The Useless Tree

China Still Not Gaining Soft Power in US

China went large at the recent Book Expo America in New York but, for the most part, American readers did not notice.  Maybe they were turned off by marketing language like this: "provides visually perceptive materials for education in patriotism and safeguarding national interests."  Not quite NYT Bestseller list stuff there.

The book bust is symptomatic of a larger problem for Zhongnanhai: even though the powers-that-be extoll the strategic importance of building Chinese "soft power," there is very little evidence in the US that the PRC is gaining in cultural attractiveness. 

A quick aside here: I am generally skeptical about the efficacy of soft power.  My sense is that Joseph Nye's analysis is not much more than a thinly veiled recycling of "American exceptionalism," and, moreover, insofar as the Sino-US relationship is concerned, the "hard power" dynamics of island dredging in the South China Sea and epic hacking of Office of Personnel Management data are much more significant in shaping American perceptions than are popular cultural flows. But it doesn't matter what I think.  Xi Jinping thinks China needs soft power and, by damn it, he's going to work hard to gin up some Chinese soft power. 

From what I can tell, however, there hasn't been much success, at least as far as the US is concerned.

Quick: what was the last great movie made in the PRC that you saw? Haven't been keeping up with the Tiny Times series?  That's OK, they're pretty bad.  Of course, Cannes regular Jia Zhangke creates marvelous films, but his work is regularly banned in his home country and he has become a symbol of the anxious censorship that disrupts so much creative art in China.  And that's the point: in the realm of popular culture the biggest obstacle to the development of Chinese soft power is the heavy hand of the Chinese government.

Now it might be the case that Chinese popular culture is attractive to some people in some countries.  A (pay walled) smart analysis of soft power reminds us that attractiveness varies from one target audience to another: what North Koreans find alluring might turn off Norwegians.  Seems obvious, but too many discussions of soft power assume that it is a unitary thing that can be easily isolated and measured.  It's really quite variable and vague.  Safe to say, though, that there has yet to be a significant breakthrough for PRC popular culture in the US.  Nothing to match, say, the British Invasion, or Jogo Bonito or even Hello Kitty. 

Much the same can be said about higher education.  Colleges and universities may be the biggest generators of US soft power.  In the 2013-2014 academic year 274,000 PRC students were enrolled in US colleges; only 14,000 Americans did the reverse.  The disproportion here is well beyond population differences, or even differences in domestic higher education enrollments.  For many Chinese, gaining a degree from a foreign university is a coveted goal.  And the US ranks at the top of the most desired locations.  They come, their families pay their way often with no financial aid, even if they are ill prepared.

Of course, not all Chinese students in the US embrace American values.  The experience for some might reinforce their perceptions of deficiencies in American culture and politics, a kind of reverse anti-soft power.  But many are positively influenced, and increasing numbers are quite literally attracted to the US for purposes of education.

The 14,000 or so American students in China (most of whom are there for one year study abroad opportunities as opposed to multiple year degree programs) come away with more positive attitudes toward the PRC.  The good feelings, however, are  generated mostly by personal friendships with Chinese people.  American students are turned off by government censorship and pollution and other facets of life in the PRC.  At my own college, several students turned down post graduate fellowships to China because they did not want to return to crowded, sooty Beijing. Other evidence suggests that American students more generally are losing interest in study abroad programs in China.

Needless to say, the current ideological tightening on PRC campuses will further reduce the attractiveness of Chinese college for American students.

On the language learning front, English is required in Chinese schools from at least the sixth grade onward. Conversely, although Chinese language instruction is gaining ground in American high schools, at the college level enrollments are leveling off.

Confucius Institutes are not going to close the language gap nor improve PRC soft power prospects.  Following the closings of programs at the University of Chicago and Penn State, and the critical report by the AAUP, many American academics are now wary of potential political ramifications of a Confucius Institute.  Those places that do sponsor CIs do so for the money: the PRC covers a good portion of the cost for a basic language program. Thus, the institutes are more a matter of inducement than attractiveness.  And the inducement is now colored by political concern.

Overall, I'm just not seeing it.  There does not seem to be much increase in China's soft power in the US.  Perhaps I'm missing something, and I would welcome evidence to the contrary.

On the other hand, it may be that China is playing a different soft power game than the one suggested by Nye.  William Callahan puts forth a notion of "negative soft power ."  (pay walled) It might be that the key target audience for PRC cultural diplomacy is not people in the US but people in China.  Instead of creating attractive popular cultural and educational products, the more important goal might be to demonstrate how "American values" are an existential threat to China and Chinese culture.  Thus, when US academics criticize Confucius Institutes, the regime can present this to a Chinese audience as just another example of American narrow-mindedness and ingratitude for the altruistic efforts of the wise Party leadership.  The goal, then, is not to increase the attractiveness of Chinese culture in America, but to weaken the attractiveness of American culture in China.

An interesting idea. And it would reinforce my general sense that Chinese soft power is not on the rise in the US.

No Self, No Other, Gish Jen, and Bipolar Disorder

I have ordered my copy of Gish Jen's new book, Tiger Writing, spured on by yesterday's review of it in the NYT.  Here's the gist:

...Jen’s father had been born into a culture whose parenting style explicitly intends the humbling of the individual self in favor of the needs of the broader collective. (Parents engage in short, selective conversation with their children, emphasizing “proper behavior, self-restraint and attunement to others.”) What this “low elaborative” parenting style aims at instead is the creation of an “interdependent self,” defined not by its sense of inner autonomy, but by its sensitivity to the social roles it must play depending on the context in which it finds itself. The scholars of cross-cultural cognition, who reject the universality of Western models of the mind, maintain that this emphasis on social context translates into a measurable divergence in how Easterners and Westerners literally see the physical world.

I sense the Confucian resonances immediately, perhaps because I have here, sitting on my desk, Roger Ames's book, Confucian Role Ethics, a philosophical reflection on the construction and reproduction of interdependent selves.   

My expectation is that the strength of Jen's writing will be its personal anecdote: she is reflecting on the irony that she has become a novelist, a person devoted to the cultivation of autonomous, inwardly defined characters, quite the contrary of interdependent selves.  This suggests that these purported cultural differences are not immutable.  In a single life time a person can, and does, move between a more independent and a more interdependent self.  Indeed, if we think further we may have reason to question the permanence of any sort of self, independent or interdependent.

An example of such malleability popped up in the NYT magazine the same day: Linda Logan's piece on her bipolar disorder. In it, Logan notices that psychiatrists and psychologists have only recently sought to consider how to reconstruct a patient's sense of self during and after acute phases of mental illness.  Her personal experience was very much a sense of loss of self; but treatment tends not to take this into account:

I would try to talk to my doctors about my vanishing self, but they didn’t have much to say on the subject. Instead they focused on whether I could make eye contact or how much expression I showed in my face. They monitored my lithium and cortisol levels; they took an M.R.I. of my head. I received an EKG, was exposed to full-spectrum lighting and kept awake all night for sleep-deprivation therapy. Nurses jotted down their observations; my scribbled lines in art therapy were inspected. Everything was scrutinized — except the transformation of my self and my experience of its loss.

Interestingly, the rebuilding of her self, though she does not frame it in quite these terms, appears to rely upon certain interdependencies: her reconnection to her family; her assumption of social and professional roles. And this would seem to agree with another point by Gish Jen:

She concludes that “we need both the interdependent and the independent self” and calls each one to recognize the claims of the other, while silkily suggesting that interdependent selves, more accustomed to striking balances, may be better equipped at finding the unity in apparent polar opposites, and thus at effecting this reconciliation of East and West.

 I would, however resist classifying interdependence as an "Eastern" or "Asian" value.  I find it alive and well in the "West," where it has always been.  Of course, it is modernity that brings the independent self into the social (and by that I also mean cultural and political and economic) scene.  Americans may like to think of themselves as rugged individualists, but they are, most of them, committed to a variety of social roles and networks and obligations that they would not give up.  Conversely, as is demonstrated by some excellent recent research, Chinese society is becoming more individualized.  The old distinctions of "East" and "West" really do not hold up anymore.

And that brings me to a larger question: why do we assume there is something like a stable, continuous "self"?  We may want to believe that there is something, either deep inside or firmly outside, that defines us in a consistent and quasi-permanent manner, from birth (or at least adulthood) to death. But Zhuangzi is not buying it.

I like the way Hinton translates this piece from chapter two:

No other and no self, no self and no distinctions - that's almost it.  But I don't know what makes it this way.  Something seems to govern, but I can't find the least trace of it.  It acts, nothing could be more apparent, but we never see its form. It has nature, but no form.

非彼無我，非我無所取。是亦近矣，而不知其所為使。若有真宰，而特不得其眹。可行已信，而不見其形，有情而無形

Zhuangzi, in chapter two, is asking us to give up distinctions, and he wants us to go all the way down: why hold on to a firm difference between self and other?  In Way, we are subject to a myriad of unknown forces.  Anything could happen at any moment, and what we thought we were - whether that definition is generated from within or without - can be swept away.  We might lose our families or lose our minds.  Or maybe we will gain something we never could have foreseen.  Whatever the change, we should know that circumstance is impermanent, transformation inevitable.  Way (Dao) - in all of its fullness and complexity -  is not mentioned in the excerpt above, but that is the thing that governs.  It has being (有情) but no form (無形).  We might do well to see our selves in the same manner: formless.

It is interesting that the third and forth characters above - 無我 wuwo- which Hinton translates as "no self," are used to express the Buddhist idea of anatta, "not-self" or "no-self,"  in Chinese.  We have to be careful of anachronisms here: Zhuangzi was written before Buddhism came into China (or at least that is the conventional wisdom).  So, the idea of "no self" here is probably not quite what is meant in Buddhism.  But it may be similar in some ways. It may be warding us away from holding on to the very idea of self, for if we grasp it too tightly, whether we understand it as independent or interdependent, we may well suffer as is shifts and melts away.

If you're self-less, you can simply be yourself.  That, in any event is what Daodejing 22 (Hinton) might be telling us:

Give up self-reflection and you're soon enlightened.

Give up self-definition and you're soon apparent.

Give up self-promotion and you're soon proverbial.

Give up self-esteem and you're soon perennial.

Simply give up contention and soon nothing in all beneath heaven contends with you.

不自見，故明；不自是，故彰；不自伐，故有功；不自矜，故長。夫唯不爭，故天下莫能與之爭

The Dao of Wolverines

Just had to mention this article, which reports that Jon Horford, a forward on the University of Michigan basketball team, is a student of the Daodejing.  Fantastic.  And it seems that the young man has a good grasp on the text:

"You can't say it's about nothing, but that's one of the main things -- just do nothing," he said of the book. "It's about returning yourself to your original nature, how you were before you were affected by everything around you."

That "everything around you" includes all of those social expectations and demands that obstruct our openness to Way.  "Original nature" could be problematic - we should steer clear of essentialist assertions of "human nature" - but the sense of unadulterated spontaneity is quite apt.

I would recommend that Horford next read the classic Cook Ding passage in chapter three of Zhuangzi, which came up in my class today.  That strikes me as the best statement of how an athlete might experience Dao:

And now ‑ now I go at it by spirit and don't look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants.

In other words, he is "in the zone," able to accomplish extraordinary physical feats without thinking, to be totally in the moment and react with utter finesse to the immediate context, rather like cutting to the rim in one explosive movement or making the no-look pass. Indeed, it is that sort of openness that inspires my own identity as a Daoist Yankee fan (and thus, I am not rattled by yesterday's poor showing from the Bronx Bombers....)

So, hooray for Mr. Horford, a man who is opening himself to Dao.  I am, first and foremost, a Badger, but I am happy to cheer for the Wolverines in the Final Four.  Maybe the Michigan cheerleaders can chant this from passage 22 of the DDJ (Hinton):

Give up self-relfection and you're soon enlightened.

Give up self-definition and you're soon apparent.

Give up self-promotion and you're soon proverbial.

Give up self-esteem and you're soon perennial.

Simply give up contention and soon nothing in all beneath heaven contents with you.

Do Nothing Blue -  and there is nothing that will be undone!

Book News: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Dao

Since last I mentioned it here on the blog, my new book - Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Dao: Ancient Chinese Thought in Modern American Life - is starting to take physical shape.  Or maybe it is just virtual shape.  It is now on Amazon; Wiley-Blackwell, the publisher, has filled out its page.  And, most importantly, it has a cover (below). 

I am a bit sad that it will not be out until October.  The details of production - securing permissions, copy-editing, indexing, etc. - are really rather time-consuming and bothersome.  Not nearly as fun as actually writing. 

I now need to work up some talks about it.  That is the odd thing about book writing. By the time the actual volume comes out, I will be turning to a new project, possibly two new projects.  My mind will be elsewhere, but the book will just be coming into the public eye.  It makes for a touch of intellectual schizophrenia. But it's all good.  I'll be in China this summer, Beijing and Shanghai, and hope to do some talks on it then.  Looking forward to feedback and conversations and critqiues.

When Martin Jacques Fools the World

Couldn't resist the title, which came to mind after I read this recent BBC commentary by Martin Jacques: "Is China more legitimate than the West?" (his book is entiteld When China Rules the World) There are many problems with the piece, perhaps the least of which is its main thesis, but let's start there.

Jacques argues:

Now let me shock you: the Chinese state enjoys greater legitimacy than any Western state. How come?

In China's case the source of the state's legitimacy lies entirely outside the history or experience of Western societies.

This was less shocking than simply inane.  What does it mean to say that the PRC state is more legitimate than any in the "West"?  He gives us no definition or basis for understanding what he means by "legitimacy."  Serious considerations of the topic, remind us that legitimacy is not simply popularity.  And it's obvious that Jacques has not really done any sort of systematic analysis to back up his claim.  He's just throwing rather empty rhetoric out there to demonstrate his admiration for the CCP.  

But he gets into some historical trouble with that second assertion, that China is somehow "outside the history or experience of Western societies."  This belies a certain inattentiveness to both Chinese politics, from at least 1911 onwards, as well as international relations more broadly.  As Amitav Acharya (pdf!), among others, argued years ago: "...China uses Westphalian language to stake its  claims to territory and sovereignty."   Imperial China did not operate with the same understanding of sovereignty as the Western powers in the 19th century.  This created big, big problems that weakened the Celestial Empire's capacity to resist imperialist encroachments.  Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st, Chinese states, both the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China have not repeated that mistake.  They have embraced the Westphalian notion of sovereignty as exclusive and extensive political dominion within a given territory, and they have used that concept to define and defend Chinese interests in terms very much within the experience of Western societies. 

And, yes, we all know that Westphalian sovereignty is regularly violated by the Great Powers that say they respect it.  We all learned this in our international relations theory classes, of which, perhaps Jacques needs a bit more.  The point is that the concept of sovereignty, as adapted from the Westphalian idea, matters because it defines a good part of the give and take, and hypocrisy, of contemporary international relations, China included.

But there are bigger problems with Jacques's piece.  Take this assertion:

...China is not primarily a nation-state but a civilisation-state. For the Chinese, what matters is civilisation. For Westerners it is nation. The most important political value in China is the integrity and unity of the civilisation-state.

He's taking an idea - China as "civilization state" - first forwarded by Lucien Pye twenty years ago and misapplying it by putting it in the service of a facile historical exceptionalism.  Yes, Chinese history is different than American or British or French history.  Yes, the idea and practice of "national identity" and "nationalism" arose in the West (theorists differ on where it started and when, but the modern concept is generally understood to have developed outside of China).  But it is rather clear at this point that "nation" is very important to "the Chinese" (is there a singular, monolithic "Chinese" experience?  I don't think so...).  Similar to the embrace of Western notions of sovereignty, many Chinese people, especially poltiical leaders and intellectuals, have worked hard, for over a hundred years, to define and reproduce various understandings of modern national identity in China. 

It is curious that Jacques discounts the importance of nationalism in China.  I don't know him, but his biography suggests that he was trained as an economist, with a focus on Marxist theory.  And that might explain his disregard for nationalism.  Remember: Benedict Anderson, in his classic study, works hard to convince those on the left that Marx was wrong in this regard, that nationalism is, in fact, a powerful political force, not just in Europe but all around the world. 

Jacques really misses the boat here.  Of course, other aspects of his argument have some merit.  China has gained a great deal of economic and political and military power in the past three decades.  And the PRC is pressing against certain international rules and practices that its leaders feel do not serve its interests.  But there is nothing particularly remarkable here.  Other "Western" powers have behaved in similar ways.  Moreover, it is not at all clear that China will "rule the world" any time soon.  It will be more powerful.  It will get its way in some areas where in the past it did not.  But global power is diffuse.  Capital in dynamically mobile. Advantages come and go, and that pattern seems to be accelerating as globalization makes everything - production, information, understanding - move faster and faster and faster.

Assertions of cultural exceptionalism thus seem untenable in a world that fragments and shifts and chages so quickly.  And nostalgia for a world that never existed is simply misplaced, as with this line from Jacques:

The Chinese idea of the state could hardly be more different [than that of the "West]

They do not view it from a narrowly utilitarian standpoint, in terms of what it can deliver, let alone as the devil incarnate in the manner of the American Tea Party.

They see the state as an intimate, or, to be more precise, as a member of the family - the head of the family, in fact. The Chinese regard the family as the template for the state. What's more, they perceive the state not as external to themselves but as an extension or representation of themselves.

This strikes me as the fluffiest form of faux-Confucianism, uninformed by serious engagement with Chinese history or philosophy.  Has he never read Mozi, the inspiration of an early Chinese utilitarianism?  Is he familiar with Han Feizi, who rejects the government-as-family metaphor?  Or the myriad ways in which family interests can clash with, and thus often take precedence over, state interests? How one could ignore the horrible assault on families and family institutions by a tyrannical state during the Great Leap Forward, and by omission assume that the memory of tens of millions of deaths is politically and culturally insignificant, is beyond me. 

So, to answer the question that Jacques poses, no, China is not more legitimate than the West.  Not, at least, until the CCP allows for truth telling about the worst famine of the twentieth century. 

A First Look at Chinese Philosophy

A book review in Asia Times caught my eye.  It considers what appears to be a new edition (2011?) of Arthur Waley's classic text: Three Ways of Thought in Ancient China.  Professor  Dmitry Shlapentokh, a historian from the Indiana University-South Bend, does the honors.  He seems to be a Russian historian with a grounding in European and classical "Western" (i.e. Greece/Rome) studies.  I assume, then, that this review is an early foray by Prof. Shlapentokh into the world of Chinese philosophy.  Welcome!

What I find interesting in this review is the central observation that he makes.  When presented with Confucianism and Daoism and Legalism (which Waley idiosyncratically refers to as "realism"), Shlapentokh immediately, and correctly to my mind, realizes that it is the latter that has had the greatest impact on what we might call "actually existing Chinese statecraft." 

This is notable because, as he rightly points out, Daoism has a certain attractiveness for Westerners, offering a kind of escape from the depredations of modernity, and Confucianism has historically had the best press, continuously asserted as the core of "Chinese culture."  Perhaps his background in Russian history, where a certain "realism" can no doubt be found, has attuned him to the power realities of the historical Chinese state:

It was not Confucianism but "realism" that was the driving force of the Chinese authoritarian/totalitarian states. It had been really a functional philosophy, at least from the author's point of view. The "realists" were unquestionably the ideologists of the totalitarian regime, at least from Waley's perspective. Indeed, the author notes that many of the ideas of the "realists" look like quotations from current newspapers. One should remember that the first edition of Waley's book emerged in 1939, the year of the beginning of World War II, a time when most of Eurasia, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, was controlled by totalitarian regimes.

I would disagree with various of Prof. Shlapentokh's other observations: I am uncomfortable with labeling Daoism as "asocial;" I wouldn't invoke the term "Oriental Despotism" (too much Wittfogel-ian baggage); and I would take issue with how much of a public purpose, beyond the ruler's interest in power, Legalism possesses.  But Shlapentokh has, at the outset, grasped something important: in the real world of Chinese politics, stretching back to pre-Qin times, it is Legalism that has had the greatest practical effect, more so than Daoism or Confucianism.  That's not a bad starting point for thinking about ancient Chinese political thought.

Kissinger is wrong on Confucius

So there I am, waiting for the lady in the bookstore to calculate my savings on my purchase of several volumes, and I notice Henry Kissinger's new book, On Chna, which is not one that I am buying just now, facing me on a shelf.  I pick it up, nose through the contents and see that he has something to say about Confucianism in the first chapter.  I open it up and start reading, and the brief passage lives down to my expectations.

I have not read the book and have only perused a few reviews (here, here, here), and maybe it is unfair to seize on such a small section of the work, but I am going to jump in with a critique.

Here is something he writes:

Confucius preached a hierarchical social creed: the fundamental duty was to "Know thy place."   To its adherents the Confucian order offered the inspiration of service in pursuit of a greater harmony.  Unlike the prophets of monotheistic religions, Confucius preached no teleology of history pointing mankind to personal redemption.  His philosophy sought the redemption of the state through righteous individual behavior.  Oriented toward this world, his thinking affirmed a code of social conduct, not a roadmap to the afterlife.

Most of this is adequate and unremarkable.  It's that first bit, though, that rankles.  Kissinger is overemphasizing the hierarchical nature of Confucian thought, at least in its pre-Qin expression.  Yes, Confucius, in his own time, assumed certain social and political hierarchies; yes, Confucius also urged us to be aware of the social context in which we exist: we have to know what social roles we need to fulfill.  But nowhere does Confucius reduce what is a rather complex understanding of moral dynamics to something so simple as "Know thy place."

We could just as easily say, if we are trading in facile reductions, that the prime directive of Confucianism is: know the place of others around you; know what roles they are working to fulfill and how you might participate, interactively, in their fulfillment of their duties.  How else can we understand Analects 6.29?

Zigong said, if someone could spread bounty abroad among the people and rescue the populace, how would that be? Could that be called humaneness?

The Master said, Why bring humaneness into the discussion?  If you must have a label, call the man a sage.  Even Yao and Shun had trouble doing that much.

The humane person wants standing, and so he helps others to gain standing.  He wants achievement, and so he helps others to achieve.  To know how to proceed on the analogy of what is close at hand [i.e. the people around you] - this can be called the humane approach.

The moral hierarchy of Confucius is more fluid and performative than Kissigner suggests.  Yes, the virtuous should rule.  But that does not mean that those who rule are virtuous (as Kissinger's own experience at the knee of Nixon should remind him).  To be worthy of rule, a person must continually fulfill his or her personal and social duties.  Those who are in positions of power and not living up to those duties should either get right with their actual conduct or get out of office, as Mencius (10.9) tells us :

Emperor Hsuan of Ch'i asked about ministers and Mencius said: "What kind of ministers are you asking about?"

"Is there more than on kind?" asked the emperor.

"Yes," replied Mencius.  "There are ministers from royal families and there are ministers from common families."

"May I ask about ministers from royal families?"

"If a sovereign is making grave mistakes, they admonish him.  If they have to admonish him over and over, and he still refuses to listen - they replace him."

The emperor blanched at this, so Mencius continued: "Why so surprised? You asked, and I wouldn't dare be less than honest and forthright with you."

After he'd recovered his color, the emperor asked about ministers from common families, and Mencius said: "If the sovereign is making mistakes, they admonish him.  If they have to admonish him over and over, and he still refuses to listen - they resign and leave his country behind."

This is an interesting passage because it reveals a certain aristocratic assumption on the part of Mencius (ministers from royal families should have wider political latitude than ministers from common families) as well as a kind of meritocratic mobility (there can be ministers from common families; and unvirtuous sovereigns can  be removed legitimately from opwer).  

Yes, all of this presumes knowing one's place, but it also shows that one's "place" in a social hierarchy is not permanent and unchanging, but, rather, reflects the conscientious daily performance of social obligations.  Confucian hierarchy is not rigid; it is meant to change to empower those who are actually living up to more general ethical norms.

Kissinger seems to miss all this.  Perhaps he is simply rushing through history and philosophy to get to his own role in contemporary Sino-US relations.  Whatever the case, the narrowness of his understanding of Confucianism is, alas, all too familiar.  The error here is to use the term "Confucianism" for what is, in reality, the fusing of Confucian and Legalist thought in the Han dynasty and after.  Kissinger makes reference to this, when he notes that Confucianism was made the "official state philosophy" under the Han.  But no mention is made of the ways in which that fusion changes "Confucianism."  Instead of the less coercive moral exemplarism of the pre-Qin period (save, perhaps, for Xunzi), a stance that relied more upon personal cultivation and less on state-commanded ethics, we get, with the Han, a bureaucratically defined code of laws and regulations, carried over from the Qin, that routinizes and rationalizes "Confucian" precepts, vitiating the subtlety and flexibility of the earlier texts.  This Legalist subversion has haunted Confucianism ever since.

It is rather odd, moreover, that Kissinger fails to see the Legalist rationale behind state-sponsored Confucianism.  He and Hanfeizi are kindred spirits, though Han was much more cautious in his foreign policy.  Kissinger sees the world in realist terms, defined by power and interests.  That's a Legalist orientation, not a Confucian one.  And it is a perspective that has a long and deep tradition in Chinese statecraft, which, especially in its foreign policy, has been more influenced by Legalism than by pre-Qin Confucianism.  

The long and the short of it: it would be much more persuasive if Kissinger explicated the Legalist foundations of Chinese foreign policy, instead of the hackneyed reductionism of "Confucianism" that he offers. 

Philosophy as a Way of Life

Philosophy was featured on the cover of this past Sunday's NYT Book Review: two pieces on new philosophy books.  I was particularly taken with one, Sarah Bakewell's review of Jame Miller's new book: Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche.  Bakewell notes:

If the proof of a pudding is in the eating, and the proof of a rule is in the exceptions, where should we look for the proof of a philosophy?

For Friedrich Nietzsche, the answer was obvious: to test a philosophy, find out if you can live by it. This is “the only critique of a philosophy that is possible and that proves something,” he wrote in 1874. It’s also the form of critique that is generally overlooked in the philosophy faculties of universities. Nietzsche therefore dismissed the professional discipline as irrelevant, a “critique of words by means of other words,” and devoted himself to pursuing an idiosyncratic philosophical quest outside the academy. As for texts, he wrote, “I for one prefer reading Diogenes Laertius” — the popular third-century Epicurean author of a biographical compilation called “Lives of the Eminent Philosophers.” If the proof of philosophy lies in life, then what could be more useful than reading about how the great philosophers have lived?

The notion that philosophy is something that should be lived, or that the value of any particular philosophy will be demonstrated to the extent that it leads one to a good or better life, is a profoundly Chinese idea.  Whether we are talking about Confucius or Mozi or Zhuangzi, it is all about living well or living better.  But, alas, neither Bakewell or Miller make this rather obvious point because so much of philosophical discourse in the US, and I suspect the West generally, is simply ignorant of Chinese texts.  How much more might be made of Miller's topic if some reference to some Chinese thinkers came into the conversation?...

Bakewell goes on:

As Miller notes, Descartes opened up two divergent paths in philosophy. One was the old tradition, in which one seeks a better life and recounts the search in a personal narrative. The other led to the impersonal discipline now prevalent in universities, which in theory can be practiced by anyone. Yet Descartes himself would barely have understood this separation. For him, a philosophical life required both the quest for precision and the intense personal experience that drove one to it.

Again, a contrast with China here is instructive.  When we contemplate the differences between Chinese and Western philosophy the break that Descartes symbolizes is important.  It would seem that there was less of a distinction between the two worlds before Descartes: Westerners were still generally in agreement with Chinese that philosophy should be practiced and inform how life is lived.  The rationalization of philosophy after Descartes, and its detachment from practical concerns, is a significant divergence.  We could say, the "West" doesn't start becoming "Westernized," in a philosophical sense, until after Descartes.   Nietzsche, then, could be seen as making a move not only back toward the West's past, but also toward a Chinese sensibility.  

We could push a bit further: Marxism in China could be seen as an extreme expression of the idea of philosophy for practical living.  In the Maoist years, it ultimately failed the test of whether a better life could be lived through it.  That particular philosophy, practiced in that particular Maoist manner simply made life worse.  The revival of Confucianism, and other philosophies and religions, in China now is an effort to recalibrate philosophy and life in a modern context.  And that modernity matters: it creates material conditions and incentives and behavior that press against the notions of a good life that might be derived from the old books.

However interesting these questions are, Miller's book will not land on the top of my reading list just now.  Instead, I have before another volume (thanks Tracy) that goes to the same sorts of questions: Pierre Hadot's, Philosophy as a Way of Life.  It focuses on Greeks and Romans, not Chinese, but digs a bit deeper and more systematically into the point Miller is making.  Clearly, blog fodder for the future....

On Herbert Fingarette

Chris, at A Ku Indeed!, and Peony, at Tang Dynasty Times, have started a discussion of Herbert Fingarette's marvelous little book, Confucius: The Secular as Sacred. I'll be following along and commenting at both places.  And, if you're interested, here is an old post (July 2005!) of mine on Fingarette.  

Straw Dogs

    A piece in yesterday's NYT Book Review caught my eye, a review of a new book, Black Mass, by John Gray, the British political philosopher.  Gray has popped up here on The Useless Tree twice before, once in a post about inherent human morality and once in a comment by a reader recommending one of his books.   I must admit, however, that I have not yet had the chance to read Gray.  But this most recent review pushes him further up my reading list. 

    He seems a pessimistic man, especially with this subtitle to him most recent book: "Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia."  Here's the reivewer's summary of his argument:

In Gray’s telling, the doctrines of Soviet Communism, Nazi racism, Al Qaeda’s technophile fundamentalism and the Bushian “war on terror” are various forms (however incompatible) of an essentially utopian impulse derived from an Enlightenment notion of progress. That notion is misguided: scientific knowledge and technological power increase over time, but there is no reason to think that politics or morality can progress in the same way. The belief in progress is just a secularized form of Christian theodicy, infecting even those minds that otherwise seem combatively atheistic. Apocalyptic impulses are coded into every ideological genome.

And it gets worse. The coming century, Gray argues, will be one of ecological disaster and resource wars; technological improvements that will be promptly turned into instruments of destruction; and mutually reinforcing tendencies toward anarchy and violent order. Hostages of the crypto-theological belief that human beings are in some sense a uniquely important part of the world, we will continue to try to impose our illusions on it until the world proves we are wrong.

 Sounds rather bleak.  The Taoists out there may be picking up on some resonances with the Tao Te Ching here (the idea of human progress as folly...).  And you would be right.  Gray makes an explicitly Taoist move:

“In ancient Chinese rituals,” Gray writes, “straw dogs were used as offerings to the gods. During the ritual they were treated with the utmost reverence. When it was over and they were no longer needed they were trampled on and tossed aside.” That is our probable fate. He quotes Laotzu: “Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs.” If we don’t wipe ourselves out first, the cosmos may do it for us. 

     I'm not sure if Taoism would necessarily come down as pessimistically as Gray does, but it is refreshing to see a accomplished Western philosopher bringing some ancient Chinese thought into the conversation.  Indeed, his previous book is titled Straw Dogs and, as my earlier commenter, the estimable Zoomzan, pointed out, is loaded with Taoist references.  Here is Zoomzan's distillation:

One key theme of this book is that there is no fundamental difference between humans and animals, that all artifices (technology, politics, economics) merely enable humans' rapacious nature. While artifices accumulate, true wisdom cannot be passed on. Ignorance of this fact produces the various religious and secular myths of progress. While the Christian myth left salvation in the murky water of theology, secular quests for social progress lead to unpredented catastrophes. John Gray suggests that we shed the illusion that we can somehow master our future, and instead take our cues from animals, who know how to live better than us.

We cannot contain our current proliferation of artifices (genetic engineering, nuclear weaponry), because the world consists of many warring nations. All advances in artifices will fall into the hands of criminal gangs, corporate interests, and secretive government programs. Neither can we, as a whole, check our continuing exploitation of nature - because humans are by nature rapacious. Therefore, the only plausible end in our engagement with nature is a Malthusian backlash, where nature rebalances herself through climate change.

John Gray is critical of all secular traditions, including neoconservatism, neoliberalism, capitalism, fascism, socialism, communism, interventionism, humanism, atheism. He also criticises many religious traditions, except Taoism. It appears that many Amazon reviewers, as well as literary critics, don't get the Taoist references. Nevertheless, this book has received high praises from many critics.

 Maybe it's time to get our Taoism on....