Shunya's Notes

Confucius and Modern China

An interesting article on China's emerging political culture by Daniel A. Bell, professor of ethics and political philosophy at Tsinghua University, Beijing. A communitarian at heart, he has written perceptively about the so-called Asian values and against the universal pretensions of western liberalism. He is also the author of China's New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society.

Four decades ago, it would have been suicidal to say a good word about Confucius in Beijing. Confucius was the reactionary enemy, and all Chinese were encouraged to struggle against him. Chairman Mao himself was photographed on the cover of a revolutionary newspaper that announced the desecration of Confucius’s grave in Qufu. My own university was a hotbed of extreme leftism.

How times have changed. Today, the Chinese Communist Party approves a film about Confucius starring the handsome leading man Chow Yun-Fat. The master is depicted as an astute military commander and teacher of humane and progressive values, with a soft spot for female beauty. What does this say about China’s political future? Confucius bombed at the box office, leading many to think that the revival of Confucianism will go the same way as the anti-Confucius campaigns in the Cultural Revolution.

But perhaps it’s just a bad movie. Confucius received the kiss of death when it went head-to-head against the blockbuster Avatar. A vote for Confucius was seen as a vote against the heroic blue creatures from outer space. In the long term, however, Confucian revivalists may be on the right side of history.

More here. To get a better measure of the man, check out this 2008 video interview (17 minutes; the interviewer is a tad painful!).

UPDATE: Here are two more articles of related interest. One by Mark Lilla, One Set of Shoulders: China's Hidden Revolution, and another by Perry Link, Waiting for WikiLeaks: Beijing's Seven Secrets. Beneath Link's article, read the comments by Jack Cameron (esp his second one), which I suspect Bell might agree with strongly. Also interesting is Stanford Encyclopedia's entry on Communitarianism, written by Bell.

On Power, Human Nature, Justice

I saw this 1971 exchange between Chomsky and Foucault some years ago (I especially resonate with the latter's take on these topics). Part 1 is below, here is Part 2. I wish the entire exchange was available online but it's not—here is a transcript (thanks, Louise).

The Lost Art of Democratic Debate

The inimitable Michael Sandel's TED talk, a short digest of his brilliant Harvard course that I heartily recommend for one and all.

Between Heaven and Earth

A most excellent article by Ronald Aronson on the false choice between god and science: 

It is as subjects, indeed social subjects, that we know, we decide on truth, and we judge right and wrong. As social subjects we decide on the rules of “communicative action” in which these activities take place. And these rules include the existence of such a thing as objective truth, and the active belief that people are capable of arriving at it. If we are truth-seeking animals, we might of course ask how we got that way, but we must also ask what our truths are and what are the rules for arriving there.

This of course entails giving up any pretense to absolute knowledge. It entails allowing oneself to enter into discussion, to submit what one says to the judgment of others, to be proven wrong by them, to be seen as fallible, and thus to realise that any particular piece of knowledge is always tentative, always demanding verification. This in turn implies a commitment to a communicative process in which we are always in dialogue with others, and in which they are always looking over our shoulders and commenting on what we claim to be true.

Truth shifts historically and is framed according to one’s disciplinary standpoint. It is never absolute but is objective. It is never raised above humans, but always takes place with, for, and about others. This is even, or especially, true of science. Its knowledge is necessarily provisional, it can be challenged and even overturned – which makes it dramatically different from the supposed “absolute knowledge” conferred by religious faith. But this also places science within a larger human project, rather than supporting any scientific claim to ultimacy.

Rorty on Plato and Freud

Richard Rorty's review of Jonathan Lear's Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life. It's a decade old but shows no signs of aging:

Philosophy and psychoanalysis are related as fusion is to fission. Philosophers seek commonalities, psychoanalysts idiosyncrasies. Ever since Plato, philosophers have been trying to answer the question ''What is a good life for a human being?'' This question presupposes that one size fits all -- that we all have the same built-in mechanism (''reason,'' ''human nature'') that steers us toward the same goal. We are all here for the same purpose. Philosophy will help us understand what that purpose is. It will do so by turning us away from appearance toward reality -- from the way the world looks from some merely subjective point of view to the way it objectively is, and thus from what merely seems good to what truly is good.

Jonathan Lear, who is both a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and a psychoanalyst, started out as a commentator on Plato and Aristotle, but soon became fascinated by Freud. Freud tells us that each of us is steered through life by a different mechanism, a unique set of quirky, largely unconscious fantasies. These fantasies were installed in us early on as a result of the interaction of our genes with our infantile experiences, our family circumstances and the like. They determine what each of us will count as a happy, fulfilling life.

Lear has spent much of his intellectual career trying to cope with the tension between Plato and Aristotle's claim that some goals are natural to human beings and Freud's doubt that we can rank the lives of the foot fetishist, the gold-hoarding miser, the self-flagellating penitent, the pedophile, the Socratic lover of wisdom, the Romantic poet and the would-be ruler of the world in terms of greater or less naturalness. Freud can of course grant that society must step in to prevent the realization of some of these goals (the pedophile's and the would-be ruler's, for example). But apart from social utility, there is little room in Freud's thinking for an objective, neutral, fantasy-free point of view from which the pedophile's, the penitent's and the philosopher's goals can be hierarchically ordered.

I also enjoyed his 1995 interview, "Toward a Post-Metaphysical Culture", and his conversation with Donald Davidson (~60 mins).

Spivak on the New Subaltern

Here is an entertaining and though-provoking—if also a tad dense—lecture by Columbia Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a leading literary theorist and cultural critic (she is introduced in the video), well known for her essay, Can the Subaltern Speak?

Two Articles and a Contest

Here are two recent articles I found thought provoking and insightful (via 3QD). I'd also like to draw your attention to a new contest for the best blog post in Arts & Literature.

Why Do Humans Reason?

Reasoning is generally seen as a mean to improve knowledge and make better decisions. Much evidence, however, shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests rethinking the function of reasoning. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given human exceptional dependence on communication and vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology or reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing but also when they are reasoning proactively with the perspective of having to defend their opinions. Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes and allow the persistence of erroneous beliefs. Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are easy to justify but not necessarily better. In all of these instances traditionally described as failures or flaws, reasoning does exactly what can be expected of an argumentative device: look for arguments that support a given conclusion, and favor conclusions in support of which arguments can be found.

How to Defend the Enlightenment (a conversation between Tzvetan Todorov and AC Grayling):

ACG: Hume and Kant both wrote about reason. We think of the Enlightenment as privileging reason, but for Hume and Kant their question was: what are the limits of reason? Hume was sceptical about the capacity of reason to solve our problems in metaphysics and elsewhere. And so indeed was Kant. For me, this is the reason why both Hume and Kant are central Enlightenment figures, and of course Kant is the author of the great essay "What is Enlightenment?" People ask, if they are Enlightenment thinkers, why are they looking for the limits of reason? The answer is that before the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and the Enlightenment, the source of knowledge was authority – the authority of the deity, the Bible, the Church. If we are going to exercise authority over the acquisition of knowledge, we have to understand our instrument. That is why we need a critique of our mental powers. Look also at Locke, a major figure in stimulating the Enlightenment. His question was, "What can we know? How much can we know?" 

Finally, 3 Quarks Daily has just announced the last of their four annual contests for the best blog post in Arts & Literature. Nominations open on Feb 22 and the judge is former US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. Read more about the contest and nominate your favorite blog post!

Early Islam, Part 5: Epilogue

Part 1: The Rise of Islam  /  Part 2: The Golden Age of Islam
Part 3: The Path of Reason  /  Part 4: The Mystic Tide

(This five-part series on early Islamic history begins with the rise of Islam, shifts to its golden age, examines two major currents of early Islamic thought—rationalism and Sufi mysticism—and concludes with an epilogue. It builds on precursor essays I wrote at Stanford’s Green Library during a summer sabbatical years ago, and on subsequent travels in Islamic lands of the Middle East and beyond.)
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Muslims discovered Greek thought hundreds of years before the Western Christians, yet it was the latter who eventually domesticated it. Why did the reverse not happen? Why did the golden age of Islam (approx. 9th-12th centuries)—led by luminaries such as al-Kindi, al-Farabi, Alhazen, al-Beruni, Omar Khayyam, Avicenna, and Averroës—wither away? Despite a terrific start, why did rationalism fail to ignite more widely in Islam? In this epilogue, I’ll survey some answers that have been offered by historians and highlight one that I hold the most significant.

Earlier in this series, we saw how three contending currents of thought dominated the Islamic golden age—orthodoxy, rationalism, and mysticism—based on three different ways of looking at the world. Orthodoxy in Islam looked to the Qur’an to justify a whole way of life. A universal, durable code of behavior and personal conduct is an understandable human craving, and so much more comforting when God Himself shows up and lays it out in one’s own language! Orthodoxy is by no means limited to ‘revealed’ religions; it took root in Hinduism via its castes, priests, and rituals. Suffice it to say that humans have been drawn to narrow and exclusive systems of belief with a dismaying alacrity. [1] The orthodox, it’s worth pointing out, are not all that otherworldly. The mullahs, bishops, and pundits are rarely disengaged from their social milieu, as the mystics tend to be. The orthodox may covet the rewards of the other world but what happens in their own—as in what norms, practices, dogmas, and rituals are followed—is profoundly important to them. They care deeply about this world and, in their own way, struggle to improve it, sometimes even waging war over it.

The mystics are rather different. They don’t care much for holy books or religious clerics, and receive God as a subjective experience, beyond the bounds of dogma. An essential mystical experience lies in the believer’s sobering realization of the inadequacy of reason in knowing God and his design. Love and devotion—even rapturous ecstasy—help bridge the enormous gulf he sees between him and God. Happiness comes not from material pleasures but from surrendering to the benevolent divine. He deals with existential angst by suppressing his self and ego. Mystical teachers across cultures have appealed to a non-dualistic approach to nature, in which everything in existence is not only interwoven but is a manifestation of the divine. Clearly, a mystical worldview does not engender ideas like competition, personal ambition, or democracy, nor does it preoccupy itself with theories of justice or science or critical inquiry. Instead, it eschews religious orthodoxy and furthers a tolerant, pacifist, and private faith, often alongside a gentle, dreamy, fatalistic detachment from the world. [2] Such otherworldly mysticism flowered in Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, and Eastern Christianity, but barely so in Western Christianity.

The rational current of Islam, as also in Western Christianity, was sparked by a small group of philosophers, scientists, doctors, liberal theologians, explorers, poets, artists, and their royal patrons in a fortuitous window of peace, prosperity, and cosmopolitan culture. They drew inspiration from ancient Greek texts, adapting them to their own milieu. A great intellectual ferment led to notable advances in areas like navigation, astronomy, and mathematics, which became the bedrock for later European advances. The bold thinkers who led the Islamic golden age profoundly inspired later Christians, including Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham. What then explains the fate of al-Farabi’s rationalist tradition? Before considering some answers, let’s briefly revisit the Greeks to remind ourselves of a few defining features of their society.

Refining Rawls

Adam Kirsch reviews two books by Michael Sandel and Amartya Sen that seek to augment John Rawls' magnum opus:

Since John Rawls published [A Theory of Justice] in 1971, its ideas and language have exercised an extraordinary hold on the imagination of political thinkers. Just look at Justice by Michael J. Sandel and The Idea of Justice by Amartya Sen—two books, coincidentally appearing at the same moment, by leading political philosophers, both of them professors at Harvard (as Rawls was). Justice is the more accessible work, based on Sandel’s popular introductory course in Harvard’s Core Curriculum, while The Idea of Justice is more ambitious, treating a range of theoretical and practical problems in political economy. Yet both books are, at heart, responses to and revisions of Rawls, and their titles deliberately allude to Rawls’s magnum opus. Just as the nineteenth-century critics of Hegel were still known as Young Hegelians, so these critics of Rawls are essentially post-Rawlsians.

The power of A Theory of Justice, which functions in Sen’s and Sandel’s books like the Freudian father who both must and must not be slain, comes from the way Rawls gave theoretical form to the core assumptions of late-twentieth-century left-liberalism. Rawls’s version of social contract theory is almost as well known by now as Hobbes’s and Locke’s. The only way for us to design a truly just society, Rawls argues, is to imagine ourselves behind a “veil of ignorance” that prevents us from knowing what our actual place in society will be—more, that blocks off our view of our own abilities, desires, and values. People negotiating in this “original position,” Rawls holds, will necessarily agree on two basic principles: first, that the liberty of every person will be inviolable; second, that economic disparities will only be allowed if they serve the advantage of the worst-off in society.

More here. (Definitely watch Sandel's Harvard course and BBC Reith lecture—links here. He also has a great talk on Markets and Morals.)

Early Islam, Part 4: The Mystic Tide

Part 1: The Rise of Islam  /  Part 2: The Golden Age of Islam  /  Part 3: The Path of Reason

(This five-part series on early Islamic history begins with the rise of Islam, shifts to its golden age, examines two major currents of early Islamic thought—rationalism and Sufi mysticism—and concludes with an epilogue. It builds on precursor essays I wrote at Stanford’s Green Library during a summer sabbatical years ago, and on subsequent travels in Islamic lands of the Middle East and beyond.)
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‘Mysticism is ultimately rooted in the original matrix of religious experience, which grows in turn out of man’s overwhelming awareness of God and his sense of nothingness without Him, and of the urgent need to subordinate reason and emotion to this experience.’ [1]

Sufism, or Islamic mysticism, first arose in Syria and Iraq in the 8th century CE. Arab conquerors, a century earlier, had taken Islam all over the Near East, which included lands with a long tradition of ascetic thought and eastern Christian monasticism—a tradition that valued religious poverty, contempt for worldly pleasures, and a secret world of virtue beyond that of obedience to law—no doubt encouraged by the fact that for three centuries, until after the conversion of Constantine to Christianity, Christians in the Near East were a minority subject to suspicion and persecution by the pagan Romans.

But old habits die hard, and even as Islam spread, many new converts, beneath a slim veneer of their new faith, persisted with asceticism and detachment. What transformed asceticism into mysticism was something quite radical: an unabashed love of God. This transformation has been symbolically ascribed to a woman from Basra, Rabi’ah al-Adawiyah (d. 801?), among the first to articulate the mystic ideal of a disinterested love of God, as in her prayer below.

‘O God, if I worship Thee for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell, and if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship Thee for Thy own sake, grudge me not Thy everlasting beauty.’ [2]

Many believers who were also drawn to rational philosophy found its objective accounts of God unsatisfactory. They yearned for a God who was more immediate and sympathetic than the remote God of the philosophers and the legalistic God of the theologians (the ulema). Early Islamic mystics, or Sufis, [3] thus evolved a more subjective notion of God: each of us can experience the divine differently; revelation is an event that unfolds deep within us; each of us, through our own effort, can reach out to the divine.

A systematic destruction of the ego (fana) and surrender of the self to God became central to the Sufi ideal: one who discards his ego to discover the divine presence at the heart of his own being would experience greater self-realization and self-control. ‘Man becomes dead unto himself and alive unto God.’ [4] Many practiced celibacy as a mystic ideal, flouting the example of matrimony set by Muhammad himself. Scholars like Majid Fakhry have noted Hindu influences on ‘this bold concept of annihilation of the ego and the reabsorption of the human in the divine’ (many early mystics in Persia had Hindu teachers).