Author Archives: Manyul Im

University of Bridgeport

Per Annum

Has it really been one year for the blog? Is it too narcissistic to note, or to celebrate, this? Okay, I’ll be brief. 42,678 hits later (from the US to the Ukraine), here are a few observations, numbers, and comments. Feel free to comment as well (be gentle).

Just a couple of personal favorites:

Discussions generated by these posts:

Gentlemen Prefer Bronze
Little Fish, Little Fish, Swimming in the Water

I liked these discussions the most because I think I learned the most from them. They seem like great models for academic blogging—tight, but with lots of freedom to try interpretations, offer proposals, and get quick and multifarious feedback from casually cordial colleagues (alliteration unintended), in a nice long string of conversation(s) over time. By the way, there is a resurfacing of the Little Fish discussion just up, over at Tang Dynasty Times (Peony’s blog), with some comments about Daodejing 60 from well-published translator, Red Pine (aka Bill Porter).

Discussant:
I want to spread the love around, but one participant deserves special mention, Bill Haines (surprise!), for reasons that should be apparent to anyone who has followed the blog. You can thank the adoring crowd, Bill, and all your handlers, but only until the music starts…

Just a few numbers from the WordPress stat compiler:

These were the top ten posts in numbers of hits:

Summer Project: Chinese Philosophy M.A. 1,658
Little Fish, Little Fish, Swimming in th 920
Question Board 828
APA Newsletter on the State of the Field 670
Shameless Self-Promotion (no longer up) 595
Value of Family in Confucianism 561
Analogical Reasoning — not just ordinar 559
Confucius and Aristotle – book review 536
Shamelessly Brief Book Reviews (no longer up) 504
Wuwei (無為) – What does it mean? 465

I’m not sure what these numbers suggest. The one thing I’m pretty confident of is that some of the “profession” related posts have a lot of hits via Brian Leiter’s Leiterreports blog, which is the mother of all philosophy blogs (Get something linked on that and you’re instantly in the top 10 of WordPress’s “Growing Blogs” list for that day; seriously, it happened twice for this blog). I guess the other thing this tells me is that I should really finish setting up the graduate study information page that I’ve been putting off for the past half year (It’s on my list of New Year resolutions). Also, for those who haven’t been hep to the blog, the two “Shameless…” pages were decommissioned recently for lack of content activity–people just liked to click on them I think because they had catchy page names.

Well, enough belly-button staring for me now; I’ll have a new substantive post up soon. My humble thanks to you all for lurking about and joining in now and then!

Happy Gregorian New Year!

Slightly belated, but not too bad. I’ve been a bit incapacitated for blogging by the laptop disaster with which my 3 year old daughter ushered in the new year. So, things will be slow for the next few weeks. My desktop is in the attic office, which has a nice view of the snow-covered golf course, but it is not as convenient to be up here for frequent blog checking.

Anyway, here’s something I’ve been wondering about in passing (very randomly), but I’ll throw it out there for comments or explanations: The current (and every previous) Dalai Lama is the reincarnation of “the Buddha of Compassion.” That means he is Avalokiteshvara, or Chenrezig in Tibetan. There is of course the curious historical transformation in gender that Avalokiteshvara underwent in China, where he–Guanyin–gradually became a feminine deity. So, the Buddha of Compassion in China is the feminine Bodhisattva, Guanyin. How do Tibetan Buddhists who are situated within the Chinese world, then regard the Dalai Lama, with respect to this identity? A different question: how do Chinese Buddhists reconcile the history of Indian Buddhism and Avalokiteshvara’s place in it, with the identity of Guanyin? There’s probably more than one “Chinese Buddhist” answer to the latter, but I don’t know enough to say.

Zhuangzi: Big and Useless — and Not So Good at Catching Rats

by Eric Schwitzgebel (guest blogger)

[Cross-posted at The Splintered Mind]

Okay, I’ve written about this before; but, to my enduring amazement, not everyone agrees with me. The orthodox interpretation of Zhuangzi puts skillful activity near the center of Zhuangzi’s value system. (The orthodoxy here includes Graham, Ivanhoe, Roth, and many others, including Velleman in a recent article I objected to in another connection.)

Here is one reason to be suspicious of this orthdoxy: Examples of skillful activity are rare in the Inner Chapters, the authentic core of Zhuangzi’s book. And the one place in the Inner Chapters where Zhuangzi does indisputably praise skillful activity is in an oddly truncated chapter, with a title and message (“caring for life”) suggestive of the early, immature Zhuangzi (if one follows Graham in seeing Zhuangzi as originally a Yangist). Even the term “wu wei”, often stressed in skill-based interpretations as indicating a kind of spontaneous responsiveness, only appears three times in the Inner Chapters, and never in a way that indisputably means anything other than literally “doing nothing”.

Zhuangzi writes:

Maybe you’ve never seen a wildcat or a weasel. It crouches down and hides, watching for something to come along. It leaps and races east and west, not hesitating to go high or low — untill it falls into the trap and dies in the net. Then again there’s the yak, big as a cloud covering the sky. It certainly knows how to be big, though it doesn’t know how to catch rats (Watson trans., Complete, p. 35).

On the one hand, we have the skill of the weasel, which Zhuangzi does not seem to be urging us to imitate; and on the other hand we have the yak who knows how to… how to do what? How to be big! It has no useful skills — it cannot carve oxen, guide a boat, or carve a wheel — and in this respect, Zhuangzi says it is like the “big and useless” trees that repeatedly occur in the text, earning Zhuangzi’s praise. Zhuangzi continues:

Now you have this big tree and you’re distressed because it’s useless. Why don’t you plant it in Not-Even-Anything Village, or the field of Broad-and-Boundless, relax and do nothing by its side, or lie down for a free and easy sleep under it? (ibid.)

That is the core of Zhuangzi, I submit — not the skillful activity of craftsmen, but lazy, lounging bigness!

Where else does Zhuangzi talk about skill in the Inner Chapters? He describes the skill of a famous lute player, a music master, and Huizi the logician as “close to perfection”, yet he calls the lute-playing “injury” and he says these three “ended in the foolishness of ‘hard’ and ‘white’ [i.e., meaningless logical distinctions]” (p. 41-42). Also: “When men get together to pit their strength in games of skill, they start off in a light and friendly mood, but usually end up in a dark and angry one, and if they go on too long they start resorting to various underhanded tricks” (p. 60-61). He repeatedly praises amputees and “cripples” who appear to have no special skills. Although he praises abilities such as floating on the wind (p. 32) and entering water without getting wet (p. 77), these appear to be magical powers rather than perfections of skill, along the lines of having “skin like ice or snow” and being impervious to heat (p. 33); and its unclear the extent to which he seriously believes in such abilities.

How did the orthodox view arise, then? I suspect it’s mostly due to overemphasizing the dubious Outer and Mixed Chapters and conflating Zhuangzi’s view with that of the more famous “Daoist” Laozi. Since this happened early in the interpretive tradition, it has the additional force of inertia.

Do Chinese Philosophers Think Tilted Coins Look Elliptical?

by Eric Schwitzgebel (guest blogger)

[Cross posted at The Splintered Mind]

In my 2006 essay “Do Things Look Flat?“, I examine some of the cultural history of the opinion that visual appearances involve what I call “projective distortions” — the opinion, that is, that tilted coins look elliptical, rows of streetlights look like they shrink into the distance, etc. I conjecture that our inclination to say such things is due to overanalogizing visual experience to flat, projective media like paintings and photographs. In support of this conjecture, I contrast the contemporary and early modern periods (in the West) with ancient Greece and introspective psychology circa 1900. In the first two cultures, one finds both a tendency to compare visual experience to pictures and a tendency to describe visual experience as projectively distorted. In the latter two cultures, one finds little of either, despite plenty of talk about visual appearances in general.

I didn’t do a systematic search of classical Chinese philosophy, which I love but which has less epistemology of perception, but I did find one relevant passage:

If you look down on a herd of cows from the top of a hill, they will look no bigger than sheep, and yet no one hoping to find sheep is likely to run down the hill after them. It is simply that the distance obscures their actual size. If you look up at a forest from the foot of a hill, the biggest trees appear no taller than chopsticks, and yet no one hoping to find chopsticks is likely to go picking among them. It is simply that the height obscures their actual dimensions (Xunzi ch. 21; Basic Writings, Watson trans., p. 134)

Though I can recall no ancient Chinese comparisons of visual experience and painting, both Xunzi and Zhuangzi compare the mind to a pan of water which can reflect things accurately or inaccurately, an analogy that seems related (Xunzi ibid. p. 131, ch. 25, Knoblock trans. 1999, p. 799; Zhuangzi, Watson trans., Complete Works, p. 97). In medieval China, which I know much less about, I noticed Wang Yangming saying such a comparison was commonplace (Instructions for Practical Living, Chan trans., p. 45).

So my question is, for those of you who know more Chinese philosophy than I, are there other passages I should be looking at — either on perspectival shape or size distortion or on analogies for visual experience? I’m revising the essay for a book chapter and I’d like to expand my discussion to China if I can find enough material. Any help would be much appreciated!

(I also wouldn’t mind more help on Greek passages, too, if anyone has the inclination. Some of the more obvious passages are Plato’s discussion of painters in the Republic and Sophist, Aristotle’s discussion of sensory experience as like impressions in wax, Sextus’s lists of sensory distortions in experience and his discussions of wax impressions, Epicurus’s discussions of the transmission of images, discussions of the sun as looking “one foot wide”, and Euclid’s and Ptolemy’s optics.)

What Would Zhuangzi Do?

Over on Facebook, Hagop Sarkissian dropped the question: WWZZD (what would Zhuangzi do)? That of course made me think, first, “He would do nothing” but I immediately realized that I was confusing WWZZD with WWLZD. My second thought, and the one I trust more, was that WWZZD isn’t really formulated correctly. It should be HWZZDT–“How would Zhuangzi do this (or that, depending on perspective)?” As far as I can see, Zhuangzi isn’t concerned so much with aims as much as methods. Does anyone read Zhuangzi differently? ‘Zhuangzi’ here refers to the nonhistorical persona that haunts the Zhuangzi text; maybe there’s more than one such specter.

(HWZZDT seems to roll off the tongue so much better than HWCTDT, doesn’t it?)

Reading Group on Chris Panza's Blog

Participation alert: Chris (of A Ku Indeed! ) and Peony (of Tang Dynasty Times) are running a reading group over on Chris’s blog and Peony’s (simultaneously) on Daniel Bell’s book East Meets West. Here is the link to their announcement: http://oolongiv.wordpress.com/2008/11/25/reading-group-east-meets-west/. Sounds great! I’ll have to squeeze in Bell’s book somewhere in my end of term grading festivities. (Actually, their posts and comment strings will run gradually, chapter by chapter, so that should make joining in relatively easy.)

Mohism and Maximizing

In thinking about Mohism lately, I’ve wondered to myself if the fact that maximizing benefit (li 利) is not explicitly a part of Mozi’s doctrines makes a difference. Though it is clear that benefit is supposed to be the primary consideration in deciding what to do or what policies to adopt, there isn’t some explicit accompanying doctrine of producing the overall best state of affairs construed in terms benefit, as there is in classcial utilitarianism for example. This could divide into at least two questions: (A) Can it simply be assumed that if someone thinks beneficial consequences should be the primary motive for acting, or rationale for policy, that she also thinks maximizing such consequences should be the primary motive? (B) If maximizing consequences weren’t part of the Mohist view, would it still count as a form of consequentialism?

Obviously, in part I’m interested (in question B) because it makes a difference for how to categorize Mohism in the spectrum of types of ethical theory. But I’m also interested (via an answer to A) in whether there might plausibly be a systematic, primary role for consequence-reasoning that isn’t committed to some kind of maximizing rationality.

Any thoughts?

Bootstrapping Problem in Mencius

There’s a very problematic passage–I’ve always thought–in Mencius 6A: 15:

Gongduzi asked: Though equally human, but some are great men (daren 大人) and some are petty men (xiaoren 小人). Why is this?

Mencius replied: Following their greater parts (dati 大體) makes them great men; following their lesser parts (xiaoti 小體) makes them petty men.

Gongduzi asked: But being equally human, how is it that some follow their greater parts and some follow their lesser parts?

Mencius replied: The organs of the ears and eyes do not think and are wrapped up in things (bi yu wu 蔽於物). When there is interaction among things, [those organs] are only led around. The organ of the heart thinks and because it thinks, it can attain (de 得) things [i.e. control and/or transform things]; if something does not think, it cannot attain things. This is what is given to us by Heaven. First, take a stand (li hu qi da zhe 立乎其大者) on the greater; then the lesser is unable to take over. That is all there is to being a great man.

Mencius doesn’t really answer Gongduzi’s question to my satisfaction because it seems clear to me that Gongduzi can just repeat the question in this form: “But being equally human, how is it that some ‘take a stand’ on their greater parts while others do not?”

I call this a bootstrapping problem because it seems to require some kind of “super-agency” in which a person has to take a stand on the better part of herself without being able to rely on that part to guide her in taking that stand. Or so I’ve argued in “Wielding Virtue in the Mengzi” (in Conceptions of Virtue East and West, Kim-chong Chong (ed.), 2006).

Doesn’t this seem like a problem for Mencius? Is there a solution?

Taxonomic Stimulus

David Chalmers and David Bourget are working on a taxonomy of philosophy:

“…part of the project is a classification scheme, under which any paper in philosophy can be classified in up to three areas. …Philosophy is divided up into five clusters (Metaphysics and Epistemology, Value Theory, Science Logic and Mathematics, History of Western Philosophy, Other Philosophical Traditions).  Each cluster is divided into six or more fields (in M&E, for example, these are Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Action, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Religion).  Each field is divided into 5-10 areas (in Philosophy of Mind, for example, these are Consciousness, Intentionality, Perception, Metaphysics of Mind, Epistemology of Mind, Mental States and Processes, and Misc).”

After more detailed explanation, the Davids state:

“At the moment, the various areas of M&E (apart from philosophy of religion) are developed to a fair degree of detail, though there is still work to be done.  Value Theory and Science/Logic/Mathematics are more patchy.  Some fields in these clusters (such as Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality, Philosophy of Education, and Philosophy of Social Sciences) are hardly subdivided at all, while other areas (such as General Philosophy of Science, Social and Political Philosophy, and many other areas in these clusters) are extremely patchy and incomplete.  As for History of Philosophy, we’ve decided not to subdivide this for now beyond a few obvious groupings, and then categories for a few individuals in each period (these were settled by mechanically choosing those with more than n entries with their name in the title in the database, followed by a small amount of tweaking), although we may well subdivide these further eventually.  And we haven’t made any attempt to subdivide the Other Philosophical Traditions.” (emphasis added)

Anyone interested in attempting to subdivide Chinese philosophy so that papers on it can be further classified? Have at!

Maybe at the end of the discussion, if we’ve been careful to follow their stipulations, we could send it off to Chalmers and Bourget for inclusion.