Perversely, this blog is not accessible through normal channels in China because of a general firewall that keeps out WordPress, Typepad, and other blog providers’ sites. But if you know someone in the PRC who is or might be interested in following the blog, send them this information: the blog can be accessed at Continue reading →
Author Archives: Manyul Im
Quick Technical Note about Commenting
There are two ways to comment in response to a post. You can jump directly to the ‘Submit Comment’ box and use it. That will result in a “primary” comment. The other way to comment is to respond to an existing comment by clicking ‘Reply’ just below the comment. That will result in a bullet-point, nested comment (the nests are enabled five levels deep). For example, see my comment here. Using the ‘Reply’ comments allows for sub-discussions and cuts down on some of the need to scroll up and down the comment papyrus.
Welcome to the Group Blog!
Manyul Im’s Chinese Philosophy Blog has been phased out (though still available for archived reference). Most of the posts and comments from that blog have been imported here to Warp, Weft, and Way. As you can see, much of the appearance of the blog has also been preserved. Click on the Home tab to join the new discussion!
I’m personally very pleased with the group of scholars who have come aboard to contribute their thoughts and to stimulate discussion. Please feel as welcome here to join in the conversation — in the warp and weft of discussion, if you will — as you felt at the old blog.
New SEP Entry on Neo-Taoism (xuanxue)
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “Neo-Taoism”, by Alan Chan (at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, formerly of National University of Singapore’s philosophy deparment), just became available on October 1. From He Yan and Wang Bi to Guo Xiang, everything you wanted to know about post-Han Daoism, encyclopedically considered. Here’s a teaser:
Both He Yan and Wang Bi were known for their expertise in the Yijing. Both were deeply interested in the Laozi. The fifth-century work Shishuo xinyu (New Accounts of Tales of the World), which is indispensable to understanding early medieval Chinese literati culture, relates that He Yan was working on or had just completed a commentary to the Laozi, but when he saw Wang Bi’s Laozi commentary, he recognized the superiority of the latter and reworked his own into two essays on the Dao and “Virtue” (de) instead (4.7 and 4.10). Wang Bi’s Laozi and Yijing commentaries occupied a privileged place in the formal xuanxue curriculum later, and arguably they remain the most important philosophical treatment of the two classics today. However, it should be noted that both He Yan and Wang Bi wrote on the Confucian Lunyu as well. Through their extant writings, we gain a good view of the central concerns of Neo-Daoist philosophy. Continue reading →
Hansen's Tao Te Ching
A little blogging while I’m running around and setting up the transition to the group blog…
Chad Hansen’s translation of the Daodejing is available now. I happened to see it at the Yale Book Store, did a double-take, and snatched it up. It has a kind of boutique feel to it, literally — the hardcover has an elegant silky-cloth finish with an embossed 道 on the front; the paper quality seems expensive; there are myriad glossy photos and art reproductions throughout. This attention to reader aesthetic experience suggests that the volume is not primarily meant for scholarly reference, most scholars being more utilitarian about the print quality of their reading material. On the other hand, what translation of the Daodejing after Legge’s really targets an academic audience? Nonetheless, I’m always a sucker for translations of the DDJ by scholars that I like.
The translation differs from what I remember of the one he had on line for a while (that page is no longer available from Hansen’s website — why?!). It’s more elegant, I think, but of course remains faithful to Hansen’s guidance-dao/performance-dao, non-mystical interpretation. Since chapter 1 is usually how people tend to judge translations of the DDJ, here is Hansen’s version, including his titular heading for it:
DAOS, NAMES, AND PUZZLES
Ways can be guided; they are not fixed ways.
Names can be named; they are not fixed names.
“Absence” names the cosmic horizon,
“Presence” names the mother of 10,000 natural kinds.
Fixing on “absence” is to want to view enigmas.
Fixing on “presence” is to want to view phenomena.
These two, emerging together, we name differently.
Conceiving of them as being one: call that “fathomless”.
Calling it “fathomless” is still not to fathom it.
…the door to a cluster of puzzles.
Ivanhoe's Lu-Wang School Translation Reviewed
Reviewed by friend of the blog, Justin Tiwald, at NDPR: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=17606
It’s good to see updated translation of Wang Yangming and Lu Xiangshan’s Neoconfucianism. What else would be nice to have in English?
Transition to Group Blog in the Works
I’m working on the transformation of things. Thanks for being patient. I may actually blog before the transformation occurs; we’ll see. I’ll take more suggestions here for the name of the new blog, if something strikes your fancy. That’s still up in the air. Names that are named are not constant names…
More Blogging to Come…
My apologies for the long lapse in blogging. As it turns out, I can’t simply sit reverently facing South in order to direct an academic program. I will begin blogging again in earnest next week.
Also, in the near future I would like to turn this blog more formally into a group endeavor, with an appropriately more general blog name, and will be seeking a willing and able cadre of co-authors for that purpose. I will make the effort to contact some people I have in mind, but if you are interested and feel qualified, I invite you to send me a message via email.
Agency Versus Freedom
Just wanted to share a snippet from a book I just read, Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. It’s an excellent book, very readable, that is part social theory and part personal history of someone who left philosophy, as a profession, but kept it with him into his career as a motorcycle mechanic. The primary thrust in the book is to rethink the partitioning off of manual labor as a non-thinking, non-intelligent activity and at the same time to rethink the social engineering that has taken place in the past century of turning labor in general, whether white or blue collar, into something that is divorced from types of activity that contribute to human excellence. You might say it’s a book against the trends in contemporary life that promote both mindlessness and alienation from the “mechanism” of the world. The book is written with style and without any pretentiousness. Great reading; I finished the entire book on a 5 hour flight.
Apropos this blog, I thought there was some excellent resonance in the book with the “skill-mastery” portions of the Zhuangzi, particularly in the ways that Crawford talks about how “freedom” and “autonomy” have been co-opted by the consumer ethic that has taken over our lives. Here’s a bit of it:
…there is a whole ideology of choice and freedom and autonomy, and that if one pays due attention, these ideals start to seem less like a bubbling up of the unfettered Self and more like something that is urged upon us. This becomes most clear in advertising, where Choice and Freedom and A World Without Limits and Master the Possibilities and all the other heady existentialist slogans of the consumerist Self are invoked with such repetitive urgency that they come to resemble a disciplinary system. Somehow, self-realization and freedom always entail buying something new, never conserving something old.
Thinking about manual engagement seems to require nothing less than that we consider what a human being is. That is, we are led to consider how the specifically human manner of being is lit up, as it were, by man’s interaction with his world through his hands. For this a new sort of anthropology is called for, one that is adequate to our experience of agency. Such an account might illuminate the appeal of manual work in a way that is neither romantic nor nostalgic, but rather simply gives credit to the practice of building things, fixing things, and routinely tending to things, as an element of human flourishing. (pp. 63-4)
Journal Survey
Andrew Cullison of SUNY Fredonia has set up a survey “…for philosophers to collectively gather useful information about philosophy journals,” here. I’ve advised him to add the main Chinese and comparative philosophy journals, in addition to Dao (which was the only one of them on a prior journals wiki). So, fairly soon, you’ll see Dao, Philosophy East and West, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, and Asian Philosophy. The survey is easy and the more of us who provide feedback, the better the information will be. I would urge anyone here who’s had experience with any of those journals to go over and participate.
