost, the confirmation of the I that is what

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Levinas calls the “meontological version of subjectivity,” based on the face as its most basic and expressive manifestation. He writes, therefore, that responsibility is “the essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity. For I describe subjectivity in ethical terms. Ethics, here, does not supplement a preceding existential base; the very node of the subjectivity is knotted in ethics understood as responsibility.”30 It would be wrong, however, to think that responsibility contradicts or opposes freedom. Macmurray’s distinction between the “I do” and the “I think” finds its parallel in Arendt’s distinction between the vita activa and vita contemplativa. Unlike the “necessity” of labor (animal laborans) and the “utility” of work (homo faber), freedom is for Arendt the distinguishing characteristic of human action. For her, the irreversibility of human action can be redeemed only by the human faculty of “forgiving,” whereas the unpredictability or uncertainty of action in the future is guaranteed by the human faculty of making and keeping promises. Defining the irreversibility and the unpredictability of human action, she asserts that “forgiving and promising enacted in solitude or isolation remain without reality and can signify no more than a role played before one’s self [without interaction or the other in mind].”31 Levinas, too, would agree with Arendt when she says that action is the human answer to the existential condition of natality as initium (initiative).32 As a matter of fact, the insertion of oneself into the human world is likened by Arendt to “a second birth.” It is noteworthy here that there is an unbridgeable gulf that separates Arendt and Heidegger. While Heidegger contemplates Dasein’s “authenticity” (Eigentlichkeit) or its “own innermost sphere,” Arendt pursues the vita activa as the locus of human plurality. More radically, there is a stark contrast between Arendt and Heidegger in that the former invests natality as the beginning of the vita activa, whereas the latter deems or redeems Dasein as “Being-towards-death” (Sein zum Tode). It is the sheer difference between natality and mortality—the two extreme spectra of human existence. Man is for Heidegger the mortal of all mortals whereas he/she is for Arendt the beginning of all beginnings within the boundaries of the allembracing earth that constitutes the quintessence of the human condition. The radical implication of natality for the philosophy of action lies in the twofold fact that each and every human being is unmistakably an initium, a new beginning and that he/she has the native or inborn gift of transforming and shaping anew the world because he/she is an initium. In other words, the human faculty of action is ontologically rooted or anchored in the simple facticity of natality. Phenomenologically, power—the central category of politics—is ancillary to the advent of natality. As its cognate etymology shows, it connotes “potentiality” as in the Latin potential or potestas, the Greek dynamis, and the German Macht. Arendt writes with lucidity:

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What makes man a political being is his faculty of action; it enables him to get together with his peers, to act in concert, and to reach out for goals and enterprises that would never enter his mind, let alone the desires of his heart, had he not been given this gift—to embark on something new. Philosophically speaking, to act is the human answer to the condition of natality. Since we all come into the world by virtue of birth, as newcomers and beginnings, we are able to start something new; without the fact of birth we would not even know what novelty is, all “action” would be either mere behavior or preservation.33

Faith and hope, Arendt adds, are two correlatives of natality. As they pertain to “Jesus of Nazareth,” they are biblical creations. Greek antiquity, which invented the vita contemplativa, knows nothing of them. “It is,” Arendt intimates, “this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their ‘glad tidings’: ‘A child has been born onto us.’”34 This does not mean, however, that, for Arendt as for Macmurray, they are divine or “otherworldly.” Rather, they are primarily human or “this-worldly” and belongs to the public order of the vita activa. By virtue of natality, Levinas would insist with Arendt that human existence is invested as freedom rather than condemned to it. The investitute of human existence as freedom, however, can never be absolute: there is no unconditional freedom insofar as we, the individuals, inhabit and share the same spatiotemporal arena of action with others in the world and on this earth. The aim of political theory itself is to ensure, according to Levinas, “the most complete exercise of spontaneity by reconciling my freedom with the freedom of the other.”35 Nevertheless, Levinas opposes Heidegger’s ontology for affirming “the primacy of freedom over ethics.” “To be sure,” Levinas writes, “the freedom involved in the essence of truth is not for Heidegger a principle of free will. Freedom comes from an obedience to Being: it is not man who possesses freedom; it is freedom that possesses man. But the dialectic which thus reconciles freedom and obedience in the concept of truth presupposes the primacy of the same, which marks the direction of and defines the whole of Western philosophy.”36 In the end, responsibility is not only compatible with, but also weightier than, freedom because one can be free without being responsible but one cannot be responsible without first being free. Speaking of Macmurray, David A. S. Fergusson confirms that for Macmurray who is under the sway of Kant, “without freedom responsible action becomes impossible.”37 Freedom, then, is the necessary but not sufficient condition of responsible action. For Macmurray, as for an existential phenomenologist, freedom and action are imbricated and imply each other. Freedom is inherent in the very structure of action. Freedom, according to Macmurray, is “the capacity to determine the future by action.”38

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We would be remiss if we do not take notice of Viktor Frankl, who gives us a glimpse of responsibility as “self-transcendence” (or “altarity”), which deserves, I think, more than a passing comment. He was a survivor of Nazi death camps and founded logotherapy, or psychotherapy with a human face, as it were. Logotherapy calls for the affirmation of life at all cost, as opposed to the abolition of life, relying on Nietzsche’s single dictum that “he who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.” Like Levinas, more importantly, Frankl prompts and promotes an elegant way of formulating the concept of responsibility as “self-transcendence,” which is “the cue to cure” the feeling of life as meaningless or worthless. By self-transcendence, Frankl means the discovery and recovery of life’s meaning by engaging actively in the world, in the other rather than one’s own inner psyche. Self-transcendence is embodied in the idea of responsibility: “Freedom . . . is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.”39 Responsibility as heterocentric ethics based on the hermeneutic of the face in Levinas and the consociational or interpersonal “I-You” relation in Macmurray is fully embellished and uplifted by the contemporary ethics of care as a feminine gift of life. For I consider the ethics of care as having the primordial structure of responsibility with a feminine face and a feminine distinction. In In a Different Voice, Carol Gilligan voices the feminine ethics of care in the following terms: the moral problem arises from conflicting responsibilities rather than from competing rights and requires for its solution a mode of thinking that is contextual and narrative rather than formal and abstract. This conception of morality as concerned with the activity of care centers moral development around the understanding of responsibility and relationships, just as the conception of morality as fairness ties moral development to the understanding of rights and rules.40

In the Anglo-American lands of “taking rights seriously”—perhaps too seriously—the implication of the ethics of care as the primordial modality of responsibility is momentous and paradigmatic. The ethical basis of “taking rights seriously” is at best one-sided and at worst illegitimate because it thinks the unthinkable, that is, the ontological fabric of the self as completely autonomous and self-reliant being rather than an interdependent ensemble of social relationships. In this sense, responsibility as first ethics deconstructs the mainstream (“malestream” as feminists would call it) philosophy of rights. It is fashionable today to invoke the “care of the self,” the “care of the soul,” the “care of the body,” “healthcare,” “medicare,” and even “earthcare.”

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Heidegger defines care (Sorge) as the ontological soul of Dasein as “Beingin-the-world.” However, as we have argued above, Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is incapable of generating an ethics or an ethics of responsibility because individual Dasein is conceived stubbornly as egocentric (eigentlich). Foucault, too, speaks of “the care of the self.”41 His analytics of the sex/power nexus has been enormously attractive—rightly so, I might add—to feminism in an attempt to empower women. For Foucault,42 power is both ubiquitous and relational, and as such it penetrates deeply the module of sexuality as nothing but a nexus of human relationships turned into carnal contact, which is abbreviated often as powerplay. Thus sexuality is really a relational function of power or a strategic form of powerplay. However, I think Foucault is as misguided as Heidegger because he is totally oblivious to care as heterocentric. Care means for Foucault taking care of oneself rather than others. In the form of a corpus of knowledge and rules, Foucault declares that the healthcare of medicine, for example, defines “a way of living, a reflective mode of relation to oneself, to one’s body, to food, to wakefulness and sleep, to the various activities, and to the environment.”43 His reference to the other in care is confined to pay “the attention one devotes to the care that others should take of themselves,” the injunction of which is regarded as “an intensification of social relations.”44 Thus care as relationality and responsibility is marginalized and secondary to the “care of the self.” At best, it is a limping affair.45 In conclusion, let me reiterate what I said in the beginning of this paper: It would be an intellectual travesty to deny or not to recognize that Macmurray and Levinas are paradigm shifters in twentieth-century philosophy in inaugurating the dialogical primacy of the “I do” over the “I think,” ethics as first philosophy, and responsibility as first ethics. In relating Macmurray and Levinas, who are truly philosophical soulmates, it must be emphasized that the primacy of the “I do” is the (ontological) precondition for ethics as first philosophy. They implicate and complement each other. For the “I do” and ethics are two reversible sides of the same process. They together herald and propel a paradigm shift of Copernican proportion and magnitude. Yet in reversing or deconstructing, if you will, the theoretic or theory-centered tradition of modern Western philosophy since Descartes, their seismic or tsunami effects have not, unfortunately, reached the shores of ethical and political thinking, even if for Macmurray the personal is concerned eminently with politics as ethics. Mary Ann Glendon, I think, is most outspoken in criticizing the longheld tradition of “rights talk”—as she calls it—in Anglo-American political, social, legal, and moral philosophy from Thomas Hobbes and John Locke to William Blackstone and Ronald Dworkin. The true American Way, she

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contends, is unmistakably the Way of Rights that places the self as the center of the world and universe. The American Way shows a genuine genuflection for the “I’s have it.” “The American rights dialect,” she writes forcefully of the hegemonic grip or eutrophication of rights in the United States, “is distinguished not only by what we say and how we say it, but also by what we leave unsaid.”48 She argues further that as the lingua franca of American social and political thought, the language of rights knows no bound and “no compromise.” It is indeed the confessional reduction ad insanitatem of American culture itself. In this light, Locke’s old observation that “in the beginning all the world was America” becomes ageless and acquires a new twist of meaning in the context of Francis Fukuyama’s recent provocation of “the end of history.” It turned out to be even prophetic, that is, in the end (as well as in the beginning) all the world is, again, America. The real question, I think, is why good Samaritans, or altruists, have increasingly become victimized in the land of “rights talk,” which is tied to choices, contracts, and entitlements. Kristen Renwick Monroe’s recent work The Heart of Altruism has a decisive bearing on the ethics of (caring as) responsibility, which, as a paradigmatic moral theory, is an alternative—or “altarnative,” if you will—to “rights talk.”46 It is heartening when the kind face of compassion transfigures and prevails upon the nasty and ugly face of contempt and cruelty. Altruism is a matter of the heart, or what Macmurray calls “emotional rationality.” Monroe attempts to answer James Q. Wilson’s cogent question: “[i]f rights are all that is important, what will become of responsibilities?” Altruism, Wilson contends, may not be “a strong beacon light” but is “a small candle flame” that is capable of dispelling the darkness and warming our soul once it is brought close to our heart and cupped in our hands.47 Altruism lands a mortal blow to the cherished tradition of “rational choice theory” whose center is “economic rationality.”48 Wilson echoes Monroe when he claims that “the teachings of the heart deserve to be taken as seriously as the lessons of the mind.”49 Economic rationality in rational choice theory as an indispensable and integral part of “rights talk” is based on the premise that “rational man” is one who chooses to maximize his/her own self-interest, “enlightened” or otherwise. He/she is a self-centered person, while the altruist is heterocentric. The altruist has the natural disposition and propensity to linking himself/herself to (distant) others through the moral sense of “a shared community.” In essence, the “heart of altruism” refutes the twofold character of rational choice theory: (1) rationality and (2) choice. Neither rationality nor choice explains the good deeds of altruists. As Monroe emphasizes, altruists are left with “no choice in their behavior toward others. They are John Donne’s people. All life concerns them. Any death diminishes them. Because they are part of mankind.”50

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It is high and propitious time, I think, that “rights talk” should give way to the language and ethics of responsibility that has been instantiated in Macmurray and Levinas. Only by “downsizing” “rights talk,” do we hope to make responsibility the center of ethics and the moral universe. Disenchantment interrupts the flow of the status quo and fosters transcendence that triggers and gathers momentum for transformation. For Levinas as for Macmurray, transcendence signifies an ethical gesture and turn of the first order. Ethics as first philosophy, indeed, involves the philosopher’s responsibility to commit himself/herself to the welfare of humanity and the betterment of the world. It is deeply rooted and inheres in the vita activa of the Hebraic dabhar in contrast to the vita contemplativa of the Greek logos, which Friedrich Hölderlin, in the footsteps of Goethe, would disdain as full of thought but poor in deed. What “rights talk” is to the usual art of the possible, responsibility is to the unusual art of the impossible—to appropriate the recent expression of the Czech president Václav Havel, who read Levinas closely in his prison years and intends to promote the idea of “living in truth” and the new vision of “politics as morality in practice.”51 Then and only then does responsibility as first ethics become an ethics of the future, and ethics as first philosophy—a philosophy of the world that is hurrying into a global village. Indeed, necessity is the mother of invention. To apostrophize my conclusion: The new millennium belongs by necessity to heterocracy or heterotopia—not to be mistaken for “outopia”—which, as the moral habitus of humanity’s conduct, is neither egocentric nor anthropocentric.52 NOTES 1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe’s Faust, trans. Carlyle F. MacIntyre (Norfolk: New Directions, 1941), pp. 82 and 83. I was introduced to both Macmurray and Levinas by John Wild, who was very instrumental to the dissemination of existential philosophy and phenomenology and to making them into an important philosophical movement in the United States. In his Existence and the World of Freedom (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 231, Wild commented on Macmurray’s Persons in Relation (London: Faber and Faber, 1961) as “[a] lucid expression of radical empiricism, worked out independently by a British philosopher, which has much in common with continental phenomenology.” Cf. David A. S. Fergusson, who, in his John Macmurray in a Nutshell (London: Faber and Faber, 1957) as “a phenomenological description” of human action. Wild also introduced me in the late 1960s to Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), which marks the inception of Levinas’s (heterocentric) ethics as prima philosophia going beyond the limits of Edmund Husserl’s constitutive phenomenology and Heidegger’s ontology. In retrospect, my article “The Logic of the Personal: John Macmurray and the Ancient

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Hebrew View of Life,” The Personalist, 47 (1966): 532–46 shows that both Macmurray and Levinas are deeply rooted in and infused with Judaism. 2.  See Thorlief Boman, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek, trans. Jule L. Moreau (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960). 3. See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wisdom and Experience, trans. and ed. Hermann J. Weigand (New York: Pantheon Books, 1949), pp. 206–207. 4.  See Gerald L. Bruns, “What Is Tradition?” New Literary History, 22 (1991): 1–21. 5.  See Wolf Lepenies, “‘Interesting Questions’ in the History of Philosophy and Elsewhere,” in Philosophy and History, eds. Richard Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 141–71. 6.  Here I am appropriating the neologism of Mark C. Taylor, Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 7. In The Other, trans. Christopher Macann (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), p. 1, Michael Theunissen writes that “. . . the problem of the Other has certainly been penetrated as deeply as today into the foundations of philosophical thought. It is no longer the simple object of a specific discipline but has already become the topic of first philosophy.” 8. Macmurray, Persons in Relation, p. 77. 9. Macmurray, Reason and Emotion (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1962), p. 14. 10. See The Self As Agent, p. 222. 11.  Cf. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 175–76. 12.  Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, trans. Manfred H. Vogel (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), p. 71. 13.  See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, rev. and enl. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1977). 14.  See Catherine Chalier, “The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and the Hebraic Tradition,” in Ethics as First Philosophy, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 8. 15. At the moment of its inception in the latter part of the nineteenth century, responsibility was identified with the “accountability” of the self for himself/herself. See Richard McKeon, “The Development and the Significance of the Concept of Responsibility,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 11 (1957): 3–32. Responsibility as heterocentric ethics in Macmurray and Levinas is, indeed, a new paradigmatic idea. 16. See Jean Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. Joel Weinsheimer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 124. 17.  On Toleration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), p. xii. 18.  The Human Condition, p. 200. 19.  See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). 20.  See Richard Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 61. 21. See Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981).

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22.  See Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, p. 57. 23.  See Emmanuel Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), pp. 1–10. 24.  Totality and Infinity, p. 199. 25.  Emmanuel Levinas, Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 158. 26.  See Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, p. 59. 27. Erwin W. Straus, Phenomenological Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1966), pp. 137–65. 28.  See Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, p. 64. 29. Emmanuel Levinas and Richard Kearney, “Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas,” in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), p. 20. 30.  Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1982), p. 95. 31. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 237. 32.  Ibid., p. 177. 33.  Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), p. 179. 34. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 247. 35.  Totality and Infinity, p. 83. 36.  Ibid., p. 45. 37.  John Macmurray, pp. 15–16. 38.  The Self as Agent, p. 212. Here Fergusson refers to Macmurray’s Kantian stress on the idea that “freedom is the necessary condition of responsible action” and also that “action can be classified as right or wrong.” Nonetheless, three important points should be made in light of the inflation of autonomy and the deflation of responsibility in modern and contemporary moral discourse since Kant. First, Wild in his Existence and the World of Freedom, p. 54, rightly points out that value, or the moral structure of approvals and disapprovals, is not a later addition, but indigenous to the life-world (Lebenswelt) as socio-cultural world. Not only is autonomy inseparable from responsibility since human is not a worldless automaton but also it is not, as Kant had it, a mysterious noumenon the assertion of which denies human noetic responsibility as knower. Wild, thus, attempts to integrate freedom and responsibility by transcending the Scylla of absolutism and the Charybdis of relativism. Second, the logical outcome of Kant’s philosophy of autonomy is, as Robert Paul Wolff once argued vigorously and convincingly in his In Defense of Anarchism (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), anarchy rather than responsible government or politics. Third, Kant’s deontological prescriptivism is deductive, whereas Macmurray and Levinas as well as Wild are eductive, i.e., phenomenological. Unlike “eductive” thinking, “deductive” thinking is often in danger of committing conceptual gerrymandering and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Kant’s decontextualized prescriptivism thus finds no resolution when two categorical imperatives collide or contradict each other in human conduct in the Lebenswelt.

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39.  See Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, rev. ed. (New York: Washington Square Press, 1985), p. 133. Cf. Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (New York: Harper and Row, 1956), p. 1, who writes poignantly that “[m]ost people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved [i.e., self-centered or taking], rather than that of loving, of one’s capacity to love [others] [i.e., giving].” 40.  Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), p. 19. 41.  See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986). 42.  See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 43.  The Care of the Self, p. 100. 44.  Ibid., p. 53. 45.  It is extremely important to note that we often forget to recognize the notion of self-identity as a misnomer because the self is always in the process of becoming and thus in the state of incompletion until death. The self as a process is, in other words, heterogeneous. See Madan Sarup, Identity, Culture and the Postmodern World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), p. xvi. 46.  Kristen Renwick Monroe, The Heart of Altruism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 47.  James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense (New York: Free Press, 1993), pp. 245 and 215. 48.  The irreducibility of human action—or the “I do” in the case of Macmurray— to economic rationality is elegantly argued by the following authors: R. H. Tawney in The Acquisitive Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920) criticizes the “acquisitive societies” of the West whose sole or main goal is the “acquisition of wealth” by confusing the end with the means; Arendt in The Human Condition critically examines the “necessity” of labor (animal laborans) and the “utility” of work (homo faber) in the context of action; C. B. Macpherson is reputed for his scathing critique of “possessive individualism.” See The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962); and Sheldon S. Wolin in Politics and Vision (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960) advances the most interesting thesis, that the decline of political philosophy can be explained neither ethically nor methodologically but only substantively, that is, it is due to liberalism’s subordination of political categories to economic ones. 49. Wilson, The Moral Sense, p. 238. 50.  Kristen Renwick Monroe, The Heart of Altruism, p. 216. 51.  The best known political idea of Havel is “living in truth.” The most recent collection of his essays under the title of The Art of the Impossible, trans. Paul Wilson et al. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), whose main concern is the related question of “politics as morality in practice.” “We must not,” he writes, “be afraid of dreaming the seemingly impossible if we want the seemingly impossible to become a reality.” Havel’s art of the impossible is synonymous with “the art of improving ourselves and the world” without getting caught in an immoral maze of “speculation, calculation, intrigue, secret deals, and pragmatic maneuvering.” Havel reminds us of

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Goethe’s maxim that “[f]or a man to measure up to all that is demanded of him he must overestimate his possibilities” (see Wisdom and Experience, p. 206). It would be wrong to interpret, however, that Havel’s conception of “politics as morality in practice” is moralizing and that the hope for his new politics as the art of the impossible is apocalyptic. In this respect, the American neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty is perspicacious in calling Havel a poet of “social hope,” which is not prognosticating or eschatological but “content to be short-rage and prudential.” Havel appears to Rorty as a man who treads a cautious middle that avoids the grand narrative of history as “heroic struggle” on the one hand and “tragic decline” on the other. Havel’s poetry of social hope is overburdened with neither utopianism nor presentism. See Richard Rorty, Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3: Truth and Progress (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 228–43. In the final analysis, Havel is engaged in neither high- nor low-altitude flying to lose sight of a proper perspective. 52.  I am firmly convinced that ecology is our “ultimate concern,” and that for the reason of humanity’s survival alone in light of the terrible defacement and destruction of the earth, heterocentric ethics or the ethics of responsibility should encompass natural things and phenomena—animals, trees, plants, grasses, and even inanimate things. It calls for the question of ethics as if the earth really matters and of finding the way of greening it. The aim of the ethics of responsibility is to reenchant, resurrect, and reenliven the body and the spirit of the earth (Gaia) as “You” with a Faustian zeal and energy. The Amerindian chief Seattle said that “the earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth.” The philosophy of the “I do” and ethics as first philosophy must develop the “geophilosophical” conception of the earth, not as one element among others, but rather that element that brings together “all the elements within a single embrace.” See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 85–113. The philosophy of the “I do” should be able to speak the fluent language and ethics of “earthcare.” At the moment, unfortunately, “rights talk” prevails in our attempt to protect, preserve, and conserve our natural environment. We speak of the “rights of nature,” “animal rights,” etc. The possibility of developing a non-anthropocentric or ecocentric ethics based on Macmurray’s and Levinas’s formulation of heteronomy and ethics of responsibility is beyond the scope of our present inquiry and must be postponed to another occasion.

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Taking Responsibility Seriously

1. PROLOGUE The concept of responsibility lives in the shadow of the hagiographic life of rights in the modern West. Western modernity has privileged rights while handcuffing and marginalizing responsibility.1 Ours, in particular, is the land of rights talk, and our political and legal thought has been enslaved to and by it. As Amy Gutmann recently points out, “Most prominent political philosophers are now rights theorists.”2 Today, rights talk has invaded and colonized even the nonhuman world of nature: We speak of the “rights of nature” and “animal rights” as well as “civil rights” and “human rights.” We are, indeed, possessed and compressed by rights talk. So-called retreat from or the “reclamation” of responsibility is a phantom expression because responsibility has never assumed conceptual prominence or strategic equity with rights in Western modernity. To echo the true spirit of the French feminist Luce Irigaray, who refuses to accept the status quo: “If we keep on speaking the same language together, we’re going to reproduce the same history.”3 The conceptual career of responsibility has been stagnant, taunted, and dismal. It has become suffused, infused, and confused with a person’s “accountability” for his/her own conduct ever since it was first introduced in English and French in 1787.4 Having been associated with personal, political, and legal reward and blame or punishment, responsibility has by and large become and still remains a merely sublimated correlative of rights, even for those who are concerned with the concept. Taking responsibility means standing behind, backing, or giving support to the substantive idea of rights.5 Mary Ann Glendon’s Rights Talk is the most scathing and serious critique of American liberalism as possessive individualism, or what she calls “the American rights dialect,” i.e., the American parochial language of the “I’s 309

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have it.”6 “The American rights dialect,” she contends, “is distinguished not only by what we say and how we say it, but also by what we leave unsaid.”7 This chapter is conceived as a counterproposal to the work of Ronald Dworkin, presently the chief spokesperson for the rights tradition of Hobbes, Locke, John Austin, and William Blackstone.8 “Someone has a right to something,” Dworkin asserts, “then it is wrong for the government to deny it to him even though it would be in the general interest to do so.”9 The absolute and universal claim of rights talk begins with Locke’s idea that in the beginning all the world was America and ends with Francis Fukuyama’s recent apocalyptic and redemptive pronouncement that in the ending all the world will, if it has not already become, America. In this paper, I intend to unpack or deconstruct rights talk and explore the ethical and political discourse of responsibility as an alternative to it.10 Rights talk may be faulted on a twofold account: First, it is based on a misconception of social ontology, and second, it is, being egocentric, tantamount to the denial of the ethical in that there is no ethics involved in self-centeredness or in the pursuit of happiness as the maximization of one’s self-interest. The ethical privileges the Other and is always other-directed. 2. THE EMBODIMENT OF RELATIONALITY To be human is to be interhuman. Human existence is relational through and through. As human reality is social process, it is socially constructed: We are born into and construct the world as “multiple realities.” Social existence is characteristic of, and quintessential to, the humanity of humankind. Good or bad, we are indeed condemned to social existence. Insofar as we are born of mothers, we are always already socially situated. The religious myth of immaculate conception is most miraculous of all miracles because it defies the law of human coexistence. There is no self unencumbered by the surrounding environment both social and natural. However attractive and precious the terms self-reliance, rights, autonomy, and independence may be, they are disconnected with affiliation, association, and interdependence. Interdependence, that is, interdependence cum difference, cannot and must not be anathema to the human or cosmic condition of plurality. In the beginning was the word, and it was called “Relation” that authors both thought and action in the co-presence of the self and the Other. As the basic root word, the Relation accompanies and corresponds to every human birth as a new beginning. Only where there is the Relation, is there the ethical. The ethical was born at the same time as the relational; they are born as twins. Like Jackson Pollock’s paintings with a labyrinthine network of lines with uncountable

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intersections, the world is nothing but an interwoven web of relationships or the manifold points of contact. To put it simply, in the beginning was primum relationis.11 In the world described in terms of the primacy of relation, we need to introduce new words, new concepts: “interbeing”12 and “interdividuality.”13 Alfred Schutz defines the social construction of reality as “social reality” as “the sum total of objects and occurrences within the social cultural world as experienced by the common-sense thinking of men living their daily lives among their fellow-men, connected with them in manifold relations of interaction.”14 Just as the world is not my private but already socialized world, my knowledge of it is from the start socialized as well by way of the “reciprocity” of individual perspectives or the “interchangeability” of individual standpoints. Likewise, moral philosophy itself is grounded in the natural experience of the life-world as socio-cultural world, or what Charles Taylor concisely calls the “affirmation of ordinary life.”15 In his work on the phenomenology of morals, therefore, Maurice Mandelbaum insists that the phenomenological approach is “eductive” rather than “deductive.”16 “In other words,” he continues, “the phenomenological approach holds that the proper basis for any moral generalization, and for the confirmation which we rightfully demand for such a generalization, are to be found in an examination of the moral judgments which [ordinary] men [and women] make.”17 The body is the living site and the material condition of sociality. As the co-presence of the self and the Other, sociality is inconceivable without bodies-in-relation. It is made of fleshly connected selves, that is, it is intercorporeal. It is not trite to emphasize that we began only very recently to understand the weighty normative consequences of defining sociality in terms of intercorporeality on matters of life and death in humanity ranging from abortion to euthanasia, from sexuality to pornography, from incarceration and torture to capital punishment, from illness to health and medicine, etc. We— particularly philosophers whose primary concern is allegedly the mind’s I or Reason—often forget or take for granted the factum brutum that the body is the active mode of being in the world and that it is the primordial location of the social.18 The body is indeed a carnal interbeing. The most serious consequence of the Cartesian division of mind and body as two separate substances—one as res cogitans and the other as res extensa—is that it denies, and is incapable of justifying, the concept of sociality. The Cartesian cogito is totally unaware of the body as a social phenomenon. It takes the disembodied subject as the hostage of knowledge or—to borrow William James’s expression—it is “wedded to the decomposition of life.”19 Its interiority is sealed from corporeal and thus worldly exteriority. Once the mind becomes a separate substance independent of and disconnected from the body, egocentrism or even solipsism is inevitable.

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The body (as flesh) is an intrinsically social phenomenon. Everything corporeal, every flesh, is social through and through: where there is no body, there is no sociality and no reality. To be social is to be intercorporeal. Only because of the body (as flesh) are we said to be visible and capable of relating ourselves first to other bodies and then to other minds. The body is our social placement in the world. Only in this sense is the world said to be made of the same stuff as the body. In defining the social, the phenomenologist Erwin W. Straus favors the ontological primacy of the body over the mind when he says that “the body of an organism is related to other bodies; it is a part of the physical universe. The mind, however, is related to one body only; it is not directly related to the world, nor to other bodies, nor to other minds.”20 The mind becomes a relatum only because the body is populated in the world with other bodies. It is necessary that we exist as body, as flesh, in order to be social and thus ethical—notwithstanding the ethics of the body itself. It stands to reason to conclude that there is not only the primacy of perception in everything we do and think, but also there can be no “disembodied reason” insofar as perception is a “nascent logos.” Indeed, the body is never an object among other objects but is a sentient subject or the subject of perception which is capable of “authoring” the world before “answering” it. Perception or the function of the body as flesh, in turn, is informed and “dilated” by the “ecological milieu” of culture. 3. DIFFERENCE AS RELATIONALITY Relation, subjectivity, and difference are intimately related but never oppositional terms.21 Plurality or a web of relationships, according to Arendt, marks the human condition.22 It means that we coexist with others in their otherness. As the existential condition of both action and speech, plurality has the twofold character of “equality” and “distinction.” Without equality, on the one hand, we—those who are living, dead, and yet to be born—cannot understand or communicate with one another. Without distinction, on the other hand, we have no need to understand or communicate with one another. Without distinction, on the other hand, we have no need to understand or communicate with one another; that is to say, we would need neither action nor speech. In order to preserve the conjunction and continuity of the acting subject with the plural world, Maurice Merleau-Ponty proposes the idea of the “instituting subject”: If the subject were taken not as a constituting but an instituting subject, it might be understood that the subject does not exist instantaneously and that the other person does not exist simply as a negative of myself. What I have begun at

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certain decisive moments would exist neither far off in the past as an objective memory nor be present like a memory revised, but really between the two as the field of my becoming during that period. Likewise my relation to another person would not be reducible to a disjunction: an instituting subject could coexist with another because the one instituted is not the immediate reflection of the activity of the former and can be regained by himself or by others without involving anything like a total recreation. Thus the instituted subject exists between others and myself, between me and myself, like a hinge, the consequence and the guarantee of our belong to a common world.23

Difference is a distinct mark of sociality. But for difference, there would be no sociality. Without it human communication either in speech or in action is unnecessary because we would be able to understand one another completely. Difference is also the axial principium of postmodernism as a philosophical mood and style. What identity is to modernity, difference is to postmodernity. It is the notion of difference that makes all the difference between modernity and postmodernity. At the end of modernity lies the adventure of difference. There is a proliferation of the ideas of difference in postmodern thought: Among the most prominent are Heidegger’s Differenz as Unterschied, Jacques Derrida’s différance, Jean-François Lyotard’s différend, Levinas’s heteronomy, Michel de Certeau’s heterology, and Bakhtin’s heteroglossia. Let us compare the “modernist” Hegel and the “postmodernist” Heidegger on the question of the difference between identity and difference. In his eagerness to prove the teleology of history as the march of Reason, of world history or the end of historical progress, Hegel falls short of making his dialectics open-ended. History’s final synthesis corresponds to the identity of identity and difference where the dialectics reaches or fulfills its telos. Gianni Vattimo thus concludes that the Hegelian dialectics consummates the long metaphysical tradition of identity in Western philosophy.24 Respect for difference promotes the very idea of plurality or multiplicity as an end in itself or having no ending. On the contrary, Heidegger’s Differenz as Unterschied offers a postmodern alternative to the cultural politics of identity. Unterschied doubles difference with the between (Unter/schied) that at once connects, preserves, and promotes difference and the relational (i.e., interbeing). Difference as dif/ference (Unterschied) is capable of conserving the principle of complementarity in interhuman relationships. Nancy Julia Chodorow brings her psychoanalytical insight into the clarification of differentiation, which is central to the security and promotion of a relational self. Differentiation even provides the basis of both spontaneity and autonomy. She judiciously contends that “we are all to some degree incorporations and extensions of others. . . . Differentiation is not distinctness and separateness, but a particular way of being connected to others. This connection to others, based on early

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incorporations, in turn enables us to feel that empathy and confidence that are basic to the recognition of the other as a self [and, I might add, of the self as an Other]” (italics original).25 4. RELATIONALITY AND THE PRIMACY OF THE OTHER Alterity and relationality are born as twins. Alterity has already become “the topic of first philosophy.”26 In the ethical, however, alterity is primary to the self. The ethical or ethics is always already social because it involves approval and disapproval. The absolute and universal claim of rights talk involves no ethics. For there can be no ethics involving the self alone without the Other or with the primacy of the self over the Other: in the ethical but not in the epistemological, egocentricity is a contradiction in terms or at best what Charles Taylor generously calls “moral laxity.”27 In the ethical, the Other is the center of value. Here we wish to appropriate Mark C. Taylor’s neologism altarity to elevate alterity to a higher ground. What différance is to Derrida, “altarity” is to Taylor.28 The term altar comes from the Latin altare, which signifies a higher place. Altarity refers to the inviolable sanctity of the other, not of the self. Thus, the idea of altarity not only accentuates alterity as the otherness of the Other but also elevates the world of the Other and makes the reading of it an elevated text or intertext. The birth of heterocentricity is the ethical elevation of alterity to altarity. Altarity, in other words, is the ethical site of responsibility if not the ethical itself. Only by way of altarity is an ethics possible in which the Other is not only not an alter ego but is primary to the self. In the ethics of altarity, responsibility as self-transcendence precedes freedom, for the former is other-directed while the latter is self-centered or egocentric. The ethical is the conception of the self whose center is “elsewhere” and “otherwise”: The only ethical is a “responsible” self. Because each self is unique and thus different, that is, singular, responsibility is an untransferable moral performance.29 From the standpoint of altarity, of responsibility, the very idea of existence has been profoundly misunderstood among its antagonists as well as its protagonists: as its etymology shows, what is really central to it is not the centrality but the eccentricity (excentricity) of the self toward the world of other people (Mitwelt) and other things (Umwelt). The human as eccentric is a being who is compelled to direct himself/herself toward the outside world or what Levinas calls “exteriority.” Thus, the motto of existence must be: Do not go inside, go outside! Thus, we need a new definition of existential authenticity as embodied eccentricity rather than disembodied subjectivity.

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Let us consider Hannah Arendt’s unforgettable discussion of Adolf Eichmann whose indifference to alterity—let alone altarity—resulted in unthinkably irresponsible acts. Eichmann’s “thoughtlessness,” or inability to think, is identified by Arendt with the “banality of evil.”30 By thoughtlessness, she never meant it to be our inability to conceptualize abstractly or philosophically, but our inability to judge or use common-sense judgments (sensus communis) to live our ordinary daily life as humans. It is seldom if ever noticed that by Eichmann’s thoughtlessness Arendt meant his real inability to think from the standpoint of an Other. He never understood the notion that “I am an Other.” Eichmann lost touch with others or became inflicted with cutaneous alagia as it were. Incapable of thinking from the standpoint of an Other, thoughtlessness is tantamount to a “defacement” or an “effacement” of the Other: it is in essence the dehumanization of the Other, humanity’s inhumanity to others. Eichmann’s “banality of evil” is once again the reminder that the abolition of difference(s), of alterity is the price we must pay for the inhumane politics of cruelty, violence, and extermination. Responsibility as self-transcendence rather than self-affirmation scales the philosophical depth and plateau of Levinas’ ethics as first philosophy (philosophie première). His meditations on the primacy of the ethical and the heteronomic ethic of responsibility were inspired, according to his own admission, by the ancient heritage of Israel. He acknowledges that the prime importance of the ethical is the Jewish contribution to the history of Western philosophy, and he turns to Judaic texts for his heteronomic ethic of responsibility for illumination. For Levinas, Judaism is a parable, as it were, for the ethical. Although “Reason” and “Deed” go hand in hand, the former is the distinguishing characteristic of Greek thought, while the latter is that of Hebraic thought. One is preoccupied with immutable and totalizing Being in the arena of theory (the “I think”), while the other concentrates on mutable and infinite Becoming (movement) in the field of action (the “I do”).31 In hindsight, Heidegger’s ontology and Levinas’s ethics were on a collision course. For Levinas, both heterogeneity and heterocentricity (i.e., heteronomy) enrich rather than impoverish the social and ethical life of the individual self. Phenomenologically speaking, responsibility refers to one’s capacity to respond or answer to the call of the Other and it ends up with becoming one’s ethical calling for others. Interestingly, in Hebrew, the “other” (aher) and “responsibility” (ahariout) share the same etymological root.32 The speaking word in the life of a concrete individual person is a part of heteronomic dialogue. It is no accident that there is in German a familial circle of “word” (Wort), “answer” (Antwort), “to answer” (antworten), and “to be responsible for” (verantworten). Indeed, for Levinas, to be social is simultaneously to be ethical. Both sociality and ethicality can never be

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reduced to the regime of knowledge and truth. In writing his “Foreword” to Stéphane Mosès’s recent study of Franz Rosenzweig, Levinas alludes to a deep crevice between Rosenzweig’s heteronomic ethics and Hegel’s abstract and totalizing logocentrism whose critique, I might add, can be traced in the modern West to Ludwig Feuerbach’s paradigmatic discovery of Thou as the fountain of ethical life. Feuerbach’s dialogical thinking abandons and refutes the monological thinking of a lone philosopher in isolation from the world.33 The “new thinking” of Rosenzweig, too, is the anti-modern “idea of reducing everything back to the self.”34 Levinas draws our attention to Rosenzweig’s teaching against modern logocentrism from Hegel to Habermas in which the Same absorbs the Other and absolute thinking is a thought thinking the identity of the same and the Other.35 Altarity, it should be reiterated here, is the site of responsibility if not the ethical itself. Heteronomy as the pragmatic “grammar of the Other”36 is the heartland of Levinas’s ethics as first philosophy—to use his own neologism—“meontology,” which confirms ethics as the “negation” of ontology. It is heteronomy, i.e., the primacy of the Other which conditions and defines the ethical. For Levinas, language, too, is an instantiation of the ethical rather than, as Heidegger formulates it, the house of Being. Levinas declares that he is radically opposed to Heidegger who subordinates the relation with the Other to a neutral ontology.37 No one, I think, is more daring than Levinas in challenging Heidegger by showing that the ethical cannot be inscribed or subscribed as a sequel to fundamental ontology. Levinas’s ethics as first philosophy stands independently of both ontology and epistemology. The ethical is for him neither ontological nor epistemological. There is no compromise between ethics and ontology or epistemology. The ethical is “otherwise than Being” or “beyond essence.” As he formulates it, “the social [ie., the ethical] is beyond ontology.”38 The Da of Dasein (Heideggerian category), according to Levinas, is not an ontological problem but already an ethical one.39 Zygmunt Bauman is judicious in observing that Levinas’s proposal for the primacy of ethics is “a scandal for [Heidegger’s] ontology.”40 Levinas contends that “knowledge is always an adequation between thought and what it thinks. There is in knowledge, in the final account, an impossibility of escaping the self; hence sociality [i.e., ethicality] cannot have the same structure as knowledge.”41 Knowledge or the “I think” does not and cannot take place in the atmosphere of sociality; rather, it takes place in the absolute “solitude” of the ego. The ethical begins and ends with the social. Therefore, according to Levinas, sociality or ethicality cannot be reduced to the regime of knowledge and truth. The former is beyond the reach of the latter.

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Levinas defines heteronomy as the primacy of the Other over the self in the ethical: The ethic of responsibility in interhuman relationship is always and necessarily heteronomic. For him, however, heteronomy necessary for the ethic of responsibility calls for an asymmetrical relationship: interhuman relationships are not the symmetrical plural of the I’s. The I alone makes the ethical untenable. Indeed, it defaces or effaces the ethical. It is only the presence of the Other, alterity, that makes the ethical possible and necessary. For the ethical, it should be reiterated, is not self-centered obsession that self-transcendence.42 Only by way of heteronomy or self-transcendence is an ethic possible in which, to repeat, the Other is not only not an alter ego but also is primary to the self. Thus, Levinas maintains that plurality (sociality) is not a multiplicity of numbers, but it is predicated upon a radical alterity of the Other. In the elevated ethic of alterity, in the ethic of altarity, responsibility does not negate but precedes and contains autonomy: it is to heteronomy what autonomy is to egocentricity. Although responsibility without autonomy is a sham, autonomy alone is not sufficient to complete an ethic. Autonomy is ancillary but not contrary to responsibility, and not the other way around, simply because we can be autonomous without being responsible, but we can never be responsible without being autonomous. From the standpoint of heteronomic ethics, responsibility contains, but cannot be secondary and supplementary to, autonomy. “Existence,” Levinas declares with Sartre in mind for whom hell is others, “is not condemned to freedom, but judged and invested as a freedom. Freedom could not present itself all naked. This investiture of freedom constitutes moral life itself, which is through and through a heteronomy.”43 In Levinas, subjectivity is affirmed never for itself but for the Other (pour l’autrui). It comes into being as heteronomic: “It is my inescapable and incontrovertible answerability to the Other that makes me an individual ‘I’.”44 Consequently, the notion of responsibility that coincides with the ethical is, first and foremost, the confirmation of the “I,” which is for Levinas the “meontological version of subjectivity.” He writes that responsibility is “the essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity. For I describes subjectivity in ethical terms. Ethics, here, does not supplement a preceding existential base; the very node of the subjective is knotted in ethics understood as responsibility.”45 Responsibility is the vulnerability of the self’s all-consuming sensitivity to and compassion for the Other as a person. Since each subjectivity is unique and thus different from others, moreover, its responsibility is accordingly untransferable. Not only is responsibility untransferable but it is also nonreciprocal: As Levinas emphasizes in no uncertain terms, “responsibility is without concern for reciprocity: I have to respond to and for the Other without occupying myself with the Other’s

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responsibility in my regard.”46 Thus responsibility for others is an unconditional gift without the forethought of reciprocation. Responsibility without concern for reciprocity is—in the very words of Levinas—“my call to help a person gratuitously in the asymmetry of the relation of one to the other.”47 Kristen Renwick Monroe’s recent work The Heart of Altuism has a decisive bearing on the ethic of responsibility, which, as a paradigmatic moral theory, is an alternative to rights talk as well as the “banality of evil.”48 It is deeply heartening in our epoch when the kind face of compassion transfigures and prevails upon the nasty face of contempt. Monroe attempts to answer James Q. Wilson’s cogent question: “If rights are all that is important, what will become of responsibilities?”49 Altruism may not be “a strong beacon light” but is “a small candle flame” that is capable of dispelling the darkness and warming our soul once it is brought close to our heart and cupped in our hands.50 Altruism lands a mortal blow to the cherished tradition of “rational choice theory” whose center is “economic rationality”—a part of rights talk. Wilson echoes Monroe when he claims that “the teachings of the heart deserve to be taken as seriously as the lessons of the mind.”51 Economic rationality in rational choice theory is based on the premise that “rational man” is one who chooses to maximize his/her own self-interest, “enlightened” or otherwise. A “rational” person is self-centered, while the altruist is heteronomic. The altruist has the natural disposition and propensity to linking himself/herself to others through the sense of “a shared humanity.” In essence, the “heart of altruism” refutes the twofold character of rational choice theory: (1) rationality and (2) choice. Neither rationality nor choice explains the good deeds of altruists. As Monroe emphasizes, altruists are left with “no choice in their behavior toward others. They are John Donne’s people. All life concerns them. Any death diminishes them. Because they are part of mankind.”52 The reverse side of altruism may be found in Eichmann’s “banality of evil” where blind obedience was mistaken as Kantian “obligation” or “duty.” Arendt’s report on Eichmann’s “banality of evil” drew severe criticisms from all quarters. For Arendt, however, the “banality of evil” does not absolve Eichmann’s crimes against humanity because she appeals to the “ethics of consequences” (“responsibilities”) rather than Kantian ethics of intention and principles. Arendt’s “verdict” relies on the “actuality” of what Eichmann did. For her, he is guilty of committing crimes against humanity because “politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.”53 He and he alone is “guilty” and “responsible” for what he actually did. Arendt condones no “collective guilt” or “collective responsibility” simply because “where all, or almost all, are guilty, nobody is.”54

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5. RESPONSIBILITY AND THE POLITICS OF CIVILITY Having discussed the social and ethical conditions of responsibility, we will now proceed to describe the relevance of responsibility to the politics of civility in two specific but integrally related ways: (1) against violence and (2) for democratic deliberation. We mean to accentuate the reciprocal type of responsibility among equals or equal citizens. V.1. The late political philosopher Judith N. Shklar once proposed that “liberal and humane people . . . would, if they were asked to rank the vices, put cruelty first. Intuitively they would choose cruelty as the worst thing we do.”55 Indeed, it is a “black hole” in the humanity of humankind. Cruelty, in all forms of its manifestation, results from disrespect for (the Other’s) difference based on the anti-hermeneutical principle that the Other is never right. No doubt, violence—whether it be war, revolution, or capital punishment—is a form of cruelty, the ultimate form of cruelty. It is in principle an irresponsible act because it aims at the obliteration of the Other (both human and nonhuman) from the face of the earth. It is indeed the total, complete effacement of the Other. As Mona Ozouf puts it well, violence (revolution) is “the price to be paid for the abolition of differences,”56 of alterity, of altarity, which signifies each person’s dignity as a human being. Violence is a result of failure to acknowledge the worth of the Other in the life-and-death struggle of recognition—to use the gratuitous language of Hegel. It results from the absolute and universal affirmation and claims of the self against the Other that violate the basic principle of human plurality based on difference. The language of violence as well as rights talk tends to absolutize and universalize the human condition. They speak the language of identity at the expense of the language of difference. For in the absolute and universal, the other becomes exactly the same as the self.57 Leszek Kolakowski once pointed out that there is an ageless antagonism between a philosophy that perpetuates, and a philosophy that questions, the absolute and universal.58 It is the antagonism between the “priest” with “the garrote of catechism” and the “jester” (or “fool”) with “the needle of mockery.” The priestly finds solace in the stability and immobility of an established system, while the jesterly thrives on destabilizing and resisting it (i.e., it is “heresiarchal”). One relies on the politics of identity and the other fosters the politics of difference. Notwithstanding the claim of violence as the only way of transforming history and politics, nonviolence, too, is entitled to the remaking of history and politics. Camus justifies the cause of nonviolent rebellion against violent revolution in the name of tolerance, of difference and humanity. “Rebellion at grips with history,” he asserts, “adds that instead of killing and dying in order

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to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.”59 The rebel as a nonviolent person readily acknowledges the dialogical interplay between the ethical principle of culpability and the epistemological principle of fallibility, whereas the (serious, too serious) revolutionary as a violent person thrives on the monologic of inculpability and infallibility. Epistemological dogmatism and moral absolutism contradict the essence of the dialogical principle of coexistence that always and incessantly recognizes the zone of ever present, porous ambiguity between doubt and certainty. In the final analysis, ambiguity is an unavoidable condition of human plurality or peaceful coexistence with others.60 V.2. The recognition of and respect for difference calls for democratic deliberation in the ever-dangerous presence of violence as the act of effacing the otherness of the Other. Deliberation is the “moral equivalent” of violence. It runs counter to the accepted norm of defining violence as—to use the famed expression of Karl von Clausewitz in the footsteps of Machiavelli—the continuation of politics by other means. As the French différend in particular, of which Jean-François Lyotard makes judicious use, implies disagreement (and dispute), difference gives rise to disagreement whose conflict is resolved by a “parliamentary” method. It is no mere accident that the parliamentary system of government is also called a “responsible government.” In perpetuating dialogue, democratic deliberation is indeed a “talking cure” for politics, which is also a politics of civility. For, to paraphrase Alfred North Whitehead slightly, civilization is the victory of persuasion over all forms of “force,” including violence. Just as difference is a permanent condition of humanity, Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson maintain in their recent work, Democracy and Disagreement, that “moral disagreement is a permanent condition of democratic politics.”61 They argue, however, neither for the ethic of responsibility nor against violence that are perfectly compatible with, and even enhance, their formulation of the ethics and politics of deliberative democracy.62 Gutmann and Thompson argue that “a deliberate democracy governed by reciprocity flourishes neither in a society of self-centered citizens nor in a society of saints,”63 presumably because in a society of self-centered or self-righteous citizens there would be no possible agreement or compromise based on genuine reciprocity, while in a society of morally perfect persons, no occasion would arise for disagreement. Rights talk is incompatible with deliberative democracy because it is deliberate but not deliberative, it knows no language of compromise.64 Deliberative democracy is necessary and possible because we are neither truthfully self-righteous nor saintly. The principles of deliberative democracy, Gutmann and Thompson argue, offer a way of reading and judging public policies more defensible than those of either utilitarianism, or libertarianism, or egalitarianism, which, despite their differences, share in common the conception of what is morally correct prior to and independently

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of democratic deliberation. By contrast, democratic deliberation is a search for answers constrained by constitutional principles, which are themselves determined and developed through deliberation. Deliberative democracy is deliberative through and through. Without question, reciprocity is for Gutmann and Thompson the “leading principle” of deliberative democracy. By maintaining moral integrity but not moral arrogance or dogmatism, the virtue of “mutual respect” fosters the principle of reciprocity that facilitates accommodation, compromises, or mutually acceptable terms. Arendt, for whom speech or “talking cure” has a special, “riteful” place in the human condition, argues that the alternative to violence—including anticolonial revolution argued for by Franz Fanon and supported by Sartre— is not nonviolence but power. Power does not come out of “the barrel of a gun.” Nonetheless, she argues that “power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, whereas words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.”65 As “action in concert,” power then has the character of “potentiality” (potential, dynamis, or Macht) rather than of unchangeable and measurable substance. Power as a political concept and as the faculty of action is the human capacity to transform the world and, as she put it, create new realities. Action or political action is distinguished from the necessity of labor and the utility of work. Unlike her mentor, Heidegger, whose Dasein is characterized by death or mortality, Arendt defines the initium of action, which is the fountain of human capacity to create new realities, in terms of the facticity of birth or natality. “Philosophically speaking,” Arendt emphasizes, “to act is the human answer to the condition of natality. Since we all come into the world by virtue of birth, as newcomers and beginnings, we are able to start something new; without the fact of birth we would not even know what novelty is, all ‘action’ would be either mere behavior or preservation.”66 Since human action is irreversible, that is, what is done cannot be undone, moreover, we actors can only forgive or be forgiven. On the other hand, equally because human action—unlike “behavior”—is unpredictable, we can only promise or be promised. Because action is unpredictable, politics is the adventurous art of the impossible as well as the possible. 6. EPILOGUE In conclusion: This paper contends that social existence is the basic condition of humanity. By social existence, I mean an ensemble of multiple relationships anchored securely in bodies-in-relation, i.e., intercorporeality. Plurality is marked by difference, by alterity. But for alterity, there would be no plurality,

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no relationality. Altarity elevates the Other to the altar of interhuman relationships without defacing or emasculating but only decentering the self. It alone engenders the heteronomic ethic of responsibility inscribed in Levinas’s ethics as first philosophy. The ethic of responsibility reclaims and continues the Copernican revolution of social thought initiated by Ludwig Feuerbach: what geocentrism is to egocentrism, heliocentrism is to heterocentrism. Feuerbach invented the “new thinking” of responsibility, which has a riteful place in the study of politics because what is political is ethical. In his attempt to initiate a “responsible politics” by integrating ethics and politics, Václav Havel, who was close to Jan Patočka since both were members of the “Charter 77” and studied Levinas in his prison years, speaks of politics hopefully as the art of the impossible (or heterotopias), that is, the art of improving ourselves in the world of difference.67 We may even agree with Arendt that ethics is primary to politics because “just as eating is not life but the condition of living, so living together in the polis is not the good life but its material condition.”68 The ultimate rationale for politics as ethics is that “it is not good to be alone.”69 Indeed, the ethical is ubiquitous and overarching because it is related to everything we do. This chapter further contends that the ethic of responsibility is an alternative to rights talk and that it should become—as Hans Jonas puts it—“the center of morality.”70 A Confucian would say that the only exemplary and proprietary rights are rites.71 The ethic of responsibility calls for “downsizing” rights talk—to use the current language of the American corporate world. It would, however, be foolhardy for anybody to dump the Bill of Rights in the rubbish-bin of political, social, and economic thought. I only suggest that we tone down the cadences of rights talk because it has reached the point of eutrophication that destroys a web of interdependence and diversity. To emphasize: What autonomy is to modernity, responsibility is to postmodernity. It is not the “sleep of reason,” but the lack or absence of altarity that produces monsters and monstrous deeds. The future of difference will make the heteronomic ethic of responsibility the pillar of heterotopias. The ethic of responsibility as self-transcendence subverts the obsession of the modern West with the sovereignty of the self, self-reliance, or narcissistic absorption, i.e., the ethic of autonomy. The noble idea of self-reliance or independence may be a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the postmodern geopolitics and geoculture of interdependence in the world becoming increasingly a global village. We must not be mesmerized by the power and rhetoric of autonomy, independence, or self-reliance. As the “responsible self” refutes the atomized and collectivized self as a theoretical abstraction and chimera, the ethic of responsibility is a hopeful alternative to both liberal individualism today and the totalitarian politics of bygone years. In the ethic of responsibility neither the individual nor the collectivity is sovereign. As

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it knows no language of compromise, however, the ethical and political Esperanto of rights is indeed unpromising and uncompromising for the future. The ethic of responsibility heralds and celebrates the dialogical principle of a consummate community where the singular self is enfleshed with the singular Other. Responsibility-centered ethics is imperative for the future survival and preservation in perpetuity of the earth, which shelters and nurtures humanity and nature in myriad ways. It is a paradigmatic way of thinking and doing—the way of a new phoenix, as it were, rising from the ashes of the past. By cultivating the habits of the heart as well as the mind, the heteronomic ethic of responsibility opens a new threshold for philosophizing politics for generations yet to come. NOTES 1.  In memory of Maurice Natanson, who introduced to me the social phenomenology of Alfred Schutz. 2.  Amy Gutmann, “The Central Role of Rawl’s Theory,” Dissent, 36 (1989), p. 338. 3.  This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 205. 4.  See Richard McKeon, “The Development and the Significance of the Concept of Responsibility,” Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 11 (1957), pp. 3–32. 5.  See Claudia Card, “Intimacy and Responsibility: What Lesbians Do,” Working Papers Series 2, No. 10 (Madison: Institute for Legal Studies, 1987), pp. 3–5. 6.  Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk (New York: Free Press, 1991). 7.  Ibid., p. 76. 8.  See Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977). 9.  Ibid., p. 269. 10.  In the tradition of existential philosophy and phenomenology, Schrader attributes responsibility to the inner-directed formulation of existence. See his “Responsibility and Existence,” in Responsibility, ed. Carl J. Friedrich (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1960), pp. 43–70. Bernard Dauenhaur’s Elements of Responsible Politics (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990) is informative. It is particularly useful in that it distinguishes freedom as autonomous from freedom as relational. He considers tyranny and anarchy as “the twin antitheses of responsible politics” (p. xii). Larry May’s Sharing Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) explores responsibility particularly from Sartre’s social existentialism and the philosophical insights of Arendt. Most recently, Derrida attempts to formulate responsibility with an accent on difference in the backdrop of the homogenizing logic of European modernity. See The Other Heading, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michiel Nass (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). They all lack the heteronomic structure found in Levinas.

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11. See Francis Jacques, Difference and Subjectivity, trans. Andrew Rothwell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 115–61. 12.  “Interbeing” is the concept employed by the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh in his Interbeing, rev. ed. (Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1993). It refers to the Buddhist teaching that in the universe nothing can exist by itself alone and that everything must “inter-be” with everything else. 13.  “Interdividuality” is the neologism of René Girard. I appropriate the term to emphasize the space of the betweenness (inter) without losing sight of “individuality.” See his Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987). 14.  Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), p. 53. 15. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 14. 16. Maurice Mandelbaum, The Phenomenology of Moral Experience (Glencoe: Free Press, 1955), p. 31. 17. Ibid. 18.  See Hwa Yol Jung, “Phenomenology and Body Politics,” Body and Society, 2 (1996): 1–22. 19.  William James, A Pluralistic Universe (New York: Longmans, 1909), p. 256. 20. Erwin W. Straus, Phenomenological Psychology (New York: Basic Books, 1966), p. 211. Rosi Braidotti writes: “In the feminist framework, the primary site of location is the body. The subject is not an abstract entity, but rather a material embodied one. The body is not a natural thing; on the contrary, it is a culturally coded socialized entity. Far from being an essentialistic notion, it is the site of intersection between the biological, the social, and the linguistic, that is, of language as the fundamental symbolic system of a culture. Feminist theories of sexual difference have assimilated the insight of mainstream theories of subjectivity to develop a new form of ‘corporeal materialism’ that defines the body as an interface, a threshold, a field of intersecting forces where multiple codes are inscribed.” Nomadic Subjects (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 238. 21.  See Jacques, Difference and Subjectivity. 22.  Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 175–76. 23.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Themes from the Lectures at the Collège de France, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 40. 24.  Gianni Vattimo, The Adventure of Difference, trans. Cyprian Blamires with Thomas Harrison (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 160. 25.  Nancy Julia Chodorow, “Gender, Relation, and Difference in Psychoanalytic Perspective,” in The Future of Difference, ed. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), pp. 10–11. 26.  Michael Theunissen, The Other, trans. Christopher Macann (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984), p. 1. 27. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 16.

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28.  “Altarity,” Taylor writes, “is a slippery word whose meaning can be neither stated clearly nor fixed firmly. Though never completely decidable, the field of the word ‘altarity’ can be approached through the network of its association: altar, alternate, alternative, alternation, alterity.” Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. xxviii. 29.  See Emmanuel Levinas, Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 95. 30.  Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, rev. and enl. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1977). 31.  See Thorlief Boman, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960), pp. 205–8. 32.  See Catherine Chalier, “The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas and the Hebraic Tradition,” in Ethics as First Philosophy, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 8. 33.  Ludwig Feuerbach’s Copernican discovery of “Thou” is iterated forcefully in the principle 59 of his “philosophy of the future,” which was originally published in German in 1843. He writes: “The single man for himself possesses the essence of man neither in himself as a moral being nor in himself as a thinking being. The essence of man is contained only in the community and unity of man with man; it is a unity, however, which rests only on the reality of the distinction between I and thou.” Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, trans. Manfred H. Vogel (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), p. 71. 34.  Nahum N. Glatzer, Franz Rosenzweig (New York: Schocken Books, 1953), p. 191. 35.  See his “Foreword” to Stéphane Mosès, System and Revelation, trans. Catherine Tibany (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), p. 19. 36.  Michel Dupuis, Pronoms et visages (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996), p. 158. 37.  Emmanuel Levinas, “Philosophy and the Idea of Infinity,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), p. 52. 38.  Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1982), p. 58. 39.  See Levinas, Outside the Subject, p. 48. 40.  Zygmunt Bauman, “Effacing the Face: On the Social Management of Moral Proximity,” Theory, Culture and Society, 7 (1990), p. 16. 41. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, p. 60. 42.  In his magnum opus Levinas writes that “in subordinating every relation with the existent to the relation with Being the Heideggerian ontology affirms the primacy of freedom over ethics. To be sure, the freedom involved in the essence of truth is not for Heidegger a principle of free will. Freedom comes from an obedience to Being: it is not man who possesses freedom; it is freedom that possesses man. But the dialectic which thus reconciles freedom and obedience in the concept of truth presupposes the primacy of the same, which marks the direction of and defines the whole of Western philosophy.” Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 46.

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Viktor Frankl gives us a glimpse of responsibility as “self-transcendence,” which deserves, I think, more than a passing comment. He was a survivor of a Nazi death camp and founded logotherapy, psychotherapy with a human face, as it were. Like Jonas’s “new ethic of responsibility,” logotherapy calls for the affirmation of life at all cost as opposed to the abnegation of life (nothingness) relying on Nietzsche’s single dictum that “he who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.” Like Levinas, more importantly, Frankl prompts and promotes an elegant way of formulating the concept of responsibility as “self-transcendence” which is “the cue to cure” the feeling that life is meaningless or worthless. By self-transcendence, Frankl means the discovery and recovery of life’s meaning by engaging in the world, in the other rather than one’s own psyche. Self-transcendence is embodied in the idea of responsibility: “Freedom . . . is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.” Man’s Search for Meaning, rev. ed. (New York: Washington Square Press, 1985), p. 133. 43.  Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), p. 58. 44.  Emmanuel Levinas, “Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas,” in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), p. 27. 45. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, p. 95. 46. Levinas, Time and the Other, p. 137. 47.  Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” in The Provocation of Levinas, ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 165. 48.  Kristen Renwick Monroe, The Heart of Altruism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 49.  James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense (New York: Free Press, 1993), p. 245. 50.  See ibid., p. 251. 51.  Ibid., p. 238. 52. Monroe, The Heart of Altruism, p. 216. 53. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 279. 54.  Ibid., p. 278. 55. Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 44. 56.  Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 12. 57.  See Michael Stocker, “Agent and Other: Against Ethical Universalism,” Australian Journal of Philosophy, 54 (1976), p. 219. 58.  See Leszek Kolakowski, “The Priest and the Jester,” in his Toward a Marxist Humanism, trans. Jane Ziekonko Peel (New York: Grove Press, 1968), pp. 9–37. 59.  Albert Camus, The Rebel, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), p. 277. 60.  Ambiguity, too, is the soul of Gadamer’s hermeneutics. In 1989, he stated that “the possibility that the other person may be right is the soul of hermeneutics.” See

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Jean Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. Joel Weinsheimer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 124. 61.  Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 9. 62.  Cf. James Bohman, Public Deliberation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). 63. Gutmann and Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, p. 91. Significant synonyms for “deliberative” in the contemporary discussion of political theorists are “discursive,” “communicative,” and “dialogical.” See particularly Seyla Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy,” in Democracy and Difference, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 67–94; Iris Marion Young, “Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy,” in Democracy and Difference, pp. 120–35; and James Bohman, Public Deliberation. Young’s “communicative model” plays on difference. 64.  Cf. Glendon, Rights Talk, p. 9. 65. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 200. 66.  Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), p. 179. 67.  See Václav Havel, Open Letters, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), esp., p. 395; on his study of Levinas, see Letters to Olga, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Henry Holt, 1989). For a discussion of Havel as both a political activist and theorist, see Jean Bethke Elshtain, “A Performer of Political Thought: Václav Havel on Freedom and Responsibility,” in Theory and Practice, ed. Ian Shapiro and Judith Wagner DeCew (New York: New York University Press, 1995), pp. 464–82. 68.  Hannah Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics,” Social Research 57 (1990), p. 83. 69.  Ibid., p. 103. 70.  Hans Jonas, “Ontological Grounding of a Political Ethics: On the Metaphysics of Commitment to the Future of Man,” in The Public Realm, ed. Reiner Schürmann (Albany: State University of New York Press), p. 166. 71.  De Bary contends that the trouble with Confucianism in China is symptomatic of the world in trouble today. He speaks of the Confucian notion of self-cultivation, for example, is not the cult of the self but the cultivation of “correlative responsibility.” See his The Trouble with Confucianism (Cambridge: Harvard University press, 1991). Confucian humanism is also said to emphasize “communicative rationality,” and it is concerned with “human rites” rather than “human rights.” On this point, see The Confucian World Observed, eds. Weiming Tu, Milan Hejtmanek, and Alan Wachman (Honolulu: East-West Center, 1992). In saying “Adieu” to Levinas, Derrida remarks that the word droiture (“straightforwardness” or “uprightness”), which is akin to the Confucian rite (ritefulness), comes from Levinas’s teaching. It means “to speak straight on, to address oneself directly to the other, and to speak for the other whom one loves and admires, before speaking of him.” “Adieu,” trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, Critical Inquiry, 23 (1996), p. 2. The center of Levinas’s thought lies in the “unlimited” and “unconditional” ethics of responsibility which precedes and exceeds freedom. Responsibility is “ethics beyond ethics.” And yet only death silences and dissolves responsibility.

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Chapter Fourteen

Václav Havel’s New Statecraft of Responsible Politics

There is something refreshing and novel about Václav Havel’s philosophic politics that appeals to, and attracts the critical attention and acclaim of, contemporary intellectuals from all political persuasions: Richard Rorty, Steven Lukes, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Roger Scruton, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Robert N. Bellah, and Robert Jay Lifton. From the side of conservatives, Havel represents the death of communism as a totalitarian political system and the “end” of ideology and history as the transparent triumph of American liberalism. From the side of political radicalism, he symbolizes the ultimate victory of the powerless. In other words, he is a philosopher-statesman for all seasons. For many intellectuals, it is the working of Havel’s philosophic politics, of the politics of the “antipolitical,” that is attractive and intriguing. It is summed up in the idea of “living in truth” as moral sensibility. In his Reinventing Politics, which surveys Eastern European politics from Stalin to Havel, Vladimir Tismaneanu writes poignantly: “Nobody better expressed the commitment to a politics of truth than the Czech playwright and human rights activist Václav Havel.”1 There is indeed something avant-garde and forward-looking in Havel’s thought. In the words of Herbert Marcuse, the artistic or aesthetic contains the categorical imperative that things must change, and the truth of art lies in its power to deconstruct the monopoly of established reality by making a commitment to “an emancipation of sensibility, imagination, and reason in all spheres of subjectivity and objectivity.”2 There is, then, no contradiction between the aesthetic and proteanism: as Robert Jay Lifton suggests, Havel is “perhaps the most dramatic exemplar of public proteanism.”3 For me, Havel’s politics of “living in truth” and his “Charter 77” group in Czechoslovakia, whose intellectual pillar was Jan Patočka—once an assistant of Husserl and a student of Heidegger—vindicates the efficacy of the jesterly against the high priesthood of totalitarian politics, of “the power of 329

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the powerless,” of the existential politics of conscience, and of the success of nonviolent resistance for the creation of a “post-totalitarian” or “post-communist” political order. Havel, in brief, vindicates the possibility of responsible politics. It is no accident that Havel’s speech delivered to the Joint Session of the U.S. Congress on February 21, 1990, was sloganized as “consciousness precedes Being” (“and not the other way around, as the Marxists claim”).4 Havel is foremost a writer, an artist of the word for which he lives and dies. He is above all a philosophic playwright and essayist who belongs to the culture of the word, which also becomes a potent political weapon. Writing about words, Havel says in a deeply pensive tone: . . .indeed, words can be said to be the very source of our being, and in fact the very substance of the cosmic life form we call man. Spirit, the human soul, our self-awareness, our ability to generalize and think in concepts, to perceive the world as the world (and not just as our locality), and lastly, our capacity for knowing that we will die—and living in spite of that knowledge: surely all these are mediated or actually created by words?5

It is also our common knowledge that Havel’s phenomenological meditations and writings were deeply influenced by Jan Patočka, who, as has above been noted, was a student of Husserl and Heidegger, an admirer of Masaryk’s democratic humanism and Comenius’s pansophic humanism, and an active political dissident—unlike his mentor, Heidegger, I might add—who willingly risked his life and died in 1977 during a political interrogation. Havel’s lengthy and best-known essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” was written in 1978 and dedicated to the memory of Patočka, and it also testifies to the ineliminable imprints of Husserlian and particularly Heideggerian meditations on the way of his thinking. Patočka’s sense of crisis in European civilization, it should be noted, reflects Husserl’s own profound sense of crisis and decline in European rationality which is rooted in modernity in the Galilean mathematization of nature that eventually “decapitates”—to use Husserl’s own word—philosophical thinking. In his effort to resolve this crisis of European humanity, Husserl discovered and introduced the phenomenology of the Lebenswelt, or what Patočka calls the “natural world,” which pertains to everyday “social reality” as the founding and funding matrix (Sinngebung) of theoretical thinking— both scientific and philosophical. The discovery of the everyday sociocultural life-world must be ranked as one of the most monumental accomplishments of twentieth-century philosophy. Moreover, Patočka’s reckoning of crisis in European humanity fundamentally as the lack or absence of moral ordering and the role of philosophy to come to its rescue is motivated by and indebted to Husserl’s vision of the philosopher as the “civil servant of humanity.”6

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In this chapter, I wish to focus not on Havel’s Husserlian and Heideggerian meditations, but rather on Levinasian meditations on the ethics of responsibility and to explore its philosophical grounding and its paradigmatic implications for the philosophy of politics. So far, many commentators of Havel, including Richard Rorty, have observed the grounding of Havel’s philosophic politics in Husserlian and Heideggerian meditations but failed to recognize the importance of his Levinasian meditations on his philosophic politics. It may be said that Havel’s Levinasian meditations make him rather unique and revolutionary in contemporary political thinking. They are found in Havel’s prison letters to his wife written between June 1979 and September 1982, which were published as Letters to Olga.7 Interestingly, they are reminiscent of the “journalistic” style of philosophizing that the French existential philosopher Gabriel Marcel once cherished and promoted. Havel’s Levinasian meditations in Letters to Olga focus their attention on the ethics of responsibility.8 While Husserl and Heidegger searched their philosophical roots in “Athens,” Levinas’s inspiration for the primacy of the ethical comes from the religious heritage of “Jerusalem.” In significant measure, Levinasian meditations are post-Husserlian and post-Heideggerian. Levinas himself acknowledges that the prime importance of the ethical is the Jewish contribution to the history of Western philosophy.9 He turns to Judaic texts for his (heteronomic) ethics of responsibility. For Havel, likewise, morals are the basic stuff of all politics. He is quintessentially a Levinasian who practices in his statecraft a heteronomic ethics of responsibility as “first politics.” The concept of freedom paints the philosophical landscape of modern philosophy in the West including existential philosophy from Søren Kierkegaard to Jean-Paul Sartre. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir was ready to assert the idea of existential philosophy as “the only philosophy in which an ethic has its place” because it alone allows the real freedom of choice between what is good and what is evil: what one chooses determines one’s own destiny, including one’s morals.10 On the other hand, however, the concept of responsibility I wish to explore in Havel’s philosophic politics and its genealogy is only a recent discovery. It begins its career in earnest in the nineteenth century with the revolutionary pronouncement of the primacy of “Thou” by Ludwig Feuerbach in formulating a philosophy of the future whose maturity, I suggest, has come of age in Levinas’s heteronomy.11 For the late French-­Jewish phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas, who is regarded by many as the most important moral philosopher of the twentieth century, morality is the sinew of human coexistence, and ethics is “first philosophy” (prima philosophia or philosophie première). “When I speak of first philosophy,” he emphasizes, “I am referring to a philosophy of dialogue that cannot not be an ethics.”12 For him, heteronomy alone is the

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site of responsibility if not ethics itself. By it, he means to favor the other in an asymmetrical relationship. The heteronomic ethics of responsibility is anchored in the primacy of the other (alterity) over the self (ipseity). Altruism for its name sake, therefore, is exemplary of responsibility. As the “you” or “we” is not a plural of the “I,” ipseity alone renders ethics impossible. Indeed, it defaces or effaces the ethical. It is the primary presence of the other that makes the ethical possible. Thus, Levinas holds that human plurality is not a multiplicity of numbers, but it is predicated upon a radical alterity of the other. As heteronomy is the ground of the ethical, alterity may be spelled “altarity”13 for the very reason that “altar” is derived from the Latin altare, which signifies “a high place.” In this sense, the idea of “altarity” elevates the world of the other and transforms it into an elevated text. In the elevated ethical text of “altarity,” responsibility precedes and is inclusive of freedom, whereas freedom as autonomy excludes the possibility of responsibility. To put it thusly, responsibility is to heteronomy what egocentricity is to autonomy. Levinas’s heteronomic ethics affirms subjectivity (or conscience) never for itself but only for an “other” (pour l’autre). Subjectivity comes into being as heteronomic: “It is my inescapable and incontrovertible answerability to the other that makes me an individual ‘I,’” i.e., it is called the “meontological version of subjectivity.”14 Answerability or responsibility is for Levinas “the essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity. For I describe subjectivity in ethical terms. Ethics, here, does not supplement a preceding existential base; the very mode of the subjective is knotted in ethics understood as responsibility.”15 Although responsibility without freedom is a sham, freedom is ancillary but not contrary to responsibility simply because we can be free without being responsible, but we can never be responsible without being free.16 “Existence,” Levinas declares, “is not condemned to freedom, but judged and invested as a freedom. Freedom could not present itself all naked. This investiture of freedom constitutes moral life itself, which is through and through a heteronomy.”17 Levinas’s “meontology,” as the literal meaning of the term itself registers, escapes and goes beyond the “tyranny of ontology.” It is the “foundation” but not a “superstructure” of ontology. It may be said that from the existential standpoint of Levinas’s heteronomy the very idea of existence (ex/istence) has been profoundly misunderstood among its antagonists as well as protagonists: as its etymology shows, what is really central to it is not the centrality but the eccentricity (ex-­centricity) of the self toward the world of others (Mitwelt) and other nonhuman things (Umwelt). The human as eccentric is a being who is always already exposed to and reaches the outside world of what Levinas himself calls “exteriority.” Thus, the motto of existence must be: Do not go inside, go outside. Be a moral agent first, not an epistemological sub-

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ject. The authenticity of existence is guaranteed not by egocentricity, but only by heteronomy or a dialogue of eccentric agents. In the end, the idea of existence as eccentricity promotes the heteronomic ethics of responsibility that refutes both egocentrism and anthropocentrism (or speciesism), including the planetary domination by technology of the earth. Humans are responsible for sustaining the entire “green” earth and the entire population of its inhabitants both human and nonhuman. Havel, for whom politics begins as ethics or ethics is the foundation of politics, is fully aware of the historic consequences of Kierkegaard’s “crowd,” which is faceless, hypnotic, conforming, indolent, indifferent, and demoralizing; José Ortega y Gasset’s “hyper-­democracy” based on the purely reactive “masses,” and above all Heidegger’s anonymous “they” (das Man) which is, as Hannah Arendt has definitively shown, the social genesis of totalitarian politics sui generis in the twentieth century. The totalitarian political system is, according to Havel, where ordinary people are knowingly caught in a network of the ideological rituals of living in untruth. Jean Baudrillard warns of technocracy in which “the masses are a stronger medium than all the media. . . . Mass(age) is the message.”18 Arendt narrated most tellingly the conforming “automatism” (Havel’s term) of Adolf Eichmann.19 It is of utmost importance to understand her controversial reportage concerning Eichmann’s “banality of evil” as “thoughtlessness.” By “thoughtlessness,” she meant Eichmann’s utter inability to think from the standpoint of an “other,” i.e., the erasure of the other’s difference. Eichmann’s “banality of evil”—the term that offended or angered her Jewish friends—is indeed a sobering reminder that the politics of identity or the abolition of the other’s difference results in the inhumane politics of cruelty, suffering, violence, and extermination as well as the politics of racism and colonialism. We would be remiss if we forget to point out that the ethics of responsibility based on heteronomy is a radical shift from Anglo-­American “rights talk” since John Locke whose center is the self in everything we do and think. If rights have their place in the ethics of responsibility, they are only the “rights of others” rather than the acquisitive or possessive claims of the self. The ethics of responsibility is “otherwise” than “rights talk.” What “rights talk” is to Ptolemaic geocentrism, the heteronomic ethics of responsibility is to Copernican heliocentrism. Responsibility thusly defined is a Copernican reversal of social, political, and ethical thought, which—to repeat—began with Ludwig Feuerbach who discovered “Thou” at the center of human dialogue for the future of philosophy. Havel closely read Levinas during his prison years in Czechoslovakia. Following Levinas, he considered responsibility as the innermost secret of moral humanity. His signature idea of “living in truth” marks the heart

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of his conception of politics as well as morality in rejecting Machiavelli’s Realpolitik and totalitarian politics in the twentieth century, both of which accept and take for granted violence as a matter of inevitability or necessity. The famous or infamous dictum of Karl Clausewitz affirms the inseparability of violence from politics since for him “war is the continuation of politics by other means.”20 Violence is without doubt an utter failure of human dialogue, of communication. It eschews responsibility: It is intrinsically an irresponsible act because it intends to efface, harm, or kill an “other.” As a freshman in college in 1954, I was introduced to Alfred North Whitehead’s inspiring work Adventures of Ideas, which left an indelible impression on me. It taught me an unforgettable lesson on the endearing idea that human civilization is the victory of persuasion over force.21 As a measured failure of persuasion, violence takes a heavy toll on humans and nonhumans alike in abolishing difference. The breach of civility is predicated upon one’s epistemological infallibility and moral inculpability, which are a deadly mix: I can never err and do nothing wrong or, to put it differently, the other might never be right and might never do anything right. The other is ultimately seen in the image of an enemy. J. Glenn Gray’s The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle,22 which is a deeply phenomenological study of homo furens (warriors), is instructive. Among the issues that Gray observes such as the appeals of battle, camaraderie, death, guilt, and even a delight of “fearful beauty” in destruction, there stands out the “abstract” image of the enemy that anaesthetizes man the warrior. It is the monstrous—totally dehumanized—image of the enemy who is at best “subhuman.” To repeat: Violence is an irresponsible act because it intends to eradicate the other’s differences. Violence is a result of identity politics or of “essentializing” cultural politics—to borrow Edward W. Said’s felicitous term—whether it be Carl Schmitt’s polarizing confrontation between “friends” and “enemies,” Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” as the ultimate triumph of American liberalism, or Samuel P. Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.” All three positions are counterproductive in the globalizing world of multiculturalism because they allow no possibility of dialogue as the middle path of the two extremes. In case of Fukuyama, the alleged triumph of American liberalism turned out to be premature in light of the waning or decline of American exceptionalism. In case of Samuel Huntington, he dismisses the globalizing effect of different cultures. As Edward Said put it well in 2003: Rather than the manufactured clash of civilizations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together. . . . But for [this] kind of wider perception we need time and

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patient and skeptical enquiry supported by faith in communities of interpretation that are difficult to sustain in a world demanding instant action and reaction.23

Over four decades ago, Leszek Kolakowski perceptively juxtaposed two prevailing styles of philosophizing that exist side by side in any given age or epoch: One is the “priestly” style of yang and the other the “jesterly” style of yin.24 Kolakowski’s juxtaposition parallels the unfusable distinction between official monologue and carnivalesque dialogue in Mikhail Bakhtin and between power in being and dissidence in Havel. For Bakhtin, whose dialogism relies heavily on the artistic world of Dostoevsky’s novels, dialogue is never a means for something else but an end in itself: “Dialogue . . . is not the threshold to action, it is the action itself. . . . To be means to communicate dialogically. When dialogue ends, everything ends.”25 Dialogue is “unfinalizable”: By its intrinsic structure, it cannot and must not come to an end. For Bakhtin’s dialogism, there is a twofold difference between dialogue and (Hegelian and Marxian) dialectics. On the one hand, dialectics is the conceptual overdetermination of dialogue in pursuit of acquiring absolute knowledge. On the other hand, it is serious enough to be a violent, this is, life-­ and-­death struggle between two opposing forces, the phenomenon of which Hegel so ably formulates in his Phenomenology of Spirit as the irreconcilable struggle between the master and the slave for mutual recognition. The soul of dialogue, according to Bakhtin, is carnivalization—the corporeal phenomenon that is both playful and heresiarchal at the same time. Carnivalization, though quintessentially corporeal, is not carnage. It is for Bakhtin the political embodiment of playfulness, which is a cardinal element of the aesthetic in transforming consciousness and creating a new way of conceiving the world by breaking up the colorless and prosaic monopoly of the established order. Based on his provocative study of Rabelais, the carnivalesque model of the world for Bakhtin deconstructs, transgresses, subverts, and transforms the canonical order of truth and the official order of reality. Dialogue portends to be a protest against the monological “misrule” of hierarchized officialdom.26 Havel’s compatriot Milan Kundera, who is also acquainted with Husserlian and Heideggerian meditations, comes to the conclusion that the artistic spirit of the novel is incompatible fundamentally, that is, ontologically, with the politics of totalitarianism.27 For the truth of totalitarianism or totalitarian truth is ignorant or intolerant of doubting, questioning, relativity, ambiguity, lightness, and playfulness, all of which signifies the artistic spirit of the novel. The art of the novel is likened to the Rabelaisian response of laughter as opposed to the abstract spirit of philosophy’s priestly asceticism, which knows of no laughter. Alluding to the idea that “man thinks, God laughs,” Kundera sees the art of the novel as “the echo of God’s laughter.” The novel’s spirit

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opposes one who has no sense of humor, one who cannot laugh. It is no mere accident that Havel received in 1986 the Erasmus Prize. One may say that Havel deserved the prize because there was such Erasmusian “folly” in his thought that the powerless can transform the world.28 Havel’s responsible politics is without question the politics of civility, of nonviolence. While the purpose of violence—war, revolution, murder, capital punishment, torture, etc.—is to obliterate or eradicate the other, alterity, or heterarchy, nonviolence means to preserve difference or heterogeneity as the soul of dialogue, of responsibility since but for difference, there would be no need for dialogue or communication. Willingness to speak or engage in a dialogue shows the intent of breaking the vicious cycle of violence—as well as silence—which is too readily accepted as the continuation of politics by other means. Havel’s “dissident” may be likened to Albert Camus’s “rebel.” Camus’s The Rebel was meant to be a critique of Marxism as the dialectical metaphysics and eschatological politics of revolutionary violence.29 For the rebel is one who justifies the existentialist thesis that the human is the only creature who refuses to be what he/she is. He/she protests against death as well as tyranny, brutality, terror, and servitude. Havel’s dissident is a true rebel who senses and cultivates his allegiance to human solidarity with no intention of obliterating the other. He is able to say that I rebel, therefore we exist. In an interview published as “The Politics of Hope,” Havel also talked about the role of an intellectual as a perpetually “irritant” rebel (or gadfly) who is self-­consciously capable of detaching himself/herself from the established order of any kind and who is vigilant to and suspicious of belonging to the “winning side.” Havel shows that—to borrow the eloquent language of Roger Scruton in writing about Masaryk and Patočka—“the individual soul is the foundation of social order and . . . the care of the soul, and the care of the polis, are two aspects of a single concern.”30 For Camus, the refusal to be what we are or the existential facticity and imperative of transformation in perpetuity must be dialogical, that is, nonviolent. He writes: Dialogue on the level of mankind is less costly than the gospel preached by totalitarian regimes in the form of monologue dictated from the top of a lonely mountain. On the stage as in reality, the monologue precedes death. Every rebel, solely by the movement that sets him in opposition to the oppressor, therefore pleads for life, undertakes to struggle against servitude, falsehood, and terror, and affirms, in a flash, that these three afflictions are the cause of silence between men, that they obscure them from one another and prevent them from nihilism—the long complicity of men at grips with their destiny.31

Rebellion or nonviolent subversion stands tall in the midway between silence and murder in refusing to accept what we are. The rebel or dissident

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willingly acknowledges the dialogical interplay between the ethical principle of culpability and the epistemological principle of fallibility, whereas the revolutionary thrives on the monological absoluteness of inculpability and infallibility however noble or ignoble his/her cause may be. Epistemological dogmatism and moral absolutism have no place in Levinas’s heteronomy, Bakhtin’s dialogism, and Havel’s responsible politics, which always recognize the ever-­present, porous moment and zone of ambiguity that resides in between complete doubt that paralyzes action and absolute certainty that inflicts suffering, terror, and death on ordinary humanity. For Havel, in conclusion, morals are the basic stuff of all politics. Thus, politics is never a tetragrammaton (or four-­letter word) precisely because it is deeply rooted in and inseparable from the moral makeup of humanity. Here, Havel follows Levinas, for whom not only is ethics “first philosophy,” but also politics without ethics “bears a tyranny within itself.” Havel speaks of politics as “morality in practice,” “practical morality,” “anti-­ political politics,” and even “the art of the impossible” against Machiavelli’s immoral politics as the “art of the possible.”32 For Havel, Machiavellian politics promotes “living in untruth,” that is, in manipulation, image-­making, deception, and above all violence. Here, Havel’s political spirit of nonconformity defies the usual business of politics as the art of the possible and replaces it with the unusual business of politics as the art of the impossible. It makes a U-­turn from the received tradition in the modern West of Realpolitik. His so-­called Velvet Revolution of 1989 signifies a radical transformation of politics from the art of the possible to the art of the impossible, which is grounded in the ethics of responsibility as “first politics.” Politics as the art of the impossible is deeply rooted in the moral makeup of humanity itself. The ethics of responsibility grounds the politics of civility, which renunciates or negates force and violence in favor of dialogue and communication.33 Indeed, responsibility is the only moral alternative to violence. Havel goes so far as to say that in order to make the impossible a reality, we must first dream about making in perpetuity the world safe for dialogue and communication for what he calls “earthly interest,” which is at once global and encompasses all living beings—not just humans but also nonhumans, as well.34 He shows the working of nonviolence as an active engagement in the making of history rather than merely passive resistance and reaction to violence. NOTES 1.  Tismaneanu, Vladimir. 1992. Reinventing Politics. New York: Free Press, p. 133. 2.  The Aesthetic Dimension (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), p. 9.

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3.  The Protean Self (New York: Basic Books, 1993), p. 10. According to Lifton, proteanism is the best way of adjusting oneself to the changing world. 4.  In the same speech, Havel also said: “Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed, whether it be ecological, social, demographic, or a general breakdown of civilization, will be unavoidable. If we are no longer threatened by world war or by the danger that the absurd mountains of accumulated nuclear weapons might blow up the world, this does not mean that we have won. We are in fact far from definite victory.” 5.  Open Letters: Selected Writings 1965–1990, ed. Paul Wilson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), p. 377. 6. See The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). 7.  Trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Henry Holt, 1989). 8.  During the years of his imprisonment, Havel had access to Levinas’s collection of essays entitled Humanisme de l’autre homme (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1972). See Eda Kriseova, Václav Havel, trans. Caleb Crain (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993). 9.  Most interesting is Hilary Putnam’s recent discussion of Levinas’s Judaic texts concerning such issues as universalizing Jewish particularism without the intention of proselytizing it, moral responsibility for others which cannot be derived from metaphysics or epistemology, and comparison between Buber and Levinas as what Putnam calls two “hedgehogs” of dialogism. See Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). 10.  Trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Citadel Press, 1948), p. 34. 11.  A trio of Feuerbach’s successors of heteronomy in the twentieth century is Levinas, the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray, and the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. See Hwa Yol Jung, “Mikhail Bakhtin’s Body Politic: A Phenomenological Dialogics,” Man and World, 23 (1990): 85–99; “Bakhtin’s Dialogical Body Politics,” in Bakhtin and the Human Sciences, ed. Michael Mayerfeld Bell and Michael Gardiner (London: Sage Publications, 1998), pp. 96–111; “Difference and Responsibility,” in Phänomenologie der Natur, a special issue of Phänomenologische Forschungen, ed. Kah Kyung Cho and Young-­Ho Lee (Freiburg/Munchen: Verlag Karl Alber, 1999), pp. 129–66; “Taking Responsibility Seriously,” in Phenomenology of the Political, ed. Kevin Thompson and Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000), pp. 147–65; “John Macmurray and the Postmodern Condition: From Egocentrism to Heterocentricism,” Idealistic Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 31 (2001): 105–23; and “Responsibility as First Ethics: Macmurray and Levinas,” in John Macmurray: Critical Perspectives, ed. David Fergusson and Nigel Dower (New York: Peter Lang), pp. 173–88. 12.  Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 97. 13.  The title of Mark C. Taylor’s work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

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14. Emmanuel Levinas and Richard Kearney, “Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas,” in Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), pp. 13–33. 15.  Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1982), p. 95. 16.  Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Freedom and Responsibility in a World Come of Age,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review, 46 (1992): 269–81; “Politics Without Cliché,” Social Research, 60 (1993): 433–44; and “A Performer of Political Thought: Václav Havel on Freedom and Responsibility,” in Theory and Practice (Nomos 37), eds. Ian Shapiro and Judith Wagner DeCew (New York: New York University Press, 1995), pp. 464–82. For a definitive work on responsibility, see Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics in the Technological Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 17.  Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), p. 58 and cf. Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), pp. 84–85. 18.  In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities or, the End of the Social and Other Essays, trans. Paul Foss, John Johnston, and Paul Patton (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983), p. 44. 19.  Eichmann in Jerusalem, rev. and enl. ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1965). 20. In Humanism and Terror, trans. John O’Neill (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), Maurice Merleau-­Ponty argued that “humanism—Machiavellianism notwithstanding—is not immune from violence.” He asserted with firm conviction that one who abstains from violence toward the violent is an accomplice of violence itself. Not only is violence the common origin of all political regimes, but also is our lot as long as we humans are incarnate beings. 21.  Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Macmillan, 1954). 22.  J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (New York: Harper and Row, 1970). 23.  Quoted in John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 322. 24.  Leszek Kolakowski, Toward a Marxist Humanism, trans. Jane Z. Peel (New York: Grove Press, 1968), pp. 9–37. 25.  Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 252. 26. In The Feast of Fools (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 82, Harvey Cox rightly contends that “the rebirth of fantasy as well as of festivity is essential to the survival of our civilization, including its political institutions. But fantasy can never be fully yoked to a particular political program. To subject the creative spirit to the fetters of ideology kills it. When art, religion, and imagination become ideological tools they shrivel into caged birds and toothless tigers. However, this does not mean that fantasy has no political significance. Its significance is enormous. This is just why ideologues always try to keep it in harness. When fantasy is neither tamed by ideological leashes nor rendered irrelevant by idiosyncrasy, it can inspire new civilizations and bring empires to their knees.”

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27. See The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher (New York: Harper and Row, 1988). 28. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 160, Bakhtin describes the deconstructive power of carnivalization in the following way: “[it] is past millennia’s way of sensing the world as one great communal performance. This sense of the world, liberating one from fear, bringing the world maximally close to a person and bringing one person maximally close to another (everything is drawn into the zone of free familiar contact), with its joy at change and its joyful relativity, is opposed to that one-­sided and official seriousness which is dogmatic and hostile to evolution and change, which seeks to absolutize a given condition of existence or a given social order. From precisely that sort of seriousness did the carnival sense of the world liberate man. But there is not a grain of nihilism in it, nor a grain of empty frivolity or vulgar bohemian individualism.” 29.  Trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Random House, 1956). 30.  Roger Scruton, “Masaryk, Patočka and the Care of the Soul,” in The Philosopher on Dover Beach (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), p. 88. 31.  Albert Camus, The Rebel, pp. 283–84. 32.  Here I should comment on Havel’s politics as the “art of the impossible” in opposition to Machiavelli’s politics known as the “art of the possible.” Havel’s close reading of Levinas for whom morality is not just a branch of philosophy but is “first philosophy.” Following Levinas, Havel was convinced that politics is “morality in practice.” During my graduate student days, political behavioralism (not behaviorism) was the ruling paradigm of political science. Therefore, I questioned its conception of the study of politics as value-­neutral or value-­free. I became interested in the political philosophy of Leo Strauss who took classical political philosophy to his heart. After I began to study phenomenology, especially Merleau-­Ponty’s phenomenology, I was convinced that phenomenology is capable of doing a two-­pronged critique of political behavioralism on the one hand and Strauss’ “essentialism” based on Merleau-­Ponty’s comments on “empiricism” and “intellectualism” on the other. Although Strauss was extremely critical of the amoral approach of Machiavelli, he wrote an interesting passage in the conclusion of his “Epilogue” for a collection of Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics, ed. Herbert J. Storing (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962), pp. 305–327, at p. 327: Only a great fool would call the new political science [i.e., political behavioralism] diabolic: it has no attributes peculiar to fallen angels. It is not even Machiavellian, for Machiavelli’s teaching was graceful, subtle, and colorful. Nor is it Neronian. Nevertheless, one may say of it that it fiddles while Rome burns. It is excused by two facts: it does not know that it fiddles, and it does not know that Rome burns. Here Strauss was not condoning or redeeming Machiavelli’s politics as the “art of the possible” against value-­neutral political behavioralism as the new science of politics. Rather, Strauss chose to praise the lesser evil of the two.

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33. In echoing Whitehead, Robert M. Hutchins writes: “The civilization of the dialogue is the negation of force.” See “The Civilization of the Dialogue,” in The Human Dialogue: Perspectives on Communication, ed. Floyd W. Watson and Ashley Montagu (New York: Free Press, 1967), p. v. 34.  It is rather moving to recapture Havel’s defining moment of conscience, which includes our responsibility for the order of natural things. As he watched dense brown smoke scattered across the sky from a huge smokestack of a hurriedly built factory, Havel writes poetically: “Each time I saw it, I had an intense sense of something profoundly wrong, of humans soiling the heavens. If a medieval man were to see something like that suddenly on the horizon—say, while hunting—he would probably think it the work of the Devil and would fall on his knees and pray that he and his skin be saved.” Living in Truth, ed. Jan Vladislav (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), p. 136. Of course, his concern for the natural order is hitched to his ontological presumption that everything is “inter-­being” with everything else in the world. Havel refers to the synchronistic effect of lepidoptery or—to put it simply—the “butterfly effect” (of chaos theory): “a belief that everything in the world is so mysteriously and completely interconnected that a slight, seemingly insignificant wave of a butterfly’s wings in a single spot on this planet can unleash a typhoon thousands of miles away.” The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice, trans. Paul Wilson and others (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), p. 93. J. Glenn Gray makes an extremely important point: “What is missing so often in modern men is a basic piety, the recognition of dependence on the natural realm. . . . There is no dearth of religions in our time, and they fulfill certain needs, but there is a general absence of religious passion for belonging to an order infinitely transcending the human. . . . This separation of man from nature as a consequence of our too-­exclusive interest in power is in part responsible for the total wars of our century. More than we ever realize, we have transferred our exploitative attitudes from nature to man. . . . The butchering of each other was almost easier to endure than the violation of animals, crops, farms, homes, bridges, and all the other things that bind man to his natural environment and help to provide him with a spiritual home. . . . Hardly anyone considers it possible that the poisoning of fish in the ocean by these experiments might be worthy of condemnation. Man can sin only against man, it seems, or possibly against God, not against nature.” The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), pp. 237–38. In The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 13, Erazim Kohák, who is a translator of Havel’s writings and a commentator on his thought, makes eminent sense when he remarks that “to recover the moral sense of our humanity, we would need to recover first the moral sense of nature” (italics added).

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Index

Achieving Our Country (Rorty), 175 action (or acting): Arendt on, 113n25, 299; as hermeneutics of the soul, 270–71, 277–79; “I do” versus “I think,” 293–95, 302; inseparability of knowledge and, 196–201; irreducibility of, 307n48; power and, 321; social placement and existence, 209–11; theater metaphor, 286n30 Adventures of Ideas (Whitehead), 75 aesthetic (aisthesis), 54–55n23, 149n6 aggression, 103–4, 113n23, 319–20. See also violence aisthesis (aesthetic), 54–55n23, 149n6 “altarity,” 254–55, 325n28, 332 alterity, 145–46, 153n70, 184n59, 296, 314, 316–17, 332 altruism, 303–4, 318, 332 ambiguity, 326–27n60 Analects (Confucius), 63, 103, 200 The Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton), 122 The Angelus (Millet), 41 anonymity, 272–73 Anonymity (Natanson), 267 Arendt, Hannah: on action, 113n25, 299; “banality of evil,” 75, 141, 229, 247, 296, 315, 333; on ethics, 322; Heidegger contrasted to, 299–300;

The Human Condition, 59–60, 79, 229; judgment as practical wisdom, 62; on misplaced identity, 104; on Nietzsche, 132; on plurality, 26n20, 260n36, 312; on power, 150n25, 297, 321 Aristotle, 60, 95, 103, 198, 209 “asymmetrical reciprocity,” 234n25 Auerbach, Erich, 158 awakenings, 185–86n77 Bacon, Francis, 47–48, 202–3 Bakhtin, Mikhail: carnivalization of the world, 64, 177, 335, 340n28; dialogism of, 13, 25n15, 66, 76, 89n65, 161–63, 177, 335; on dialogue, 228, 246, 255, 335; on Dostoevsky, 43–44, 69, 163–64, 246, 335; heteroglossia, 12–13, 18, 22; recycling of past meanings, 202 “banality of evil,” 75, 141, 229, 247, 296, 315, 333 Baudrillard, Jean, 61, 333 Bauman, Zygmunt: on civility, 82, 232n11, 255–56; on Eurocentrism, 66, 188, 220–21; on legislators and interpreters, 132; on Levinas’s primacy of ethics, 316; on Western modernity, 178 371

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372

Beauvoir, Simone de, 137, 331 Beck, Erlich, 230, 236–37n50, 236n48 Beckett, Samuel, 194 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 121–22, 125 Being and Time (Heidegger), 144–45, 187, 272–73, 288–89n61, 297–99 Beloved (Morrison), 140 benevolence (ren), 121–23, 128–29n2, 158, 205, 211 Benitez-Rojo, Antonio, 248 Bentham, Jeremy, 143, 295 Berlin, Isaiah, 254 Bhabha, Homi K., 157, 249 The Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche), 122 “black Atlantic,” 226–27, 251 Blackmur, R. P., 171, 194 Blake, William, 65 the body: face, 298; hands, 139–41, 143, 288–89n61; land and, 202; metaphors for, 190–91, 279; mind and, 194–95, 203–8; primacy of, 173–77; as social, 204–8, 277–79. See also body politics and phenomenology; gestures and gesculation; sociality (relation) body politics and phenomenology: about, 131, 132–36, 147–48; feminism and, 136–39, 143, 148; heteronomy and ethics, 144–46; jouissance, 141; Panopticon House, 142–43; postmodernism and, 131– 32; touch and contact, 139–41, 143 Bongie, Chris, 248, 252 Book of Rites (Confucius), 121 Botticelli, Sandro, 125 Bourdieu, Pierre, 172–73, 204 Brown, Norman O., 12, 168, 194 Brown, Peter, 133 Bruner, Jerome, 104 Bruns, Gerald L., 133, 176 Buber, Martin, 77, 126, 272 Buddhism: Hoshi (Baozi) statue, 21, 67–68, 120, 190, 223; Tantric, 151n42

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Index

Bugbee, Henry G., Jr., 81 Burke, Edmund, 49, 284–85n14 Burton, Robert, 122 butterfly effect, 341n34 calligraphy, 172 Calvino, Italo, 72, 245 Camus, Albert, 90n71, 319–20, 336 capitalism, 57n33 Caribbeanness, 73, 179, 243–44, 252, 256 carnal hermeneutics, 173, 204–8. See also the body; body politics and phenomenology carnivalization of the world, 64, 177, 335, 340n28 Cartesian epistemocracy, 54–55n23, 173–77, 195–96, 209, 294–95, 311 The Cathedral (Rodin), 124, 141, 173– 74, 196, 294 Certeau, Michel de, 12 China and Chinese culture: crisis expression, 48; Hegel dismissive of, 71, 192, 242–43; Hu Ruowang’s journey to the West, 222; MerleauPonty on, 225; missionaries and, 18–19; Nanking massacre, 79; reasoning/philosophy from, 48, 53n8. See also Buddhism; Confucius and Confucianism; Dao; sinism; specific Asian scholars Chodorow, Nancy Julia, 193, 245, 313–14 Chomsky, Noam, 101, 105 Chow, Rey, 67, 222, 240 Christocentrick approach, 18–19 citizenship, 60 civil hetero-cosmopolis, 81–82 civility: Bauman on, 82, 232n11, 255–56; contracts and, 103–5; nonviolence and, 336; responsibility and, 319–21; Vico on polity and, 82 Clausewitz, Karl, 75, 334 Collected Papers, II (Schutz), 280 Collingwood, R. G., 172

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Index 373

colonialism, 259n29. See also Eurocentrism color (seeing) and sound (hearing), 121–28 commonality principle, 29n46 communicative praxis, 13–14, 17–18, 21–22 Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity (Schrag), 13 comparative literature/politics, 67. See also Zhang, Longxi Confucius and Confucianism: Analects, 63, 103, 200; Book of Rites, 121; ethics as first philosophy of, 62–63, 196; geophilosophy and, 127–28; Hegel on, 189; humanism of, 30n50, 54–55n23, 65–66, 327n71; humanness concept, 207; moral virtues, 199–201; on musical performances, 201, 205; “rectification of names,” 200; ren concept, 121–23, 128–29n2, 158, 205, 211 consilience (C-theory): about, 93–95; as artistic endeavor, 94; Darwinian biologism and, 98–101; Enlightenment and, 93–98; paradigm of hermeneutics and, 101–12 Consilience (Wilson), 94 consociates, 271–74 contracts and civility, 103–5 Copernican revolution of thought, 296 cosmopolitanism: about, 81–82; Beck on, 89n57, 230, 236n48; Dallmayr and, 231; ethics of responsibility and, 255; globalization and, 254. See also multiculturalism Counter-Enlightenment movement, 30n48, 82, 106, 114n37 Cox, Harvey, 63–64 Creel, H. G., 169, 192–93 creoleness, 73, 179, 226–27, 244, 250, 252, 256 Critchley, Simon, 254 critical resistance, 63–64

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cruelty, 319 C-theory. See consilience (C-theory) Culler, Jonathan, 67, 222, 240 cultural anthropologists, 99 cultural pluralism, 29n39 culture, 30n49, 85–86n25. See also China and Chinese culture Dallmayr, Fred, 219, 228, 229–30, 231 Dao, 202, 210, 215n47, 221–29. See also transversality Darwinian biologism, 98–101 Davutoglu, Ahmet, 240 death, 92n90 de Bono, Edward, 179–80 deconstruction: as constructive and destructive, 63, 147–48, 174–75, 178–79, 210, 248; Heidegger on, 63, 133, 175, 216n50, 261n53; transversality and, 69, 178–79, 223 de Gérando (Degérando), Joseph-Marie, 19 Deleuze, Gilles: Cartesian epistemocracy, 195; on conception of earth, 54n18; geophilosophy of, 230; on Hegel, 162; on modernists, 133; on multiplicity, 245; on postmodernity, 12; on “true theory” multiplying, 119; What Is Philosophy?, 42, 46, 47 deliberation, 320–21 Democracy and Disagreement (Gutmann and Thompson), 320–21 Derrida, Jacques: on forgiveness, 79–80; hospitality as ethics, 90; Levinas and, 82, 92n90, 327n71; on logocentrism, 24n7; on Western “metaphysics,” 12 Descartes, René: cogito, 47, 133–34, 176, 213–14n30; as founder of modern Western philosophy, 202. See also Cartesian epistemocracy da Vinci, Leonardo, 122 Dewey, John, 61, 83n2 disagreement, 320–21

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374

Index

dialogue and dialogism: Bakhtin on, 13, 25n15, 66, 76, 89n65, 161–63, 177, 228, 246, 255, 335; Camus on, 90n71; dialectic and, 245–46; as ethics, 228–29; hybridity and, 231; as listening, 77; transversality and, 235n38; Zhang on, 161 difference, 193, 243–48, 259n35; Heidegger on, 49, 191, 225–26, 245, 313; identity versus, 13, 29n44; Merleau-Ponty on, 245. See also “altarity”; alterity; “banality of evil”; diversity/diversality; Otherness; pluralism disenchantment idea, 281–82 ditch metaphor, 108, 115n41 diversity/diversality, 227, 243–48, 250–53. See also Caribbeanness; creoleness; difference Donne, John, 49, 184n59 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 43–44, 69, 161– 63, 246, 335 Dufour, Dany-Robert, 46 Dufrenne, Mikel, 121 Dussel, Enrique, 77 Dworkin, Ronald, 310 Eagleton, Terry, 204 ecocentrism, 50 ecological self, 42 ecology, 123–25, 210, 308n52, 333 Egyptian hieroglyphics, 169–70 Eichmann, Adolf, 75, 247, 296, 333 electronic technology, 166–68 Ellison, Ralph, 140 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 64, 72, 170–71 empiricism, 215n44 Enlightenment, 93–98, 220, 240. See also modernity epigenesis, 98–101, 102 epistemology, 174–75 Erasmus Prize, 336 Escher, M. C., 46, 124 ethical ecocentrism, 50

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ethics: Arendt on, 322; in body as flesh, 143–44; of care, 301–2, 303; in Collected Papers, II, 280; Confucian/Sinic tradition, 62–63, 196; as first philosophy, 74, 144–46, 196, 228–29, 255, 296–98, 304, 315–16, 331–33; heterocentric, 296; intercorporeality and, 276–83; in phenomenological movement, 279–80; politics as, 322, 333, 336; of responsibility, 254, 255, 298–99, 302, 308n52, 322–23, 327n71, 332– 33; of sexual difference, 136–39; of the social world, 291n94; Straus on ethical “posture,” 280–81, 298; transcendence as ethical gesture, 304. See also civility The Ethics of Ambiguity (Beauvoir), 331 ethnocentrism, 11, 22, 241. See also Eurocentrism ethnography, 17–19, 45 ethnology, 17–18 etymosinology, 159 Eurocentrism: about, 11–13, 220– 21, 241; Bauman on, 66, 188, 220–21; Christianity and, 258n22; comparative literature/politics and, 67; cross-cultural dialogue and, 246; essentializing Europe, 252, 253–54; Glissant on, 234–35n6; Hegel on, 70–73, 88n57, 187–89, 226, 246–48; Jullien on, 201; transversality and, 22–23, 42–45, 177–80, 189–90, 208 European humanity, 330 existence, 28n36, 30n49 existential phenomenology, 187–88 experience, 84n13 experimental (inductive) method, 202–3 face (visage), 298–99 Fanon, Franz, 250 fantasy, as creative spirit, 339n26 Félix Guattari, 12 feminism, 47, 56–57n32, 259n35, 301– 2, 324n20

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Index 375

Fenollosa, Ernest, 159, 164–65, 168–69, 171 Fergusson, David A. S., 300 Feuerbach, Ludwig: on heteronomy, 18, 50, 228; as influencer, 145; on responsibility, 322–23; “Thou” concept, 74–75, 145, 255, 296, 325n33, 333 filial piety, 123, 204, 207 Fillizat, Jean, 15 Fingarette, Herbert, 123, 201 Fiore, Quentin, 167 foreign others. See Otherness forgiveness, 79–81 Foucault, Michel: on body politics, 135–36; on care of the self, 302; on critique, 63, 115n41; Jullien and, 70; on meetings between Europe and non-Europe, 70, 224; visit to Japan, 120; on Western philosophy, 201 fox metaphor, 180, 254 Frankl, Viktor, 301, 326n42 freedom and responsibility, 76–77, 300–301, 306n38 French ethnography, 17, 19, 45 Freud, Sigmund, 100, 112–13n16 Fukuyama, Francis, 231, 240, 257n6, 310, 334 fusion, 261n59 future as history, 85n22 Gadamer, Hans-Georg: on ambiguity, 326–27n60; on dialogue, 228; “fusion of horizons,” 165; Hegel comparison, 27n28; hermeneutics and, 132, 133, 158–61, 228, 326– 27n60; history and, 110; radicalizing tradition, 163; on toleration, 191 Garfinkel, Harold, 268 Geertz, Clifford, 104–5, 127 The Geography of Thought (Nisbett), 74 geometric concepts, 120, 223 geophilosophy, 45–52, 201–11, 229–30 geopiety, 123–25, 127

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Gernet, Jacques, 19 gestures and gesculation, 152n52, 171– 72, 194, 237n52 Gilligan, Carol, 11, 143, 193, 301 Gilroy, Paul, 226–27, 251, 255 Gita, Bhagavad, 123 Glendon, Mary Ann, 51, 302–4, 309–10 Glissant, Edouard: critique of Eurocentrism, 234–35n6; critique of Hegel, 226, 241; on diversity, 243–48; on diversity/diversality, 227, 253; on global village, 256–57n2; on Interbeing, 253; multiculturalism and, 189; on relation, 261n52; on transversality, 70, 73, 179, 250–53. See also Caribbeanness; Creoleness globalization: challenges of, 239–40; civil hetero-cosmopolis and, 81–82; cosmopolitanism and, 231, 254; glocalization and, 60, 65, 157–58, 177–80; McLuhan on, 165–66; multiculturalism and, 119–20. See also multiculturalism “global village” concept, 219–20, 239, 256–57n2 glocalization, 60, 65, 157–58, 177–80 Goethe, Wolfgang von, 62, 157–60, 293–94 Goodall, Jane, 103 Gray, J. Glenn, 75–76, 90n69, 334, 341n34 Great Chain of Interbeing, 46, 51–52 Greenblatt, Stephen, 18 Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft (Feuerbach), 74–75 Guattari, Félix: on Cartesianism, 195; on conception of earth, 54n18; geophilosophy of, 52, 230; on modernists, 133; transversality, 14; What Is Philosophy?, 42, 46, 47 Guernica (Picasso), 297 Gurwitsch, Aron, 109, 287n56 Gutenberg Galaxy (McLuhan), 166 Gutmann, Amy, 309, 320–21

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376

Index

Habermas, Jürgen, 26–27n25, 135–36, 248 habit, importance of, 290n70 haiku, 125–26, 244, 258n28 the hand, 139–41, 143, 288–89n61 Hardt, Michael, 60, 239 harmony, 120–28, 205, 227 Havel, Václav: conscience regarding nature, 90–91n74; on global catastrophe, 338n4; intellectuals’ response to, 329–31; Letters to Olga, 331; Levinas and, 76, 77; “living in truth” concept, 304, 307–8n51, 329–30, 333–34; politics as ethics/ morals, 77, 90–91n74, 322, 333, 336, 337; “The Politics of Hope,” 336; “The Power of the Powerless,” 330; on responsibility for natural world, 341n34; as statesman for all seasons, 76; on words, 330 The Heart of Altruism (Monroe), 303, 318 hedgehog metaphor, 180, 254 Hegel, G. W. F.: on dialectical history, 245; dialogism of, 161–63; dismissive of Chinese philosophy, 71, 192, 242–43; Eurocentrism and, 70–73, 88n57, 187–89, 226, 246–48; Gadamer comparison, 27n28; Glissant on, 226, 241; Heidegger comparison, 12–13, 137–38, 313–14; on identity and unity, 25n12; Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 188–89; Marx on, 291n89; Merleau-Ponty on, 44–45, 72, 178, 191–92, 224–25, 241–43; on “Oriental despotism,” 221; Phenomenology of Spirit, 335; rationalism of, 87n48 Heidegger, Martin: Arendt contrasted to, 299–300; Being and Time, 144–45, 187, 272–73, 288–89n61, 297–99; calculative thinking, 47; on care, 302; das Man, 61, 333; on deconstruction, 63, 133, 175,

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216n50, 261n53; on difference (Unter/schied), 49, 191, 225–26, 245, 313; The End of Philosophy, 185– 86n77; Hegel comparison, 12–13, 137–38, 313–14; on Interbeing, 86n34, 249–50; “I-viewpoint,” 174, 195; Kolb on, 31n53; Krell and, 26n19; on language, 160; Levinas and, 297–99, 316, 325n42; Schrag and, 17; on serenity, 48; “stock of knowledge at hand,” 278; on voice and mood, 122; What Is Called Thinking?, 140–41 Heisenberg, Werner, 215n47 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 69–70, 178, 190–91, 223, 247–48 hereditarians, 99, 105–6 hermeneutics: about, 105–6; consilience and, 101–12; face (visage) as ethical hermeneutic of altarity, 298–99; Gadamer on, 132, 133, 158–61, 228, 326–27n60; Rorty on, 133, 174–75; Zhang on, 159–64. See also consilience (C-theory) Hermes, 106, 124 heterocentrism, 228, 296, 332–33 heteroglossia, 12–13, 18, 22 heteronomy, 50, 52, 56–57n32, 74, 144–46, 317–18 Hobbes, Thomas, 79, 103 Hoffmeister, Gerhart, 157 Homer, 168 Hoshi (Baozi) statue, 21, 67–68, 120, 190, 223 hospitality, 82, 90 Hoy, David Couzens, 63 human body. See the body The Human Condition (Arendt), 59–60, 79, 229 humanism, 65–66 Humanism and Terror (Merleau-Ponty), 75 human plurality, 26n20, 260n36, 312 human specificity, 104 Hume, David, 241, 246–48

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Index 377

Huntington, Samuel, 231, 251, 334 Hu Ruowang (John Hu), 222 Husserl, Edmund: initiating phenomenology movement, 65; Merleau-Ponty and, 15, 88n49; on natural world, 330; philosophy of infinite tasks, 276; on phoenix metaphor, 119; Schutz and, 268–70; on scientism, 109; transversality and, 67 hybridity, 179, 226–28, 231, 235n31, 237n52, 244 Ibsen, Henrik, 107–8 identity politics, 184n59, 262n68 identity versus difference, 13, 29n44 “I do” versus “I think,” 293–95, 302 In a Different Voice (Gilligan), 143–44, 301 Innis, Harold A., 166 intellectualism and empiricism, 215n44 Interbeing: about, 193–94, 229–30, 324n12; action and, 271; geophilosophy and, 48–49; Glissant on, 253; Great Chain of, 46, 51–52; harmony and, 121; Heidegger on, 86n34, 249–50; interconnected bodies, 208; Merleau-Ponty on, 46–47, 208–9, 253; Sinism and, 176– 77; Watsuji on, 126–27. See also interspeciesistic relationships intercorporeality, 276–83 interdisciplinarity, 31n51, 87n44 “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man” (Taylor), 221 interspeciesistic relationships, 40, 46, 50, 56n29, 123–24, 210–11 Invisible Man (Ellison), 140 Irigaray, Luce, 136–39, 140 “I think” versus “I do,” 293–95, 302 “I-viewpoint,” 174, 195 James, William, 62, 65, 87n48 Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 80

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Japan’s invasion of Korea and Taiwan, 78–81 Jardine, Alice A., 137 jinja visit, 91n79 jouissance, 141 Jullien, François, 70, 178–79, 201, 223–24 Jung clan, 78–79 Kalternmark, Max, 15 Kant, Immanuel, 11–12, 23n5, 95–96, 220, 240–41, 246–48 Kierkegaard, Søren, 60–61, 209, 333 Kigen, Dogen, 173 Kipling, Rudyard, 231 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 143–44 Kolakowski, Leszek, 63, 319, 335 Kolb, David, 31n53 Koreans, 78–81 Krauthammer, Charles, 257n6 Krell, David Farrell, 26n19, 232n12, 249 Kuhn, Thomas S., 61, 109–11, 116n49 Kundera, Milan, 335 Kurosawa, Akira, 67, 222, 270 Kyoto school of philosophy, 233n16 language: centrality to action, 199–200; connecting spirit and nature, 170–71; as gesture, 172; Havel on, 330; Heidegger on, 160; hermeneutics and, 160; humans and, 105–7; medium and message, 166–68; Vico on, 168, 194; Zhuangzi on, 186n77. See also sinograms lateral and vertical thinking, 179–80 lateral universals, 21–22, 43, 224–25, 242, 249 Leopold, Aldo, 48–49, 127 Leppenies, Wolf, 176 Letters to Olga (Havel), 331 Leviathan (Hobbes), 103 Levinas, Emmanuel: on death, 92n90; defining heteronomy, 317–18; ethics as first philosophy, 74, 144–46, 196,

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378

Index

228–29, 255, 296–98, 304, 315–16, 331–33; face (visage) and, 298–99; on freedom, 300; Havel and, 76, 77; Heidegger and, 297–99, 316, 325n42; hospitality of, 82; “I do” versus “I think,” 293–95, 302; JudeoChristian tradition and, 293–94; meontology of, 138, 146, 148, 332; as moral philosopher, 291n94; on responsibility, 298–99, 302, 327n71; Schrag on, 50 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 15, 17, 45, 225, 242 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 152n52 Li, Zehou, 128, 177 Lifton, Robert Jay, 29n46, 329 listening, poverty of, 77 Liszt, Franz, 125 literature and literary theory, 159–64 Locke, John, 50–51, 310 logocentrism, 23–24n6, 24n7 logotherapy, 301, 326n42 Lord, Albert B., 168 Lorenz, Konrad, 103 Lumsden, C. J., 93–94, 98–100, 101 Lycenkoism, 99 Lyotard, Jean-François, 12, 25n12, 131, 320 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 340n32 Macmurray, John: cogito ergo nonsum concept, 294–95; Copernican revolution of thought and, 296; on freedom, 300; “I do” versus “I think,” 293–95, 302; Judeo-Christian tradition and, 293–94; The Self as Agent, 295; transcendence as ethical gesture, 304 Macpherson, C. B., 103 Mahbubani, Kishore, 73–74, 208 Mairs, Nancy, 136 male mythology, 23n6 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 172 Mandelbaum, Maurice, 280, 311 Mao, Zdong, 197

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Marcel, Gabriel, 134–35, 175 Marcuse, Herbert, 329 Marx, Karl, 161–62, 197–98, 221, 282, 291n89 Marxism, 57n33, 76, 100, 336 Masao, Abe, 233n16 Masaryk, T. G., 77 Maslow, Abraham H., 115n40 The Master Builder (Ibsen), 107–8 mathematics and music, 122 Mauss, Marcel, 15, 17, 45, 225 McCumber, John, 115n41 McLuhan, Marshall, 81, 165–67, 219– 20, 239 Mead, George Herbert, 245, 267, 283– 84n3, 285n26 medium and message, 166–68 The Medium Is the Message (McLuhan and Fiore), 167 Melas, Natalie, 254 Memory, History, Forgetting (Ricoeur), 80 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: on body politics, 134–36, 205–6; on Cartesian cogito, 209; civility and, 255; on conception of earth, 54n18; on difference, 245; on the end of a philosophy, 128; on Hegel, 44–45, 72, 178, 191–92, 224–25, 241–43; Humanism and Terror, 75; Husserl and, 15, 88n49; on hyperdialectic, 162, 228, 245–46; “instituting subject,” 150n25, 312–13; on Interbeing, 46–47, 208–9, 253; lateral universals, 21–22, 43, 224–25, 242, 249; on Oriental and Occidental thought, 15–17; on perception, 121; on phenomenology, 131–32, 201–2, 211; on preconceptual, 198; “primacy of perception,” 175–76; Schrag on, 13, 14; on the self, 49, 62; social existence, 212n18; on transversality, 69, 70–73; on violence, 339n20 Mill, John Stuart, 17–18, 94, 103, 151n34

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Index 379

Millet, Jean François, 41 Mimesis (Auerbach), 158 mind and body, 194–95, 203–8 missionaries, 18–19 modernity: Bauman on, 178; Beck on, 230, 236–37n50; Eurocentrism and, 240–43; postmodernity and, 11–12, 68, 244–45, 313; universality and, 20. See also Enlightenment Monan, J. Donald, 198 mondialisation, 81–82. See also globalization Monroe, Kristen Renwick, 303, 318 Monteverdi, Claudio, 125 morals and politics, 77, 90–91n74, 337. See also ethics Morris, Ivan, 199 Morrison, Toni, 23n5, 56n29, 140 Mosès, Stéphane, 316 multiculturalism: challenges of, 239–40; difference and, 225; Glissant on, 189; globalization and, 119–20; Herder on, 223; transversality and, 67–68, 70. See also cosmopolitanism; globalization; transversality multiple realities, 270 multiplicity, 245 “multitude,” 60–61, 239 multiversity, 12 music, 132–33, 201, 204–5 Naess, Arne, 230 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 173, 191 Nanking massacre, 79 natality, 299–300 Natanson, Maurice, 267–68. See also Schutz, Alfred Native Americans, 20 The Natural Contract (Serres), 51 nature and the natural world, 101–4, 123–28, 330, 341n34 Nazi Holocaust, 77–78, 79, 290n75 Negri, Antonio, 60, 239 New Science of Giambattista Vico (Vico), 182–83n36

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Nhat Hanh, Thich, 46, 193, 324n12 Nietzsche, Friedrich: on aesthetic, 54–55n23; The Birth of Tragedy, 122, 132, 204; on music, 132–33; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 132, 203 nihilism, 281 ningen/ingen, 74, 126, 127 Nisbett, Richard E., 74 Nishida, Kitaro, 85–86n25 Nivison, David S., 197 The Nobility of Failure (Morris), 199 non-European portrayals, 18–20 nonviolence, 319–20, 336–37 Northrop, F. S. C., 165 Occidentalism, 15–17, 44–45, 72, 220–21 Oken, Lorenz, 140 On Toleration (Walzer), 74 ontology of social roles, 271–74 oral poetry, 167–68 Orientalism, 15–17, 44–45, 72, 220–21 Origen, 203–4 Orpheus, 124–25, 126 Ortega y Gasset, José, 333 Otherness: colonialism and, 259n29; comparison and, 67–69, 239–40; as enemy, 334; ethnography and, 17–19; Eurocentrism and, 240–42, 254–55; heteronomy and, 317–18; man’s inhumanity to man, 315; postmodernity and, 11–12; primacy of the Other, 50, 294; variations of, 220, 222, 240. See also alterity; “banality of evil”; China and Chinese culture; difference; Eurocentrism; Gadamer, HansGeorg; Occidentalism; Orientalism; responsibility Pagden, Anthony, 190, 247 Panopticon of knowledge, 174–77, 214n30, 295 Pan (One) versus Proteus (Many), 20–21

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380

Index

“paradigm hunting” of C-theory. See consilience (C-theory) Patočka, Jan, 76, 77, 329–30 Patterson, Orlando, 23n5 Pecora, Vincent P., 26–27n25 perception, 206, 312 performance, 201, 277–79, 286n30, 287–88n60 phenomenology movement: ethics in, 279–80; existential phenomenology, 187–88; Husserl initiating, 65; Merleau-Ponty on, 131–32, 201–2, 211; postmodernity and, 131; Schultz on, 268–71. See also body politics and phenomenology The Phenomenology of Moral Experience (Mandelbaum), 280 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 335 Phenomenology of the Social World (Schutz), 268 Philosophical Papers (Schrag), 13 philosophy, 242 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Rorty), 174 phoenix metaphor, 119 physicalism, 95 Picasso, Pablo, 172, 194, 297 piety, 123, 204, 207 Plato, 174, 293 playfulness, 335–36 pluralism, 26n20, 29n39, 74, 260n36, 312, 332. See also sociality (relation) poetry, 167–70 Polanyi, Michael, 111 politics: as ethics, 332, 333, 336; identity politics, 184n59, 262n68; morals and, 77, 90–91n74, 337. See also body politics and phenomenology Pollock, Jackson, 310–11 postcolonialism, 262n69 postmodernity: body politics and, 147; difference and, 248; modernity and, 11–12, 68, 244–45, 313; responsibility and, 322–23; Wilson’s

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critique of, 97–98. See also difference; Schrag, Calvin O. power, 150n25, 297, 321, 330 pragmatism, 84n11 praxis, 197–98 the preconceptual, 198 The Present Age (Kierkegaard), 60–61 Primavera (Botticelli), 125 Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (Feuerbach), 296 The Problem of Social Reality (Schutz), 269 projects, 271 public philosophy: about, 59–64; emphasizing practice, 83n1; globalization and transversality, 65–73; multiculturalism, 64–65 Pythagoras, 122 racism, 99, 241, 246–48 Rashomon (film), 67, 222, 270 Rawls, John, 99 Realpolitik (Clausewitz), 75, 337 reason, defense of, 281 The Rebel (Camus), 336 reconciliation, 77–81 reductionism, 102–3 Reinventing Politics (Tismaneanu), 329 relationality: alterity and, 314, 316–17; difference as, 243–48, 312–14; primacy of the other and, 314–18; sociality and, 310–12. See also sociality (relation) relational ontology, 88–89n57 religion, critique of, 96–97 ren (benevolence), 121–23, 128–29n2, 158, 205, 211 The Resources of Rationality (Schrag), 13 responsibility: alterity and, 321–22; civility and, 319–21; difference as relationality, 312–14; ethics and, 254, 255, 302, 308n52, 327n71, 332–33; freedom and, 76–77, 300– 301, 306n38; Levinas on, 298–99,

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Index 381

302, 327n71; as moral alternative to violence, 337; postmodernity and, 322–23; relationality and primacy of other, 314–18; relation and sociality, 310–12; “rights talk” and, 303–4, 309–10. See also sociality (relation) Ricci, Matteo, 18–19 Rich, Adrienne, 23n6, 47 Ricoeur, Paul, 80 Riesman, David, 61 Rights Talk (Glendon), 309–10 “rights talk,” 50–51, 74, 302–4, 309–10, 319–20, 322, 333 Rilke, Rainer Marie, 124–25, 153n70, 173, 196 Roberts, J. M., 240 Rodin, Auguste, 124, 141, 173–74, 196, 294 roles and role-playing, 273 Rorty, Richard, 83n2, 105, 133, 174, 175 Rosenzweig, Franz, 316 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 51 Sacks, Oliver, 171–72 Sahlins, Marshall, 106, 114n31 Said, Edward W., 251, 334–35 Sandel, Michael J., 83n2 Santayana, George, 270 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 67, 222 “satisficing” terminology, 102 Scheler, Max, 104, 280 Schmitt, Carl, 334 Schrag, Calvin O.: on communicative praxis, 13–14, 17–18, 21–22; defining transversality, 119–20; on difference, 252; on ethics of alterity, 50; Heidegger and, 17; on Levinas, 50; on Merleau-Ponty, 13, 14; The Resources of Rationality, 13; The Self after Postmodernity, 33–40; on self in community, 49; on transversality, 13–15, 20–22, 42–43, 45, 67–69, 189–90, 222–23, 235n38, 249–50, 252

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Schutz, Alfred: Collected Papers, II, 280; Husserl and, 268–70; intercorporeality and ethics, 276–83; on Nazi leaders and responsibility, 290n75; ontology of social roles, 271–74; phenomenology of the social world, 268–71; relationship with Natanson, 267–68; on social reality, 107, 109, 274–76, 311; wisdom of, 49 science, 110–11, 116n49 scientism, 275–76, 280–81 Scienza Nuova (Vico), 106 Scott, Joan Wallach, 191 Scruton, Roger, 77 sculpture: as anonymous person, 185n65; Hoshi (Baozi) statue, 21, 67–68, 120, 190, 223; of Rodin, 124, 141, 173–74, 196, 294 The Second Sex (de Beauvoir), 137 Seeing Voices (Sacks), 171–72 the self, 62, 307n45 The Self after Postmodernity (Schrag), 33–40 Semimaru legend, 126 September 11 attacks, 75 serenity, 48 Serres, Michel, 51, 152n56 Sewell, Elizabeth, 136–37 Shklar, Judith N., 319 sight and hearing, 152n56 sign language, 171–72 sincerity, 63, 199–201, 298 Sinism, 122–28, 169, 176–77, 192–96, 204, 209–11. See also Buddhism; China and Chinese culture; Confucius and Confucianism; Dao; Interbeing; ren (benevolence) sinograms, 62–63, 169–72, 177, 193–94 Skinner, B. F., 100–101, 102, 113n23 Snow, C. P., 101–2 social “I do,” 295 social imaginary, 85n22, 249, 255–56, 262n61

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382

Index

sociality (relation), 245–46, 285n26, 310–12, 319–21. See also responsibility social man, 282–83 social placement and existence, 182– 83n36, 206–7, 209–11 social roles, 271–74 social sciences, 274. See also Schutz, Alfred Sociobiology (Lumsden and Wilson), 93–94 Socrates, 157–58 Sonnets to Orpheus (Rilke), 124–25 sound (hearing) and color (seeing), 121–28, 128–29n2 South Africa, 77, 79–80 speciesism, 30n48, 119, 124, 129n3 Spengler, Oswald, 165 Standard Social Science Model (SSSM), 99–100 Straus, Erwin W.: “absentee landlord” metaphor, 279; on ethical “posture,” 280–81, 298; favoring body in social environment, 135, 173, 206–7, 279; primacy of body over mind, 312 Strauss, Leo, 280, 281, 340n32 Stravinsky, Igor, 125 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn), 109–11 subjectivity and subjectality, 128, 177 Sulloway, Frank J., 112–13n16 Symphony No. 6, the Pastoral Symphony (Beethoven), 125 A System of Logic (Mill), 103 tactility, 288–89n61 Tantric Buddhism, 151n42 Taoism. See Dao; Zhang, Longxi Taylor, Charles, 116n52, 160–61, 221, 311, 314 Taylor, Mark C., 254–55 technocracy, 333 technologism, 55n24 technology, 166–68 technoscience, 108–9

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Tharoor, Shashi, 75 “The Coming Fusion of East and West” (Fenollosa), 164–65 The Thinker (Rodin), 141, 173, 196 Thinking the Difference (Irigaray), 140 Thompson, Dennis, 320–21 Thompson, John B., 260n51 “Thou” concept, 74–75, 145, 255, 296, 325n33, 333 thoughtlessness, 75 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsch), 132 tickling pleasure, 139–40 Tischner, Father Józef, 184n59 Tismaneanu, Vladimir, 329 totalitarianism, 335 totalization, 21, 24–25n11 totemism, 114n35 touch, 139–41, 143, 288–89n61 Toulmin, Stephen, 61–62 translation, 28–29n37, 32n60, 163–64, 263n72 transversality: about, 178–80; defined, 113n20, 119–20; Eurocentrism and, 22–23, 42–45, 177–80, 189–90, 208; geophilosophy and, 45–52; Glissant on, 70, 73, 179, 250–53; Guattari on, 14; Husserl and, 67; Merleau-Ponty on, 69, 70–73; rainbow coalitions and, 264n92; Schrag on, 13–15, 20–22, 42–43, 45, 67–69, 189–90, 222–23, 235n38, 249–50, 252; universality and, 14–15, 21–23; way of, 248–53. See also multiculturalism transvestism, 31–32n55 The Triumph of the West (Roberts), 240 truth, 120 typification, 273–75 unity of science movement, 95, 105, 275–76 universality, 14–15, 21–23, 251 Universal Reason, 247–48 Valéry, Paul, 172 Vattimo, Gianni, 13, 313

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Index 383

Verbum (Escher), 46, 124 vertical and lateral thinking, 179–80 Vico, Giambattista: as cultural pluralist, 29n39; on language, 168, 194; on mind and body, 203; The New Science of Giambattista Vico, 182– 83n36; on poetry, 170; on polity and civility, 82; on practical nature of philosophy, 62; Scienza Nuova, 106; verum ipsum factum, 275–76 violence, 75–76, 296–97, 319–20, 334, 336, 339n20. See also aggression The Visible and the Invisible (MerleauPonty), 15 Voegelin, Eric, 280 Waal, Frans de, 103 Walzer, Michael, 74, 245, 297 Wang, Yangming, 177, 187–88, 194– 201, 203–11. See also Sinism The Warriors (Gray), 75–76, 334 Watsuji, Tetsuro, 126–27, 207 Weber, Max, 280, 281–82 “well-informed citizen,” 280, 290n75 Welsch, Wolfgang, 233n17 West, Cornel, 22

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Westermarck, Edward A., 100 What Is Called Thinking? (Heidegger), 140–41 What Is Philosophy? (Deleuze & Guattari), 42 Whewell, William, 94 White, Hayden, 167 Whitehead, Alfred North, 75, 293, 320, 334 Wiesel, Elie, 77–78, 80–81 Wild, John, 187–88, 304n1, 306n38 Wilson, Edward O. See consilience (C-theory) Wilson, James Q., 303–4, 318 Wittfogel, Karl, 221 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 61, 146, 176, 195 world culture, 30n49, 85–86n25 xenophobia, 81, 82 Young, Robert J. C., 226 Zhang, Longxi, 27n28, 48, 157–64 Zhang, Zai, 127, 207–8 Zhuangzi, 186n77, 202

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About the Author

Hwa Yol Jung was professor emeritus at Moravian College, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. As a postdoctoral fellow, he studied at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and Yale University. At Northwestern and Yale, he studied phenomenology with the guidance of the late John Wild. In addition to the forty years he spent at Moravian College, he taught at Purdue University, Seoul National University, Nanjing University, and Kyung Hee University’s Graduate Institute of Peace Studies. He published numerous articles and books, including Prolegomena to a Carnal Hermeneutics (2014) also with Lexington Books. His works have been translated into several European and East Asian languages. His book Transversal Rationality and Intercultural Texts: Essays in Phenomenology and Comparative Philosophy, published in Ohio University’s “Series in Continental Thought” (No. 40), was awarded the 2012 Edward Ballard Prize.

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