The Pinyin & Wade-Giles Transliteration Systems
Before we start in on the schools and sages of the Chinese tradition, first we must cover the shift in transliteration of Chinese into Phoenician/Roman alphabetic characters. Today, we use the Pinyin system, adopted by the People’s Republic of China in 1958, adopted by other countries by the 1980s. It still has problems, but is vastly superior to the Wade-Giles system invented in Britain in the 1800s. When you read books from the 60s and 70s, you find the word Dao spelled ‘Tao’. This is because the Wade-Giles ‘t’ became ‘d’, and so the Daoist classic the ‘Tao Te Ching’ became today the ‘Dao De Jing’. What was once the capital city ‘Peiking’ is now ‘Beijing’. Important for Chinese Philosophy, while the Latinized names ‘Confucius’ and ‘Mencius’ remained the same, all other names changed, particularly the suffix for ‘master’, which was ‘Tzu’ but is today ‘Zi’ (pronounced something like ‘tzih’ with a soft ‘t’ in front). My favorite Chinese philosopher used to be ‘Chuang Tzu’, but is today ‘Zhuangzi’, or Master Zhuang. Similarly ‘Lao Tzu’ is today Laozi, Master Lao, and ‘Mo Tzu’ is Mozi, Master Mo. None of these names unfortunately appear in spell check either way. Luckily, Wikipedia is a good tool for dealing with this annoying situation, for if you search for a name either way, it sends you to the right page with the modern Pinyin name. I use this all the time, even though I have studied these guys for years.
The Origins of Chinese Philosophy
One would like to think that times of peace and prosperity are good for systems of thought, but times of civil war and disintegration of empires seems best for thinkers and systems of thought. This was true in ancient Egypt, India, Greece, and true in the golden age of ancient Chinese thought as well. Human beings only rethink problems when they are faced with them, and they are only able to teach new and counter-cultural solutions when the orthodoxy is weak and failing. In Confucius’ China there were great problems in the Warring States period (500 – 220 BCE) as many kings came and went, each calling themselves ‘mandated by heaven’. Interestingly, this same period is known as the golden age of Chinese thought, the Period of the Hundred Philosophies, also called the Period of the Hundred Schools or Period of the Hundred Sages.
In the frame of ancient cosmology, the worldview of ancient Egypt and Persia that influenced all three of the axial age powers (ancient India, Greece and China), the world was thought to be built like a person and order was thought to be spoken downward from the heavens to the earth. In ancient China, it was said that if a king was good he would be supported and affirmed by the voice of heaven, which in speaking for a king gave the king the ‘mandate of heaven’ and allow him and the empire to prosper. Likewise, the king would speak for and support local rulers and ministers. This is very similar to most other polytheistic and monotheistic cultures of the ancient world. If the king does not follow the way of heaven, the gods or god stops speaking for the king, and someone else comes along and takes the king’s place. Each new king claims that the old king was ‘no longer spoken for’, so the populations of ancient Greece, India, as well as China, find themselves wondering: who or what kind of king exactly does heaven (the heavens) speak for, and why? Philosophy of the ancient world was both about how to rule the self and how to rule a people, and the questions were often intertwined.
China was settled as early as 5000 BCE. The next two and a half thousand years, when the origins of Chinese culture were laid down, is called the Period of Jade, when the legendary Red Emperor, Shenlung, and Yellow Emperor, Xianyuan, were said to have invented the basics of culture, including rites and rituals (li) hunting, fishing, and agriculture (though today, we know these to have been developed earlier in Africa before 5000 BCE by our common human ancestors). In one passage of the Zhuangzi, the second central work of Daoism, we read:
Chuchuehzi said to Changwuzi, “I have heard Confucius say that the sage does not work at anything, does not pursue profit, does not dodge harm, does not enjoy being sought after, does not follow the Way, says nothing yet says something, says something yet says nothing, and wanders beyond the dust and grime. Confucius himself regarded these as wild and flippant words, though I believe they describe the working of the mysterious Way. What do you think of them?” Changwuzi said, “Even the Yellow Emperor would be confused if he heard such words, so how could you expect Confucius to understand them?
The word ‘li’, which is used in Chinese thought to mean not only devotional ritual but also tradition and culture, is related to the word for jade, as jade and items in jade vessels were given as offerings to the ancestors, gods and spirits. The word ‘jing’ means reverence, which is proper not only for the gods, rulers and parents but for the ideal self, the community, and the cosmos. Following the Period of Jade was the Lungshan period (2600 - 2100 BCE), the time of the revered sage-kings Yao and Shun. In one passage of the Analects of Confucius, he says, “Anyone can become a Yao or a Shun”, arguing that making oneself in harmony with the common people is the essence of being both a sage and a king.
Confucius, the Daoists and others speak of the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ (Tianming) and the ‘Way’ (Dao) of heaven (Tiandao) but not much about the Lord of Heaven. In India, Greece, China, and many other places, we can see that first many tribes and their gods were drawn into polytheistic (many gods) systems, and then after this these were increasingly drawn into monotheistic (one god over many lesser deities and saints) systems. We can see that many gods with human like desires become one ruling god with human like desires, and then this one god becomes more and more abstract as the great One, also known as philosophical monism.
We see the same pattern in China, where polytheism grew into a monotheistic and then abstract monist ‘Way’ or ‘Mandate’. The Zhou and earlier empires spoke of the Lord of Heaven, and it when the Zhou overthrew the Shang in 1029 BCE that they supported the idea, found in much of ancient Chinese thought including Confucianism and Daoism, that the heavens and the way of things only speaks for a king, giving him the Mandate of Heaven, when he is virtuous (‘de’, as in the Dao De Jing), and when he is not he is overthrown (obviously to legitimize their own seizure of power). Confucius and the Daoists in the Warring States period, however, do not speak much of the Lord of Heaven, but speak much of the Mandate and Way, showing us that, like the golden age of thought in ancient India and Greece, the revered thinkers were challenging the old tradition with philosophical monism that questioned the very shape of cosmology itself while extending it.
Additionally, just as we see in India, what is at first only true for the royalty and ruling class gradually becomes popular and common. In ancient Egypt, at first only the Pharaoh could escape rounds of reincarnation and ascend into the heavens as a star, but by the later periods common people who were virtuous could obtain heavenly rest. In ancient India, only the brahmins and then with Theravada Buddhism only the monks could escape rounds of reincarnation and obtain nirvana. In China, similarly, the Way and Mandate of Heaven was first used to justify the position of the king, but by the time of the golden age of Chinese thought, common people could gain not merely position but wisdom such as that of the legendary sage kings by being in accord with the Dao, the way and nature of things.
Yin & Yang
One early cosmological and philosophical idea that is central to Chinese thought that can be found in the early dynasties is the Zhou Yi system of the complementary opposites of Yin and Yang, the two sides of energy (‘chi’). Yin is the dark, female, and earthly force, and Yang is the bright, male, and heavenly force. Many early societies from the time of Shamanism saw the cosmos as a sexual procreation of male and female forces. The mind understands and reasons in terms of opposites, and the creation and recreation of life by nature was associated with the procreation of offspring by female and male. In the Chinese conception, Yin was associated with the acceptance of the passive, the darkness of space, the support of the earth, the absence of non-being, and the mystery of the unknown. Yang was associated with the transformation of the active, the brightness of the sun, the motions of the sky, the presence of being, and the power of the known.
The idea is that everything consists of and is in relationship with other things in terms of oppositions. The ancient Greeks and later German philosophers used the terms ‘dialectic’ and ‘dialectical’ to describe the oppositional components and motions of things, including the human mind, truth, and dialogue. Hegel, one of my favorite German philosophers, wrote in his Logic:
That true and positive meaning of the antinomies is this: that every actual thing involves a coexistence of opposed elements. Consequently to know, or, in other words, to comprehend an object is equivalent to being conscious of it as a concrete unity of opposed determinations. The old metaphysic, as we have already seen, when it studied the objects of which it sought a metaphysical knowledge, went to work by applying categories abstractly and to the exclusion of their opposites.
However reluctant Understanding may be to admit the action of Dialectic, we must not suppose that the recognition of its existence is peculiarly confined to the philosopher. It would be truer to say that Dialectic gives expression to a law which is felt in all other grades of consciousness, and in general experience. Everything that surrounds us may be viewed as an instance of Dialectic.
The Yin and Yang became a central idea behind the Yi Jing divination system and later Daoism. Many are familiar with Yin and Yang through the Daoist symbol which is thought to be a solar calendar showing roughly the length of daylight through the year as it increases in the summer and then diminishes in the winter. The Daoists got this image from one of the many schools in the Hundred Schools Period that did not survive with patronage called the Yin Yang school.
The Yi Jing Divination System
The Yi Jing is the famous oracle system of ancient China. Originally, the Chinese diviners used turtle shells and bones to answer questions of kings, nobles and common people ‘yes’ or ‘no’ depending on how they would crack over a fire. Turtles were thought to be symbolic of the cosmos, as their shells resembled heaven, round on the top, and earth, flat on the bottom. Unfortunately, being sacred did not help the Chinese turtle, as their numbers depleted from all the divination to the point that turtles were imported from Vietnam and other southern lands and cattle bones began to be used as substitutes.
The Yi Jing replaced this earlier system about 1000 BCE with the rise of the Zhou dynasty. Many systems of thought were influenced by the Yi Jing in the Warring States period, including Confucianism and Daoism. Confucians and Daoists wrote commentaries on the books. Confucius considered the Yi Jing to be one of the six great classics of the tradition of the sage emperors, and made it central to his educational system that became the entrance exams for the Chinese bureaucracy.
The original system is attributed to Fu Xi, a mythical king who is said to have discovered the symbols of the Yi Jing hexagrams in the stars. It was then said to have been re-systematized by King Wen, one of the founders of the Zhou dynasty. It is impossible today to know whether these kings were the sages behind the system, or if the system was finalized as a book by Confucius himself around 500 BCE.
The system is built out of eight trigrams which in pairs of upper and lower trigram form sixty four hexagrams. Each trigram is build out of solid and/or broken lines, solid signifying yang and broken signifying yin. In ancient times, a question was asked and sticks were tossed to determine each line, starting from the top down. The counter-culture of the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties, including surfers (who were introduced to Daoism in Hawaii), beatniks, hippies, and new age spiritual seekers, would toss coins, often quarters, heads being yang, and tails being yin. Six tosses equals six lines, giving two trigrams, one heaven and one earth.
The trigrams are:
☰ Heaven (Creative)
☱ Lake (Reflecting/Excess)
☲ Fire (Bright/Conscious/Clinging)
☳ Thunder (Exciting)
☴ Wind/Wood (Penetrating/Growth)
☵ Water (Dark/Danger/Profound)
☶ Mountain (Steady/Still)
☷ Earth (Receptive)
Notice that Creation is the beginning of the end Reception (heaven and earth), Bright is the beginning of the end Darkness (fire and water), Excitement is the beginning of the end Growth (thunder and wind), Stillness is the beginning of the end Excess (mountain and lake). When we invert a hexagram, changing its solid lines to broken and broken lines to solid, the opposite has an opposite role in process and change.
There are eight hexagrams that are composed of a trigram and its reverse or mirror image:Creation (heaven on heaven), Insight (wind on lake), synergy (fire on fire), Nourishing (Mountain on Thunder), Critical Mass (lake on wind), Danger (water on water), Mindfulness (thunder on mountain) and reception (earth on earth). Four of these eight hexagrams are composed of the same trigram twice, the trigrams that are symmetrical. The inversions are interesting as Insight is the beginning of the end Mindfulness, and Nourishing is the beginning of the end Critical Mass. This is very similar to the inversions we saw amongst the trigrams.
There are 8 hexagrams that are composed of a trigram and its inverse, the diagonal from top right to bottom left of the Fu Xi order: Prosper (earth on heaven), Decline (mountain on lake), After Ends (water on fire), Benefit (wind on thunder), Continuing (thunder on wind), Before Ends (fire on water), Attraction (lake on mountain), and Stagnation (heaven on earth).
Notice that Prosper/Stagnation and After Ends/Before Ends are both inverses and reverses, and also that Prosperity and Stagnation are positive and negative beginnings, and After Ends and Before Ends are positive and negative endings. Prosperity is a beginning that is beginning, Stagnation is a beginning that is not beginning, After Ends is an end that has ended, Before Ends is an end that has not ended. We have a beginning that is and isn’t and an end that has been or isn’t yet.
When we compare the original Fu Xi order with the later King Wen order, it becomes clear that the Fu Xi order is composed of inversions and alternates while the King Wen order is based in reversals. The Fu Xi order is composed of sets of inversions and alternates. The King Wen order is not composed of inversions or alternates but is essentially a list of hexagrams and their reversals from start to finish. This is why Creation and Reception are hexagram one and hexagram two for King Wen but they are the first and last hexagram of the Fu Xi. King Wen took the hexagrams and focused on matching each with its reversal without regard for the essential inversions and alternates of Fu Xi.
The Period of the Hundred Schools
The Period of the Hundred Philosophers or Hundred Schools, as it is called, came with the Warring States Period after the Spring and Autumn period (770 - 476 BCE), the period when the Zhou dynasty (1029 - 476 BCE) crumbled. One of the six Confucian classics that became the texts for the Chinese Confucian educational system and bureaucracy was The Spring and Summer Annals (or Spring and Autumn Record). This was the period when Confucius and Laozi lived. Mencius and Xunzi (the two great Confucians after Confucius) and Zhuangzi (the great Daoist after Laozi) lived in the Hundred Schools or Warring States Period, at the time when Confucianism and Daoism were forming along with and competing with other schools who followed other sages. The Hundred Schools period ended with the brief Chin (221 - 206 BCE) and then the Han dynasty (206 BCE - 220 CE) who took over the China that the Chin had unified. While there may not have been a hundred separate schools, there were many schools of thought in this time but many and their teachings did not survive. The four most popular and famous philosophies were Confucianism, Daoism, Moism, and Legalism. We will be discussing the first three in greater detail in the coming weeks.
The word ‘China’ comes from the Chin, who were the first to unify much of the land. The Chin were patrons of Legalism, and Emperor Chin pronounced Confucius a subversive danger to the state. Confucian books, including the Analects, the Mencius and the Xunzi were burned, and anyone found reciting them or hiding them was executed. The legend developed that Confucianism and the texts survived hidden in a well.
Legalism was started by Shang Yang (390 - 338 BCE) and then in Chin times championed by Han Fei (280 - 233 BCE). Central to Legalism was the idea that law (fa) should be strict and in the interests of the state and the ruler who ensures the protection and continuation of the state (a position much like Hobbes, the later British political philosopher, takes in his book Leviathan). The ruler uses rewards and punishments to regulate agriculture, trade, and warfare. Shang Yang argued that people are self-interested, and only respond if there are great threats as well as great rewards (the stick and the carrot). The Legalists rejected allegiance to family and the aristocracy in favor of utility, similar to Mill’s utilitarianism but with a strong emphasis on punishment as the effective tool of the ruler. They believed in the evolution of society beyond the ways of the past and toward a new disciplined future, much like the Soviet Union but without the communal property of the Moists, who the Legalists despised.
While some Han rulers employed Legalism to rule and patronized Legalist scholars, the Han did not like the authoritarianism of the Legalists (likely because the Han were trying to win over the people at a prosperous time with much new wealth and many other options of philosophy). They equally did not like the communalism of the Moists who believed that war should be abolished and, like in Plato’s ideal republic, all property and family shared in common (likely because the Han were trying to hold down a prosperous and diverse empire). We will study Moism in the weeks to come, as well as the School of Names, also called the Logicians or the Sophists (both ancient Greek terms for debaters). We will spend more time with Confucianism and Daoism, however, as they along with Buddhism became the primary three systems of thought in Chinese culture.
The Han chose, in supporting education, scholarship and the arts, to patronize Confucianism and Daoism. Confucianism included Confucius (550 – 480 BCE), and the two central and early Confucians, Mencius (Menzi, 370 – 290 BCE) and Xunzi (312-230 BCE). Daoism included Laozi (600 – 500? BCE), supposed author of the Dao De Jing, and Zhuangzi (370 – 300 BCE), though these two figures would not have known themselves to be ‘Daoists’ any more than Confucius would have known his followers would go on to found the central system of Chinese thought and politics.
Confucius and the Daoists proposed different solutions to the problem of self and society. The Daoists believed that going off into nature, forgetting embedded understandings and rejecting typical human ways was best for cultivating the individual, while Confucius believed that the city, morality and study were best for cultivating human virtues. Thus, while Confucius and the Daoists were both questioners of individual desires and judgment, Confucius believed we should turn to civilization and cultivation to realize our true nature and the Daoists believed we should turn away from civilization and back to simplicity and the natural to realize our true nature.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Logic: Islamic & Medieval European Logic
First, we look at the rise of Islamic civilization and its relationship to medieval European civilization with regard to logic, technology, science and scholarship. This is important to know, especially today. Second, we will look at central Islamic and medieval European philosopher/logicians (especially Avicenna and Aquinas).
America is particularly bad at Islamic Scholarship, though it is hard to beat out Europe. The United States has very few scholars who have contributed to the field. Because of this, there are few good comprehensive books about Islam published in the US, so books from the 50s and 60s are republished and taught (this is true of ancient Babylon and Persia as well). Centers for Islamic or ‘Near Eastern’ Studies focus on Islamic cultures in modern times, after the rise of Europe, so there is little opportunity for the American student to study the golden age of Islamic civilization and its massive influence on European civilization. In addition, philosophy departments rarely offer courses on Islamic philosophy or logic, and few departments of any subject study Islamic literature, philosophy, or science.
Islamic civilization was the world’s most powerful and advanced civilization before European civilization rose, so it is the natural place to look for the progression and development of philosophy, technology, and culture. It was the great multi-cultural, scientific, and philosophical culture before Europe and it gave Europe an astonishing amount of education and technology. In spite of this, most scholars remain entirely ignorant as we rarely look outside of ancient Greek or Roman history to find influences on European and modern society.
There is a greater appreciation of India and China in American scholarship, one that does not acknowledge equality with Europe but which acknowledges some depth. It is a good example of what has been called the “grandfather effect”: the grandfather (China and India) has tension with the father (Islam), the father has tension with the son (Europe) but the grandfather and grandson get along great because there is no direct relationship or conflict. Because Islam has always shared a border with Europe, Islam has been portrayed in a negative light as warlike and despotic. This is not because Muslims and Middle Eastern people are illogical, violent or authoritarian compared to Christians and Western people, but because Christian Europe viewed Islam as the enemy.
Here are some excellent ahadith, sayings of the prophet Mohammed, the second source of Islam after the Koran, which compliment this one-sided view.
Go in quest of knowledge, even unto China.
It is better to teach knowledge one hour in the night than to pray straight through it.
A moment’s reflection is better than 60 years devotion.
The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyrs.
Many times after quoting lines such as these, I have been asked by students, and even some of my professors, how it is that Muslims can say such things if they also behave in such violent and authoritarian ways. The unfortunate truth is that this paradox makes Muslims our close relatives more than either the intelligence of these verses or the brutality of warfare alone. Humanity is always capable, and in each civilization openly displays, both intelligence and ignorance, both discovery and brutality. We should use the best and the worst of Islamic civilization to better understand the best and the worst of our own.
Algebra is possibly the most useful device (if it can be called a device, though it is part device and part language) in human history. It is important for us to examine algebra because in the second half of the course logic like mathematics becomes an algebraic language of equations. In the ancient world, logic was intended to reveal the foundations of debate, but with Islamic and European developments it gradually became a specialized form of mathematics that was intended to reveal the foundations of not debate but mathematics itself.
It was assumed that the practice of mathematics was grounded in a simple form, a set of rules, and logic became the attempt to simplify and clarify these rules. Debate had proved too complicated and tricky to distill, but mathematics seemed simple, elegant, and symmetrical compared to human arguments and situations. Unfortunately, as Wittgenstein came to realize in his later thought, and as Godel asserted with his two Incompleteness theorems, mathematics, like debate, is too complicated to simplify into a single coherent and thoroughly deductive set of proven rules. Debate, logic and mathematics are useful tools we can use for discovery and innovation, but we can not use them to fully prove anything, neither about the complex and chaotic situations of our world, nor about our consistent use of debate, logic, or mathematics.
Let us take the simplest and most obvious algebraic equation, “1 = 1”. We learn this in kindergarten, if not before. We can write this down, and we all can assume that it is true, but can it be proved? At first, we assume (note, assume) that because it is so obvious and useful, that there is a way of proving it to be true, but any further proof complicates the matter. “1 = 1” is as simple as things get. To prove it would be to involve additional rules and adopt a system for the purpose of proving it. This makes sense, as if we need a system to prove “1 = 1”, what will prove the system is true? We must assume elementary rules and forms, such as “1 = 1” and “x = x”, to create any system. Similarly, we must use a hammer and screwdriver because they consistently work, not because we have proved without any doubt that they are the best tools for the job. A screwdriver need not be THE perfect screwdriver, let alone an unbreakable or immortal screwdriver, as long as it is a decently effective screwdriver.
Many might say here, “OK, I can’t prove the simplest elements, but it makes NO SENSE to question the use of “1 = 1” or “x = x” as they work in our systems with no contradictions or complications. This, unfortunately, is also often assumed, but there are problems and counter examples in our use of algebraic mathematics. Take the famous example of the Proof that One Equals Two, taught to me by my algebra teacher in eighth grade. It begins with the equally simple and intuitive equation, “a = b”.
a = b We multiply both sides by a.
a^2 = a*b We subtract b squared from both sides.
a^2-b^2 = a*b-b^2 We do difference of squares from the left and factor b from the right.
(a+b)(a-b) = b(a-b) We divide both sides by ‘a - b’.
(a+b) = b We substitute a for b, as they are equal.
a+a = a We substitute 2a for a + a.
2a = a Finally, we divide by a.
2 = 1
Typically, people think that there has been some wrong use of a rule and they focus on the fourth step because it is the most complex and try to find the error. The trick, however, is in the next fifth step. The rules of algebra work well, but sometimes they do not work and additional rules need to be invented, such as the rule, “Never divide by zero”. While it seems perfectly fine to divide both sides by ‘a - b’, as it is the next move to make to simplify both sides, in this particular case, because we started with ‘a = b’, you can not divide by ‘a - b’ because if you do the rules of algebra no longer work in this case. When you divide by ‘a - b’, you are in this case deducing that two infinities equals one infinity, which is true, but the equations work as if you have deduced that a + b is equal to b, which is where two seems to become equal to one. Algebra is a fine system, but when the rules do not work new rules need to be patched onto the system.
Before algebra, much of the world used the Egyptian doubling method (including ancient Greece and Rome) to do mathematics. Unfortunately, this method could not keep track of remainders and could not take account of series and other functions critical to the growth of math, trade and mechanical technology. Islamic mathematicians and logicians (some of whom are listed below) took the Indian base 10 system, along with the Indian numerals that became our Indian-Arabic numerals we use today, and began doing math in the form of equations we are all taught by law.
Algebra allowed trade caravans to keep greater accounts of goods, as well as sophisticated forms of insurance and banking. Islamic merchants traded by caravan all the way up through Russia and Scandinavia, as coins discovered attest. In dark age Europe, Islamic culture was passing through cities and towns with the latest things and systems of thought (books and printing come this way too into Europe from China). European Castles are modeled on Islamic Questles, the Persian word for fort. Medieval dress and decoration are not modeled on Roman but rather Islamic Persian and Turkish society. Consider hospitals with many beds, dosages measured with algebra, mechanical innovations such as gears, the chain and belt drive, pistons and clocks were all passed from Islamic to European hands before Europe became wealthy and successful. Europe owes very much to Islamic mechanics and mathematics.
While it is not central to the study of logic, it should be mentioned that law and protections for a diverse population were developed the most in Islam before Europe rose and took over. A woman had the right to sue her husband for divorce, and use algebra to get a percentage of his income and wealth. Jews and Christians who were not Catholic such as Nestorians fled to Islamic lands from European persecutions. Islam thrived as a multicultural and ‘cosmopolitan’ society. It would be centuries before Europe passed them. Consider that the year 1492 was not simply the year Columbus sailed the ocean blue, but the year that Spain and Portugal were reconquered from Muslims by Christian kings, as well as the first year of the Spanish Inquisition, the infamous persecution of Jews and other groups deemed heretical by the Catholic Church. Jews went from thriving and contributing much scholarship in Islamic Spain to outright persecution and secrecy underground in a year’s time. Maimonides (1135 - 1204 CE), the most famous Jewish medieval philosopher who lived much of his life in Cordoba, Spain, wrote that he read Aristotle but could not understand him until he read Al-Farabi.
Central to logic, it was with Islamic mathematics, logic and science that equations became the language for mathematical structures. The ancient Greeks such as Euclid and Aristotle talked out problems in long spoken form. Today, many scholars use algebraic logic to explain ancient Greek ideas, but it can be quite anachronistic and misleading to do this without acknowledging Islamic contributions. For instance, the syllogisms of Aristotle seem much clearer and cleaner when presented in variables and equations of first India and then Islamic algebra.
One of the sources of algebraic science was code-breaking or cryptography (also cryptanalysis). Between questles, codes had to be sent and algebra was used to make and break these codes. As nature was studied with mathematics, the philosophers and scientists discovered that algebra is an amazing tool for CODE BREAKING NATURE. What we call “science” is still very much this today. Consider the constant of gravity as a hidden code or message to be discovered and phrased in algebraic language. Remember that in ancient cosmology, as well as medieval Islamic and European thought, the order of things was thought to be spoken downwards from the heavens. As Islamic scientists began using algebra to crack the codes of nature, they believed that they were finding the numbers that were the thoughts and speech of God. Islamic art, which makes much use of geometric patterns, reflects this too.
Algebraic equations allowed for Wittgenstein’s later truth table logic and other forms that we study as Logic today. However, equations present us with a new problem that was recognized by the central philosophers of the golden age of Islamic civilization: Is the world truly structured by equations, or are they a model in the human mind? Dogmatists and positivists say that the world is truly mathematical and we can acquire true knowledge of it, while skeptics and relativists say that mathematics is human modeling and it remains human perspective and opinion. Consider again the One Equals Two example, and how equations seem to function on their own until we find cases in which they break down.
ISLAMIC LOGIC AND THE GREAT PHILOSOPHERS:
Islam has a long history of debate, called ‘Qiyas’ (translated most often as reasoning or argument). There were three types of reasoning debated in the Islamic world: Analogy, Induction and Deduction. Notice that the Nyaya of India use all three in their proofs, and that Islamic thought and mathematics gathered much from India. A big issue for Islamic philosophy was which of these three was primary, and which secondary. Ibn Hazm said inductive is the only one, rather skeptical of deduction and analogy as misleading, arguing the other two are illusions of the mind, while Al Ghazali (Aquinas’ favorite author and source) says Analogy is first, then Deductive second. We will see more of analogy as central to analysis today with Avicenna, and near the end of the course in the later thinking of Wittgenstein.
Al Kindi (801-873) was a pioneer of Islamic sciences, cryptography and the experimental method. He was also one of the scholars that introduced Indian numerals and base ten system to Islam, where it was developed into Algebra. He wrote numerous medical treatises (including the memorable Treatise on Diseases caused by Phlegm). Unlike Galileo and Newton, who came much later, but like Einstein, he argued that time and space are relative, as all things save Being or God are relative, subjective, and contingent. Avicenna took up this position powerfully later. Modern scholarship often says that he merged Neo-platonism and Aristotle, but he also incorporated Zoroastrianism and Indian Logic. Even though Christians in Europe followed Islamic Alchemy and Astrology for centuries, he was an early voice against both, saying they were both pseudo-sciences and the best method of knowledge was strictly observation and experimentation.
Al Farabi (872-950), who was either Turkish or Persian, took the Aristotelian tradition of Alexandria, Egypt and expanded beyond. Maimonides was much indebted to his work, and read his commentaries to understand Aristotle. Farabi paid much attention to imagination, as this is central to science, philosophy and religious prophecy. He argued that if you learn and think critically, you can have greater and greater visions of the cosmos and its workings.
Avicenna or Ibn Sina (980-1037) was the foremost doctor of his time. As a boy he learned Indian Arithmetic from an Indian grocer in his neighborhood. His Cannon of Medicine was used as a text book for Europe in translation until the 1700s. His medicine was based on experimentation and clinical trials, fusing Persian, Greek, Indian and other texts together. He is credited with formulating the nature of infectious disease, randomized control trials, psychiatry (hallucinations, insomnia, mania, dementia, epilepsy), the syndrome, as well as hypothesizing that microscopic organisms are the cause of disease. He was the first to correctly show the workings of the eye. He was one of the key authors for understanding Aristotle and scientific investigation, even as he argued against Aristotle Europeans often took up his ideas as genuine fruit of Aristotle’s tradition of thought, thus ‘Aristotelian’. He was also a pioneer of equations and propositional algebra, which would be developed later by Europeans into calculus.
The focus of the selection of Avicenna I gave you was whether or not universals exist. Consider that Aristotle believed that universals are motions or forms of the eternal cosmos coming down from the stars, so the universal group ‘cows’ or ‘numbers’ is up in the sky and is embodied in substances on the earth. Islamic philosophers increasingly turned to the human mind and imagination as the source of universals, though this was highly debated. Today, we understand universals to be concepts and mental rather than physical, but it is still highly debatable. Do our theories exist in the real world, or in our heads? Does the group ‘cows’ exist primarily in the physical set of animals, or in the line we draw around several animals in our heads? This was the big issue, and it still is. Avicenna asks about unicorns and the phoenix, which he knows to be fictional animals made by the imagination out of the parts of real animals. He asks many probing questions about the reality of imagination, concepts and universals. Does a unicorn exist? Does it exist in your head as one thing, the same way that an imaginary horse does? Does the horse-ness of the unicorn exist? Is it more or less real than the horse-ness of a real horse? Avicenna says that all are things (single beings) equally, but only the horse is real and physical, while the unicorn and the universal ‘horse-ness’ are mental.
Al Ghazali (1058-1111) was Persian and one of the most celebrated scholars of Sufism, Islamic mysticism. Like Heraclitus and Pyrrho, he was skeptical of human expertise and the ability to acquire absolute knowledge. His work ‘The Incoherence of the Philosophers’ criticized Kindi, Farabi and Avicenna as thinking too much of arriving at certainty. He does say that Avicenna is beyond all doubt the most distinguished philosopher. He argued that atoms are the only true things, and all else in the world is accidental. In his ‘Alchemy of Happiness’, wrote of the negative theology of embracing the One. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great ethics teacher of Christianity, read Ghazali as his favorite and central author. Unfortunately, Aquinas is in spell check today, while Ghazali is not.
Averroes, Ibn Rushd (1126-1198) like Maimonides lived in Cordoba, Spain. he wrote commentaries on all of Aristotle’s works, and like Avicenna (notice that their two names are rendered in Latin) was central for Europe’s understanding of Aristotle. Against Ghazali, he wrote The Incoherence of the Incoherence, arguing against skepticism for the pursuit of universal knowledge. He turned back to Aristotle from Avicenna, and Europe largely followed him, arguing that universals are physical and not mental. He is credited more than anyone with turning Europe on to Aristotle. Our understanding and science is today more like Avicenna and conceives of the universal as a mental and psychological phenomena, but for the longest time it was Aristotelian thanks to Averroes. It was only with Sir Francis Bacon in the 1600s declaring the syllogism as uselessly rigid that Europe turned from Averroism.
THE GREAT MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHERS
Aquinas (1225-1274) lived just after Averroes, about 200 years after Avicenna. Augustine was the bringer of Plato back into Christian Europe, and Aquinas was the bringer of Aristotle into medieval Europe thanks to his reading of Islamic authors. He studied at the University of Naples until he was 16. Because he was brilliant, the Dominican order offered to support his scholarship. He became a Dominican, then was kidnapped by his parents who wanted him to come back home. According to the legend his brother’s brought him a prostitute, but he drove her away. Then the Pope intervened, and he went back to being a Dominican.
Aquinas was primarily influenced by Ghazali and Averroes, both of whom were critics of Avicenna. Three years after his death, Aquinas was excommunicated for heresy due to following Averroes’ interpretation of Aristotle’s works, but later the Church reversed its position. This is after Aquinas defended the Church again and again as the only source of true authority and knowledge. 50 years after his death, he was pronounced a Saint. Later, at the First Vatican Council (1868) he was pronounced the central thinker of the Catholic Church.
As an Averroist Aristotelian, Aquinas believed that universals are real beings that are even more real than physical objects. His argument for the existence of God shows this. He argues that all things are dependent on, possible because of, and less than a highest thing, which must be God, Being itself. Thus, like later European thought, Being is essence of essences (we will see this in Hegel later). Descartes follows Aquinas’ argument for a highest, most necessary being.
William of Ockham (1288-1348), unlike Aquinas, followed Avicenna and argued that only objects and individuals are real, all else is mental construction and conception. He is sometimes called the first modern thinker because of this, but Avicenna put this idea forward centuries earlier. His nominalism says that concepts are just our names for things, our labels. Just like Avicenna, he argued that only Being (God) is not contingent, not dependent on other things. Ockham is also known for ‘Ockham’s razor’: the simplest explanation is often correct. This fits with his Avicenna-like position: if how a thing works is a conception in our heads, then the simplest conception will often be the most useful.
America is particularly bad at Islamic Scholarship, though it is hard to beat out Europe. The United States has very few scholars who have contributed to the field. Because of this, there are few good comprehensive books about Islam published in the US, so books from the 50s and 60s are republished and taught (this is true of ancient Babylon and Persia as well). Centers for Islamic or ‘Near Eastern’ Studies focus on Islamic cultures in modern times, after the rise of Europe, so there is little opportunity for the American student to study the golden age of Islamic civilization and its massive influence on European civilization. In addition, philosophy departments rarely offer courses on Islamic philosophy or logic, and few departments of any subject study Islamic literature, philosophy, or science.
Islamic civilization was the world’s most powerful and advanced civilization before European civilization rose, so it is the natural place to look for the progression and development of philosophy, technology, and culture. It was the great multi-cultural, scientific, and philosophical culture before Europe and it gave Europe an astonishing amount of education and technology. In spite of this, most scholars remain entirely ignorant as we rarely look outside of ancient Greek or Roman history to find influences on European and modern society.
There is a greater appreciation of India and China in American scholarship, one that does not acknowledge equality with Europe but which acknowledges some depth. It is a good example of what has been called the “grandfather effect”: the grandfather (China and India) has tension with the father (Islam), the father has tension with the son (Europe) but the grandfather and grandson get along great because there is no direct relationship or conflict. Because Islam has always shared a border with Europe, Islam has been portrayed in a negative light as warlike and despotic. This is not because Muslims and Middle Eastern people are illogical, violent or authoritarian compared to Christians and Western people, but because Christian Europe viewed Islam as the enemy.
Here are some excellent ahadith, sayings of the prophet Mohammed, the second source of Islam after the Koran, which compliment this one-sided view.
Go in quest of knowledge, even unto China.
It is better to teach knowledge one hour in the night than to pray straight through it.
A moment’s reflection is better than 60 years devotion.
The ink of the scholar is holier than the blood of the martyrs.
Many times after quoting lines such as these, I have been asked by students, and even some of my professors, how it is that Muslims can say such things if they also behave in such violent and authoritarian ways. The unfortunate truth is that this paradox makes Muslims our close relatives more than either the intelligence of these verses or the brutality of warfare alone. Humanity is always capable, and in each civilization openly displays, both intelligence and ignorance, both discovery and brutality. We should use the best and the worst of Islamic civilization to better understand the best and the worst of our own.
Algebra is possibly the most useful device (if it can be called a device, though it is part device and part language) in human history. It is important for us to examine algebra because in the second half of the course logic like mathematics becomes an algebraic language of equations. In the ancient world, logic was intended to reveal the foundations of debate, but with Islamic and European developments it gradually became a specialized form of mathematics that was intended to reveal the foundations of not debate but mathematics itself.
It was assumed that the practice of mathematics was grounded in a simple form, a set of rules, and logic became the attempt to simplify and clarify these rules. Debate had proved too complicated and tricky to distill, but mathematics seemed simple, elegant, and symmetrical compared to human arguments and situations. Unfortunately, as Wittgenstein came to realize in his later thought, and as Godel asserted with his two Incompleteness theorems, mathematics, like debate, is too complicated to simplify into a single coherent and thoroughly deductive set of proven rules. Debate, logic and mathematics are useful tools we can use for discovery and innovation, but we can not use them to fully prove anything, neither about the complex and chaotic situations of our world, nor about our consistent use of debate, logic, or mathematics.
Let us take the simplest and most obvious algebraic equation, “1 = 1”. We learn this in kindergarten, if not before. We can write this down, and we all can assume that it is true, but can it be proved? At first, we assume (note, assume) that because it is so obvious and useful, that there is a way of proving it to be true, but any further proof complicates the matter. “1 = 1” is as simple as things get. To prove it would be to involve additional rules and adopt a system for the purpose of proving it. This makes sense, as if we need a system to prove “1 = 1”, what will prove the system is true? We must assume elementary rules and forms, such as “1 = 1” and “x = x”, to create any system. Similarly, we must use a hammer and screwdriver because they consistently work, not because we have proved without any doubt that they are the best tools for the job. A screwdriver need not be THE perfect screwdriver, let alone an unbreakable or immortal screwdriver, as long as it is a decently effective screwdriver.
Many might say here, “OK, I can’t prove the simplest elements, but it makes NO SENSE to question the use of “1 = 1” or “x = x” as they work in our systems with no contradictions or complications. This, unfortunately, is also often assumed, but there are problems and counter examples in our use of algebraic mathematics. Take the famous example of the Proof that One Equals Two, taught to me by my algebra teacher in eighth grade. It begins with the equally simple and intuitive equation, “a = b”.
a = b We multiply both sides by a.
a^2 = a*b We subtract b squared from both sides.
a^2-b^2 = a*b-b^2 We do difference of squares from the left and factor b from the right.
(a+b)(a-b) = b(a-b) We divide both sides by ‘a - b’.
(a+b) = b We substitute a for b, as they are equal.
a+a = a We substitute 2a for a + a.
2a = a Finally, we divide by a.
2 = 1
Typically, people think that there has been some wrong use of a rule and they focus on the fourth step because it is the most complex and try to find the error. The trick, however, is in the next fifth step. The rules of algebra work well, but sometimes they do not work and additional rules need to be invented, such as the rule, “Never divide by zero”. While it seems perfectly fine to divide both sides by ‘a - b’, as it is the next move to make to simplify both sides, in this particular case, because we started with ‘a = b’, you can not divide by ‘a - b’ because if you do the rules of algebra no longer work in this case. When you divide by ‘a - b’, you are in this case deducing that two infinities equals one infinity, which is true, but the equations work as if you have deduced that a + b is equal to b, which is where two seems to become equal to one. Algebra is a fine system, but when the rules do not work new rules need to be patched onto the system.
Before algebra, much of the world used the Egyptian doubling method (including ancient Greece and Rome) to do mathematics. Unfortunately, this method could not keep track of remainders and could not take account of series and other functions critical to the growth of math, trade and mechanical technology. Islamic mathematicians and logicians (some of whom are listed below) took the Indian base 10 system, along with the Indian numerals that became our Indian-Arabic numerals we use today, and began doing math in the form of equations we are all taught by law.
Algebra allowed trade caravans to keep greater accounts of goods, as well as sophisticated forms of insurance and banking. Islamic merchants traded by caravan all the way up through Russia and Scandinavia, as coins discovered attest. In dark age Europe, Islamic culture was passing through cities and towns with the latest things and systems of thought (books and printing come this way too into Europe from China). European Castles are modeled on Islamic Questles, the Persian word for fort. Medieval dress and decoration are not modeled on Roman but rather Islamic Persian and Turkish society. Consider hospitals with many beds, dosages measured with algebra, mechanical innovations such as gears, the chain and belt drive, pistons and clocks were all passed from Islamic to European hands before Europe became wealthy and successful. Europe owes very much to Islamic mechanics and mathematics.
While it is not central to the study of logic, it should be mentioned that law and protections for a diverse population were developed the most in Islam before Europe rose and took over. A woman had the right to sue her husband for divorce, and use algebra to get a percentage of his income and wealth. Jews and Christians who were not Catholic such as Nestorians fled to Islamic lands from European persecutions. Islam thrived as a multicultural and ‘cosmopolitan’ society. It would be centuries before Europe passed them. Consider that the year 1492 was not simply the year Columbus sailed the ocean blue, but the year that Spain and Portugal were reconquered from Muslims by Christian kings, as well as the first year of the Spanish Inquisition, the infamous persecution of Jews and other groups deemed heretical by the Catholic Church. Jews went from thriving and contributing much scholarship in Islamic Spain to outright persecution and secrecy underground in a year’s time. Maimonides (1135 - 1204 CE), the most famous Jewish medieval philosopher who lived much of his life in Cordoba, Spain, wrote that he read Aristotle but could not understand him until he read Al-Farabi.
Central to logic, it was with Islamic mathematics, logic and science that equations became the language for mathematical structures. The ancient Greeks such as Euclid and Aristotle talked out problems in long spoken form. Today, many scholars use algebraic logic to explain ancient Greek ideas, but it can be quite anachronistic and misleading to do this without acknowledging Islamic contributions. For instance, the syllogisms of Aristotle seem much clearer and cleaner when presented in variables and equations of first India and then Islamic algebra.
One of the sources of algebraic science was code-breaking or cryptography (also cryptanalysis). Between questles, codes had to be sent and algebra was used to make and break these codes. As nature was studied with mathematics, the philosophers and scientists discovered that algebra is an amazing tool for CODE BREAKING NATURE. What we call “science” is still very much this today. Consider the constant of gravity as a hidden code or message to be discovered and phrased in algebraic language. Remember that in ancient cosmology, as well as medieval Islamic and European thought, the order of things was thought to be spoken downwards from the heavens. As Islamic scientists began using algebra to crack the codes of nature, they believed that they were finding the numbers that were the thoughts and speech of God. Islamic art, which makes much use of geometric patterns, reflects this too.
Algebraic equations allowed for Wittgenstein’s later truth table logic and other forms that we study as Logic today. However, equations present us with a new problem that was recognized by the central philosophers of the golden age of Islamic civilization: Is the world truly structured by equations, or are they a model in the human mind? Dogmatists and positivists say that the world is truly mathematical and we can acquire true knowledge of it, while skeptics and relativists say that mathematics is human modeling and it remains human perspective and opinion. Consider again the One Equals Two example, and how equations seem to function on their own until we find cases in which they break down.
ISLAMIC LOGIC AND THE GREAT PHILOSOPHERS:
Islam has a long history of debate, called ‘Qiyas’ (translated most often as reasoning or argument). There were three types of reasoning debated in the Islamic world: Analogy, Induction and Deduction. Notice that the Nyaya of India use all three in their proofs, and that Islamic thought and mathematics gathered much from India. A big issue for Islamic philosophy was which of these three was primary, and which secondary. Ibn Hazm said inductive is the only one, rather skeptical of deduction and analogy as misleading, arguing the other two are illusions of the mind, while Al Ghazali (Aquinas’ favorite author and source) says Analogy is first, then Deductive second. We will see more of analogy as central to analysis today with Avicenna, and near the end of the course in the later thinking of Wittgenstein.
Al Kindi (801-873) was a pioneer of Islamic sciences, cryptography and the experimental method. He was also one of the scholars that introduced Indian numerals and base ten system to Islam, where it was developed into Algebra. He wrote numerous medical treatises (including the memorable Treatise on Diseases caused by Phlegm). Unlike Galileo and Newton, who came much later, but like Einstein, he argued that time and space are relative, as all things save Being or God are relative, subjective, and contingent. Avicenna took up this position powerfully later. Modern scholarship often says that he merged Neo-platonism and Aristotle, but he also incorporated Zoroastrianism and Indian Logic. Even though Christians in Europe followed Islamic Alchemy and Astrology for centuries, he was an early voice against both, saying they were both pseudo-sciences and the best method of knowledge was strictly observation and experimentation.
Al Farabi (872-950), who was either Turkish or Persian, took the Aristotelian tradition of Alexandria, Egypt and expanded beyond. Maimonides was much indebted to his work, and read his commentaries to understand Aristotle. Farabi paid much attention to imagination, as this is central to science, philosophy and religious prophecy. He argued that if you learn and think critically, you can have greater and greater visions of the cosmos and its workings.
Avicenna or Ibn Sina (980-1037) was the foremost doctor of his time. As a boy he learned Indian Arithmetic from an Indian grocer in his neighborhood. His Cannon of Medicine was used as a text book for Europe in translation until the 1700s. His medicine was based on experimentation and clinical trials, fusing Persian, Greek, Indian and other texts together. He is credited with formulating the nature of infectious disease, randomized control trials, psychiatry (hallucinations, insomnia, mania, dementia, epilepsy), the syndrome, as well as hypothesizing that microscopic organisms are the cause of disease. He was the first to correctly show the workings of the eye. He was one of the key authors for understanding Aristotle and scientific investigation, even as he argued against Aristotle Europeans often took up his ideas as genuine fruit of Aristotle’s tradition of thought, thus ‘Aristotelian’. He was also a pioneer of equations and propositional algebra, which would be developed later by Europeans into calculus.
The focus of the selection of Avicenna I gave you was whether or not universals exist. Consider that Aristotle believed that universals are motions or forms of the eternal cosmos coming down from the stars, so the universal group ‘cows’ or ‘numbers’ is up in the sky and is embodied in substances on the earth. Islamic philosophers increasingly turned to the human mind and imagination as the source of universals, though this was highly debated. Today, we understand universals to be concepts and mental rather than physical, but it is still highly debatable. Do our theories exist in the real world, or in our heads? Does the group ‘cows’ exist primarily in the physical set of animals, or in the line we draw around several animals in our heads? This was the big issue, and it still is. Avicenna asks about unicorns and the phoenix, which he knows to be fictional animals made by the imagination out of the parts of real animals. He asks many probing questions about the reality of imagination, concepts and universals. Does a unicorn exist? Does it exist in your head as one thing, the same way that an imaginary horse does? Does the horse-ness of the unicorn exist? Is it more or less real than the horse-ness of a real horse? Avicenna says that all are things (single beings) equally, but only the horse is real and physical, while the unicorn and the universal ‘horse-ness’ are mental.
Al Ghazali (1058-1111) was Persian and one of the most celebrated scholars of Sufism, Islamic mysticism. Like Heraclitus and Pyrrho, he was skeptical of human expertise and the ability to acquire absolute knowledge. His work ‘The Incoherence of the Philosophers’ criticized Kindi, Farabi and Avicenna as thinking too much of arriving at certainty. He does say that Avicenna is beyond all doubt the most distinguished philosopher. He argued that atoms are the only true things, and all else in the world is accidental. In his ‘Alchemy of Happiness’, wrote of the negative theology of embracing the One. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great ethics teacher of Christianity, read Ghazali as his favorite and central author. Unfortunately, Aquinas is in spell check today, while Ghazali is not.
Averroes, Ibn Rushd (1126-1198) like Maimonides lived in Cordoba, Spain. he wrote commentaries on all of Aristotle’s works, and like Avicenna (notice that their two names are rendered in Latin) was central for Europe’s understanding of Aristotle. Against Ghazali, he wrote The Incoherence of the Incoherence, arguing against skepticism for the pursuit of universal knowledge. He turned back to Aristotle from Avicenna, and Europe largely followed him, arguing that universals are physical and not mental. He is credited more than anyone with turning Europe on to Aristotle. Our understanding and science is today more like Avicenna and conceives of the universal as a mental and psychological phenomena, but for the longest time it was Aristotelian thanks to Averroes. It was only with Sir Francis Bacon in the 1600s declaring the syllogism as uselessly rigid that Europe turned from Averroism.
THE GREAT MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHERS
Aquinas (1225-1274) lived just after Averroes, about 200 years after Avicenna. Augustine was the bringer of Plato back into Christian Europe, and Aquinas was the bringer of Aristotle into medieval Europe thanks to his reading of Islamic authors. He studied at the University of Naples until he was 16. Because he was brilliant, the Dominican order offered to support his scholarship. He became a Dominican, then was kidnapped by his parents who wanted him to come back home. According to the legend his brother’s brought him a prostitute, but he drove her away. Then the Pope intervened, and he went back to being a Dominican.
Aquinas was primarily influenced by Ghazali and Averroes, both of whom were critics of Avicenna. Three years after his death, Aquinas was excommunicated for heresy due to following Averroes’ interpretation of Aristotle’s works, but later the Church reversed its position. This is after Aquinas defended the Church again and again as the only source of true authority and knowledge. 50 years after his death, he was pronounced a Saint. Later, at the First Vatican Council (1868) he was pronounced the central thinker of the Catholic Church.
As an Averroist Aristotelian, Aquinas believed that universals are real beings that are even more real than physical objects. His argument for the existence of God shows this. He argues that all things are dependent on, possible because of, and less than a highest thing, which must be God, Being itself. Thus, like later European thought, Being is essence of essences (we will see this in Hegel later). Descartes follows Aquinas’ argument for a highest, most necessary being.
William of Ockham (1288-1348), unlike Aquinas, followed Avicenna and argued that only objects and individuals are real, all else is mental construction and conception. He is sometimes called the first modern thinker because of this, but Avicenna put this idea forward centuries earlier. His nominalism says that concepts are just our names for things, our labels. Just like Avicenna, he argued that only Being (God) is not contingent, not dependent on other things. Ockham is also known for ‘Ockham’s razor’: the simplest explanation is often correct. This fits with his Avicenna-like position: if how a thing works is a conception in our heads, then the simplest conception will often be the most useful.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
IntroPhilosophy: Midterm Review
The Exam will consist of 25 Multiple Choice questions and 5 short answer questions. The Multiple Choice are pulled from the lectures and readings on the topics below.
Shamanism: “One who knows”, common world culture of early tribal society, forms that appear in world religions, ecstatic experience as ‘standing outside’, initiation rites and ‘rebirth’, investigating problems and seeking visions of solutions, the All-Tree, the problem of the One and the Many, the problem of destiny after death, stories as transmission of knowledge
City State Priests & Egypt: Societies gather into larger societies and settle, authorities become traditional, specialization of experts and scholars, eternal stars of fire as order above, water as chaos below, air as ordering breath or communication, Egyptian wisdom texts show criticism of society and human behaviors, heart centered individual, warring state periods good for thought, polytheism to monotheism to abstract solar monotheism
Hinduism, Jainism & Buddhism: Three paths of worship (Bhakti devotion, Raja asceticism, Jnana scholarship), trinity of Brahma, Vishnu (salvation) and Shiva (destruction), multitude of gods who are yet are not these three, two types of afterlife (reincarnation and release of Nirvana), Vedas as multiple origin stories, Upanishads as philosophical ‘that is you’ inner meaning, Jain influence on Buddhism and Hinduism, Mahavira and the Tirthankaras, two principles of skepticism (non-one-endedness and postulation), practice of asceticism and austerities (fasting, postures, meditation), Jain all karma as negative and total release as joining the order of the cosmos, the Jain metaphor of the leaky boat (plugging and bailing), Buddhism concepts of Impermanence, Doctrine of the Mean, Codependent Arising
Heraclitus: All is One/Fire/Cosmic Mind, all particular things are impermanent (even gods/planets), experts do not know much more than the common people, we are all apes to the gods, can’t step in the same river twice, perspective changing how things are
Plato: Parmenides over Heraclitus, Forms/Ideas as eternal models of things, the three parts of the soul (appetite, spirit and reason) corresponding to the three classes of the city (workers, police and philosophers), allegory of the cave
Confucianism: Mandate of Heaven as abstract monotheism, social order and rites as strength of society, study and civil service over meditation and nature of Daoism, criticism of the individual and equating others with oneself, right mind/intention over right body/action, love as center of human and system, recognition of the lowest as oneself and self criticism, Neo-Confucianism as blend with Daoism and Buddhism
Daoism: Return to nature and stillness, seeing both sides, Yin-Yang symbol, influence on Chinese Buddhism and Zen, the great One/Way as nameless above all named 10,000 things, water-like in fluidity and getting everywhere, the wheel as both solid and empty together, Zhuangzi and perspective, Cook Ting, humans ugly to minnows and deer, Peng bird vs. dove and cicada
For the short answers, pick five topics from the list below. For each of your choices, write a third to a half page in each of the spaces provided below. You should demonstrate that you 1) understand the meaning of the concept, 2) that you can connect it to other material from the class, and 3) that you can apply it to examples from your own experience or outside material (print or video, fictional or nonfictional). If you demonstrate each of these three things and complete the required page length, you will get full points for your answer.
Topics:
The Jain metaphor of the Leaky Boat
Jain negative view of karma vs. the Buddha’s middle way
Buddhist Codependent Arising
Heraclitus and Zhuangzi on animals and perspective
Heraclitus and the river ‘never twice’
Plato’s assent out of the cave
Plato’s three parts of the soul and city
Confucius’ right intention over right act
Laozi’s wheel as both solid and empty
Confucian study in the city vs. Daoist meditation in nature
Absolute truth vs. relative truth
Shamanism: “One who knows”, common world culture of early tribal society, forms that appear in world religions, ecstatic experience as ‘standing outside’, initiation rites and ‘rebirth’, investigating problems and seeking visions of solutions, the All-Tree, the problem of the One and the Many, the problem of destiny after death, stories as transmission of knowledge
City State Priests & Egypt: Societies gather into larger societies and settle, authorities become traditional, specialization of experts and scholars, eternal stars of fire as order above, water as chaos below, air as ordering breath or communication, Egyptian wisdom texts show criticism of society and human behaviors, heart centered individual, warring state periods good for thought, polytheism to monotheism to abstract solar monotheism
Hinduism, Jainism & Buddhism: Three paths of worship (Bhakti devotion, Raja asceticism, Jnana scholarship), trinity of Brahma, Vishnu (salvation) and Shiva (destruction), multitude of gods who are yet are not these three, two types of afterlife (reincarnation and release of Nirvana), Vedas as multiple origin stories, Upanishads as philosophical ‘that is you’ inner meaning, Jain influence on Buddhism and Hinduism, Mahavira and the Tirthankaras, two principles of skepticism (non-one-endedness and postulation), practice of asceticism and austerities (fasting, postures, meditation), Jain all karma as negative and total release as joining the order of the cosmos, the Jain metaphor of the leaky boat (plugging and bailing), Buddhism concepts of Impermanence, Doctrine of the Mean, Codependent Arising
Heraclitus: All is One/Fire/Cosmic Mind, all particular things are impermanent (even gods/planets), experts do not know much more than the common people, we are all apes to the gods, can’t step in the same river twice, perspective changing how things are
Plato: Parmenides over Heraclitus, Forms/Ideas as eternal models of things, the three parts of the soul (appetite, spirit and reason) corresponding to the three classes of the city (workers, police and philosophers), allegory of the cave
Confucianism: Mandate of Heaven as abstract monotheism, social order and rites as strength of society, study and civil service over meditation and nature of Daoism, criticism of the individual and equating others with oneself, right mind/intention over right body/action, love as center of human and system, recognition of the lowest as oneself and self criticism, Neo-Confucianism as blend with Daoism and Buddhism
Daoism: Return to nature and stillness, seeing both sides, Yin-Yang symbol, influence on Chinese Buddhism and Zen, the great One/Way as nameless above all named 10,000 things, water-like in fluidity and getting everywhere, the wheel as both solid and empty together, Zhuangzi and perspective, Cook Ting, humans ugly to minnows and deer, Peng bird vs. dove and cicada
For the short answers, pick five topics from the list below. For each of your choices, write a third to a half page in each of the spaces provided below. You should demonstrate that you 1) understand the meaning of the concept, 2) that you can connect it to other material from the class, and 3) that you can apply it to examples from your own experience or outside material (print or video, fictional or nonfictional). If you demonstrate each of these three things and complete the required page length, you will get full points for your answer.
Topics:
The Jain metaphor of the Leaky Boat
Jain negative view of karma vs. the Buddha’s middle way
Buddhist Codependent Arising
Heraclitus and Zhuangzi on animals and perspective
Heraclitus and the river ‘never twice’
Plato’s assent out of the cave
Plato’s three parts of the soul and city
Confucius’ right intention over right act
Laozi’s wheel as both solid and empty
Confucian study in the city vs. Daoist meditation in nature
Absolute truth vs. relative truth
Monday, October 10, 2011
Intro Philosophy: Second Paper Topics
The second response essay (at least 2 pages typed and double spaced) is due on the day of the midterm exam (10/19). You should pick something that interests you we have studied in ancient Greece (Heraclitus & Plato) or ancient China (Confucianism & Daoism). Some possible topics you may use include:
Is truth relative (Heraclitus & Daoism) or absolute (Plato)? Is there true objective knowledge, or is everything relative human opinion and perspective?
Is Plato's Republic a good city? Is it possible?
Do you favor Confucians who believe in study and civilization, or Daoists who believe in meditation/forgetting and returning to nature?
Laozi teaches us about how to rule correctly, while Zhuangzi has more faith in individual development than society becoming decent. Which do you favor?
Is truth relative (Heraclitus & Daoism) or absolute (Plato)? Is there true objective knowledge, or is everything relative human opinion and perspective?
Is Plato's Republic a good city? Is it possible?
Do you favor Confucians who believe in study and civilization, or Daoists who believe in meditation/forgetting and returning to nature?
Laozi teaches us about how to rule correctly, while Zhuangzi has more faith in individual development than society becoming decent. Which do you favor?
Asian Philosophy: Second Paper Topics
The second response essay (at least two pages, typed and double spaced) is due this Friday (10/14), also the day of the midterm. You are welcome to invent your own topic, but some possible topics you can reflect on include:
The close and closed community (Theravada) vs. the open and common community (Mahayana)
Sudden vs. gradual enlightenment, knowledge and ability
Emptiness/Openness as compassionate or nihilistic
Absolute vs. relative truth as superior (when? where?)
The close and closed community (Theravada) vs. the open and common community (Mahayana)
Sudden vs. gradual enlightenment, knowledge and ability
Emptiness/Openness as compassionate or nihilistic
Absolute vs. relative truth as superior (when? where?)
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Intro Philosophy: Daoism, Laozi & Zhuanzi
Intro Philosophy: Daoism, Lao Zi & Zhuang Zi
This week, we will be studying the two most central texts of Chinese Daoism: the Dao De Jing of Laozi, and the book of the ‘second patriarch’ of Daoism, Zhuangzi. Daoism has always been dear to my heart, as I have an old printing of the Dao (on the book, the ‘Tao Te Ching’, now typically and more accurately written ‘Dao De Jing’) which I loved when I was a kid with black and white photos of beaches and sea gulls in fog accompanying the text. It was only later in my studies that I was able to have a real love of the text, which at first seemed simply mysterious poetry.
Daoism is often opposed to Confucianism as a skeptical and mystical school of thought vs. Confucianism which is a more traditionalist and dogmatic school. Indeed, Daoism is one of the most powerful skeptical schools of thought in history, and during the later years of the Han dynasty peasants and scholars turned from Confucianism to Daoism in support of innovation and revolution (such as the famous Yellow turban rebellions of 184 and 187 CE). Daoist sages are often ordinary men and women. However it is also clear that Confucius was critical of tradition, politics, knowledge and judgement, and Daoism became an orthodox religious system that was used by the Han and later dynasties to control and pacify the people.
While Confucianism advocates city life, study, and the structure of the family and state, Daoism advocates returning to nature and the natural (ziran), simplicity, meditation, and questioning all human understanding. Confucianism argues that we should cultivate and civilize ourselves through education and tradition, Daoism argues that we should return to our natural state and let nature run its course, thus reaching a state of completion. Rather than study harder to understand more distinctions between things, Daoism argues we should work hard to forget the understandings and distinctions we have stored up in ourselves already. Daoists would agree with Confucius that “a noble person is not a pot”, but rather than add and stir they would have us empty it out.
Many are familiar with the Daoist image of the Yin and Yang intertwining female earth energy of darkness and male sky energy of light, however only few know that the symbol originally comes from the Yin Yang school, one of the hundred schools of thought from the warring states and hundred schools period of Chinese philosophy. The Daoists got the symbol from this school, and followed similar ideas about things being constituted by opposing forces. The symbol has also been identified as a solar calendar that charts daylight hours over the course of a year, important for farmers who were supporters and sources of both the Yin Yang and Daoist schools of thought. When the Han unified China, they patronized Confucianism and Daoism but not the Yin Yang school and others that disappeared without their support.
The most important concept for Daoism (and, interestingly, the mystics of most religions) is the Great One, the All. Like Confucius and Confucianism, Daoism followed the Zhou Dynasty before the Han in speaking about the Way (Dao) of heaven and the mandate of heaven but less about the ‘Lord of Heaven’, showing us the same abstraction and evolution from polytheism to monotheism to philosophical monism we found in ancient Egypt, India and Greece. Like in ancient Egypt and India, but unlike ancient Greece after the spread of Christianity, ancient China kept traditional polytheism as their philosophers moved toward monism. In Daoism, you can find many gods and the Dao, the Way, being praised and venerated beyond all particular beings.
Daoism argues that one should remove one-sided judgments and desires from the mind such that harmony with the whole, with the One, is achieved. This is similar in many ways to the Indian Jain idea of anekantavada, ‘non-one-sidedness’. My favorite quote from the Zhuang Zi, which can serve as a great slogan for skepticism and relativism is, “A sage too has a this and a that, but his that has a this, and his this has a that”. We also find in the Zhuangzi accusations that other schools are one-sided in their theories and thus not clear on the whole.
With regard to the Confucians and the Moists, what one calls right the other calls wrong, but if we want to right their wrongs and wrong their rights, the best thing to use is clarity.
A key concept for Daoism is wu-wei, ‘non-action’. The idea is to get what you want by being patient and doing less, not more, to see results. This increases one’s ability to perceive changing circumstances and opportunities in the situation that one would miss if hurried or over-exerting. The idea is to act less but still act, not to simply not act at all. Acting with moderation and simplicity in mind conserves energy and prevents mistakes that can be avoided. Patience and awareness are valued over speed and focus.
There is a medieval Japanese story that illustrates wu-wei well. A local lord has three sons, and must decide who should inherit his position. He tests them by placing a pillow on the sliding door to his room and calling them one at a time. The eldest son enters and annihilates the pillow in a frenzy of skilled sword strikes. The middle son draws his sword but sees the pillow in midair and catches it. The youngest son sees the pillow on the door, tucks it under his arm and enters the room to the joy of his father. Those familiar with Aikido, the Japanese martial art, will recognize the concept of wu-wei as it is physically used: one defeats one’s opponent by moving out of their way and allowing the situation to take its course, not by directly striking them.
It is traditionally held that Laozi, whose name simply means ‘Old Master’, lived sometime around 600 BCE, and Zhuangzi, the second patriarch of Daoism, lived from 370-290 BCE. Not much is known about either patriarch. Zhuangzi’s life and dates are better known. He worked as a overseer of a lacquer warehouse, a place for mass-producing bento boxes, vases and plates with glazes. According to his text, written by his students and followers, he was a friend of many philosophers including the Logicians Hui Shi and Gongsun Long. Laozi was traditionally said to have been an archivist of the Imperial library who Confucius wanted to study under but was rejected. Modern scholarship considers Laozi to be a combination of at least three old masters whose life stories were mixed together as the tradition settled.
The Dao De Jing of Lao Zi
Laozi is said to have given up on life in politically turbulent China and rode a water buffalo west to live as a hermit. As he was about to leave the state, he was recognized by the border guard Yin Xi who pleaded with him to leave his teachings for the people before leaving society. Laozi consented and in the dirt road wrote the 81 passages of the Dao De Jing (a sacred number, 9 times 9, each of which is 3 times 3) before disappearing forever. Because no one witnessed his death, he is considered an immortal like other Daoist sages.
The first chapter, opening verse, of the Dao De Jing, famously reads:
The Dao can be talked about, but not the Eternal Dao. Names can be named, but not the Eternal Name. As the origin of heaven and earth, it is nameless.
The All, or the One, includes everything. Thus, there is no proper or particular name. The All does not need a particular name, because there is nothing in particular that one can judge about it. It is the source of all things, so it could be called ‘green’, ‘not green’, ‘life’, ‘death’,‘both’ or ‘neither’, with equal but equally incomplete meaning. The same, of course, goes for any adjective. Just as any particular thing has its opposite (hot and cold, good and evil), the One is the source of all opposites, and thus is neither and both of each particular thing. Notice the duality of heaven and earth, of open sky and closed ground. Sometimes we think being solid and limited is good, other times we feel that being open and free is good. In fact, the All is all solidity (order) and freedom (chaos), so it is the source of all closure and openness. In the first three lines, we have much of Daoist thought already.
In chapter 8 of the Dao, we learn that the Dao is like water. This is a common metaphor that Daoism employs to describe how the way and nature of things is fluid, like water, getting down into the lowest and tightest cracks and divisions. The Dao has no status or pride, and so like the Daoist sage the Way is down amongst the poor and the common, together as one with the things people avoid and despise as well as the things people exalt and desire.
Chapter 9 of the Dao is a classic example of Daoist reasoning by contradiction. All things have contradictory properties, but this is hard for our one sided judgments and views to see. Thus, we are told that if we continue to sharpen a sword it goes dull, and if we store up enough valuables they will surely attract thieves, and so no one can fully protect a palace of gold and diamonds. “When you have done your work, retire” means to do just enough for the present situation, but not build up merit or riches, for they will bring you trouble.
Chapter 10 asks if we can make our strength united with softness like a little child. It says that growing while refraining from dominating is the secret to life.
Chapter 11 of the Dao is my favorite. I find it very important for understanding the duality of positive and negative, the solid and empty we saw in heaven-and-earth of chapter 1. We are told that a wheel is only useful because of the emptiness at the center. When you first look at a wheel, you see it as a simply solid thing. Then, if you look again, you will see that the emptiness, not just the substance, is important too. Imagine if a house was not mostly empty, but was solid through and through. You would not be able to get inside it! May as well build the house in outer space. Solid and empty get their meanings, their uses, from a mutual relationship, not from one being the only thing and the other merely false. I love this verse, as it is very close to Hegel’s idea of positive, negative, and synthesis. The synthesis here would be seeing not just the solid wheel, nor simply the emptiness, but both working together.
Human truth is quite relative. At first, one believes particular things are absolute. After negative experiences, it is easy to be discouraged and only see the limitations and emptiness of beliefs. This would be like focusing on first the solidity and then the emptiness of the wheel exclusively. The point is not to stop at the emptiness however, but to see that both sides work together to make the wheel, all things, and life itself, what it is. There is a Zen Buddhist Koan which says something very similar: “First practicing (Zen), I saw a rock as a rock…then, I saw it as not a rock…finally, I saw it as truly a rock.”
In Chapter 22, we read that the sage does not boast, and is thus admired by everyone, that he does not want to shine, and is thus will be enlightened, that he does not seek excellence, and is thus exalted, that because he does not argue, no one can argue with him. Most people assume that they know what is simply good, and what is simply bad, and they are not afraid to tell you so. Only the sage, the wise person, knows not to boast about anything but to enjoy and appreciate things just as they are, and thus the sage is far less annoying than the average person. This takes practice and patience, something the average person does not have the patience for before making a quick and certain judgment leading to action. If you desire nothing, “everything will flock to you”, and you have whatever you need right at hand in any situation. This is opposite the common understanding, which says that you must want something and relentlessly seek it in order to have it. Patient action is often more fruitful then strenuous action.
In Chapter 25, we read that there is only one thing that is complete and turns in a perfect circle without endangering itself, the “Mother of All”. The texts says, “I call the Dao...Painfully giving it a name, I call it great”.
Chapter 33 reads, “Whoever knows others is clever. Whoever knows himself is wise. Whoever conquers others has force. Whoever conquers themselves is truly strong.”
Chapter 36 reads, “What you want to weaken you must first allow to grow strong. What you want to destroy, you must first allow to flourish. From whomever you want to take away, to him you must first give.
In Chapter 42 we read, “The strong do not die a natural death”, or “The violent die a violent death”. This is quite similar to Jesus saying, ‘those who live by the sword die by the sword’. Try to gain for yourself, and the great balance of all things will cut you down, doing to you what you do to others. In the Zhuangzi, twice there appears the example of a gnarled old tree which outlives other trees because it does not grow powerful and strong and is thus not cut down and used to build other things by woodcutters and carpenters.
In Chapter 43, we read, “The softest thing on earth overtakes the hardest thing...From this one recognizes the value of non-action (wu-wei).” This calls to mind a seashore, with the waves of soft fluid water battering the hard rock cliffs to make sand where the water and land meet.
Chapter 46 reads, “When the Dao rules on earth, racehorses are used to pull dung carts. When the Dao has been lost on earth, warhorses are raised on green fields. There is no greater defect than many desires. There is no greater evil than to not know sufficiency...Therefore, the sufficiency of sufficiency is lasting sufficiency.”
Chapter 56 reads, “Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.”
Chapter 60 reads, “A great nation must be led the way one fries a small fish. If one administers the world according to the Dao, then the ancestors do not swarm about as spirits. Not that the ancestors are not spirits, but their spirits do not harm humanity.”
Chapter 63 reads, “Whoever practices non-action occupies themselves with not being occupied, finds taste in what is tasteless, sees the great in the small and the much in the little...Plan what is difficult while it is still easy. Do the hard thing while it is still small. Everything heavy on earth begins as something light. Everything on earth begins as something small.”
Chapter 64 reads, “The tallest tree trunk grows from a sprout as thin as a hair. A tower nine stories high is built from a small pile of earth. A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single footstep in front of your feet.”
Chapter 67 reads, “I have three treasures that I treasure an guard. The first is called ‘love’. The second is called ‘sufficiency’. The third is called ‘not daring to lead the world’.
Chapter 68 reads, “Whoever knows how to lead well is not warlike. Whoever knows how to fight well is not angry. Whoever knows how to conquer enemies does not fight them. Whoever knows how to use men well keeps themselves low.”
Chapter 71 reads “To realize that our knowledge is ignorance, this is a noble insight. To regard our ignorance as knowledge, this is mental sickness”. Knowledge is always focusing on one thing. When you focus on one thing, you ignore everything else. This is crucial to seeing how our knowledge is always human perspective, and how it can always be improved and extended.
Chapter 76 reads, “When we enter life we are soft and weak. When we die we are hard and strong. Plants when they enter life are soft and tender. When they die they are dry and stiff. Therefore the hard and strong are companions of death, and the soft and weak are companions of life. Therefore, when weapons are strong they are not victorious. When trees are strong they are cut down.”
The last Chapter, 81, reads, “True words are not beautiful. Beautiful words are not true...The more the sages do for others, the more they possess. The more they give to others, the more they have.”
The Book of Zhuang Zi
While Laozi’s Dao De Jing is concerned with how to properly live as a community and sounds like political advice to rulers and officials in many places, Zhuangzi’s text, known under his name as ‘The Zhuangzi’, is concerned with the individual mind, with human judgements and attitude. It argues that individuals should seek freedom and happiness through simplicity and open-mindedness. Zhuangzi may have been from the Sung region of ancient China, a place torn apart by political conflicts from within and conquered repeatedly by neighboring regions. Zhuangzi repeatedly suggests that if one takes the long view over many lifetimes, the bad comes with the good and it is all part of one process and whole. While other Chinese masters suggested various ways one could structure the state, as Laozi does in places, Zhuangzi is entirely concerned with liberating the individual mind in a chaotic and close-minded world.
Zhuangzi does speak of Laozi in several places in the text, as he does of many other sages and masters drawing from their teachings as well as being critical of some. In one passage, he tells us that Nan-jung Chu went to see Laozi for advice, who asked him as he entered, “Why have you brought this crowd of people with you?”. Nan-jung spun around, to find no one behind him, as Laozi was referring to the attachments and memories Nan-jung carried with him. Many assumed along with the Daoist tradition that Zhuangzi was familiar with Laozi’s Dao De Jing because both are considered the patriarchs of Daoism and Zhuangzi seems to quote the Dao De Jing in places, however modern scholarship does not know whether Zhuangzi had ever read Laozi’s work or whether both texts are drawing from the same sources. Both patriarch’s books were likely added to by other authors, and it was only by the time of the Han dynasty around 200 BCE that the two texts were set as they remain today.
The Zhuangzi was a major influence on Zen Buddhism, which unlike other Buddhist schools was a native Chinese tradition that was cross-pollinated with Daoism from its beginning. Many Zen koan stories contain lines that are similar if not identical to the Zhuangzi. Joshu, my favorite Zen master who lived about 700 CE, quotes the Zhuangzi to a monk in training, “Ships can not sail where the water is too shallow”. Like Joshu and Zen, Zhuangzi enjoyed using humor (as did Heraclitus) much more than other philosophers, using it to shock and free people from their judgements, understandings and limitations.
In several places of the Zhuangzi, we see the idea of perspective presented the same way as we saw in Heraclitus. We are told that Mao Quiang and Lady Li were legendary beautiful women, but minnows were frightened of them when they gazed into a stream, and birds and deer were frightened by them when they walked through the forest. Heraclitus said that all human beauty and achievement is nothing but apes to the gods. Who knows what is beautiful, humans, birds, fish, or deer? Zhuangzi asks which of them knows what tastes good.
Often, the heroes of Zhuangzi are common people, woodcutters, fishermen, butchers, carpenters, ex-cons, and others of low status. In two places, Zhuangzi seems to exalt while mock Confucius who praises two sages who have had their legs cut off for committing crimes but have flocks of followers. Confucius is made to say that his own teachings are the lowly ways of humans, but these sages know the way of heaven, the Dao, and he would become their student if he only had the time. Confucius says to Wang Dai, who asks about one of the legless sages, “If you look at them from the point of view of their differences, then there is liver and gall (two organs in the body), Ch’u and Yueh (two warring kingdoms in China), but if you look at them from the point of view of their sameness, then the ten thousand things are all one.”
We are told that the emperor learns how to rule his kingdom by listening to Cook Ting, who tells the emperor that he has learned over a lifetime how to cut up oxen with his knife that never dulls because he knows instinctively where the spaces are. We hear about the woodcutter scolding his apprentice for saying that an old gnarled tree is useless, replying that what is useless in some ways is useful in others, such as a tree no one will cut down providing a shady spot for centuries.
When Zhuangzi is asked by Dung Kuo where the way of heaven is, Zhuangzi says it is everywhere. Dung Kuo asks him to be more specific, so Zhuangzi says it is in the ant, in grass, in tile shards, in piss and in shit, horrifying Dung Kuo progressively. Like the Laozi text, the Zhuangzi continuously suggests that we see the lowest things as beautiful, and avoid striving for and hoarding the things people desire to be happy and free.
In the first passage of the Zhuangzi, the mythical Peng bird is mocked by the dove and the cicada (a large grasshopper-like insect) for flying high and far in the sky. They have no frame of reference to understand such an act, as they die every winter and do not survive by migrating south. Several times Zhuangzi is told by other sages that his wisdom is foolish and useless, but Zhuangzi replies, much like the Dao text, that there are no things which are not foolish or useless, but this does not stop them from also being serious and useful.
In another passage, Chien Wu tells Lien Shu that he has heard talk of a holy sage living on a mountain top who is gentle and shy like a young girl, does not eat anything but drinks dew, rides a dragon through they sky and can protect people and animals from illness. Chien Wu says this is clearly insane and he refuses to believe it. Lien Shu replies:
We can’t expect a blind man to appreciate beautiful patterns or a deaf man to listen to bells and drums, and blindness and deafness are not confined to the body alone. The understanding has them too, as your words have just now shown. This man, with his virtue, is about to embrace the ten thousand things and roll them all into one.
The philosopher and logician Huizi tells Zhuangzi that a king gave him seeds of a huge gourd, but when he planted the seeds and grew huge gourds they were so large that he could not use them as containers so he smashed them. Zhuangzi tells him he should have used them as boats, and “Obviously you still have a lot of underbrush in your head!” Huizi tells Zhuangzi that he has a large gnarled tree, which is as useless as Zhuangzi’s reasoning. Zhuangzi replies that if no ax will cut it down, it makes a great shaded place for taking a nap.
Tzu Ch’i tells Tzu Yu that when the wind blows you can hear many sounds made by many things, including the whistling of trees and the wailing of hollow logs, but there is only one wind. He then says:
Words are not just wind. Words have something to say, but if what they have to say is not fixed, then do they really say something, or do they say nothing? People suppose that words are different from the peeps of baby birds, but is there any difference, or isn’t there? What does the Way rely upon, such that we have true and false? What do words rely upon, such that we have right and wrong?...When the Way relies on little accomplishments and words rely on vain show, then we have the rights and wrongs of the Confucians and the Moists. What one calls right the other calls wrong, and what one calls wrong the other calls right, but if we want to right their wrongs and wrong their rights, then the best thing to use is clarity. Everything has its ‘that’, and everything has its ‘this’. From the point of view of ‘that’, you cannot see it, but through understanding you can know it, so I say, ‘that’ comes out of ‘this’ and ‘this’ depends on ‘that’, which is to say ‘this’ and ‘that’ give birth to each other...Therefore the sage does not proceed in such a way, but illuminates all in the light of heaven. A sage too has a ‘this’ and a ‘that’, but a sage’s ‘that’ has a ‘this’, and a sage’s ‘this’ has a ‘that’. A sage’s ‘that’ has both a right and a wrong in it, and a sage’s ‘this’ too has both a right and a wrong in it, so does a sage still have a ‘this’ and ‘that’? A state in which ‘this’ and ‘that’ no longer find their opposites is called the hinge of the Way. When the hinge is fitted into the socket, it can respond endlessly. Its right then is a single endlessness and its wrong too is a single endlessness, so I say the best thing to use is clarity...
To wear out your brain trying to make things into one without realizing that they are all the same is called “three in the morning”. What do I mean by “three in the morning”? When the monkey trainer was handing out acorns, he said, “You get three in the morning and four at night.” This made all the monkeys furious. “Well then,” he said, “you get four in the morning and three at night.” The monkeys were all delighted. There was no change in the reality behind the words, and yet the monkeys responded with joy and anger. Let them, if they want to. The sage harmonizes with both right and wrong and rests in heaven, the equalizer.
Because right and wrong appeared, the Way was injured, and because the Way was injured, love became complete, but do such things as completion and injury really exist, or do they not?
Those who divide fail to divide. Those who discriminate fail to discriminate. What does this mean, you ask? The sage embraces things. Ordinary people discriminate among things and parade their discriminations in front of others. So I say, those who discriminate fail to see.
Nieh Ch’ueh asks Wang Ni about something everyone can agree to. Wang Ni replies:
If someone sleeps in a damp place, their back aches and he ends up half paralyzed, but is this true of a carp? If someone lives in a tree, they are terrified and shake with fright, but is this true of a monkey? Of these three creatures, which knows the proper place to live? We eat the flesh of grass-fed and grain-fed animals, deer eat grass, centipedes find snakes tasty, and hawks and falcons love mice. Of these four, who knows how food ought to taste? Monkeys pair with monkeys, deer go out with deer, and fish play around with fish. men claim that Mao-Ch’iang and Lady Li were beautiful, but if fish saw them they would dive to the bottom of the stream, if birds saw them they would fly away, and if deer saw them they would break into a run. Of these four, which knows the standard of beauty for the world?
Chuchuehzi said to Changwuzi, “I have heard Confucius say that the sage does not work at anything, does not pursue profit, does not dodge harm, does not enjoy being sought after, does not follow the Way, says nothing yet says something, says something yet says nothing, and wanders beyond the dust and grime. Confucius himself regarded these as wild and flippant words, though I believe they describe the working of the mysterious Way. What do you think of them?” Changwuzi said, “Even the Yellow Emperor would be confused if he heard such words, so how could you expect Confucius to understand them? Whats more, you’re too hasty in your own appraisal. You see an egg and demand a crowing rooster, see a crossbow pellet and demand a roast dove. I’m going to try speaking some reckless words and I want you to listen to them recklessly. How will that be? The sage leans on the sun and the moon, tucks the universe under his arm, merges himself with things, leaves the confusion and muddle as it is, and looks on slaves as exalted. Ordinary people strain and struggle. The sage is stupid and blockish. The sage takes part in ten thousand ages and achieves simplicity in oneness...Confucius and you are both dreaming, and when I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming too. Words like these will be labeled the Supreme Swindle.
In the most famous passage of the book, Zhuangzi dreamt that he was a butterfly and forgot that he was Zhuangzi. When he woke, he no longer knew whether he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he is Zhuangzi.
Another famous metaphor used is that of the praying mantis that waved its arms angrily in front of an approaching carriage, unaware that it is incapable of stopping it. It suggests that we move in response to life rather than hold our ground taking pride in our own abilities.
We read in one passage about the True Man, who sounds quite similar to Nietzsche’s Super Man (Ubermensch) who understands the world and himself to be beyond good and evil:
What do I mean by a True Man? The True Man of ancient times did not rebel against want, did not grow proud in plenty, and did not plan his affairs. A man like this could commit and error and not regret it, could meet with success and not make a show. A man like this could climb the high places and not be frightened...He didn’t forget where he began. He didn’t try to find out where he would end. He received something and took pleasure in it. he forgot about it and handed it back again. This is what I call not using the mind to repel the Way, not using man to help out Heaven.
You hide your boat in the ravine and your fish net in the swamp and tell yourself that they will be safe, but in the middle of the night a strong man shoulders them and carries them off, and in your stupidity you don’t know why it happened. You think you do right to hide little things in big ones, and yet they get away from you, but if you were to hide the world in the world, so that nothing could get away, this would be the final reality of the constancy of things.
That which kills life does not die. That which gives life does not live. This is the kind of thing it is. There’s nothing it doesn’t send off, nothing it doesn’t welcome, nothing it doesn’t destroy, nothing it doesn’t complete.
Jo of the North Sea said, “You can’t discuss the ocean with a well frog. He’s limited by the space he lives in. You can’t discuss ice with a summer insect. He’s bound to a single season. You can’t discuss the Way with a cramped scholar. He’s shackled by his doctrines. Now you have come out beyond your banks and borders and have seen the great sea, so you realize your own insignificance. From now on it will be possible to talk to you about the Great Principle.
Jo of the North Sea said, “From the point of view of the Way, things have no nobility or meanness. From the point of view of things themselves, each regards itself as noble and other things as mean. From the point of view of common opinion, nobility and meanness are not determined by the individual himself. From the point of view of differences, if we regard a thing as big because there is a certain bigness to it, then among all the ten thousand things there are none that are not big. If we regard a thing as small because there is a certain smallness to it, then among the ten thousand things there are none that are not small. If we know that heaven and earth are tiny grains and the tip of a hair is a range of mountains, then we have perceived the law of difference. From the point of view of function, if we regard a thing as useful because there s a certain usefulness to it, then among all the ten thousand things there are none that are not useful. If we regard a thing as useless because there is a certain uselessness to it, then among the ten thousand things none that are not useless. If we know that east and west are mutually opposed but that one cannot do without the other, then we can estimate degree of use.
If someone can swim underwater, they may never have seen a boat before and still they’ll know how to handle it. That’s because they see the water as so much dry land, and regards the capsizing of a boat as they would the overturning of a cart. The ten thousand things may all be capsizing and turning over at the same time right in from of them and it can’t get at them and affect what’s inside, so where could they go and not be at ease? When you’re betting for tiles in an archery contest, you shoot with skill. When you’re betting for fancy belt buckles, you worry about your aim, and when you’re betting for real gold, you’re a nervous wreck. Your skill is the same in all three cases, but because one prize means more to you than another, you let outside considerations weigh on your mind. They who look too hard on the outside get clumsy on the inside.
This passage reminds me of a metaphor used by the psychotherapist Milton Erickson. If you put a board on the ground, everyone can walk across it with confidence. If you put the same board three hundred feet up in the air, most people would be terrified, even though walking across the board is the same set of physical motions. Erickson is thinking of clients petrified by fear, such as codependents who can’t leave their abusive partner by taking several steps to the door and then several more out it.
Huizi said to Zhuangzi, “Your words are useless!” Zhuangzi replied, “A man has to understand the useless before you can talk to him about the useful. The earth is certainly vast and broad, though a man uses no more of it than the area he puts his feet on. If, however, you were to dig away all the earth from around his feet until you reach the Yellow Springs, then would the man still be able to make use of it?” “No, it would be useless,” said Huizi. “It is obvious, then,” said Zhuangzi, that the useless has its use.”
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 that I can have a word with him?
This week, we will be studying the two most central texts of Chinese Daoism: the Dao De Jing of Laozi, and the book of the ‘second patriarch’ of Daoism, Zhuangzi. Daoism has always been dear to my heart, as I have an old printing of the Dao (on the book, the ‘Tao Te Ching’, now typically and more accurately written ‘Dao De Jing’) which I loved when I was a kid with black and white photos of beaches and sea gulls in fog accompanying the text. It was only later in my studies that I was able to have a real love of the text, which at first seemed simply mysterious poetry.
Daoism is often opposed to Confucianism as a skeptical and mystical school of thought vs. Confucianism which is a more traditionalist and dogmatic school. Indeed, Daoism is one of the most powerful skeptical schools of thought in history, and during the later years of the Han dynasty peasants and scholars turned from Confucianism to Daoism in support of innovation and revolution (such as the famous Yellow turban rebellions of 184 and 187 CE). Daoist sages are often ordinary men and women. However it is also clear that Confucius was critical of tradition, politics, knowledge and judgement, and Daoism became an orthodox religious system that was used by the Han and later dynasties to control and pacify the people.
While Confucianism advocates city life, study, and the structure of the family and state, Daoism advocates returning to nature and the natural (ziran), simplicity, meditation, and questioning all human understanding. Confucianism argues that we should cultivate and civilize ourselves through education and tradition, Daoism argues that we should return to our natural state and let nature run its course, thus reaching a state of completion. Rather than study harder to understand more distinctions between things, Daoism argues we should work hard to forget the understandings and distinctions we have stored up in ourselves already. Daoists would agree with Confucius that “a noble person is not a pot”, but rather than add and stir they would have us empty it out.
Many are familiar with the Daoist image of the Yin and Yang intertwining female earth energy of darkness and male sky energy of light, however only few know that the symbol originally comes from the Yin Yang school, one of the hundred schools of thought from the warring states and hundred schools period of Chinese philosophy. The Daoists got the symbol from this school, and followed similar ideas about things being constituted by opposing forces. The symbol has also been identified as a solar calendar that charts daylight hours over the course of a year, important for farmers who were supporters and sources of both the Yin Yang and Daoist schools of thought. When the Han unified China, they patronized Confucianism and Daoism but not the Yin Yang school and others that disappeared without their support.
The most important concept for Daoism (and, interestingly, the mystics of most religions) is the Great One, the All. Like Confucius and Confucianism, Daoism followed the Zhou Dynasty before the Han in speaking about the Way (Dao) of heaven and the mandate of heaven but less about the ‘Lord of Heaven’, showing us the same abstraction and evolution from polytheism to monotheism to philosophical monism we found in ancient Egypt, India and Greece. Like in ancient Egypt and India, but unlike ancient Greece after the spread of Christianity, ancient China kept traditional polytheism as their philosophers moved toward monism. In Daoism, you can find many gods and the Dao, the Way, being praised and venerated beyond all particular beings.
Daoism argues that one should remove one-sided judgments and desires from the mind such that harmony with the whole, with the One, is achieved. This is similar in many ways to the Indian Jain idea of anekantavada, ‘non-one-sidedness’. My favorite quote from the Zhuang Zi, which can serve as a great slogan for skepticism and relativism is, “A sage too has a this and a that, but his that has a this, and his this has a that”. We also find in the Zhuangzi accusations that other schools are one-sided in their theories and thus not clear on the whole.
With regard to the Confucians and the Moists, what one calls right the other calls wrong, but if we want to right their wrongs and wrong their rights, the best thing to use is clarity.
A key concept for Daoism is wu-wei, ‘non-action’. The idea is to get what you want by being patient and doing less, not more, to see results. This increases one’s ability to perceive changing circumstances and opportunities in the situation that one would miss if hurried or over-exerting. The idea is to act less but still act, not to simply not act at all. Acting with moderation and simplicity in mind conserves energy and prevents mistakes that can be avoided. Patience and awareness are valued over speed and focus.
There is a medieval Japanese story that illustrates wu-wei well. A local lord has three sons, and must decide who should inherit his position. He tests them by placing a pillow on the sliding door to his room and calling them one at a time. The eldest son enters and annihilates the pillow in a frenzy of skilled sword strikes. The middle son draws his sword but sees the pillow in midair and catches it. The youngest son sees the pillow on the door, tucks it under his arm and enters the room to the joy of his father. Those familiar with Aikido, the Japanese martial art, will recognize the concept of wu-wei as it is physically used: one defeats one’s opponent by moving out of their way and allowing the situation to take its course, not by directly striking them.
It is traditionally held that Laozi, whose name simply means ‘Old Master’, lived sometime around 600 BCE, and Zhuangzi, the second patriarch of Daoism, lived from 370-290 BCE. Not much is known about either patriarch. Zhuangzi’s life and dates are better known. He worked as a overseer of a lacquer warehouse, a place for mass-producing bento boxes, vases and plates with glazes. According to his text, written by his students and followers, he was a friend of many philosophers including the Logicians Hui Shi and Gongsun Long. Laozi was traditionally said to have been an archivist of the Imperial library who Confucius wanted to study under but was rejected. Modern scholarship considers Laozi to be a combination of at least three old masters whose life stories were mixed together as the tradition settled.
The Dao De Jing of Lao Zi
Laozi is said to have given up on life in politically turbulent China and rode a water buffalo west to live as a hermit. As he was about to leave the state, he was recognized by the border guard Yin Xi who pleaded with him to leave his teachings for the people before leaving society. Laozi consented and in the dirt road wrote the 81 passages of the Dao De Jing (a sacred number, 9 times 9, each of which is 3 times 3) before disappearing forever. Because no one witnessed his death, he is considered an immortal like other Daoist sages.
The first chapter, opening verse, of the Dao De Jing, famously reads:
The Dao can be talked about, but not the Eternal Dao. Names can be named, but not the Eternal Name. As the origin of heaven and earth, it is nameless.
The All, or the One, includes everything. Thus, there is no proper or particular name. The All does not need a particular name, because there is nothing in particular that one can judge about it. It is the source of all things, so it could be called ‘green’, ‘not green’, ‘life’, ‘death’,‘both’ or ‘neither’, with equal but equally incomplete meaning. The same, of course, goes for any adjective. Just as any particular thing has its opposite (hot and cold, good and evil), the One is the source of all opposites, and thus is neither and both of each particular thing. Notice the duality of heaven and earth, of open sky and closed ground. Sometimes we think being solid and limited is good, other times we feel that being open and free is good. In fact, the All is all solidity (order) and freedom (chaos), so it is the source of all closure and openness. In the first three lines, we have much of Daoist thought already.
In chapter 8 of the Dao, we learn that the Dao is like water. This is a common metaphor that Daoism employs to describe how the way and nature of things is fluid, like water, getting down into the lowest and tightest cracks and divisions. The Dao has no status or pride, and so like the Daoist sage the Way is down amongst the poor and the common, together as one with the things people avoid and despise as well as the things people exalt and desire.
Chapter 9 of the Dao is a classic example of Daoist reasoning by contradiction. All things have contradictory properties, but this is hard for our one sided judgments and views to see. Thus, we are told that if we continue to sharpen a sword it goes dull, and if we store up enough valuables they will surely attract thieves, and so no one can fully protect a palace of gold and diamonds. “When you have done your work, retire” means to do just enough for the present situation, but not build up merit or riches, for they will bring you trouble.
Chapter 10 asks if we can make our strength united with softness like a little child. It says that growing while refraining from dominating is the secret to life.
Chapter 11 of the Dao is my favorite. I find it very important for understanding the duality of positive and negative, the solid and empty we saw in heaven-and-earth of chapter 1. We are told that a wheel is only useful because of the emptiness at the center. When you first look at a wheel, you see it as a simply solid thing. Then, if you look again, you will see that the emptiness, not just the substance, is important too. Imagine if a house was not mostly empty, but was solid through and through. You would not be able to get inside it! May as well build the house in outer space. Solid and empty get their meanings, their uses, from a mutual relationship, not from one being the only thing and the other merely false. I love this verse, as it is very close to Hegel’s idea of positive, negative, and synthesis. The synthesis here would be seeing not just the solid wheel, nor simply the emptiness, but both working together.
Human truth is quite relative. At first, one believes particular things are absolute. After negative experiences, it is easy to be discouraged and only see the limitations and emptiness of beliefs. This would be like focusing on first the solidity and then the emptiness of the wheel exclusively. The point is not to stop at the emptiness however, but to see that both sides work together to make the wheel, all things, and life itself, what it is. There is a Zen Buddhist Koan which says something very similar: “First practicing (Zen), I saw a rock as a rock…then, I saw it as not a rock…finally, I saw it as truly a rock.”
In Chapter 22, we read that the sage does not boast, and is thus admired by everyone, that he does not want to shine, and is thus will be enlightened, that he does not seek excellence, and is thus exalted, that because he does not argue, no one can argue with him. Most people assume that they know what is simply good, and what is simply bad, and they are not afraid to tell you so. Only the sage, the wise person, knows not to boast about anything but to enjoy and appreciate things just as they are, and thus the sage is far less annoying than the average person. This takes practice and patience, something the average person does not have the patience for before making a quick and certain judgment leading to action. If you desire nothing, “everything will flock to you”, and you have whatever you need right at hand in any situation. This is opposite the common understanding, which says that you must want something and relentlessly seek it in order to have it. Patient action is often more fruitful then strenuous action.
In Chapter 25, we read that there is only one thing that is complete and turns in a perfect circle without endangering itself, the “Mother of All”. The texts says, “I call the Dao...Painfully giving it a name, I call it great”.
Chapter 33 reads, “Whoever knows others is clever. Whoever knows himself is wise. Whoever conquers others has force. Whoever conquers themselves is truly strong.”
Chapter 36 reads, “What you want to weaken you must first allow to grow strong. What you want to destroy, you must first allow to flourish. From whomever you want to take away, to him you must first give.
In Chapter 42 we read, “The strong do not die a natural death”, or “The violent die a violent death”. This is quite similar to Jesus saying, ‘those who live by the sword die by the sword’. Try to gain for yourself, and the great balance of all things will cut you down, doing to you what you do to others. In the Zhuangzi, twice there appears the example of a gnarled old tree which outlives other trees because it does not grow powerful and strong and is thus not cut down and used to build other things by woodcutters and carpenters.
In Chapter 43, we read, “The softest thing on earth overtakes the hardest thing...From this one recognizes the value of non-action (wu-wei).” This calls to mind a seashore, with the waves of soft fluid water battering the hard rock cliffs to make sand where the water and land meet.
Chapter 46 reads, “When the Dao rules on earth, racehorses are used to pull dung carts. When the Dao has been lost on earth, warhorses are raised on green fields. There is no greater defect than many desires. There is no greater evil than to not know sufficiency...Therefore, the sufficiency of sufficiency is lasting sufficiency.”
Chapter 56 reads, “Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know.”
Chapter 60 reads, “A great nation must be led the way one fries a small fish. If one administers the world according to the Dao, then the ancestors do not swarm about as spirits. Not that the ancestors are not spirits, but their spirits do not harm humanity.”
Chapter 63 reads, “Whoever practices non-action occupies themselves with not being occupied, finds taste in what is tasteless, sees the great in the small and the much in the little...Plan what is difficult while it is still easy. Do the hard thing while it is still small. Everything heavy on earth begins as something light. Everything on earth begins as something small.”
Chapter 64 reads, “The tallest tree trunk grows from a sprout as thin as a hair. A tower nine stories high is built from a small pile of earth. A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single footstep in front of your feet.”
Chapter 67 reads, “I have three treasures that I treasure an guard. The first is called ‘love’. The second is called ‘sufficiency’. The third is called ‘not daring to lead the world’.
Chapter 68 reads, “Whoever knows how to lead well is not warlike. Whoever knows how to fight well is not angry. Whoever knows how to conquer enemies does not fight them. Whoever knows how to use men well keeps themselves low.”
Chapter 71 reads “To realize that our knowledge is ignorance, this is a noble insight. To regard our ignorance as knowledge, this is mental sickness”. Knowledge is always focusing on one thing. When you focus on one thing, you ignore everything else. This is crucial to seeing how our knowledge is always human perspective, and how it can always be improved and extended.
Chapter 76 reads, “When we enter life we are soft and weak. When we die we are hard and strong. Plants when they enter life are soft and tender. When they die they are dry and stiff. Therefore the hard and strong are companions of death, and the soft and weak are companions of life. Therefore, when weapons are strong they are not victorious. When trees are strong they are cut down.”
The last Chapter, 81, reads, “True words are not beautiful. Beautiful words are not true...The more the sages do for others, the more they possess. The more they give to others, the more they have.”
The Book of Zhuang Zi
While Laozi’s Dao De Jing is concerned with how to properly live as a community and sounds like political advice to rulers and officials in many places, Zhuangzi’s text, known under his name as ‘The Zhuangzi’, is concerned with the individual mind, with human judgements and attitude. It argues that individuals should seek freedom and happiness through simplicity and open-mindedness. Zhuangzi may have been from the Sung region of ancient China, a place torn apart by political conflicts from within and conquered repeatedly by neighboring regions. Zhuangzi repeatedly suggests that if one takes the long view over many lifetimes, the bad comes with the good and it is all part of one process and whole. While other Chinese masters suggested various ways one could structure the state, as Laozi does in places, Zhuangzi is entirely concerned with liberating the individual mind in a chaotic and close-minded world.
Zhuangzi does speak of Laozi in several places in the text, as he does of many other sages and masters drawing from their teachings as well as being critical of some. In one passage, he tells us that Nan-jung Chu went to see Laozi for advice, who asked him as he entered, “Why have you brought this crowd of people with you?”. Nan-jung spun around, to find no one behind him, as Laozi was referring to the attachments and memories Nan-jung carried with him. Many assumed along with the Daoist tradition that Zhuangzi was familiar with Laozi’s Dao De Jing because both are considered the patriarchs of Daoism and Zhuangzi seems to quote the Dao De Jing in places, however modern scholarship does not know whether Zhuangzi had ever read Laozi’s work or whether both texts are drawing from the same sources. Both patriarch’s books were likely added to by other authors, and it was only by the time of the Han dynasty around 200 BCE that the two texts were set as they remain today.
The Zhuangzi was a major influence on Zen Buddhism, which unlike other Buddhist schools was a native Chinese tradition that was cross-pollinated with Daoism from its beginning. Many Zen koan stories contain lines that are similar if not identical to the Zhuangzi. Joshu, my favorite Zen master who lived about 700 CE, quotes the Zhuangzi to a monk in training, “Ships can not sail where the water is too shallow”. Like Joshu and Zen, Zhuangzi enjoyed using humor (as did Heraclitus) much more than other philosophers, using it to shock and free people from their judgements, understandings and limitations.
In several places of the Zhuangzi, we see the idea of perspective presented the same way as we saw in Heraclitus. We are told that Mao Quiang and Lady Li were legendary beautiful women, but minnows were frightened of them when they gazed into a stream, and birds and deer were frightened by them when they walked through the forest. Heraclitus said that all human beauty and achievement is nothing but apes to the gods. Who knows what is beautiful, humans, birds, fish, or deer? Zhuangzi asks which of them knows what tastes good.
Often, the heroes of Zhuangzi are common people, woodcutters, fishermen, butchers, carpenters, ex-cons, and others of low status. In two places, Zhuangzi seems to exalt while mock Confucius who praises two sages who have had their legs cut off for committing crimes but have flocks of followers. Confucius is made to say that his own teachings are the lowly ways of humans, but these sages know the way of heaven, the Dao, and he would become their student if he only had the time. Confucius says to Wang Dai, who asks about one of the legless sages, “If you look at them from the point of view of their differences, then there is liver and gall (two organs in the body), Ch’u and Yueh (two warring kingdoms in China), but if you look at them from the point of view of their sameness, then the ten thousand things are all one.”
We are told that the emperor learns how to rule his kingdom by listening to Cook Ting, who tells the emperor that he has learned over a lifetime how to cut up oxen with his knife that never dulls because he knows instinctively where the spaces are. We hear about the woodcutter scolding his apprentice for saying that an old gnarled tree is useless, replying that what is useless in some ways is useful in others, such as a tree no one will cut down providing a shady spot for centuries.
When Zhuangzi is asked by Dung Kuo where the way of heaven is, Zhuangzi says it is everywhere. Dung Kuo asks him to be more specific, so Zhuangzi says it is in the ant, in grass, in tile shards, in piss and in shit, horrifying Dung Kuo progressively. Like the Laozi text, the Zhuangzi continuously suggests that we see the lowest things as beautiful, and avoid striving for and hoarding the things people desire to be happy and free.
In the first passage of the Zhuangzi, the mythical Peng bird is mocked by the dove and the cicada (a large grasshopper-like insect) for flying high and far in the sky. They have no frame of reference to understand such an act, as they die every winter and do not survive by migrating south. Several times Zhuangzi is told by other sages that his wisdom is foolish and useless, but Zhuangzi replies, much like the Dao text, that there are no things which are not foolish or useless, but this does not stop them from also being serious and useful.
In another passage, Chien Wu tells Lien Shu that he has heard talk of a holy sage living on a mountain top who is gentle and shy like a young girl, does not eat anything but drinks dew, rides a dragon through they sky and can protect people and animals from illness. Chien Wu says this is clearly insane and he refuses to believe it. Lien Shu replies:
We can’t expect a blind man to appreciate beautiful patterns or a deaf man to listen to bells and drums, and blindness and deafness are not confined to the body alone. The understanding has them too, as your words have just now shown. This man, with his virtue, is about to embrace the ten thousand things and roll them all into one.
The philosopher and logician Huizi tells Zhuangzi that a king gave him seeds of a huge gourd, but when he planted the seeds and grew huge gourds they were so large that he could not use them as containers so he smashed them. Zhuangzi tells him he should have used them as boats, and “Obviously you still have a lot of underbrush in your head!” Huizi tells Zhuangzi that he has a large gnarled tree, which is as useless as Zhuangzi’s reasoning. Zhuangzi replies that if no ax will cut it down, it makes a great shaded place for taking a nap.
Tzu Ch’i tells Tzu Yu that when the wind blows you can hear many sounds made by many things, including the whistling of trees and the wailing of hollow logs, but there is only one wind. He then says:
Words are not just wind. Words have something to say, but if what they have to say is not fixed, then do they really say something, or do they say nothing? People suppose that words are different from the peeps of baby birds, but is there any difference, or isn’t there? What does the Way rely upon, such that we have true and false? What do words rely upon, such that we have right and wrong?...When the Way relies on little accomplishments and words rely on vain show, then we have the rights and wrongs of the Confucians and the Moists. What one calls right the other calls wrong, and what one calls wrong the other calls right, but if we want to right their wrongs and wrong their rights, then the best thing to use is clarity. Everything has its ‘that’, and everything has its ‘this’. From the point of view of ‘that’, you cannot see it, but through understanding you can know it, so I say, ‘that’ comes out of ‘this’ and ‘this’ depends on ‘that’, which is to say ‘this’ and ‘that’ give birth to each other...Therefore the sage does not proceed in such a way, but illuminates all in the light of heaven. A sage too has a ‘this’ and a ‘that’, but a sage’s ‘that’ has a ‘this’, and a sage’s ‘this’ has a ‘that’. A sage’s ‘that’ has both a right and a wrong in it, and a sage’s ‘this’ too has both a right and a wrong in it, so does a sage still have a ‘this’ and ‘that’? A state in which ‘this’ and ‘that’ no longer find their opposites is called the hinge of the Way. When the hinge is fitted into the socket, it can respond endlessly. Its right then is a single endlessness and its wrong too is a single endlessness, so I say the best thing to use is clarity...
To wear out your brain trying to make things into one without realizing that they are all the same is called “three in the morning”. What do I mean by “three in the morning”? When the monkey trainer was handing out acorns, he said, “You get three in the morning and four at night.” This made all the monkeys furious. “Well then,” he said, “you get four in the morning and three at night.” The monkeys were all delighted. There was no change in the reality behind the words, and yet the monkeys responded with joy and anger. Let them, if they want to. The sage harmonizes with both right and wrong and rests in heaven, the equalizer.
Because right and wrong appeared, the Way was injured, and because the Way was injured, love became complete, but do such things as completion and injury really exist, or do they not?
Those who divide fail to divide. Those who discriminate fail to discriminate. What does this mean, you ask? The sage embraces things. Ordinary people discriminate among things and parade their discriminations in front of others. So I say, those who discriminate fail to see.
Nieh Ch’ueh asks Wang Ni about something everyone can agree to. Wang Ni replies:
If someone sleeps in a damp place, their back aches and he ends up half paralyzed, but is this true of a carp? If someone lives in a tree, they are terrified and shake with fright, but is this true of a monkey? Of these three creatures, which knows the proper place to live? We eat the flesh of grass-fed and grain-fed animals, deer eat grass, centipedes find snakes tasty, and hawks and falcons love mice. Of these four, who knows how food ought to taste? Monkeys pair with monkeys, deer go out with deer, and fish play around with fish. men claim that Mao-Ch’iang and Lady Li were beautiful, but if fish saw them they would dive to the bottom of the stream, if birds saw them they would fly away, and if deer saw them they would break into a run. Of these four, which knows the standard of beauty for the world?
Chuchuehzi said to Changwuzi, “I have heard Confucius say that the sage does not work at anything, does not pursue profit, does not dodge harm, does not enjoy being sought after, does not follow the Way, says nothing yet says something, says something yet says nothing, and wanders beyond the dust and grime. Confucius himself regarded these as wild and flippant words, though I believe they describe the working of the mysterious Way. What do you think of them?” Changwuzi said, “Even the Yellow Emperor would be confused if he heard such words, so how could you expect Confucius to understand them? Whats more, you’re too hasty in your own appraisal. You see an egg and demand a crowing rooster, see a crossbow pellet and demand a roast dove. I’m going to try speaking some reckless words and I want you to listen to them recklessly. How will that be? The sage leans on the sun and the moon, tucks the universe under his arm, merges himself with things, leaves the confusion and muddle as it is, and looks on slaves as exalted. Ordinary people strain and struggle. The sage is stupid and blockish. The sage takes part in ten thousand ages and achieves simplicity in oneness...Confucius and you are both dreaming, and when I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming too. Words like these will be labeled the Supreme Swindle.
In the most famous passage of the book, Zhuangzi dreamt that he was a butterfly and forgot that he was Zhuangzi. When he woke, he no longer knew whether he was Zhuangzi who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he is Zhuangzi.
Another famous metaphor used is that of the praying mantis that waved its arms angrily in front of an approaching carriage, unaware that it is incapable of stopping it. It suggests that we move in response to life rather than hold our ground taking pride in our own abilities.
We read in one passage about the True Man, who sounds quite similar to Nietzsche’s Super Man (Ubermensch) who understands the world and himself to be beyond good and evil:
What do I mean by a True Man? The True Man of ancient times did not rebel against want, did not grow proud in plenty, and did not plan his affairs. A man like this could commit and error and not regret it, could meet with success and not make a show. A man like this could climb the high places and not be frightened...He didn’t forget where he began. He didn’t try to find out where he would end. He received something and took pleasure in it. he forgot about it and handed it back again. This is what I call not using the mind to repel the Way, not using man to help out Heaven.
You hide your boat in the ravine and your fish net in the swamp and tell yourself that they will be safe, but in the middle of the night a strong man shoulders them and carries them off, and in your stupidity you don’t know why it happened. You think you do right to hide little things in big ones, and yet they get away from you, but if you were to hide the world in the world, so that nothing could get away, this would be the final reality of the constancy of things.
That which kills life does not die. That which gives life does not live. This is the kind of thing it is. There’s nothing it doesn’t send off, nothing it doesn’t welcome, nothing it doesn’t destroy, nothing it doesn’t complete.
Jo of the North Sea said, “You can’t discuss the ocean with a well frog. He’s limited by the space he lives in. You can’t discuss ice with a summer insect. He’s bound to a single season. You can’t discuss the Way with a cramped scholar. He’s shackled by his doctrines. Now you have come out beyond your banks and borders and have seen the great sea, so you realize your own insignificance. From now on it will be possible to talk to you about the Great Principle.
Jo of the North Sea said, “From the point of view of the Way, things have no nobility or meanness. From the point of view of things themselves, each regards itself as noble and other things as mean. From the point of view of common opinion, nobility and meanness are not determined by the individual himself. From the point of view of differences, if we regard a thing as big because there is a certain bigness to it, then among all the ten thousand things there are none that are not big. If we regard a thing as small because there is a certain smallness to it, then among the ten thousand things there are none that are not small. If we know that heaven and earth are tiny grains and the tip of a hair is a range of mountains, then we have perceived the law of difference. From the point of view of function, if we regard a thing as useful because there s a certain usefulness to it, then among all the ten thousand things there are none that are not useful. If we regard a thing as useless because there is a certain uselessness to it, then among the ten thousand things none that are not useless. If we know that east and west are mutually opposed but that one cannot do without the other, then we can estimate degree of use.
If someone can swim underwater, they may never have seen a boat before and still they’ll know how to handle it. That’s because they see the water as so much dry land, and regards the capsizing of a boat as they would the overturning of a cart. The ten thousand things may all be capsizing and turning over at the same time right in from of them and it can’t get at them and affect what’s inside, so where could they go and not be at ease? When you’re betting for tiles in an archery contest, you shoot with skill. When you’re betting for fancy belt buckles, you worry about your aim, and when you’re betting for real gold, you’re a nervous wreck. Your skill is the same in all three cases, but because one prize means more to you than another, you let outside considerations weigh on your mind. They who look too hard on the outside get clumsy on the inside.
This passage reminds me of a metaphor used by the psychotherapist Milton Erickson. If you put a board on the ground, everyone can walk across it with confidence. If you put the same board three hundred feet up in the air, most people would be terrified, even though walking across the board is the same set of physical motions. Erickson is thinking of clients petrified by fear, such as codependents who can’t leave their abusive partner by taking several steps to the door and then several more out it.
Huizi said to Zhuangzi, “Your words are useless!” Zhuangzi replied, “A man has to understand the useless before you can talk to him about the useful. The earth is certainly vast and broad, though a man uses no more of it than the area he puts his feet on. If, however, you were to dig away all the earth from around his feet until you reach the Yellow Springs, then would the man still be able to make use of it?” “No, it would be useless,” said Huizi. “It is obvious, then,” said Zhuangzi, that the useless has its use.”
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 that I can have a word with him?
Asian Philosophy: Midterm Review
So far, we have studied Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism in the class. The midterm will have three types of questions testing your knowledge of the material from the readings and lectures. First, there will be multiple choice questions. Second, there will be fill-in-the-blank questions. Third, there will be short answer questions. The first two types of questions are straight forward. Choose the answer or fill in the blank as best as you can. For the short answer questions, you will be given a list of concepts we have studied (such as the Jain leaky boat, the Upanishads’ ‘Tat Tvam Asi’, the Buddhist metaphor of the monkey mind, etc, in bold below) from which you must select four and write a comprehensive third to a half page explanation for each you select. You should demonstrate that you understand the meaning of the concept, that you can connect it to other material from the class, and that you can apply it to examples from your own experience or outside material (print or video, fictional or nonfictional). If you demonstrate each of these three things and complete the required page length, you will get full points for your answer.
Hinduism (Vedas, Upanishads, Epics & Orthodox Schools)
Hinduism a rich diversity of traditions and schools, Vedas lead to Upanishads that lead to Vedanta, many gods/one god/monism, Brahma vs. Brahman, Six orthodox schools & three unorthodox schools rise in the golden age of Indian thought after the Upanishads, three paths of worship & devotion (Bhakti, Raja & Jnana yoga), Bhakti Shaivism & Vaishnavism, Vishnu as preserver/savior & Shiva as destroyer/transformer, darshana as seeing/being seen, intermediate goal of better rebirth and ultimate goal of moksha/nirvana, additional goals of dharma, kama & artha (discipline, pleasure & comfort), wootz and mathematical concepts of zero, variable & infinite series important to algebra, knowing the self (atmavidya), self vs. no-self (atman & anatman), Vedic passages questioning the gods, Does Indra exist, purchase Indra for modest price, boneless One, frogs like priests, Upanishads (‘sitting down beside’) use Vedas as metaphors about the self & cosmos, Tat Tvam Asi (That Is You), essence mudra, appeal beyond the caste system, beyond knowledge & non-knowledge, becoming as destruction, Jabala’s fig seed & salt water, Ramayana, Mahabharata & Arjuna’s duty, Maya as illusion/trickster/demon, Vedanta schools of Shamkara vs. Ramanuja (monism vs. theism), Vaisheshika school of Kanada & atomism, general/particular/inherence, fire as energy, sound as impermanent, water cycle & inertia, Nyaya school of Gautama, debates & proofs
The Unorthodox Schools of Indian Thought (Charvaka & Jainism)
Charvaka skepticism & materialism, gods, afterlife & all inference as illusion, comparison with Wittgenstein’s ‘facts, not things’, consciousness as fermentation of alcohol, Jainism as relative of Buddhism, two Jain principles of skepticism (non-one-endedness & truth is hypothetical), seven points of view (describable & indescribable), absolute vs. relative truth debate, pot as being/non-being, teaching & discipline in spite of relativism, cycles of the cosmos (kalpas), Tirthankaras, karma as bondage & bad, Jain leaky boat, radical non-violence & vegetarianism
Buddhism (India, Tibet, China & Japan)
Life of the Buddha, the four sights (sick, old, dead, holy), period of austere Jain-like practice, balance over self-hate/annihilation, Buddha vs. Budai the laughing monk, four noble truths, eightfold path, five abilities (wisdom highest), the middle way, impermanence, monkey mind, codependent arising, emptiness as openness/compassion, dueling mudras, meditation practices, Theravada (“Hinayana”) vs. Mahayana, three vows, three ways of being involved in the sangha, popular movement of Mahayana, naga princess story, Buddha nature (from seed to reality), bodhisattvas & vow, superiority to arhats, completion of wisdom sutras, questioning Subhuti to demonstrate understanding transmission, Buddhist logic, dominant causes vs. essences, study, reflection & meditation, Nagarjuna & the Madhyamaka school vs. Yogachara school, the catuskoti
Tibetan culture transformed by Buddhism, Indian sutras & Nagarjuna kept, demons & profane/sacred images, Chinese Zen controversy, celebrity debaters, Book of the Dead, Chinese Han weakening as Buddhism gaining a foothold, Daoism appeal, Chinese concrete vs. Indian abstract, issue with monastery vs. traditional family, Pure Land practice, Shinran & Jodoshinshu, gradual vs. sudden enlightenment, Neo-Confucian use of Buddhist teachings, modern Chinese interpretations, Nishida Kitaro
Zen sitting, unorthodox methods, Buddha holds up a lotus, Bodhidharma vs. Emperor Wu, Hui Neng’s verses, flag, wind & minds moving, Joshu’s dog, Gutei’s finger, Nansen, Joshu & the cat, Joshu’s avoid picking & choosing, compulsive passions are Buddha, tale of old woman burning down the hut, girl in the kimono, samurai & the gates of hell, Basho’s frog
Hinduism (Vedas, Upanishads, Epics & Orthodox Schools)
Hinduism a rich diversity of traditions and schools, Vedas lead to Upanishads that lead to Vedanta, many gods/one god/monism, Brahma vs. Brahman, Six orthodox schools & three unorthodox schools rise in the golden age of Indian thought after the Upanishads, three paths of worship & devotion (Bhakti, Raja & Jnana yoga), Bhakti Shaivism & Vaishnavism, Vishnu as preserver/savior & Shiva as destroyer/transformer, darshana as seeing/being seen, intermediate goal of better rebirth and ultimate goal of moksha/nirvana, additional goals of dharma, kama & artha (discipline, pleasure & comfort), wootz and mathematical concepts of zero, variable & infinite series important to algebra, knowing the self (atmavidya), self vs. no-self (atman & anatman), Vedic passages questioning the gods, Does Indra exist, purchase Indra for modest price, boneless One, frogs like priests, Upanishads (‘sitting down beside’) use Vedas as metaphors about the self & cosmos, Tat Tvam Asi (That Is You), essence mudra, appeal beyond the caste system, beyond knowledge & non-knowledge, becoming as destruction, Jabala’s fig seed & salt water, Ramayana, Mahabharata & Arjuna’s duty, Maya as illusion/trickster/demon, Vedanta schools of Shamkara vs. Ramanuja (monism vs. theism), Vaisheshika school of Kanada & atomism, general/particular/inherence, fire as energy, sound as impermanent, water cycle & inertia, Nyaya school of Gautama, debates & proofs
The Unorthodox Schools of Indian Thought (Charvaka & Jainism)
Charvaka skepticism & materialism, gods, afterlife & all inference as illusion, comparison with Wittgenstein’s ‘facts, not things’, consciousness as fermentation of alcohol, Jainism as relative of Buddhism, two Jain principles of skepticism (non-one-endedness & truth is hypothetical), seven points of view (describable & indescribable), absolute vs. relative truth debate, pot as being/non-being, teaching & discipline in spite of relativism, cycles of the cosmos (kalpas), Tirthankaras, karma as bondage & bad, Jain leaky boat, radical non-violence & vegetarianism
Buddhism (India, Tibet, China & Japan)
Life of the Buddha, the four sights (sick, old, dead, holy), period of austere Jain-like practice, balance over self-hate/annihilation, Buddha vs. Budai the laughing monk, four noble truths, eightfold path, five abilities (wisdom highest), the middle way, impermanence, monkey mind, codependent arising, emptiness as openness/compassion, dueling mudras, meditation practices, Theravada (“Hinayana”) vs. Mahayana, three vows, three ways of being involved in the sangha, popular movement of Mahayana, naga princess story, Buddha nature (from seed to reality), bodhisattvas & vow, superiority to arhats, completion of wisdom sutras, questioning Subhuti to demonstrate understanding transmission, Buddhist logic, dominant causes vs. essences, study, reflection & meditation, Nagarjuna & the Madhyamaka school vs. Yogachara school, the catuskoti
Tibetan culture transformed by Buddhism, Indian sutras & Nagarjuna kept, demons & profane/sacred images, Chinese Zen controversy, celebrity debaters, Book of the Dead, Chinese Han weakening as Buddhism gaining a foothold, Daoism appeal, Chinese concrete vs. Indian abstract, issue with monastery vs. traditional family, Pure Land practice, Shinran & Jodoshinshu, gradual vs. sudden enlightenment, Neo-Confucian use of Buddhist teachings, modern Chinese interpretations, Nishida Kitaro
Zen sitting, unorthodox methods, Buddha holds up a lotus, Bodhidharma vs. Emperor Wu, Hui Neng’s verses, flag, wind & minds moving, Joshu’s dog, Gutei’s finger, Nansen, Joshu & the cat, Joshu’s avoid picking & choosing, compulsive passions are Buddha, tale of old woman burning down the hut, girl in the kimono, samurai & the gates of hell, Basho’s frog
Friday, October 7, 2011
Logic: Chinese Paradox
Logic: Chinese Paradox
In China, we find Daoists, Logicians and Zen monks (Chan in Chinese) showing the skeptical side of logic and human thought that we have already seen in India (Jainism & Buddhism) and Greece (Heraclitus, Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus).
DAOISM: LAOZI & ZHUANGZI
The Dao De Jing (formerly the Tao Te Ching under the old Wade-Giles system from the 1800s) is the book by the first Daoist patriarch Laozi (600 BCE) according to tradition. This book and the book of the second Daoist Patriarch Zhuangzi (370-300 BCE) have many excellent examples of some and some not, paradox and contradiction. We will consider some of these before the paradoxes of the Chinese logicians Hui Shi and Gongsun Long.
Chapter 11 of the Dao is one of my favorites. It tells us that a wheel is only useful because of the hole in the center. The same is true of a jar made of clay, and the space in a room as well as the doors and windows. We naturally think of things as positives, as beings, but non-being, the holes and emptiness, goes hand in hand with the being to make it what it is. This is quite similar to the example of the pot found in Jain and Buddhist logic. Things both are and are not in very specific ways to be what they are. The wheel is both solid and empty at the same time, but not in all of its parts equally. Positive and negative, being and non-being, work together to make things what they are. In a similar way, as we saw with Heraclitus, things must not be, then become what they are, and then stop being what they are to be an individual thing. Being, non-being, becoming, and unbecoming must all happen continuously for a thing to be what it is.
There is a Buddhist koan that says at first we see a thing as a thing, then after practice and contemplation we see the thing as a non-thing (a concept, or illusion), and then after further practice and contemplation we again see the thing as a thing (but also, in this third stage, as also a non-thing, our conception). Hegel, whose logic we will learn later, sees this same three-fold process in every stage of individual thought and history of philosophy. At first, if asked, the wheel is a thing, not a nothing or non-thing. Then, we see the hole when it is pointed out to us. Finally, we can see that the solidity and the emptiness of the wheel are both necessary and essential to the wheel being what it is together.
In the Zhuang Zi there are many excellent passages. There are many parts of the text that are almost identical to fragments of Heraclitus. Both Zhuang Zi and Heraclitus say that things can be good to some and bad to others at the same time, dependent on the perspective of the viewer. Heraclitus says that salt water is poisonous for us to drink, but not for the fish who require it to live and breathe. Heraclitus also says that pigs like to bathe in filth. Zhuang Zi asks us which animal knows what tastes good if each eats something different? He says that birds like to sleep in trees, but humans certainly do not. Both thinkers say that humans are ugly to non-humans. Zhuang Zi says that the legendary beautiful women Lady Mao and Lady Qiang frightened minnows, deer and birds when they walked through the forest. Clearly, human beauty is of no matter to animals who find us frightening and ugly. Another passage asks if words say something or nothing and compares them to the peeps of baby birds. Our words relatively say things, but may mean nothing in a thousand years. This does not prevent them from meaning something powerfully today to many people.
Another of my favorite passages tells us, “A sage too has a this and a that, but his that has a this, and his this has a that.” Speaking of the Confucians and the Moists (two competing schools of Chinese thought at the time the text is being written) it says what one school calls right the other school calls wrong, but if we want to right their wrongs and wrong their rights, the best thing to use is clarity. Notice how similar this is to Jain and Buddhist logic’s conception of attachment to partial viewpoints. It suggests that a sage would see the wrong to a right and the right to a wrong, would see how something said is both meaningful and yet meaningless, and thus have more ability to mean many different things.
Another passage which is important for the two logicians to follow says that among the 10,000 things (the number 10,000 means ‘everything’ in the Chinese tradition, much as we would use the word ‘million’ or ‘billion’ today) there are none that are not big, small, right, wrong, useful and useless. If we consider relativity, any particular thing must be bigger that some other thing and smaller than some other thing. If right and wrong, useful and useless are similarly relative, then the sage should see the back and forth, the some and some not to each of these in considering each individual thing.
THE SCHOOL OF NAMES LOGICIANS: HUI SHI & GONGSUN LONG
Hui Shi (380-305 BCE) is famous for his ten paradoxes which are very similar to those of the ancient Greek thinker Zeno, paradoxes of size, location and motion. Hui Shi appears as a friend and fellow philosopher in the Zhuangzi many times, where he is also called Huizi, ‘Master Hui’. In one passage, while passing the grave of Hui Shi’s grave Zhuangzi laments that he has no one he can talk to anymore. In another, the two are walking together by the Hao river dam when Zhuangzi remarks that the fish love to dart back and forth. Hui Shi replies that he can not know that, because he is not a fish. Zhuangzi replies that Hui Shi is not himself, so how does he know he does not know that? Hui Shi maintains that he can’t know about what fish like, so Zhuangzi points out that Hui Shi asked him, “How do you know that?”, so Hui Shi assumed that he knew it already, and as far as ‘how’, he knows it by standing by the Hao river dam. The two disagree, but they are clearly friends who enjoy arguing together.
Hui Shi’s second paradox says that that which has no thickness cannot be piled up but can be a thousand li (measure of distance) in dimension. He seems to have a line or surface in mind, which is one or two dimensional over any length yet lacking second or third dimensional width.
Hui Shi’s third paradox says that the heavens are as low as the earth and mountains and marshes are on the same level. Indeed, at the horizon the heavens are as low as the earth and mountains must meet the marshland to rise above it as they do.
His fourth paradox says that the sun at noon is the sun setting, and the thing born is the thing dying. The sun does begin setting right at noon, and as soon as something is born it is transforming and moving towards its death, thus constantly dying.
His fifth paradox says that the lesser similarity is that great similarity is different from small similarity, but the greater similarity is that all things are similar and different from one another. Consider a bowl of apples and oranges. All are round, all are fruit, and all are edible, yet it is easy to see that the apples are more similar to each other than the oranges. It is easy, and thus it is lesser, to see that apples are not oranges and oranges are not apples. It is difficult, obscured by this easy judgement and thus greater, to see that no two apples or oranges are alike and, at the same time, all contents of the bowl are alike. It is easier to see the categories of apples and oranges than it is to see that similarity and difference do not stop at the categories they create for us, but go clear beyond them to unite everything in similarity and difference.
When he says one goes to the state of Yueh today and arrives there yesterday, this is a famous puzzle that is quite like the wisdom tales we read in the beginning of the semester. If one crosses the border of Yueh at the stroke of midnight, then one was in Yueh and not in Yueh both today and yesterday, so one could say that one was going there today and arrived yesterday. We can also say that we were going to Yueh today and yesterday, and arrived there today and yesterday, but you can select the parts to say that are most paradoxical. This is very similar to Gongsun Long’s ‘A white horse is not a horse’ argument.
Gongsun Long (325-250 BCE) also appears in the Zhuangzi, where he says:
“When I grew up, I understood the practice of kindness and duty. I united the same and different, separated hard from white, made so the not-so and admissible the inadmissible. I confounded the wits of the hundred schools and exhausted the eloquence of countless speakers. I took myself to have reached the ultimate.”
Gongsun’s writings are now lost, but his famous ‘A White Horse Is Not A Horse’ argument lives on. Many say that this argument is faulty, but if we follow the thinking of the Daoists and Hui Shi we can see that they are quibling, and Gongsun is showing us the two types of ‘is’ we saw earlier in Buddhist Logic and that we will see again with Wittgenstein. Gongsun does not mean that a white horse is not in any way a horse, but that in one particular way “a white horse” is not the same thing as “a horse”. He argues that if one brings a yellow horse, it would not fit the description “a white horse” but it would do fine for the description “a horse”. The two are thus different sets and are not identical though one set is a subset of the other. This means that “a white horse” is and is not “a horse” (in one way “is” and in another way “is not”), and so he can truly say that “a white horse is not a horse”, like Hui Shi saying the parts of the full truth that sound most paradoxical when said side by side.
Consider that your finger is you but also is not you. If we use “is” in terms of strict identity (like Clark Kent is Superman) then your finger is not you because you are much more than a finger. However, if we use “is” to mean a part incorporated within a thing (like a tree is green, or trees are green things) then your finger is you because it is part of you. Bill Clinton famously tried explaining this with his “that depends what your definition of ‘is’ is”, which did not gain him much sympathy. Being an individual human, you are and are not humanity. In fact, you are only one human out of quadrillions so far, so you are not very much of humanity at all, but what are you more than a human?
THE ZEN PATRIARCHS HUI-NENG & JOSHU
Hui-Neng (683-713 CE) became one of the central patriarchs of the Zen Buddhist tradition by outdoing his fellow student in a poetry competition to see who had the superior understanding and would succeed the master. Hui-Neng was illiterate as well as a southerner from Canton who was considered an inferior barbarian by his fellow monks. The head monk, who everyone expected to be the next master wrote:
The body is the Bodhi Tree
The mind is a clear mirror on a stand
Take care to wipe it continuously
Never letting dust cling
Late at night, Hui Neng had a boy read the verse to him and write the following reply:
There is no Bodhi Tree
Nor is there a stand with a mirror
All things are originally empty
Where can the dust cling?
The master called Hui-Neng and said that this verse showed the superior understanding. Consider the similarity of this exchange to chapter 11 of the Dao. The head monk used traditional Buddhist metaphors, but Hui Neng supplied their complimentary meaning.
Joshu (780 CE) is my favorite Chan/Zen thinker. Many of his short quotes became focal koans for study by students of Zen and are featured prominently in the two most famous koan collections of medieval China, The Gateless Gate and The Blue Cliff Record. Here are some of my favorites.
Joshu said to the assembly, “The ultimate way is without difficulty. Just avoid picking and choosing. As soon as there are words spoken, ‘this is picking and choosing’, ‘this is clarity’. This old monk does not abide in clarity. Do you still preserve anything or not?”
A monk asked, “Since you do not abide within clarity, what do you preserve?”
Joshu replied, “I don’t know either.”
The monk asked, “Since you don’t know, why do you say that you do not abide in clarity?”
Joshu said, “It is enough to ask about the matter. Bow and withdraw.”
A monk asked, “The many things return to the one. Where does the one return to?”
Joshu said, When I was in the state of Chou, I made a hempen shirt. It weighted 7 pounds.”
A monk asked, “What is the Buddha’s true experience of reality?”
The master said, “Is there anything else you don’t like?”
A monk asked, “What is that which is spiritual?”
The master said, “A puddle of piss in the Pure Land.”
The monk said, “I ask you to reveal it to me.”
The master said, “Don’t tempt me.”
A monk asked, “What is the fact that I accept responsibility for?”
The master said, “To the ends of time you’ll never single it out.”
A monk asked, “I have just come here and know nothing. What are my duties?”
The master said, “What is your name?”
The monk said, “Hui-han.”
The master said, “A fine ‘knowing nothing’ that is.”
A monk asked, “It’s not yet clear to me, who is the patriarch of this land?”
The master said, “Bodhidharma has come, so here we are all patriarchs.”
The monk said, “What number generation are you?” (What position in the Zen lineage?)
The master said, “I do not fall into any position.”
The monk said, “Where are you?”
The master said, “Inside your ears.”
Doctor Ts’ui asked, “Does an accomplished person go to hell or not?”
The master said, “I entered at the head of the line.”
The doctor asked, “You are an accomplished person. Why do you go to hell?”
The master said, “If I had not gone, how could I have met you?”
A monk asked, “What is the perfect question?”
The master said, “Wrong!”
A monk asked, “What are honest words?”
The master said, “Your mother is ugly.”
A monk asked, “Two mirrors are facing each other. Which is the clearest?”
The master said, “Your eyelids hang over Mount Sumaru.”
A monk said, “I don’t have a special question. Please don’t give a special reply.”
The master said, “How extraordinary.”
The master and an official were walking the the garden and saw a rabbit run away.
The official said, “You are a great and accomplished person. Why did the rabbit run away?”
The master said, “Because I like to kill.”
A monk asked, “What is the unending depth of the deep?”
The master said, “Your questioning me is the unending depth of the deep.”
In China, we find Daoists, Logicians and Zen monks (Chan in Chinese) showing the skeptical side of logic and human thought that we have already seen in India (Jainism & Buddhism) and Greece (Heraclitus, Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus).
DAOISM: LAOZI & ZHUANGZI
The Dao De Jing (formerly the Tao Te Ching under the old Wade-Giles system from the 1800s) is the book by the first Daoist patriarch Laozi (600 BCE) according to tradition. This book and the book of the second Daoist Patriarch Zhuangzi (370-300 BCE) have many excellent examples of some and some not, paradox and contradiction. We will consider some of these before the paradoxes of the Chinese logicians Hui Shi and Gongsun Long.
Chapter 11 of the Dao is one of my favorites. It tells us that a wheel is only useful because of the hole in the center. The same is true of a jar made of clay, and the space in a room as well as the doors and windows. We naturally think of things as positives, as beings, but non-being, the holes and emptiness, goes hand in hand with the being to make it what it is. This is quite similar to the example of the pot found in Jain and Buddhist logic. Things both are and are not in very specific ways to be what they are. The wheel is both solid and empty at the same time, but not in all of its parts equally. Positive and negative, being and non-being, work together to make things what they are. In a similar way, as we saw with Heraclitus, things must not be, then become what they are, and then stop being what they are to be an individual thing. Being, non-being, becoming, and unbecoming must all happen continuously for a thing to be what it is.
There is a Buddhist koan that says at first we see a thing as a thing, then after practice and contemplation we see the thing as a non-thing (a concept, or illusion), and then after further practice and contemplation we again see the thing as a thing (but also, in this third stage, as also a non-thing, our conception). Hegel, whose logic we will learn later, sees this same three-fold process in every stage of individual thought and history of philosophy. At first, if asked, the wheel is a thing, not a nothing or non-thing. Then, we see the hole when it is pointed out to us. Finally, we can see that the solidity and the emptiness of the wheel are both necessary and essential to the wheel being what it is together.
In the Zhuang Zi there are many excellent passages. There are many parts of the text that are almost identical to fragments of Heraclitus. Both Zhuang Zi and Heraclitus say that things can be good to some and bad to others at the same time, dependent on the perspective of the viewer. Heraclitus says that salt water is poisonous for us to drink, but not for the fish who require it to live and breathe. Heraclitus also says that pigs like to bathe in filth. Zhuang Zi asks us which animal knows what tastes good if each eats something different? He says that birds like to sleep in trees, but humans certainly do not. Both thinkers say that humans are ugly to non-humans. Zhuang Zi says that the legendary beautiful women Lady Mao and Lady Qiang frightened minnows, deer and birds when they walked through the forest. Clearly, human beauty is of no matter to animals who find us frightening and ugly. Another passage asks if words say something or nothing and compares them to the peeps of baby birds. Our words relatively say things, but may mean nothing in a thousand years. This does not prevent them from meaning something powerfully today to many people.
Another of my favorite passages tells us, “A sage too has a this and a that, but his that has a this, and his this has a that.” Speaking of the Confucians and the Moists (two competing schools of Chinese thought at the time the text is being written) it says what one school calls right the other school calls wrong, but if we want to right their wrongs and wrong their rights, the best thing to use is clarity. Notice how similar this is to Jain and Buddhist logic’s conception of attachment to partial viewpoints. It suggests that a sage would see the wrong to a right and the right to a wrong, would see how something said is both meaningful and yet meaningless, and thus have more ability to mean many different things.
Another passage which is important for the two logicians to follow says that among the 10,000 things (the number 10,000 means ‘everything’ in the Chinese tradition, much as we would use the word ‘million’ or ‘billion’ today) there are none that are not big, small, right, wrong, useful and useless. If we consider relativity, any particular thing must be bigger that some other thing and smaller than some other thing. If right and wrong, useful and useless are similarly relative, then the sage should see the back and forth, the some and some not to each of these in considering each individual thing.
THE SCHOOL OF NAMES LOGICIANS: HUI SHI & GONGSUN LONG
Hui Shi (380-305 BCE) is famous for his ten paradoxes which are very similar to those of the ancient Greek thinker Zeno, paradoxes of size, location and motion. Hui Shi appears as a friend and fellow philosopher in the Zhuangzi many times, where he is also called Huizi, ‘Master Hui’. In one passage, while passing the grave of Hui Shi’s grave Zhuangzi laments that he has no one he can talk to anymore. In another, the two are walking together by the Hao river dam when Zhuangzi remarks that the fish love to dart back and forth. Hui Shi replies that he can not know that, because he is not a fish. Zhuangzi replies that Hui Shi is not himself, so how does he know he does not know that? Hui Shi maintains that he can’t know about what fish like, so Zhuangzi points out that Hui Shi asked him, “How do you know that?”, so Hui Shi assumed that he knew it already, and as far as ‘how’, he knows it by standing by the Hao river dam. The two disagree, but they are clearly friends who enjoy arguing together.
Hui Shi’s second paradox says that that which has no thickness cannot be piled up but can be a thousand li (measure of distance) in dimension. He seems to have a line or surface in mind, which is one or two dimensional over any length yet lacking second or third dimensional width.
Hui Shi’s third paradox says that the heavens are as low as the earth and mountains and marshes are on the same level. Indeed, at the horizon the heavens are as low as the earth and mountains must meet the marshland to rise above it as they do.
His fourth paradox says that the sun at noon is the sun setting, and the thing born is the thing dying. The sun does begin setting right at noon, and as soon as something is born it is transforming and moving towards its death, thus constantly dying.
His fifth paradox says that the lesser similarity is that great similarity is different from small similarity, but the greater similarity is that all things are similar and different from one another. Consider a bowl of apples and oranges. All are round, all are fruit, and all are edible, yet it is easy to see that the apples are more similar to each other than the oranges. It is easy, and thus it is lesser, to see that apples are not oranges and oranges are not apples. It is difficult, obscured by this easy judgement and thus greater, to see that no two apples or oranges are alike and, at the same time, all contents of the bowl are alike. It is easier to see the categories of apples and oranges than it is to see that similarity and difference do not stop at the categories they create for us, but go clear beyond them to unite everything in similarity and difference.
When he says one goes to the state of Yueh today and arrives there yesterday, this is a famous puzzle that is quite like the wisdom tales we read in the beginning of the semester. If one crosses the border of Yueh at the stroke of midnight, then one was in Yueh and not in Yueh both today and yesterday, so one could say that one was going there today and arrived yesterday. We can also say that we were going to Yueh today and yesterday, and arrived there today and yesterday, but you can select the parts to say that are most paradoxical. This is very similar to Gongsun Long’s ‘A white horse is not a horse’ argument.
Gongsun Long (325-250 BCE) also appears in the Zhuangzi, where he says:
“When I grew up, I understood the practice of kindness and duty. I united the same and different, separated hard from white, made so the not-so and admissible the inadmissible. I confounded the wits of the hundred schools and exhausted the eloquence of countless speakers. I took myself to have reached the ultimate.”
Gongsun’s writings are now lost, but his famous ‘A White Horse Is Not A Horse’ argument lives on. Many say that this argument is faulty, but if we follow the thinking of the Daoists and Hui Shi we can see that they are quibling, and Gongsun is showing us the two types of ‘is’ we saw earlier in Buddhist Logic and that we will see again with Wittgenstein. Gongsun does not mean that a white horse is not in any way a horse, but that in one particular way “a white horse” is not the same thing as “a horse”. He argues that if one brings a yellow horse, it would not fit the description “a white horse” but it would do fine for the description “a horse”. The two are thus different sets and are not identical though one set is a subset of the other. This means that “a white horse” is and is not “a horse” (in one way “is” and in another way “is not”), and so he can truly say that “a white horse is not a horse”, like Hui Shi saying the parts of the full truth that sound most paradoxical when said side by side.
Consider that your finger is you but also is not you. If we use “is” in terms of strict identity (like Clark Kent is Superman) then your finger is not you because you are much more than a finger. However, if we use “is” to mean a part incorporated within a thing (like a tree is green, or trees are green things) then your finger is you because it is part of you. Bill Clinton famously tried explaining this with his “that depends what your definition of ‘is’ is”, which did not gain him much sympathy. Being an individual human, you are and are not humanity. In fact, you are only one human out of quadrillions so far, so you are not very much of humanity at all, but what are you more than a human?
THE ZEN PATRIARCHS HUI-NENG & JOSHU
Hui-Neng (683-713 CE) became one of the central patriarchs of the Zen Buddhist tradition by outdoing his fellow student in a poetry competition to see who had the superior understanding and would succeed the master. Hui-Neng was illiterate as well as a southerner from Canton who was considered an inferior barbarian by his fellow monks. The head monk, who everyone expected to be the next master wrote:
The body is the Bodhi Tree
The mind is a clear mirror on a stand
Take care to wipe it continuously
Never letting dust cling
Late at night, Hui Neng had a boy read the verse to him and write the following reply:
There is no Bodhi Tree
Nor is there a stand with a mirror
All things are originally empty
Where can the dust cling?
The master called Hui-Neng and said that this verse showed the superior understanding. Consider the similarity of this exchange to chapter 11 of the Dao. The head monk used traditional Buddhist metaphors, but Hui Neng supplied their complimentary meaning.
Joshu (780 CE) is my favorite Chan/Zen thinker. Many of his short quotes became focal koans for study by students of Zen and are featured prominently in the two most famous koan collections of medieval China, The Gateless Gate and The Blue Cliff Record. Here are some of my favorites.
Joshu said to the assembly, “The ultimate way is without difficulty. Just avoid picking and choosing. As soon as there are words spoken, ‘this is picking and choosing’, ‘this is clarity’. This old monk does not abide in clarity. Do you still preserve anything or not?”
A monk asked, “Since you do not abide within clarity, what do you preserve?”
Joshu replied, “I don’t know either.”
The monk asked, “Since you don’t know, why do you say that you do not abide in clarity?”
Joshu said, “It is enough to ask about the matter. Bow and withdraw.”
A monk asked, “The many things return to the one. Where does the one return to?”
Joshu said, When I was in the state of Chou, I made a hempen shirt. It weighted 7 pounds.”
A monk asked, “What is the Buddha’s true experience of reality?”
The master said, “Is there anything else you don’t like?”
A monk asked, “What is that which is spiritual?”
The master said, “A puddle of piss in the Pure Land.”
The monk said, “I ask you to reveal it to me.”
The master said, “Don’t tempt me.”
A monk asked, “What is the fact that I accept responsibility for?”
The master said, “To the ends of time you’ll never single it out.”
A monk asked, “I have just come here and know nothing. What are my duties?”
The master said, “What is your name?”
The monk said, “Hui-han.”
The master said, “A fine ‘knowing nothing’ that is.”
A monk asked, “It’s not yet clear to me, who is the patriarch of this land?”
The master said, “Bodhidharma has come, so here we are all patriarchs.”
The monk said, “What number generation are you?” (What position in the Zen lineage?)
The master said, “I do not fall into any position.”
The monk said, “Where are you?”
The master said, “Inside your ears.”
Doctor Ts’ui asked, “Does an accomplished person go to hell or not?”
The master said, “I entered at the head of the line.”
The doctor asked, “You are an accomplished person. Why do you go to hell?”
The master said, “If I had not gone, how could I have met you?”
A monk asked, “What is the perfect question?”
The master said, “Wrong!”
A monk asked, “What are honest words?”
The master said, “Your mother is ugly.”
A monk asked, “Two mirrors are facing each other. Which is the clearest?”
The master said, “Your eyelids hang over Mount Sumaru.”
A monk said, “I don’t have a special question. Please don’t give a special reply.”
The master said, “How extraordinary.”
The master and an official were walking the the garden and saw a rabbit run away.
The official said, “You are a great and accomplished person. Why did the rabbit run away?”
The master said, “Because I like to kill.”
A monk asked, “What is the unending depth of the deep?”
The master said, “Your questioning me is the unending depth of the deep.”
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