Transversal Rationality and Intercultural

Hwa Yol
u g
Jun
Transversal
raTionaliTY &
inTerculTural TexTs
essaYs in PHenomenologY
and comParaTive PHilosoPHY
series in continental thought
Transversal Rationality and Intercultural Texts
SE RIE S
IN
CONT INEN TA L
TH O U G H T
Editorial Board
Ted Toadvine, Chairman, University of Oregon
Elizabeth A. Behnke, Study Project in Phenomenology of the Body
David Carr, Emory University
James Dodd, New School University
Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University
Jos Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University
Joseph J. Kockelmans, Pennsylvania State University
William R. McKenna, Miami University
Algis Mickunas, Ohio University
J. N. Mohanty, Temple University
Dermot Moran, University College Dublin
Thomas Nenon, University of Memphis
Rosemary Rizo-Patron de Lerner, Ponticia Universidad Catlica del Per, Lima
Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg Universitt, Mainz
Gail Soffer, Rome, Italy
Elizabeth Strker, Universitt Kln
Nicolas de Warren, Wellesley College
Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University
International Advisory Board

Suzanne Bachelard, Universit de Paris
Rudolf Boehm, Rijksuniversiteit Gent
Albert Borgmann, University of Montana
Amedeo Giorgi, Saybrook Institute
Richard Grathoff, Universitt Bielefeld
Samuel Ijsseling, Husserl-Archief te Leuven
Alphonso Lingis, Pennsylvania State University
Werner Marx, Albert-Ludwigs Universitt, Freiburg
David Rasmussen, Boston College
John Sallis, Boston College
John Scanlon, Duquesne University
Hugh J. Silverman, State University of New York, Stony Brook
Carlo Sini, Universit di Milano
Jacques Taminiaux, Louvain-la-Neuve
D. Lawrence Wieder
Dallas Willard, University of Southern California
Transversal Rationality
and Intercultural Texts
Essays in Phenomenology
and Comparative Philosophy
HWA YOL J U N G
OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS
ATHENS
Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

www.ohioswallow.com
2011 by Ohio University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jung, Hwa Yol.
Transversal rationality and intercultural texts : essays in phenomenology and
comparative philosophy / Hwa Yol Jung.
p. cm. (Series in Continental thought)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-0-8214-1955-7 (hc : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8214-4369-9 (electronic)
1. Phenomenology. 2. Philosophy, Asian. 3. Philosophy, Comparative. I. Title. II.
Series.
B829.5.J86 2011
142'.78dc22
2011010137
This book of thirteen essays is dedicated to my late mentor

John Wild and the following short list of close friends and
fellow-travellers whose associations have inspired and enriched
my intellectual cultivation and growth:
Fred Dallmayr,
Cal Schrag,
Bill McBride,
Ed Casey,
Lester Embree,
John ONeill,
Kuang-ming Wu,
Hugh Silverman,
Herb Reid,
Michael Gardiner,
KIM Hongwoo,
CHA In Suk
MOON Chung-in
Yong Huang,
ZHANG Longxi,
and my lifelong intellectual companion, Petee Jung.
C O N T E N T S
Acknowledgments
Introduction
ix
xi
Part I. Prelude to Phenomenology and Comparative Philosophy

Chapter 1. Enlightenment and the Question of the Other:
A Postmodern Audition
Part II. Transversality, Phenomenology, and Intercultural Texts

Chapter 2. Transversality and the Philosophical Politics of
Multiculturalism in the Age of Globalization
15
Part III. Transversal Linkage between Phenomenology and

Asian Philosophy
Chapter 3. Wang Yang-ming and Existential Phenomenology
37
Chapter 4. The Unity of Knowledge and Action:

A Postscript to Wang Yang-mings Existential Phenomenology
56
Chapter 5. Jen: An Existential and Phenomenological Problem of

Intersubjectivity
72
Chapter 6. Confucianism and Existentialism:

Intersubjectivity as the Way of Man
87
Chapter 7. Heideggers Way with Sinitic Thinking
102
Part IV. Phenomenology, Literary Theory,

and Comparative Culture and Politics
Chapter 8. Reading/Misreading the Sinogram:
From Fenollosa to Derrida and McLuhan
129
Chapter 9. Ernest Fenollosas Etymosinology in the

Age of Global Communication
141
Chapter 10. The Joy of Textualizing Japan:

A Metacommentary on Roland Barthess Empire of Signs
163
viii
contents
Chapter 11. Revolutionary Dialectics:

Mao Tse-tung and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
179
Part V. The Fleshfold of the Earth: Green Thought, East and West
Chapter 12. Merleau-Pontys Transversal Geophilosophy
and Sinic Aesthetics of Nature
211
Chapter 13. The Greening of Postmodern Philosophy:

The Ethical Question of Reinhabiting the Earth
229
Notes
Bibliography
Index
249
321
393
A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
A note of apologies to my offspring for sacricing my quality time with

them for writing. Le temps perdu will be remembered but never be regained.
I am deeply sorry for that. Among my four grandchildren (Wiley, Adeline
Petee, Damien, and Wyatt), only Wiley knew his nana well, and the other
three were yet to be born when she passed away. My oldest grandson, Wiley,
who is now twelve years old became interested in philosophy because of one
of his teachers two years ago. He asked me earlier this year, Papa, what is
reality? I hope that all of my grandchildren, whatever they do in life, develop
some interest in and sustain curiosity for the love of wisdom.
A note of thanks goes to Mickey Ortiz. I have been blessed with her skillful
and outstanding assistance and work for three decades. She is one of a very
few on campus who know what existential phenomenology, hermeneutics,
philosophy East and West, and transversality are! I am eternally grateful for
her service and dedication to my work. I am so glad that she is here. Because
she has been so involved in the production of this book, she should take some
responsibility for errors contained in it, typographical or otherwise.
I am also thankful to Debbi Gaspar and Nancy Strobel in the Reeves
Library for having taken care of interlibrary loan books for me for years.
Last but not least, I wish to thank two anonymous philosophers for their
wonderful reviews of my book manuscript.
My gratitude goes to the following publishers and journals for granting me permission to reprint my published essays: chapter 1, Enlightenment and the Question of the Other: A Postmodern Audition, Human
Studies 25 (2002): 297306; chapter 2, Transversality and the Philosophical Politics of Multiculturalism in the Age of Globalization, Research in
Phenomenology 39 (2009): 41637; chapter 3, Wang Yang-ming and Existential Phenomenology, International Philosophical Quarterly 5 (1965):
61236; chapter 4, The Unity of Knowledge and Action: A Postscript to
acknowledgments
Wang Yang-mings Existential Phenomenology, Journal of Chinese Studies 3 (1986): 1938; chapter 5, Jen: An Existential and Phenomenological
Problem of Intersubjectivity, Philosophy East and West 16 (1966): 16988;
chapter 6, Confucianism and Existentialism: Intersubjectivity as the Way
of Man, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 30 (1969): 186303;
chapter 7, Heideggers Way with Sinitic Thinking, in Heidegger and Asian
Thought, ed. Graham Parkes (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987),
21744; chapter 8, Reading/Misreading the Sinogram: From Fenollosa to
Derrida and McLuhan (slightly modied from the original title Misreading the Ideogram: From Fenollosa to Derrida and McLuhan), Paideuma 13
(1984): 21127; chapter 9, Ernest Fenollosas Etymosinology in the Age of
Global Communication, Theory, Culture and Society 26, no. 23 (2009):
24973; chapter 10, The Joy of Textualizing Japan: A Metacommentary on
Roland Barthes Empire of Signs, in Bucknell Review, vol. 30, no. 2: Self,
Sign, and Symbol, ed. Mark Neuman and Michael Payne (Lewisburg, PA:
Bucknell University Press, 1987), 14467; chapter 11, Revolutionary Dialectics: Mao Tse-tung and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Dialectical Anthropology
12 (1977), 3356; chapter 12, Merleau-Pontys Transversal Geophilosophy
and Sinic Aesthetics of Nature, in Merleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy: Dwelling on the Landscapes of Thought, ed. Suzanne L. Cataldi
and William S. Hamrich (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007),
23558; and chapter 13, The Greening of Postmodern Philosophy: The Ethical Question of Reinhabiting the Earth, in The Way of Ecopiety: Essays in
Transversal Geophilosophy (New York: Global Scholarly Publications, 2009),
22645 and 31524.
I N T R O D U C T I O N
Questioning is the piety of thought.

Martin Heidegger
We all stand only together, not only all men [and
women], but all things.
Henry G. Bugbee Jr.
If we keep on speaking the same language together,
were going to reproduce the same history.
Luce Irigaray
This book of thirteen selected essays spans almost half a century from 1965
(chapter 3) to 2009 (chapters 9 and 13). Many, if not all, of them are experimental and exploratory in nature. Since they are meant to be a transversal
linkage between phenomenology and East Asian philosophy, Part III, which
contains ve essays, constitutes the kernel of this collection. Chapters 3, 5,
and 6 form a triptych with an emphasis on the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) as a
sociocultural or intersubjective world. Chapter 4 is a rejoinder on chapter 3 in
which the idea of sincerity (cheng) is suggested and emphasized as the moral
soul of East Asian peoples. In the late 1960s, we lived on the Moravian campus. When my oldest son, Michael, was four years old, somebody asked him
what his dad taught. With a clear voice and without a moment of hesitation,
he answered, My dad teaches existential phenomenology and philosophy
East and West.
Chapter 1 auditions the major agenda of Enlightenment thought, which
is paradigmatic to Western modernity. Kant institutionalized and valorized
the autonomy of reason and reason alone. While privileging the authority
and autonomy of reason for alleged human progress and emancipation, he
marginalized and disenfranchised the (reasons) other whether it be the body,
femininity, nature, or the non-West. J. G. Herder raises a critical question
xii
introduction
concerning the universal formulation of reason as the single summit and

purpose of all human culture, all happiness, all good and challenges the
unitary vision of Enlightenment rationalism with a question: Is the whole
body just one big eye?
Chapter 3 stands out as the earliest exploratory attempt to show an affinity
between the Chinese philosopher Wang Yang-ming (14721529) and existential phenomenology and hopefully to open a meaningful dialogue between
Chinese philosophy and existential phenomenology in particular and Western philosophy in general in the twentieth century (see further chapters 5, 6,
and 7 in particular).
Chapter 2 advances the concept of transversality, which is central to the
main themes of this book. It begins with a critique of the notion of universality in modern Western philosophy. It targets Hegelthe modernist
incarnatein particular, who had a dark view of the non-Western world,
particularly China and India. His overarching Eurocentric universality is
founded on the fallacious assumption that what is particular in the West is
made universalized whereas what is particular in the non-West remains particular forever. As the Martiniquan francophone Edouard Glissant puts it
succinctly, however, thinking about One is not thinking about All (or
Many). Eurocentric universality is outmoded and thus has no place in the
globalization of the multicultural world. It simply ignores the reality of interlacing of multiple lifeworlds. Eurocentric universality is nothing but a form
of what Roland Barthes calls Western narcissism (see chapter 10).
The concept of transversality is symbolized in the Maitreyan Middle Way.
The image of the new emerging face may be likened to the famous rustic
wooden statue of the Buddha at a Zen temple in Kyoto, Japan, whose face
marks a new dawn of awakening (satori) or signals the beginning of a new
global regime of ontology, culture, politics, and ethics. From the crack in the
middle of the old face of the Buddha, there emerges an interstitial, liminal
face that signies a new transguration and transvaluation of the existing
world. The icon of the emerging new face symbolizes the arrival of Maitreya
(the future Awakened One) or Middle Waythat third enabling term of
transversality that is destined to navigate the stormy waters of intercultural,
interspecic, and interdisciplinary border crossings. Transversality means to
overcome and go beyond (trans) the clash of ethnocentrisms both Orientalist and Occidentalist as a result of essentializing (to use Edward W.
Saids phrase) the Orient or the Occident. We are warned not to take it simply as a middle point between bipolar opposites. Rather, it breaks through
introduction
xiii
bipolarity itself (theory and practice, philosophy and nonphilosophy, mind

and body, femininity and masculinity, humanity and nature, Europe and nonEurope, etc.). What must be recognized as important is the fact that transversality is the paradigmatic way of overcoming all polarizing dichotomies and
ready for the conceptualization of world philosophy. The end product of
transversality in the fusion of cultural (and disciplinary) horizons is hybridity
or creolization. Viewed in this way, what is traditionally called comparative
philosophy is not just a neglected and underdeveloped branch of philosophy, but it is poised to transform radically the very conception of philosophy
itself. Furthermore, this new philosophy of hybridity renders the American
intellectual Francis Fukuyamas thesis of the end of history on the one
hand and his Asian-Singaporean counterpart Kishore Mahbubanis thesis of
essentializing China on the other.
The three previously cited epigraphs permeate the spirit of this book.
First is Heideggers notion of thinking as questioning. Second Bugbee captures that Deleuzean-Guattarian geophilosophical principle that embraces
all matters of the earth as a whole. The incomparable American pioneering
ecologist Aldo Leopold calls the land a biotic community. With a touch of
Kantian deontological ethics, he speaks of a land ethic that entails human
obligation to nonhuman beings and things on earth. Bugbee also uses the
betting expression the sacrament of coexistence among all earthly beings
and things both human and nonhuman. The expression combines the artistic renditions by the noted French sculptor Auguste Rodins Cathedral that
depicts interhuman existence and the Dutch lithographer M. C. Eschers Verbum that geometrically details what we might call the ecological continuum
of Being or simply Interbeing. At the early stage of my environmental writings that began to celebrate the rst Earth Day in 1970, I used the expression
deep ecology in the footsteps of its founder, the Norwegian philosopher
Arne Naess. Like geophilosophy, it means to be holistic. Nonetheless, geophilosophy denes the contours of the earth more comprehensively and inclusively than deep ecology (see chapters 12 and 13).
The principle of the interconnectedness of differentiated elements in
the cosmos is called synchronicity in the Yijing1 (the Chinese Book of
Changes), whose calculation in terms of trigrams and hexagrams is based
on the binary system of yin and yang as complementary. The American pioneering ecologist Barry Commoner calls synchronicity the rst law of ecology in which everything is said to be interconnected to everything else in the
universe, and nothing exists or can exist in isolation (compare the so-called
xiv
introduction
buttery effect). It refers to the structural patterns of asymmetrical reciprocity. But for graded differentiation there would be no genuine reciprocity. To
be is to communicate; but for difference there would be no genuine communication because there would be nothing to communicate or no need for
communication. Here Heideggers play of Differenz as Unterschied is most
suggestive because it signies both difference and the relational at the same
time. The Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo intimates that the postmodern
is an adventure of difference(s).
What I call relational ontology characterizes the distinction of EastAsian thinking and doing: what Being is to Western thought from Heraclitus
to Heidegger, Interbeing is to East-Asian thought from Confucius to Mao
Zedong. Sinism (i.e., Confucianism, Daoism, and Chan/Zen Buddhism,
which is a hybrid religion of Indian and Chinese cultures) is this-worldly,
practical, concrete, specic, and particular. It is a species of relational ontology, including its language (ideography or sinography). It is predicated upon
the conception of reality as social process. This social process is always
already embodied. Also for the Romans, it should be noted, the idea of piet
(piety) signifying absolute reciprocity was something spiritual and bodily at
the same time. Speaking of the relational ontology of Sinism, it is noteworthy
that the dialogism of Mikhail Bakhtin and Emmanuel Levinas is an ethical
celebration of the other (alterity) or, to use the neologism of Mark C. Taylor, altarity that places the other on a place higher (altar) than the self.
The primacy of the other in Western relational ontology is a recent discovery
by Ludwig Feuerbach that may be hailed as the Copernican revolution of
social thought. Be that as it may, dialogue for Levinas cannot afford not to be
ethical, while for Bakhtin, dialogism is a celebration of the other or alterity.
Recently I came across Rainer Maria Rilkes short verse that is inscribed in
one of the American Greetings cards (made in China!). It reads, I am so
glad that you are here. It helps me to realize/ how beautiful my world is. The
content of the inscription is simply beautiful. It may be called the aesthetics
of asymmetrical reciprocity or relationships.
The eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico judiciously formulated the idea of complementarity of the body and the mind
as the inseparable dancing partners (Roy Porters phrase) in opposition to
the Cartesian bifurcation of res cogitans and res extensa when he writes, If
there is no mind, there will be no body, and if there is no body, there will be
no mind. In fact, the body is the ontological factum of our very Interbeing
in the world. It cannot be otherwise. The body, in short, is a social inscription
introduction
xv
in the world. As an authorial inscriber of the world, it authors the world

before answering it. According to Merleau-Ponty, the body and the world
are made of the same stuff. Moreover, to be alone is not to be: existence is
coexistence. The I think is inherently egocentric or monological. Because
to be social is necessarily to be intercorporeal, the I think scandalizes sociality. Following Norbert Elias, we can describe speech as nothing but social
relations turned into sound. Similarly, sexuality too is nothing but social relations turned into carnal contact. The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips raises the
most interesting question: why cant we tickle ourselves? Because it is a contact sport, that is, it requires the tactile enactment of the other. Its pleasure
cannot be had in the absence of the other.
The French literary meijin (famous person) Roland Barthes declares that
the human is his or her language (lhomme, cest le language). He confesses
that he can function only within language but not outside it. His Empire of
Signs is an expression of his fascination with the vast network of ideograms
and sinograms or a galaxy of signiers (see chapter 10). It is, as Susan Sontag
puts it, the ultimate accolade of semiology. If the city is an ideogram, the
country Japan is an empire of ideograms or ideographic metropolis after the
fashion of Ludwig Wittgenstein who wittingly likens language to a city. Vico
has a keen sense of linguistic anatomy. Not only does he dene man as only
mind, body and speech but he also locates speech as standing somewhere
midway between mind and body. As he writes, the carnal principle of etymology is that words are carried over from bodies and from the properties
of bodies to signify the institutions of the mind and spirit.2 Many sinograms
are the dramatic personae of corporeal movements as kin/esthetic performance. As a matter of fact, every sinogram is the metaphor of a thing human
or natural. It is a gesture and as a gesture it is mute speech. A cluster of sinograms is a conversation of gestures. When Samuel Beckett remarks that in
language as gestures the spoken and the written are identical, he is speaking
of sinography even if he was unaware of it.
Gestures animate language or are an animated language. They are the
roots of language. Without it language becomes petried. As language and
thought are interconnected, the body plays the midwifery of both. Rodins
sculptural masterpiece The Thinker leads us to believe that thinking is always
embodied, and the idea of disembodied thinking or the Cartesian cogito is a
ction. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, what language is to thought, the body is to
the mind. Thus Paul Valry speaks of the dance as the intense festival of the
body in the presence of our souls, while Stphane Mallarm calls the dance
xvi
introduction
corporeal writing (criture corporelle). There is a Chinese dance troupe

that performs calligraphic dance or writes in the form of calligraphy.
In the Sinic world view, culture and language are inseparable: they are correlative. Thinking tied to language is related to culture. Culture is a superset,
and language and thinking are subsets. Richard Rorty is impeccable when
he uses the expression philosophy as cultural politics. Language is a product of culture as much as it is an agent of culture. Fenollosas etymosinology is the expression that assumes the intrinsic relatedness or correlativity
of language to Sinic culture. As a matter of fact, philosophy of the Cartesian
cogito runs counter to Sinic relational ontology. From a Sinic perspective,
in fact, language is relational ontology par excellence. Heidegger cannot be
faulted when he regards language as the relation of all relations, that is, all
human relations are rooted in language. It is worth noting that the Russian
psychologist L. S. Vygotsky contends that the development of thinking as
a function of language (speech translated from rech in Russian) occurs not
from the individual to the social, but rather from the social to the individual.
In closing, let me quote the dialogical philosopher Martin Buber when
he says with humility about his endeavor as erecting bridges, not building towers. The aim of transversality, too, is to build bridges that would
promote and facilitate cross-cultural, cross-speciesistic, cross-disciplinary
exchanges as well as globalization toward the creation of planetary thinking.
Neither globalization nor cosmopolitanism intends to create one world
with one government. Globalization as glocalization is the process in which
the global and the local are blended together: the global is rooted in the local.
Transversality advances the cause of cross-cultural fertilization or hybridization as well as cross-disciplinary engagement in which truth as communicability privileges, and is monopolized by, neither the West nor philosophy
alone. For truths center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.
PART I
Prelude to
Phenomenology and
Comparative Philosophy
CHAPTER 1
enlightenment and the question of the other

a postmode r n audi t i on
The Other is itself always other than itself.

Thomas Docherty
Questioning is the piety of thought.
Martin Heidegger
Luce Irigaray
What is Enlightenment (Aufklrung)? Kants response to the historic question, which was published in Berlinische Monatsschrift in 1784, is undoubtedly an epochal essay. It denes and distills the philosophical mood and
tempo of modernity and apotheosizes its movement as enlightening. The
unbridled optimism of Enlightenment, which promotes humanitys innite
progress based on the cultivation of pure and applied reason, is the grandest narrative or lingua franca of Western modernity. In critically reviving
Kants quest for Aufklrung and reformulating his critique in terms of
the knowledge-power nexus in the late twentieth century, Michel Foucault is
exacting when he frames it as an intellectual orientation rather than a mere
periodization of European thought and history.
Kant spells out the motto of Enlightenment in the clearest and simplest
terms in the beginning paragraph of his famed essay: the autonomy of reason portends to rescue and emancipate humanityperhaps more accurately
European humanityfrom the dark cave of self-incurred tutelage or immaturity (selbstverschuldeten Unmndigkeit). By so doing, he institutionalized
the major agenda of European modernity. Ultimately, the autonomy of reason
transversal rationality and intertextual texts
guarantees humanitys progress in perpetuity. Kants critique of pure reason

as an autonomous epistemological subject is certainly indebted to Descartess
cogito (ergo sum), whose logocentrism sums up and unies the combined
characteristics of being disembodied, monologic, and ocularcentric. For the
cogito, the minds I is the minds eye. Descartess cogito in pursuit of clear
and distinct ideas, which are three visual terms, is as enlightening as Kants
critique. It has indeed become the turning point of modern Western philosophy. Its rationality exacts Galileos inquisition of nature, which is open to our
reductive gaze as a manifold of mathematical or geometric gures. Western
modernity, which is empowered and driven by the disciplinary regime of the
Cartesian cogitoepistemocracy, in shortis an analogue to Jeremy Benthams masterly architectural design of a prison house straightforwardly called
the Panopticon, whose inspecting warden is capable of objectifying and universalizing the world at a single and quick glance.
European modernity is set to prejudge truth claims by Enlightenments
criteria. While privileging and valorizing the authority and autonomy of
reason for allegedly human (material) progress and emancipation, it marginalizes, disenfranchises, and denigrates the (reasons) Other whether it
be (1) body, (2) woman, (3) nature, or (4) non-West, which happen to be
four central postmodern landmarks and subversive possibilities.1 While its
protagonists insist on modernity as an unnished project, its postmodern
antagonists consider it a failure and are determined to unpack and audit
it. By thinking the unthought and unthinkable in modernity, postmodernists intend to overcome the delimitations of the unreective habitus of modernist discourses on truth. If the postmodernist aim of philosophizing is to
problematize and destabilize the prolonged intergenerational status quo of
Western modernity, then Michel Foucault (author of Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, and Discipline and Punish) is the postmodernist
par excellence, although he was indifferent to if not in opposition to such
an appellation. In these discerning works, he is justiably suspicious of the
modernist enlightened projects, he excavates the seamy undercurrents of
Western civilizational progress, and he enables us to shift our attention to the
excluded, marginalized, and disempowered. In a nutshell, postmodernization
means to surpass modernization.2
The opposite of autonomy, furthermore, is heteronomy, which cultivates
difference and plurality rather than identity and homogeneity on the one
hand and ambiguity rather than clarity on the other. On all accounts, the
prototype of postmodernization is the philosophy of the eighteenth-century
Neapolitan Giambattista Vico, whose anti-Cartesianism, sensus communis,

and above all hermeneutical principle of verum ipsum factum are so familiar
and well known to us by now that they need no recapitulation.
First, the modernist conception of autonomous reason is necessarily disembodied: by valorizing reasons autonomy as enlightening, it bifurcates mind
as res cogitans and body as res extensa. By objectifying body as well as mind
as substance (res), the Cartesian plot is oblivious to the body as living subject and thus renders impossible socialityboth interhuman conviviality and
interspecic connaturality. Sociality as a multiple web of relationships is untenable without the lived body as its root or anchor. Soma is not the sema (tomb
or death) of the psyche. Rather, the former eneshes and enlivens the latter.
There is and can be no disembodied reason insofar as perception is a nascent
concept or logos. Isnt Nietzsche right when he considers psyche as another
name for soma? Thus it is wrongheaded to say that what is rational is real,
and what is real is rational. An event such as the Holocaust, according to JeanFranois Lyotard, may not be rational, but it is real. Jrgen Habermas, who is
today the staunchest defender of European modernity as an unnished project,
is also wrong when he criticizes, for example, the phenomenologist Maurice
Merleau-Ponty for centering his philosophical attention on the body. Habermas completely forgets the fact that reason dened as communicative action
requires in itself the (lived) body as its root. His philosophy of communicative
action dened in terms of mind as the site of reason and body as the site of
unreason is rootless, abortive, and self-defeating. Auguste Rodins sculptural or
handcrafted masterpiece The Thinker, for example, speaks loudly of thinking
as embodied, in opposition to his compatriot Descartes (as well as Hegel and
Jrgen Habermas), who visualizes existence solely in terms of the clarity of
disembodied ideas. Rodin embodies existing as well as thinking as I am
my body. As the body is ineradicably the material condition of sociality, man
without a (lived) body is only a ghost or phantom but no social man. Indeed,
he or she is a ghost in a machine or cyborg. The body, which is capable of rst
authoring the world before answering it, does not simply occupy space, but
rather it inhabits the world with other (inhabiting) bodies.
Second, criture fminine, which constitutes for many an epochal issue,
engenders, incorporates, and embodies what is principally postmodern.
What, one may ask, is the gender of European modernity? It is overwhelmingly
masculine or phallocentric. Indeed, critique of pure reason as enlightening
privileges the masculine. By privileging the masculine, European modernity
commits the phallacy of identity in that its univocity or universality fails
and refuses to acknowledge or recognize feminine difference, which engenders care and jouissance by embracing the pariah senses of touch and hearing (jouissance also spelled jous sens) as opposed to rights and domination
and the hegemonic sense of sight. By celebrating gynesis as the principium
of feminine difference, feminism engages in the subversion of identity. It
means and is determined to deconstruct masculine phallacy and supremacy.
In other words, it contests with vigor phallic monism or homogenizing
identity in which man is deemed to be the measure of all things and woman
does not exist as an ontologically distinct category. Sexual difference is a real
substrate of alterity, but this feminine substrate is not just a g leaf hiding
the genitalia.
The essentialist theory of human nature (as universal) marginalizes the
feminine and feminine difference in that it regards woman not so much as
different from man but rather as less than man. According to the essentialist,
what is particular in woman remains always particular, and what is particular in man is always and readily made universal. Herein lies the paradigmatic
inuence of Simone de Beauvoirs The Second Sex3 on the social and cultural
constructivist view of femininity: gender is made, it is a factum, that is, one is
not born but is made a woman. It is the morphology rather than the anatomy
of the body that destines, marginalizes, and disempowers woman. The essentializing or universalizing theory of human nature independent of culture
and history is a ction or chimera.
Third, what is the gender of nature? In all cultures and throughout history,
as far as I know, it is invariably feminine. The feminine and nature are symbolized together by the fact of fertility. Thus the exploitation and domination
by man of woman and nature are the two sides of the same coin. By the same
token, therefore, phallocentrism and anthropocentrism are the reverse sides
of logocentric modernity. For the French feminist Luce Irigaray, it is no mere
accident that the calendar of the feminine esh is consonant with the cyclical
rhythm of nature.
Among modern anthropocentrists, Descartes and Francis Bacon should
be singled out. In the footsteps of Galileowho mathematizes nature as the
geometric conguration of triangles, squares, and circles and promotes the
idea that we must speak the language of geometry in order to understand and
control natureDescartes conceptualizes man as the possessor and master of
dumb nature. In every signicant aspect, Bacon is the intellectual harbinger
and architect of the modern age as the age of science, technology, and quantitative economy that justies and promotes modern humanity as the avaricious
consumer of the earth. He is indeed the philosopher who designs and engineers
the technomorphic and industrial ethos of modernity. Bacon upholds the convergence of theory and practical operations, of knowledge and utility, and of
knowing and making. He knows neither Goethean soft empiricism (zarte
Empirie) nor reverence for the earth. His hard experimentalism not only captures the essence of the modern sciences but also discovers the secret feminine
bosom of nature. Bacon puts forth most forcefully the modern Promethean
principles of Herrschaftswissen in which knowledge and power intersect the
crossroads of utility for the sake of philanthropia. Philanthropia, which is the
centerfold of his anthropocentrism, is the maximization of prots from mans
investment in nature by way of science and technology.
Fourth and last, many Western commentators gender, wittingly or unwittingly, the East as feminine, which embraces aesthetic sensibility, and the
West as masculine, which infuses scientic rationality. The non-West, or
East, engenders and cultivates a rich eld of geophilosophical ideas in which
the earth (Gaia, Terra Mater) is not just one element among many but the
all-encompassing elements of all elements. Geophilosophy, which is a phoenix rising from the ashes of modernization, is the condition sine qua non of
humanity. Rabindranath Tagore thinks that the serene beauty of nature is as
important as man-made chalks and blackboards for the education of young
mindswhether nature be a lean blade of grass, a buttery with dancing
wings, a spiders web sprinkled with dew in the early summer morning, a
singing cricket in the autumn evening, the festive colors of a rainbow, or a
majestically soaring Himalayan mountain peak. SinismTaoism and Chan
(Zen) Buddhism in particularepitomizes the geophilosophical attitude of
what Heidegger calls Gelassenheit (serenity), which is subversive of Bacons
Gestell and the enframing ethos of modernization. Mindful of nature as
humanitys esh fold and its pious reception of nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson, too, is scornful of the so-called civilized mans unself-reliance or dependence on man-made things as unhealthy crutches.
Sinism is also demonstrative of the nonanthropocentric conception of
sociality that is extended to include the relationships between human and
nonhuman species. Take the example of the Sinic eco-art called geomancy (feng shui, or wind and water), which embodies the East Asian
abiding sense of reverence for living in harmony with nature (tzu-jan, both
self-thusness or the facticity of being there and ten thousand things).
Feng shui is the Sinic way of harmonizing humans with their natural surroundings with reverence and heteronomic or non-self-centered care. It
exemplies earthcare. To think in terms of feng shui is to cherish and to

be thankful for the generosity of the earth as a gift (ltant donn) where we
plant our rm foothold of life and pledge and promise our inseparable and
lasting bond with the earth. Along with Taoism and Chan (Zen) Buddhism,
feng shui exacts an East Asian greenprint for the future.
To ignore or denigrate the non-West, therefore, isto say the leastto
abandon the treasure chest of many geophilosophical ideas and thus jeopardize the survival of humanity and the sustainability of the earth in the future.
The European ight from ancient Asian ideas before modernization, for
example, may spell an ecological disaster. For a growing number of the Western writing elite, the rediscovery and reclamation of Asian thought, particularly of Chan (Zen) Buddhism, is welcomed as a second renaissance in the
cultural history of the West. As the advent of the postmodern marks the dissolution of Enlightenment as the philosophical soul of Western modernity,
for a growing number of Western thinkers the Eastfor its ideographic
namesakestands for a new dawn of human thought and history. The East
lives no longer in the dark shadows of the West.
We are compelled to ask, What are the race and primary color of Western modernity? They are brightly and expressly white. Enlightenment or its
reason is not color-blind. It belongs to the intellectual property of the white
West. Therefore, the Enlightenment is identied with white mythology.
From Hume and Kant to Hegel and Marx, it is unquestionably Eurocentric
or Orientalist. Indeed, it has an unenlightened, dim, and immature view of
the non-West. It is truly an eye-opener to read that in his physiophilosophy,
the early nineteenth-century German thinker Lorenz Oken hierarchizes the
human races according to a hierarchy of the senses: the white European is
characterized as eye-man, the yellow Asian (Mongolian) as ear-man, and
the black African as skin-man. According to the ruling Western metaphysics of the senses, the skin, which is the organ of touch and associated often
with womans sense, is the most primitive sense and belongs to the lowest
rung in the ladder of human sensibility. The pariah sense organ of touch is
downright unaesthetic. On the other hand, the eye, which is the organ of
sight and the organ of the European sense, is aristocratic in every sense of
the word. It epitomizes the height of aesthetic sensibility, while the black race
or skin-man is deprived of aesthetic sensibility altogether. For Kant and
Hegel, sight is the rational sense and the bright sense of intellect.
The intellectual propensity of Western modernity legitimizes itself as the
privileged epicenter of the historical telos of the entire globe in the name of
pure reason as enlightening. Hegel, for whom what is rational is real and what
is real is rational, privileges the Western mind as the guardian of philosophy.
For him, accordingly, the EastChina and India in particularlives in perpetual philosophical infancy, which points to the allegedly Eastern inability to
speak the language of philosophy. Hume and Kant were professedly racists,
white supremacists. In his white mythology, the empiricist Hume regards
all the other races of menparticularly the blacksas naturally inferior
to the whites. The nonwhites produce no civilization worthy of its name.
Kant, who is the philosophical paragon of the enlightened age (Aufklrung)
of invincible Western modernity, parrots mindlessly Humes racism in his
1763 essay Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime4 and
categorically declares that the difference of mental capacity between the
whites and the blacks is as great as in the color of their skin: black and white.
Kant falls at on the face of his promise that critique begins with experience
when he asserts that being black is a clear proof that what the man says is
stupid. When, for example, we get entrapped in universalizing Enlightenment criteria or claims for truth, we approach the roots of racism: Denition, the New Zealandborn American ethnographer Michael Jackson
declares judiciously in his At Home in the World,5 is itself at the roots of
racism: the way we reduce the world to a word, and gag the mouths of others
with our labels. The ndings of ethnographythe Western academic discipline whose sole focus is on non-Western peoples and culturesfrom Marcel Mauss and Claude Lvi-Strauss to Clifford Geertz, James Clifford, and
Michael Jackson continue to challenge Western ethnocentrism and provide
us with the basis of a critique of Western philosophy and clues for understanding oneself in the alterity of the Other, that is, I am an Other rather
than the Other is the negative mirror of myself. It never ceases to amaze me
that philosophers today do not take heed of ethnographers in search of philosophical primitives or elementals (e.g., Maurice Merleau-Pontys esh as
an element).
In the nal analysis, the advent of the postmodern is witnessing the dissolution of Enlightenment. The white mythology of Enlightenment as the
philosophical soul of Western modernity is blind to the ethos of cultural
and discursive pluralization. It should take heed of William Jamess pluralist
contention that there is no single perspective, European or otherwise, from
which the world can appear as an absolutely single fact. Enlightenment
fails to entertain the cardinal principle of (Gadamerian) hermeneutics that
the Other (e.g., the non-West) may be right. The soul of hermeneutics has a
10
touch of intellectual humility, which is conducive to philosophical dialogue,

while Enlightenment displays intellectual arrogance if not dogmatism. HansGeorg Gadamer is both poignant and judicious when he contends that the
fundamental prejudice (Vorurteil) of Enlightenment is the prejudice against
prejudice itself. Indeed, Enlightenments denial of prejudice affirms and
exemplies it. It would be nave to think that the acquisition of truth or
knowledge by way of allegedly disinterested and unprejudiced reason can be
insulated from the political and moral fold of any given historical era.
In essence, Enlightenment fails miserably to lend its ears to different voices
of the non-West. It is simply monologic and knows no dialogic principle as
the way of constructing truths. Some suggest for very good reasons, therefore,
that the conquest of Americawhich also happens to be the title of Tzvetan
Todorovs recent worktypies the Eurocentric model for the constitution of
the (non-European) Other. In a plurality of the lifeworlds and in the world
that is increasingly becoming a global village, the perpetuation of the conversation of the West with itself is untenably shortsighted and dated as well as
monologic. The future does not belong to just one culture. Rather, in it cultural
difference and toleration will become synonymous. Difference and toleration
go hand in hand: as the political philosopher Michael Walzer put it recently,
toleration makes difference possible and difference makes toleration necessary.
Disenchantment calls for transgression and transformation. The reclamation of truth must come by way of planetary (or cosmopolitan) thinking that
is no longer Eurocentric but the result of correlating laterally the multiple
sociocultural lifeworlds as the decentered sites of truth, for truths center
is everywhere and its circumference nowhere. Planetary thinking seeks and
allows to take place what the late Octavio Paz prudently calls the conuence
of differences rather than the totalization of identityEurocentric or otherwisein all human endeavors. I call this seismic conuence of differences by
intercultural elenchi transversality, which deprovincializes and widens our
intellectual horizon concerning foreign lifeworlds as more than the negative
mirrors of our own. It stands for the true maturity of planetary thinking in
the age of globalization. Thus transversality neither asserts the triumph of
one particular cultural paradigm (as in Francis Fukuyamas thesis of the end
of history) nor endorses the separatist approach of East is East, and West
is West, and never the twain shall meet (as in Rudyard Kipling) nor assumes
the inevitability of civilizational clashes (as in Samuel P. Huntington). It is
rather an interruption of universality as the foundational pillar of Western
philosophizing. In todays world as a global village or cosmopolis, to insist
11
on and perpetuate the Eurocentric myth of truth as universal, or modernity

as an unnished project, would be counterproductive as well as myopic.
Worldly philosophizing must be truly pansophic since truth is not carved into
the Eurocentrists stone. Asian intellectuals have been asking themselves seriously for some time if Asian societies can enter into the process of globalization as genuinely Asian societies or merely Western replicas.
The fashionable theory of multiculturalism as an alternative to Eurocentrism, too, is not much help in promoting the cause of planetary thinking
because it manifests itself largely as multiple ethnocentrisms or as an uncoordinated, fragmentary, and localized cluster of ethnic essentializations (to
borrow the expression from Edward W. Said), for example, Africanizing the
African, Sinicizing the Chinese, Indianizing the Indian, Americanizing the
American, Orientalizing the Oriental, and Westernizing the Western. Essentialized discourses may be likened to conceptual condominia. By inating
willy-nilly ethnic and cultural pride and with an unrestrained eagerness for
recognition, multiculturalism often gets trapped in conceptual gerrymandering rather than interfacing and, worst of all, ends up practicing the very narcissistic politics of identity that it tries to subvert. In globalization, the real
opposite of monoculturalism is not multiculturalism but transversality, which
promotes cross-cultural fertilization and the fusion of cultural horizons whose
paradigmatic case, I suggest, is the Sinicization of Indian Buddhism. Marshall
McLuhan, who is an undisputed champion of the electronic age from radio
and television to the Internet and the author of the household expression
global village, poignantly characterizes the contracting and interdependent
world with a touch of body language: we wear all humankind as our skin. Now
is the time for us to defenestrate our intellectual habitus in believing that the
disembodied mind of Western man is the measure of all things.
If, in the end, the East stands for the dawn of a new, lateral thinking, the
Western way of static and monologic Being must give way to the Eastern
way of dynamic and correlative Interbeing in the world that is becoming
more and more a planetary village. We must indeed dig a new hole rather
than the same hole deeper and deeper with no exit in sight. The dawn of the
new millennium will come when all earthlings feel at home in this planetary
village. This is not a utopian dream but the hope for a heterotopian reality. I
speak of heterotopian reality because, as the recent massive study of Randall CollinsThe Sociology of Philosophies6underscores, disagreement is
the heartland of intellectual or philosophical life, and to contradict it is to
authenticate it.
PART II
Transversality, Phenomenology,
and Intercultural Texts
CHAPTER 2
transversality and the philosophical politics of

multiculturalism in the age of globalization
Gateless is the Great

Dao,
There are thousands of ways to it.
If you pass through this barrier,
You may walk freely in the universe.
Mumon (Gateless or
No Gate in two sinograms)
True theory does not totalize, it multiplies.
Gilles Deleuze
Transversal logos replaces the universal logos as the
lynchpin for the philosophy of the new millennium.
Calvin O. Schrag
Luce Irigaray
i. prologue: the idea of globalization

Globalization is a new venture in the civilizational history of humankind
everywhere. It is a movement toward the creation of a new world (mondialisation). As everything including globalization is a matter of communication,
16
the late Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan fashioned

the idea of the shrinking world as a global village in an age of electronic
media that superseded the Gutenberg era of printing technology. Now his
faithful followers digitalized the global villagethe phenomenon of which
may be called McLuhan 2.0. In terms of media or communication technology, hewho had fancied writing his magnum opus, The Gutenberg Galaxy
(1962), in the medium of sinographyhad an unerring sense of the ow and
rhythm of history since the Homeric oral culture of ancient Greece. His disputed slogan, the medium is the message, scales Western history as much
as communication theory.
As we are living in the midst of the world, which is constituted by a plurality of sociocultural lifeworlds, the neologism glocalization signies the
interdependence of the global and the local or the rootedness of the global
in the local: the global without the local is empty, and the local without the
global is myopic. The end of globalization is neither to hold on to anachronistic national or cultural identities nor to establish a futuristic one world
with one government if it is ever possible at all. Rather, it fosters a nonpolar middle path between the global and the local that shuns abstract universalism on the one hand and ethnocentric particularism on the other.1
In the world of multiculturalism, we are not one but many. Interestingly,
according to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, we are neither people
nor masses but a multitude.2 The idea of people for them reduces
many to a single or unitary entity while masses is driven to uniformity or
conformity. Both people and masses fail to take into account plurality cum
difference or diversity. To conserve diversity in the idea of we, multitude
is preferred in this essay to describe the contemporary sociocultural reality
that is nothing but a multitudinous web of relationships as well as a multiplicity of experiential realities. Multitude for its namesake is a particularly betting response to both the phenomenon of multiculturalism and the
advent of globalization or, better, glocalization.
ii. western modernity and the legacy of eurocentrism

Enlightenment thought is the intellectual soul of Western modernity. Its
legacy continues and, as its inheritors insist, its project is far from being
nished. Some speak of modernity as an unnished project, a second
modernity, even the modernization of modernity, or the second coming
transversality and the philosophical politics of multiculturalism
17
of Enlightenment itself. They have an unwavering faith in it as the absolute end of history. Enlightenments untamed optimism alleges to promote and crown humanitys progress based on the cultivation of pure and
applied reason.
Kant is the paragon of Enlightenment thought, and as such he spelled out
its rationale in the clearest and simplest terms: the autonomy of reason was
meant to rescue and emancipate humanity from the dark cave of self-incurred
immaturity. In so doing, he institutionalized the major agenda of European
modernity whose rationality has never been seriously challenged until the auspicious advent of postmodernism found in the voluminous corpus of work in
Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Franois Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Gianni Vattimo, Gilles Deleuze,
Luce Irigaray, and others. While privileging and valorizing the autonomy and
authority of reason for allegedly human progress and emancipation, European modernity unfortunately left in the cold the (reasons) Other, whether it
be body, woman, nature, or Orient. Body, woman, nature, and Orient are not
randomly isolated but four interconnected (t)issues: most interestingly, it is
no accident that the feminine gender is assigned to body, nature, and Orient,
while its (binary) oppositesmind, culture, and Occidentare masculine or
malestream categories.3 It is worth noting that the heart of postmodernist
contention lies in the refutation of these binary oppositions in the thinking
or, better, unthinking of Western modernity.
There is nothing trite about emphasizing the fact that all understanding,
all thinking, is comparative. Comparison is the source and resource of discovering the limits of the selfs discourse in light of the foreign other who is
always more or less exotic. For the sake of advancing comparative literature,
the American literary theorist Jonathan Culler wisely prods his colleagues
to abandon its traditional Eurocentrism and turn global or go planetary.4
The global exchange of ideas and values would advance a world republic
of literature (la rpublique mondiale des lettres)5 in the innovative spirit
of Goethes world literature (Weltliteratur) beyond national boundaries.
Since everything is literature (that is, reading, writing, and translating), it is
binding on all academic disciplines including philosophy.
Ethnocentrism, great or small, has ltered through some of the nest philosophical minds in the modern intellectual history of the West from Montesquieu to Rousseau, Hegel and Marx to Karl Wittfogel.6 There are always,
of course, exceptions: Voltaire, Leibniz, Humboldt, and Herder who, as a
judicious comparativist, refused to identify truth and felicity with just being
18
European or Western. From the very outset, it should be said that the heatedly debated question of rationality in the production of intercultural texts
is not so much the question of epistemological absolutism and relativism as
of how lateral or transversal truth may indeed be formulated without being
entrapped in ethnocentrism.
The institution of the European mindset called Eurocentrism is that
hegemonic disposition or propensity of the modern Europe (West), which
legislates or legitimizes itself as the privileged or anointed guardian of the
cultural, scientic and technological, political, economic, and even moral
capital of the entire globe. By constructing a great dividing wall between
the East and the West, in other words, Eurocentrism willfully engages in a
kind of intellectual apartheid regime in which the superior West is quarantined off from the inferior East.7 Modernization is nothing but the allencompassing catchword given to the totalizing and hegemonizing process
of this Eurocentric phenomenon. By positioning itself as the teleological
temple of the world, Eurocentrism becomes a tribal idolatry. As the astute
interpreter and critic of Western modernity and Eurocentrism Zygmunt
Bauman relates,
From at least the seventeenth century and well into the twentieth,
the writing elite of Western Europe and its footholds on other continents considered its own way of life as a radical break in universal history. Virtually unchallenged faith in the superiority of its
own mode over all alternative forms of lifecontemporaneous or
pastallowed it to take itself as the reference point for the interpretation of the telos of history. This was a novelty in the experience of objective time; for most of the history of Christian Europe,
time-reckoning was organized around a xed point in the slowly
receding past. Now,... Europe set the reference point of objective time in motion, attaching it rmly to its own thrust towards
colonizing the future in the same way as it had colonized the surrounding space.8
Indeed, this Eurocentric idea of colonizing the future gives a new meaning
to the conception of modernity as an unnished project or as the end of
history.
The ugly and ghastly Eurocentric racism of two of the guiding, enlightened philosophers of Western modernity certainly tarnishes them as world
19
philosophers: David Hume and Immanuel Kant. They were unquestionably

white supremacists. Hume wrote the following:
I am apt to suspect the negroes, and in general all the other species of men... to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never
was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even
any individual eminent either in action or speculation.... Not to
mention our [British] colonies, there are NEGROE slaves dispersed
all over EUROPE, of which none ever discovered any symptoms of
ingenuity; tho low people, without education, will start up amongst
us [Whites], and distinguish themselves in every profession. In
JAMAICA indeed they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and
learning; but tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few [English] words plainly.9
Kant, who was hailed as the political harbinger of the League of Nations,
is reputedly the philosophical paragon of enlightened Western modernity.
He championed human dignity, obligatory moral integrity, and universal
knowledge. Unfortunately, however, he echoed or, better, parroted Humes
racism in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1763). In
addition to ridiculing the grotesqueries of the Indians and Chinese, Kant
observed the following in a singularly unenlightened and prejudiced way:
The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above
the triing. Mr. Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in
which a Negro has shown talents, and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from
their countries, although many of them have even been set free, still
not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art
or science or any other praiseworthy quality, even though among
the whites some continually rise aloft from the lowest rabble, and
through superior gifts earn respect in the world. So fundamental is
the difference between these two races of man, and it appears to be
as great in regard to mental capacities as in color. The religion of
fetishes so widespread among them is perhaps a sort of idolatry that
sinks as deeply into the triing as appears to be possible to human
nature. A bird feather, a cows horn, a conch shell, or any other common object, as soon as it becomes consecrated by a few words, is an
20
object of veneration and of invocation in swearing oaths. The blacks

are very vain but in the Negros way, and so talkative that they must
be driven apart from each other with thrashings.10
The noted nineteenth-century African American thinker Frederick Douglass
had white supremacists such as Hume and Kant in mind when he contended
that the complexion of the skin has no bearing on the working of the mind.
iii. the dao of transversality

Philosophy often begins anew by inventing concepts to come to grips with
the world always already in transition. In todays multicultural and globalizing world, we are in dire need of inventing new concepts to explore changing
realities. I would venture to say that transversality is one of those new concepts that replaces the outmoded Eurocentric idea of universality in Western
modernity. It is, in a manner of speaking, a phoenix rising from the ashes
of universality wedded to Eurocentrism. By decentering or deprovincializing Eurocentrism, it intends to go beyond and transgure the Eurocentric
meganarratives of universality. It is truly an interruption in the etymological
sense of the term. Thus it may be conceived of as trans(uni)versality. As
a paradigm shift in our thinking, it may be likened to the lateral movement
of digging a new hole, instead of digging the same hole deeper and deeper
with no exit in sight.11 Transversality goes beyond the hierarchized binary
oppositions, for example, between mind (the rational) and body (the sensorial), man and woman, humanity and nature, East and West, and North and
South. It leaves behind the essentialized notion that what is particular in the
West is universalized or universalizable, whereas what is particular in the East
remains forever particular.
To draw insights from Leszek Kolakowski, what the priestly is to Eurocentric universality, the jesterly is to transversality. He is incontrovertible
when he observes that throughout the ages there is an incurable antagonism
between a philosophy that perpetuates the absolute and a philosophy that
questions accepted absolutes.12 That is, there is the antagonism between the
priestly and the jesterly, which are the two most general forms of intellectual culture at any given period of time in history. Priests are authoritative
and ceremonious guardians of the absolute, while jesters are those vigilantes
who distrust the absolute as a stabilized system and intend to unpack it. The
21
jesterly play of difference aims at the creation of an alternative or reversible

world order. As a form of transgression and subversion, it intends to transform a real world into a possible world.
Inspired directly and indirectly by the insights of continental philosophers
(e.g., Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Lyotard, Deleuze, and Guattari), the American existential phenomenologist Calvin O. Schrag develops,
and spells out, the intricacies of transversality as diacritical engagement and
enrichment across differences and embraces the conception of truth as the
way of communicability.13 As a derivative concept of geometry, transversality
denotes the crossing (Xing) of two diagonal lines in any given parallelogram. Schrag exacts lesprit de nesse by way of a geometric conguration:
in addition to the two diagonals crossing or intersecting each other at the epicenter of any rectangle, the hermeneutical circle and the rhetorical triangle
also gure in an attempt to resolve the deadlock between Western modernity and postmodernity. Transversality is for Schrag capable of transgression,
intervention, re-creation, and new invention. It is in search of convergence
without coincidence, commonality without identity, and cooperation
without uniformity. What started out to be a reguration of rationality as a
diagonal passageway between the modernist overdetermination and the postmodernist underdetermination of reason has become a radically new project that would be capable of navigating the stormy channel betweenin his
wordsthe Scylla of a hegemonic unication/a vacuous universalism,
on the one hand, and the Charybdis of a chaotic pluralism/an anarchic
historicism, on the other. One comes to understand transversality by splitting the difference between the two extremes. Most recently Schrag declared
that the transversal logos replaces the universal logos as the lynchpin for the
philosophy of the new millennium,14 which is already here. In other words,
transversality deconstructs Eurocentrism, the mission of which is to proselytize the universality of the rational. It rst dismantles or unpacks the status
quo and then goes beyond what is given, received, or established by constructing a new formation or constellation of concepts. It attempts to challenge
the assumed transparency of truth as universal and overcome the limits of
universality as the Eurocentric canon of truth in Western modernity. It means
to decenter Europe as the site of universal truth whose identitarian and
unitarian motivation fails to take into account a plurality of cultures or a
world of multiculturalism.
What should be noted here is that in transversality differences are negotiated and compromised rather than effaced, absorbed, or assimilated into
22
sameness or unitariness. In transversal engagement what is lacking in one

is compensated for or supplemented by the other. Here we should take heed
of the pluralist Johann Gottfried Herder, a pupil of Kant, who contended
that colonialism effaces cultural differences. As Anthony Pagden points out,
Western colonialism is for Herder an evil because it reduces, or threatens to
reduce... the number of cultural variants that exist in the world. That is an
evil because plurality is part of the way the world is constituted.15 Herder
challenges the mainstream Western conception of universal reason in interesting bodily metaphors: After dozens of attempts, I nd myself unable to
comprehend how reason can be presented so universally as the single summit and purpose of all human culture, all happiness, all good. Is the whole
body just one big eye? Would it not suffer if every part, the hand and the
foot, had to serve as the eye and the brain? Reason, too carelessly, too uselessly diffused, may well weaken desire, instincts and vital activityin fact
has already done so.16 Insofar as transversality is the negotiated or compromised middle voice, it touches the soul and heart of Buddhism. I would
not hesitate to suggest that the famous wooden statue of Buddha at a Zen
temple in Kyoto, Japan, which is now housed in the Kyoto National Museum,
embodies the mantra of transversality. The Buddhas facethe soul of the
body (Wittgensteins expression) that speaks the world in transformation
marks a new dawn of awakening (satori) or signals the beginning of a new
regime of ontology, culture, ethics, and politics. From the crack in the middle
of the old face of Buddhas statue, there emerges an interstitial, liminal face
that signies a new transguration and transvaluation of the existing world.
The icon of the emerging face symbolizes the arrival of Maitreya (the future
Awakened One, Bodhisattva) or Middle Waythe third enabling term of
transversality that is destined to navigate the difficult waters of intercultural
border crossings. We are warned not to take it as a middle point between two
polarities. Rather, it breaks through bipolarity (e.g., mind and body and East
and West). What is important here is the fact that transversality is the paradigmatic rendition of overcoming any bipolarity. The bipolar solids melt into
the air of transversality, as it were.17
The French sinologist and philosopher Franois Jullien calls the effort
of decentering Eurocentrism or Western modernitywith Kant in mind
a new Copernican reversal.18 He contends that in shaking up Western
modernity, China becomes a philosophical tool. That is to say, he uses Chinese thought to interrogate the limits of Western philosophy and to liberate it from its own mental cage. Most radically, he wishes to replace the
23
very concept of truth itself with that of intelligibility, because truth

is bound up with the history of Western philosophy. Jullien puts Foucault
to the test in order to vindicate the Eurocentric legislation of truth for all
global humanity. In his 1978 visit to Japan, the vintage Foucault remarked
that knowledge and power are interwoven as one fabric; European imperialism and the era of Western philosophy come to an end. Foucault is not alone
in conjecturing that philosophy of the future must be born outside Europe
or in the meetings and impacts between Europe and non-Europe.19
Long before either Michel Foucault or French sinologist Franois Jullien,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty spoke of the lateral universal and the lateral continuity of all humanity both primitive and civilized across history. He is
unmistakably a consummate transversalist avant la lettre. The lateral universal is for him a new paradigm for world making and for world philosophy.
For Merleau-Ponty, all history is not only contemporaneous and written in
the present tense but also an open notebook in which a new future can be
inscribed. It is unfortunate, I think, that his deconstructive effort for comparative philosophy and his sensitivity to the global scope of philosophy have
escaped the attention of comparativists and specialists alike. This inattention
is likely due to the same tendencies that inform our Eurocentric propensity
and orientation in philosophy, including phenomenology.20
Merleau-Pontys deconstructive effort in philosophy, in comparative
philosophy, is evidenced in his critique of Hegels Eurocentrism. In the
conceit of Eurocentrism, the modernist Hegel judged the Oriental philosophy of China in a cavalier fashion. His grand narratives of Lectures on
the History of Philosophy show at times an inexcusable philosophical truancy. He totally dismissed the importance of Chinese philosophy in world
philosophy as elementary (infantile), the Chinese yin-yang trigrams and
hexagrams as supercial, and the Chinese composition of elements (re,
water, wood, metal, and earth) as all in confusion. Then he caps his commentary on Confucius: We have conversations between Confucius and his
followers in which there is nothing denite further than a commonplace
moral put in the form of good, sound doctrine, which may be found as well
expressed and better, in every place and amongst every people. Cicero gives
us De Officiis, a book of moral teaching more comprehensive and better
than all the books of Confucius [emphasis added]. He [Confucius] is hence
only a man who has a certain amount of practical and worldly wisdom
one with whom there is no speculative philosophy.21 It is transparent that
Hegels judgment is too rash in which Europe is his reference culture. The
24
concept of universal truth is West generated, that is, born out of Western narcissism22 and ethnocentric ignorance.23 Hegels myopic view of
universal truth may be likened to the Korean proverbial frog who lived in a
deep well, looked up to the sky one day, and squealed with delight: thats
the universe! For Merleau-Ponty the West invented an idea of truth itself,
and there is no one philosophy that contains all philosophies. Rather, philosophys center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere. Thus truth is
concentric or polycentric, that is, transversal.
Merleau-Ponty charges that Hegel arbitrarily drew a geographical frontier between philosophy and non-philosophy, that is, between the West and
the East.24 For Merleau-Ponty, all philosophies are anthropological types and
none has any privilege of, or monopoly on, truth. European philosophy is as
much ethnophilosophical as Chinese philosophy. However, Hegels Eurocentric philosophy assumes that what is ethnophilosophical in the West is universalized, whereas what is ethnophilosophical in China (and India) remains
ethnophilosophical.25 Chinese philosophy is dismembered from the exclusive
club of philosophy itself. Besides philosophys own constant vigilance on
what it is doing, Merleau-Pontys phenomenological orientation demands
its attention to the ethnography of sociocultural lifeworlds,26 without which
philosophy is a vacuous if not fatal abstraction.
The way of ethnographys thick description practiced by Marcel Mauss
and Claude Lvi-Strauss, who also taught at the Collge de France, provides
Merleau-Ponty with the idea of the lateral continuity of humanity between
the primitive and the civilized, that is, with the incessant ethnographic testing
of the self by the other and the other by the self, which has a diacritical value
for humanitys coexistence and its planetary solidarity. Ethnography redeems
Western narcissism precisely because it is the human science of understanding the foreign other. Merleau-Ponty contends that while for Hegel philosophical truth as absolute and universal knowledge is notarized and certied
by the Occidental seal of approval alone,27 the Oriental past must also have
an honored place in the famed hall of philosophies to celebrate its hitherto
secret, muted contribution to philosophy. He writes resolutely, Indian and
Chinese philosophies have tried not so much to dominate existence as to be
the echo or the sounding board of our relationship to being. Western philosophy can learn from them to rediscover the relationships to being and an initial option which gave it birth, and to estimate the possibilities we have shut
ourselves off from in becoming Westerners and perhaps reopen them. If
25
Western thought is what it claims to be, he challenges further, it must prove

it by understanding all lifeworlds as multiple geo-sociocultural realities.28
Thus Merleau-Ponty suggests that, in contrast to the overarching universal of objective sciences, or we might add, Western metaphysics, the lateral universal is acquired through ethnographical experience as the way of
learning to see what is ours as alien and what was alien as our own. His lateral universal is a passport, as it were, that allows us to cross borders between
diverse cultures, enter the zone of intersections and discover cross-cultural
connections and convergences. While the European geophilosophical politics
of identity claims its validity as universal truth, the lateral universal takes into
account local knowledge prior to planetary knowledge (dubbed by some as
glocalization) and allows the hermeneutical autonomy of the other who
may very well be right. Indeed, Merleau-Pontys lateral universal is contextualized as an open-ended and promiscuous web of temporal and spatial (that
is, chronotopic) interlacings.
Merleau-Ponty further contends that the conceited path of Hegel that
excludes Chinese thought from universal knowledge and draws a geographical frontier between philosophy and nonphilosophy also excludes a good
part of the Western past itself. Philosophy as a perpetual beginning is open
to examine its own idea of truth again and again, because truth is a treasure
scattered about in human life prior to all philosophy and not divided among
doctrines.29 In this view, Western philosophy itself is destined to reexamine
not only its own idea of truth but also related matters and institutions such as
science, economy, politics, and technology. Merleau-Ponty writes with unsurpassable poignancy:
From this angle, civilizations lacking our philosophical or economic
equipment take on an instructive value. It is not a matter of going in
search of truth or salvation in what falls short of science or philosophical awareness, or of dragging chunks of mythology as such into
our philosophy, but of acquiringin the presence of these variants
of humanity that we are so far froma sense of the theoretical and
practical problems our institutions are faced with, and of rediscovering the existential eld that they are born in and that their long success has led us to forget. The Orients childishness has something to
teach us, if it were nothing more than the narrowness [and rigidity, I
might add] of our adult ideas. The relationships between Orient and
Occident, like that between child and adult, is not that of ignorance to
26
knowledge or non-philosophy to philosophy; it is much more subtle,

making room on the part of the Orient for all anticipations and prematurations. Simply rallying and subordinating non-philosophy
to true philosophy will not create the unity of the human spirit. It
already exists in each cultures lateral relationships to the others, in the
echoes one awakes in the other.30 (emphases added).
In Hegels thought, in sum, there can be no genuine dialogue between the
philosophy of the Occident and the nonphilosophy of the Orient.
Italo Calvino denes the very notion of multiplicity as an inability to
nd an ending: multiplicity multiplies itself.31 The same cannot be said of
Hegels dialectic, which dictates the Eurocentric march of history. The ultimate
synthesis of his dialectic of history is in fact the identity of identity (affirmation) and difference (negation). In mapping connections, Deleuze contends
that his philosophy of multiplicity based on the repetitive logic of difference is non-dialectizable.32 In support of Max Webers conception of sociality as a reconcilable or transversal multiplicity of perspectives (Vielseitigkeit),
Merleau-Ponty argues that the dialectic is inherently unstable and that the
only good dialectic is hyperdialectic, that is, dialectic without synthesis.
Hyperdialectic, he intimates, is a thought that... is capable of reaching truth
because it envisages without restriction the plurality of the relationships and
what has been called ambiguity33 (emphasis added).
It is the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtins dialogical principle
or dialogism, as opposed to Hegels (and Marxs) dialectic, that deserves
our close attention, as it uncovers the postmodern dispositif of multiplicity
as having no ending. Hegels succession of sublations nalizes itself in the
identity of identity and difference. Bakhtins dialogical principle, based on
Dostoevskys poetics, is unnalizable, that is, it has no ending. Not only is
there neither a rst nor a last word but every past meaning also has its homecoming festival. Speaking of Dostoevsky, Bakhtin writes forcefully,
[A]t the center of Dostoevskys artistic worlds must lie dialogue,
and dialogue not as a means but as an end itself. Dialogue here is
not the threshold to action, it is the action itself. It is not a means for
revealing, for bringing to the surface the already ready-made character of a person; no, in dialogue a person not only shows himself
outwardly, but he becomes for the rst time that which he isand,
we repeat, not only for others but for himself as well. To be means
27
to communicate dialogically. When dialogue ends, everything ends.

Thus dialogue, by its very essence, cannot and must not come to an
end. At the level of his religious-utopian worldview, Dostoevsky carries dialogue into eternity, conceiving of it as eternal co-rejoicing,
co-admiration, con-cord. At the level of the novel, it is presented as
the unnalizability of dialogue34 (emphases added).
In the nal analysis, Bakhtins dialogical principle is predicated upon the
eternity of time and the innity of space, that is, it is both eternal chronopolitics and innite geopolitics that are historically intertemporal and
culturally interspatial.
The (Eurocentric) universalist has failed to take into account seriously the
question of diversity in the world of multiculturalism. He is still entangled
in the cobweb of absolute universal truth and cultural relativism. As difference marks diversity and all relationships, Heideggers Differenz as Unter/
schied edies our discussion here because it plays and feeds on the double
meaning of the words that connects, preserves, and promotes both difference and the relational at the same time.35 In Differenz as Unterschied, the
other is neither assimilated and incorporated nor erased and segregated:
the integrity of the other is well preserved. Here we would be remiss if, in
light of Merleau-Pontys previously mentioned lateral universal including
a critique of Hegels Eurocentrism, we failed to recognize the seminal contribution of the Caribbean francophone Edouard Glissant to the making of
a transversal world.36 Educated in philosophy and ethnography in France, he
is a philosopher, a poet, and a novelist whose poetics of relation shaped
Caribbean (antillais) discourse on diversality and creoleness (crolit).
Glissant has an uncanny convergence in the name of transversality with
Merleau-Ponty in his critique of Hegel the Eurocentric universalist and
absolute rationalist when he articulates without equivocation that transversal relation means to replace the old concept of the universal. Thinking
about One, Glissant puts it concisely, is not thinking about All (La pense de lUn ne soit pas la pense du Tout).37 Speaking of Hegels conception of history, Glissant retorts, History is a highly functional fantasy of
the West, originating at precisely the time when it alone made the history
of the world. If Hegel relegated African peoples to the ahistorical, Amerindian peoples to the prehistorical, in order to reserve history for European
people exclusively, it appears that it is not because these African or American peoples have entered History that we can conclude today that such a
28
hierarchical conception of the march of History is no longer relevant.38

Glissant unpacks Hegels history by dissolving it as irrelevant or pass in the
postcolonial world of diverse cultures that rejects the linear, hierarchical
vision of a single History.39
It is worth exploring further Glissants transversal philosophy because it
is, I submit, an ontology of global relation venir. Transversality embodies
the heart of his poetics of relation as cross-cultural encounters. It is the way
of crossing and going beyond (i.e., creolized) ethnic, lingual, and cultural
boundaries. The word errance means for him to be at home in several languages and cultures while not cutting off the umbilical cord to ones own
native land.40 For Glissant, therefore, transversality, hybridity, and creoleness may be used interchangeably: transversality is nothing but a project to
relate (italics added). The Caribbean archipelago as a constellation of small
islands is a supreme symbol of interconnectedness and interdependence. As
he puts it, the relational poetics of diversity seeks a transversal relation,
without any universalist transcendence. Creoleness, too, is the way of discovering Caribbean subterranean convergence from within. As it is indigenous to the Caribbean archipelago, it is the mtissage (Glissants translation
of the term is cross-breeding) of Western and non-Western ethnicity, language, and culture. As mtissage is the site of multiple converging paths,
the converging histories of the Caribbean multitude liberate them from the
all-encompassing vision of a single history. Caribbeanness is the root of a
cross-cultural relationship that mutates culturally, ethnically, and linguistically. In brief, it frees the Caribbean multitude from uniformity. The British postcolonial theorist Robert J. C. Young, who regards Eurocentrism as
a white mythology, makes an interesting and unusually astute observation
that postcolonialism is neither western nor non-western, but a dialectical
product of interaction between the two, articulating new counterpoints of
insurgency from the long-running power struggles that pre-date and postdate colonialism.41
The so-called recognition or acknowledgment of difference, which is not
one but many, is not the nal but only the rst step in the making of hybridity. In In Praise of Creoleness/loge de la Crolita Caribbean manifesto
that is purposely written bilinguallydiversality in opposition to universality is dened as the conscious harmonization of preserved diversities.42
When harmonization is understood musically, it enriches the totality and
even coloration of diversality when two or more tones are put together (i.e.,
orchestrated); there emerges harmonization (or symphony) in which each
29
individual tone is not lost but preserved, whereas when two colors are mixed
together, there is no harmony but another color. In the name of a polyphonic harmony, diversality frowns upon the obsessional concern with
the Universal. The previously mentioned Caribbean or creolized manifesto
begins with the following sentence: Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor
Asians, we proclaim ourselves Creoles (Ni Europens, ni Africains, ni Asiatiques, nous nous proclamons Croles).43 The Creole (as hybrid) is neither
unitarian nor separatist but is likened to a hybrid buttery who frees himself/herself by breaking off from an ethnocentrist cocoon. Glissant himself
describes the principium of creoleness as the end of diversality, which can
hardly be paraphrased:
Diversity, which is neither chaos nor sterility, means the human
spirits striving for a cross-cultural relationship, without universalist
transcendence. Diversity needs the presence of peoples, no longer
as objects to be swallowed up, but with the intention of creating
a new relationship. Sameness requires xed Being. Diversity establishes Becoming. Just as Sameness began with expansionist plunder
in the West, Diversity came to light through the political and armed
resistance of peoples. As Sameness rises within the fascination with
the individual, Diversity is spread through the dynamism of communities. As the Other is a source of temptation of Sameness, Wholeness is the demand of Diversity. You cannot become Trinidadians or
Quebecois, if you are not; but it is from now on true that if Trinidad and Quebec did not exist as accepted components of Diversity,
something would be missing from the body of world culturethat
today we would feel that loss. In other words, if it was necessary
for Sameness to be revealed in the solitude of individual Being, it is
now imperative that Diversity should pass through whole communities and peoples. Sameness is sublimated difference; Diversity
is accepted difference.44
iv. epilogue
What does transversality hold for the future? It begins with global dialogue45
and ends in hybridity or creolization as an exonomy.46 The aim of this chapter is to explore how transversality plays out as a thought experiment in the
30
globalizing world of multiculturalism as an asymmetric innity whose Many

is irreducible to One. The Holy Grail of universality as an ethnocentric project
gives way to transversality: universality may be spelled trans(uni)versality.
This thought experiment of transversality requires a willingness to risk the
safety and comfort of philosophical self-sufficiency and self-referentiality.47
Our journey is to discover the unknown continent of a new reality as well as a
new way of philosophizing. In a globalizing world, meanings, ideas, and values do indeed travel and immigrate everywhere in all directions48from West
to East, from North to South, and above all diagonallythe phenomenon
of which would reduce if not eradicate ethnocentric ignorance. MerleauPonty would call this thought experiment a thought traveling in a circle.
However, there can be no genuine cross-cultural dialogue in the logic
of Eurocentrismor, for that matter, of any ethnocentrism, for example,
Sinocentrism, Indocentrism, or Afrocentrismwhere the host culture is
conceived of as superior (master) and the guest culture as inferior (slave).
In Hegels model of the master-slave struggle between the colonizer and the
colonized, there is only the irreconcilable opposition of domination and subordination, which inevitably ends into use Hegels own language of the
ultimatumthe death of one against the other. In other words, the aim of
a cross-cultural dialogue is to transgress, that is, to turn the world upside
down or inside out or go beyond the question of Hegels recognition, whose
logic inevitably leads to the death of the other or the abolition of difference.
His Eurocentrism as well as Humes and Kants racism is wholly or partly, I
suspect, due to ethnocentric ignorance, whose banality engenders a colonial or imperialistic mentality. To overcome it, we need rst and foremost a
phenomenological anthropology of cultural differences.
Transversality is one of philosophys most inventive modes today. The
world of transversality is not a zero-sum game, because everyone wins except
ethnocentrists. Transversality, in short, reduces ethnocentric ignorance. It
calls for a radical regime change in philosophizing beyond both Orientalism and Occidentalism.49 The construction of transversality may be called
a global imaginary after the fashion of the Canadian political philosopher
Charles Taylor.50 To adopt and modify his conception of social imaginary, a
global imaginary is something broader than an intellectual scheme. Rather, it
is lifeworldly, that is, it is the way people think about and imagine their social
existence in relating themselves to others with global connectedness in mind
that is engaging and normative. Thus viewed, transversality has a global
or planetary outlook. It is indeed a newly emerging face in the interstitial,
31
liminal middle of an old face: it is toward future awakening. As the way of

the middle or in-betweenness, it neither approves nor promotes irreconcilable
binary oppositions of any kind, including what are now known as civilizational clashes. Nor can there be the effacement or defacement of differences.
As with the ancient Chinese logic of yin and yang, which characterizes the
way the world works, what is lacking or decient in one is complemented or
supplemented by the other. In short, it makes binary oppositions obsolete.51
In a transversal world that freely allows border crossings, it is populated with
the peoples and events of hyphenation and hybridization.52
Recently the Singaporean intellectual and statesman Kishore Mahbubani,
who is now Dean of the Lee Kuang Yew School of Public Policy, asked a
testy question: Can Asians think?53 What he really meant to ask is this:
can Asians think independently of Western inuence or Westoxication.54
His question has now become obsolete if not wrong-headed in the world of
hyphenations and hybridizations, that is, of conuences.
By the Manichaean essentialization of European universalism (philosophy), on the one hand, and non-European particularism (nonphilosophy or
ethnophilosophy), on the other, Eurocentrism builds a great divide between
Europe and non-Europe, which makes no global dialogue conceivable or
possible. To reiterate, for global dialogue, there can be neither Orientalism
nor Occidentalism. Indeed, there is a geographical if not cultural contiguity
between Asia and Europe: Europe is a cape of the Asian continent (Paul
Valrys word) or a little peninsula of Asia (Nietzsches expression). The
Foucauldian Edward W. Said warned us of the danger of essentializing a
culture that occasions and spawns culture wars and hinders cross-cultural
dialogues and conversations. As he puts it, it is the mode of Orientalizing the
Orient, Occidentalizing the Occident, Africanizing Africa, Americanizing
America, and so on.5 Essentialization is the site of civilizational clashes and
culture wars. In his new preface to the 2003 printing of his seminal work Orientalism (1978), Said forthrightly asserted, Rather than the manufactured
clash of civilizations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together
of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together.... But
for [this] kind of wider perception we need time and patience and skeptical
enquiry supported by faith in communities of interpretation that are difficult
to sustain in a world demanding instant action and reaction.56 Our future
world is held in the palm of cultural pluralism marked by hyphenations
and hybridizations. Out of a transversal exchange of the ideas and values
of global humanity, the world is poised for transformation. The intersecting
32
middle or crossroads (Xroads) is the way that Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and

Foucault envisioned the rise of a new paradigm of planetary thinking. Cultural pluralism is rooted in difference, not identity or sameness, which effaces
or defaces differences.
The x factor in transversal or x-cultural studies goes beyond or, better,
dissolves the dichotomous, epistemological, and axiological question of relativism and universalism. As relationism is radically distinguished from relativism, transversality is a new face in the miscegenating middle, as it were,
for the age of multiculturalism and globalization, which is not one but many.
There can be no one philosophy that monopolizes truth: truth is concentric
or transversal. In the world of hyphenation and hybridization, no culture
can claim its independence, self-referentiality, and self-sufficiency. As the old
Chinese saying goes, everything is related to everything else in the cosmos
and thus nothing exists in isolation. We are indeed condemned to be interdependent with one another not only among humans but also among all things.
This web of interdependence privileges humanity for its responsibility to take
care of all earthlings without exception.
Transversality is conceived of as a global imaginary that is the pillar of
correlating, negotiating, and compromising differences in the postmodern
world of multiculturalism. It is a journey of difference without arrival, which
may be likened to the saying of a Zen koan: when you get to the top of
the mountain, keep climbing. Transversality demands global dialogue that
facilitates the intercourse of ideas and values from East and West and from
North to South. Indeed, it targets those intersections where two or more lines
of thought and action meet. What is decient in one is hopefully augmented
and supplemented by the other(s).
Globalization, too, is the process that facilitates the exchange of ideas and
values at the crossroads (Xroads) of all sides. Ultimately, the future cultivation
of global humanity between heaven and earth will become more tricontinental
(Asian, African, and Latin American) and less European or Euro-American.
Globalization is nothing but the (middle) way of cross-pollinating and crossfertilizing cultural meanings, ideas, and values in multiplicity. It enhances our
chances for cosmopolitanism. The new phoenix of postmodern cosmopolitanism, whose language is interspersed with such prexes as inter, con, and
trans, has risen from the ashes of sovereign nation-states that the modernist
Hegel deied as the political telos of his dialectic.
As we are living in the midst of the world that is constituted by a plurality of sociocultural lifeworlds, the neologism glocalization signies the
33
interdependence of the global and the local or the rootedness of the global
in the local: the global without the local is empty, and the local without the
global is myopic. The end of glocalization is neither to hold on to anachronistic national-cultural identities nor to establish futuristic one world with
one government, if it is ever possible at all. Rather, it fosters a nonpolar
middle path between the global and the local that shuns abstract universalism, on the one hand, and ethnocentric particularism, on the other.
The essentialization of culture that reies or vilies the other is not conducive to cosmopolitanism espoused by the Cynic Diogenes, Marx, Giuseppe
Garibaldi, and Virginia Woolf, who called themselves citizens of the world.
The civility of cosmopolitanism venir means to feel at homein the Freudian sense of being heimlichein the world. As an active principle, civility
goes beyond the mere toleration of difference. In the language of the postcolonial theorist Paul Gilroy, it is the desire to dwell convivially with difference.57 Merleau-Ponty spells out the true spirit of civility when he speaks
of the chiasmus or reversibility of ourselves as strangers and strangers as
ourselves. In the postmodern age of cosmopolitanism, the virtue of civility
advances our communication and interaction with foreign others without
holding their foreignness against them. The cultural polyglot Julia Kristeva
echoes and amplies Merleau-Ponty.58 Her utopic idea or distant ideal
is transidenticatory cosmopolitanism in opposition to identicatory
nationalism that essentializes and valorizes the modern nation-state as an
inviolable and sovereign entity and impenetrable shield. She means to proselytizein the etymological sense of propagating foreign or strange ideas.
As it is a transversal affair, cosmopolitanism is the way of making us at ease
with the world that is unmistakably polyphonic. Without it, the buzzword
globalization or glocalization would be an empty slogan or a disguised form
of conquest.59 In tune with global humanity, there is global Korea, global
China, global Japan, global United States, and global Europe. Reecting on
the condition of global lifeworlds, philosophy too is poised for radical transformation. What is traditionally called comparative philosophy is no longer just a neglected branch of philosophy, but it radically transforms the very
conception of philosophy itself.
After all is said and done, the transversalist is a fox rather than a
hedgehog. I am alluding here to Isaiah Berlins often-quoted line from the
fragments of the Greek poet Archilochus that reads, The fox knows many
things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.60 Thus the transversalist is an
interdependent thinker who has both deftness and agility to interweave many
34
things, whereas the universalist has one big magnetizing thought. The history
of philosophy both Eastern and Western has been overshadowed by hedgehogs. In the world of multiculturalism and globalization, the balance should
be shifted to the voice of foxes. In other words, the monistic voice of the
universalist gives way to the pluralistic voice of the transversalist. The newly
emerging face of the Maitreyan Middle Way mediates and facilitates cultural,
disciplinary, speciesistic, and sensorial border crossings. It is concerned with
those in-between matters that are intercultural, interdisciplinary, interspecic, interlinguistic, and intersensorial (i.e., intertextual) border crossings.61
It cannot be otherwise. It is high time to put an end to the metaphor of philosophy as the owl of Minerva that takes its ight at dusk. Philosophy
should be metaphorized as the Muse who can play mousike (i.e., recite, sing,
dance, and dramatize) for, and orchestrate, the global harmonics of interhuman and interspecic relationships at the dawn of a new day.
PART III
Transversal Linkage
between Phenomenology and
Asian Philosophy
CHAPTER 3
wang yang-ming and existential phenomenology
The Chinese and European philosophical ideas are

compared and studied not with any intention of judging
which is necessarily right and which is necessarily
wrong, but simply with the interest of nding what the
one is in terms of the other. It is expected that before
long we will see that the European philosophical ideas
will be supplemented with the Chinese intuition and
experience, and the Chinese philosophical ideas will be
claried by the European logic and clear thinking.
Fung Yu-lan
i. introductory remarks
At an East-West philosophical conference John Wild once aptly remarked
that all the major forms of Western philosophical thought are to be found
in a vast variety of Eastern schools.1 Recently some effort has been made to
link Eastern and Western thought. The purpose of this essay is to examine,
compare, and show an affinity between existential phenomenology and the
philosophy of the sixteenth-century Chinese Neo-Confucian philosopher,
Wang Yang-ming (14721529).2 The aim of the essay is limited in scope in
that, rst, it is not a full-scale attempt to expose either every aspect or every
resemblance of the two philosophies, and second, it is of an experimental
nature. Thus it is not my intention to draw a premature conclusion that Wang
Yang-mingor, for that matter, Confucius or Menciuswas, though a precursor, the rst authentic existential phenomenologist.
In order to make this comparison valid, however, the central themes of both
philosophies must be compared. In so doing, I must admit at the outset that
38
many obstacles make a comparison of this sort a difficult task. To mention a

few, the rst obstacle is a linguistic and terminological one. For example, the
key terms such as hsin and liang-chih in the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming
are as untranslatable as the Heideggerian term Dasein3 and the Husserlian
term Lebenswelt. Another example is the Chinese term li, which is translated as principle, reason, form (Aristotelian sense), law, pattern
(Gestalt), denition, Vernunft, logos, ratio, norme, or ordonnancement.4
Another obstacle is the magnitude and fecundity of existential philosophy
and phenomenology. Take simply the example of phenomenology. As Herbert Spiegelberg says in his recent historical survey of the phenomenological movement, there are as many phenomenologies as phenomenologists.5 A
third obstacle is the nature of Chinese philosophy that, when compared to
Western thought, is often regarded as intuitive, simple, unsystematic, synoptic, and lacking precise denitions and renements, thus leaving gaps that
must be lled by further interpretations.
Keeping these difficulties in mind, this essay will attempt to discuss rst,
Wang Yang-mings conception of mind or consciousness in terms of the unity
of the internal and the external and its relation to body and sense perception
(herein lies the most clearly phenomenological elements of his doctrine, that
is, the intentionality of consciousness); second, intuitive knowledge, which
often is referred to as the original substance (en-soi6) of the mind; and last,
his insistence on the unity of knowledge and action.
In the unitary philosophy of Wang Yang-ming these are only different
dimensions of the selfsame mind or consciousness: they are in one thread
(i-kuan), although the internal is the fundamental and the external is the secondary form.7 In a philosophical spirit akin to that of Henri Bergson, who
said that every great philosopher has one fundamental central point of view
from which he views all reality, and to that of Martin Heidegger, who stated
that the philosopher thinks only one single thought (Denken des Seins), Wang
Yang-ming thought that seriousness (ching) is nothing but the concentration
on one thing and that the philosopher must be serious.
ii. existential phenomenology as a philosophy

Existential phenomenology (or phenomenological existentialism) is a new
movement that attempts to nd a common style of thinking in the phenomenological thought inaugurated by Edmund Husserl and in the existential
39
thought inaugurated by Sren Kierkegaard.8 Existential phenomenology

is evidenced, for example, in the writings of Martin Heidegger,9 Jean-Paul
Sartre,10 Maurice Merleau-Ponty,11 and John Wild.12 Two central themes of
existential phenomenology essentially relevant to the philosophy of Wang
Yang-ming are intentionality and what Husserl called the Lebenswelt or the
lifeworld.13
As the starting point of existential phenomenology, William Luijpen points
to the convergence of the phenomenological theme of intentionality and that
of existence. In intentionality, he nds an implication of existence; by the
very existential implication of intentionality, the self is open to the world.
Intentionality is encounter (Begegnung), Gabriel Marcels participation,
or Martin Bubers mutuality (Gegenseitigkeit). It is a reciprocal relation of
the subject to the world: consciousness of something is consciousness of the
world, which is itself an essential activity of existence. So is the lifeworld that,
above all, is the matrix of relations or the nexus of intersubjective relations.
As Merleau-Ponty quotes Saint-Exupry, Man is but a network of relationships (un noeud de relations).14 Intentionality is thus being-to-the-world
that becomes synonymous with existence: By virtue of the implication of
the idea of intentionality, phenomenology is a philosophy of encounter.15
At the end of his philosophical career, Husserl16 regarded the Lebenswelt
as the primary or central theme of phenomenology.17 To consider the primary task of phenomenological philosophy as the constitutive analysis of the
lifeworld of the natural attitude (Welt der natrlichen Einstellung) is in fact
to consecrate existence. Thus Husserl moved in the direction of existential
philosophy, and the lifeworld has become the most inuential and absorbing enterprise of post-Husserlian phenomenology. The very location of
the Lebenswelt, Maurice Natanson affirms, is itself a phenomenological
act.18 Merleau-Ponty also alludes to the lifeworld as the lived world, the
world not of I think (je pense) but of I live through (je vis).19 Existential
phenomenology, in this sense, is related closely to John Macmurrays philosophy of action,20 the recent philosophy of experience,21 and, above all, to
the radical empiricism of William James. Therefore, to speak of existential
pragmatism22 is meaningful and suggests a signicant direction in characterizing the convergence of these movements.
It is well known that the distinctive characteristics of phenomenology are
marked by a descriptive method, as the term phenomenology (the logos
of phenomenon) clearly implies. For example, phenomenology for Heidegger means to let that which shows itself be in itself as it it.23 As a matter
40
of fact, Heidegger points out that to say that phenomenology is descriptive

is redundant and tautologous. Phenomenology as a theory of knowledge,
according to Aaron Gurwitsch, aims at the ultimate clarication and justication of knowledge, whether that knowledge be reective or prereective
knowledge rooted in the lifeworld from which reective knowledge grows.
And knowledge is achieved through acts of consciousness. Phenomenology, Gurwitsch writes, is concerned throughout with phenomena... not
with things and objects simply, but with things and objects as they appear
through acts of consciousness.24
Thus the key to the understanding of phenomenology lies in the explanation of what a phenomenon is. A phenomenon is not a thing as it really is or
a real thing, but a phenomenon is that which appears to the experiencing subject through an act of consciousness. In other words, a phenomenon is a thing
that is seen as itself given in person (selbstda).25 A phenomenon, therefore,
is explained as an object meant, intended, and experienced as it presents
itself to the subjects consciousness as a real existent. It is meaning for the
experiencing subject. Agreeing with Gaston Berger, Gurwitsch acknowledges
the fact that phenomenology... does not recognize any other philosophical
problems except those concerning meaning and signication.26 Here is the
clue to the battle cry of phenomenology: Zu den Sachen selbst (back to the
things themselves), which means the return to meaning. As Merleau-Ponty
puts it, Man is condemned to meaning (sens).27
Phenomenology is also understood in terms of its unique method called
epoch, or transcendental-phenomenological reductiona device for obtaining rigorous knowledge through the suspension of all existential beliefs and
acts. The epoch is the act of suspending the integration of the object of consciousness with the world of existence or the real world in order to see this
object more clearly. As Gurwitsch explains, in the phenomenological reduction, instead of the existential belief simply being accepted, as it is in the
natural attitude, it is suspended and bracketed, not eliminated, suppressed,
or invalidated.28 How this epoch, characteristic of the strict Husserlian
school, is modied or interpreted when assimilated into existential phenomenology, is too complex to be analyzed here.
As a descriptive method, phenomenology is a neutral instrument29 to
be used by a philosopher of any persuasion. However, for many phenomenologists, phenomenology represents more than a descriptive and neutral
method. To use the language of Paul Ricoeur, Existential phenomenology
never describes merely for the sake of describing; it is an effort to rediscover
41
(retrouver) the place of man in the world.30 The focal point of existential
phenomenology is the notion of existence; phenomenology is used to help
deal with the problematic of existence (problmatique de lexistence). It is, in
short, the phenomenological philosophy of existence.
The early Heidegger, mainly represented in his epoch-making Sein und
Zeit (1927), considered phenomenology as the method for disclosing or discerning the ontological structure of man, that is, what is well known as the
Dasein or There-being. Strictly as a method, it guides the direction of how
philosophy is done rather than what is to be investigated. However, for Heidegger, it is more than a method, for the task of phenomenology and of
fundamental ontology (Fundamentalontologie) is one and the same: Ontology is possible only as phenomenology.31 Armed with a method of phenomenology, Heidegger here exemplies existential phenomenology at its best in
his analysis of the various modes of Being-in-the-world (in-der-Welt-sein).
He exalts existential phenomenology when he writes, The essence of Dasein lies in its existence (Das Wesen des Daseins liegt in seiner Existenz).32
Merleau-Ponty resorts to the same theme: the tre-au-monde or the tredans-le-monde (Being-in-the-world). Phenomenology is also a philosophy
which puts essences back into existence;33 or as Thvenaz puts it, it aims
at essences, and it ends up in existence.34 Spiegelberg, although he is rather
critical of selling the birthright of phenomenology for a mess of existential pottage, has not abandoned the unifying goal of a practical philosophy
on phenomenological foundations which would combine the better insights
of a phenomenology of values with a deepened conception of human existence,35 and he maintains that the primary task of phenomenological philosophy is to elucidate, deepen, and enlarge the lifeworld.
iii. wang yang-mings philosophy and phenomenology

In the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming, one vainly looks for the transcendentalphenomenological reduction and an analysis of methodological procedure.
However, both phenomenology and Wangs philosophy are an adventure in
consciousness (i.e., hsin). Phenomenology as a theory of knowledge centers
on the notion of intentionality, the way in which consciousness directs itself
toward the world.36 As in phenomenology, Wangs theory of knowledge is
marked by the notion of intentionality, which provides a link, to use Wangs
own language, between the internal and the external. Furthermore, insofar
42
as phenomenology elucidates the world of everyday life, the philosophy of

Wang Yang-ming is phenomenological in that the task of philosophy, as he
conceived it, is understanding liang-chih (good knowledge). His philosophy,
in this sense, is a mundane phenomenology that is attuned to the analysis of
the natural attitude.
iv. wang yang-ming and the phenomenological

notion of intentionality
After many years of search for truth and reality, Wang Yang-ming one day had
a sudden insight into the nature of philosophy. To philosophize is to grasp the
structure and essence (en-soi) of the mind or consciousness. Philosophically
speaking, his philosophy was a revolt against the alleged dualism of Chu Hsi
and the so-called School of Principle or Reason (li).37 Practically speaking, he
rebelled against the formalistic education of memorization, recitation, and
the writing of owery compositions. However, Wang acknowledges his intellectual indebtedness to Chu Hsis doctrine as a revelation from the gods.38
Wangs exhortation to return to the mind or consciousness is simply a
plea to return to the golden age of Chinese philosophy, that is, to Confucianism. The School of Mind (hsin) in general and his philosophy in particular
have an affinity with Buddhism and Taoism only to the extent that they both
focus their attention on the mind or consciousness.39 Although Wang himself
studied Buddhism in his youth, its inuence on him must not be exaggerated.
In fact, he was repelled by the rebellious teaching of Buddhism and Taoism;
thus he emphatically denies that his philosophy has anything in common
with Buddhist and Taoist lifeless contemplation, emptiness, and silence;40
and he asserts that his philosophy is Confucian through and through: the
Confucian way is the only way of philosophy.41 His return to the mind and
its en-soi, called intuitive knowledge, which might be called Wangs philosophical battle cry, resembles in spirit the motto of phenomenology, that is, zu
den Sachen selbst. This concept, as Merleau-Ponty interprets it, has an existential implication, for [t]o return to things themselves is to return to that
world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in
relation to which every scientic schematization is an abstract and derivative
sign-language, as is geography in relation to the country-side in which we
have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie or a river is.42 The prereective world of which Merleau-Ponty speaks is a network of subject-to-subject
43
rather than subject-to-object relationships. This world is not the egocentric world of thought but the heterocentric world of action. In this sense
Merleau-Pontys claim, the most important gain of phenomenology is to
unify the Scylla of extreme subjectivism and the Charybdis of extreme objectivism, can be accepted.43 The basis of this claim lies explicitly in the phenomenological notion of intentionality.
This deep echo of the consecration of intentionality and the Lebenswelt
is heard in the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming as the world of liang-chih
(good knowledge). It must be clearly understood that Wangs battle cry is
by no means an exaltation of the Buddhist bliss of pure consciousness or of
an incarcerated substance called the mind or self. By returning to the mind,
Wang does not imply that reality is already within the mind. On the contrary,
reality is a relation or encounter between the internal (the mind) and the
external (the world). The self is open to the world. To cultivate the mind does
not mean to detach the self from the world and to withdraw it to the inner
world of the pure self. Rather, it means selfs involvement in the world. Not
withdrawal but involvement is the essence of Wangs philosophy. True to the
phenomenological and existential meaning of intentionality, the mind is of
centrifugal character: it extends or directs itself toward the world.
For Wang Yang-ming an infallible beginning is essential to any philosophical inquiry simply because an innitesimal mistake in the beginning may
lead to an innite error at the end.44 To live up to this philosophical spirit,
the analysis of Wangs philosophy must begin with his notion of hsin and
its en-soi (pen-ti) called liang-chih. And if the philosopher is a perpetual
beginner, as Husserl said, then his beginning must perpetually return to his
original home, hsin and liang-chih.
The Chinese term hsin is usually translated as mind and, interestingly
enough, Wang Tchang-tche translates it as coeur in the Pascalian sense.45 It
may connote the thinking subject as in the Cartesian cogito, the spirit in the
Berkeleyan sense, and the ego, self, or person in the sense that hsin is the unity
of the act of intelligence and an agent who is able to generate action. More
importantly, it may be further described as consciousness. As Wang writes,
hsin is wherever consciousness is46 and what makes seeing, listening,
speaking, and moving possible.47 Hsin is not a static thing, for it is always
active: after all, the act of thinking itself is an activity.
The activity (yong) of hsin is called yi. Yi is translated most often as will
and sometimes as thought, consciousness, and so on. However, to translate yi as will is unsatisfactory, because will only refers to volitional acts.
44
Therefore, the term will for yi is restrictive. But to translate yi as thought

is to circumscribe the activity of hsin to reection. Thus when yi is referred
to as the activity of hsin, it should not mean either volitional acts or acts of
reection separately. To use the language of phenomenology, yi is an intentional act in the widest sense; it includes all intentional activities whether they
be objectifying or nonobjectifying. It is used in the sense that intention is necessary to both action and thought. In reference to action and thought, yi may
then imply practical intention and theoretical intention respectively. Yi, that
is, consciousness as activity, therefore, is best described as intentionality in
the phenomenological sense.48
In the metaphysics of Wang Yang-ming, hsin often has a transcendent,
cosmological, organistic, and even ethical meaning. However, the key to the
understanding of hsin is that hsin is always active, that is, consciousness is
the source of thought and action and is also the way in which it activates
(directs) itself toward the world. For all practical purposes, then, hsin and yi
are identical: as Husserl said, consciousness is intentionality (Bewusstsein ist
Intentionalitt). Thus, the comparison of the epistemology of Wang Yangming and phenomenology must be focused on hsin (i.e., consciousness) or,
more specically, yi (i.e., the intentionality of consciousness).
Wang Yang-mings concept of intentionality is also the radical starting
point of Husserls phenomenology and can be explained in phenomenological terms. The phenomenological description of the subject-and-object relation is radically different from the traditional view, for example, the Cartesian
cogito or the Berkeleyan percipi, which affirms the simple fact that thinking
requires an object of some sort to think about. For Husserl (following Franz
Brentano), all conscious acts are of intentional or directional character.49
In the stream of consciousness, intentionality is directed toward an object,
whether it be real or ideal, existent or imaginary, objectifying or nonobjectifying: thinking is thinking of something, remembering is remembering of
something, willing is willing of something, and so on. In other words, intentionality is a relation which all, or at least certain, acts bear to an object.50
The cogito, which is always ego cogito, bears within itself its cogitatum and
thus is the ego-cogito-cogitatum or consciousness-of-the-world. To describe
it in Husserls technical terms, the object as intended is called noema, and
its correlate, the act of intending, is called noesis. Intentionality is then a
term for the inseparable noematic-noetic correlation. The (external) world,
which is already given, is tied to consciousness. The very intentionality of
consciousness is Wangs claim for the unity of the internal and the external.
45
In this sense, Wang Yang-ming declares that the essence of hsin is singleness
or unity, which does not separate the internal from the external. The very
directionality of consciousness liberates the cogito from its own prison cell
to open it to the world.
According to Wang Yang-ming, consciousness never exists in a vacuum
because, as it will be remembered, it is always doing something (i.e., intending), whether this doing be the activity of thought (theoretical intention)
or actual doing (practical intention). Yi as the activity of hsin is the stream
of intentional acts, thought, or action: consciousness is always connected
with some thing (wu) or event (shih).51 Wang says that the mind is always
conscious of something.52 However, like Merleau-Ponty and other existential phenomenologists, Wang is existential in that the intentionality of consciousness is essentially practical, that is, it is a person-to-person encounter.
What emanates from the mind, he writes, is the will... and wherever the
will is directed is a thing.53 At a quick glance, intentionality seems to refer to
theoretical intentionality. However, the existential implication of this passage
is found in Wangs meaning of thing (wu).
For Wang, thing really means affair or event (shih), which primarily
suggests the principles of human relations. As Wang himself writes, [W]hen
the will is directed toward serving ones parents, then serving ones parents is a
thing. When the will is directed toward being humane to all people and feeling love toward things, then being humane to all people and feeling love toward
things are things.54 Thus lial piety, brotherly respect, loyalty, and benevolence are all things. Intentionality is then primarily practical intentionality. It
refers to the vast nexus of practical human relationships. Similarly, this is the
way in which Merleau-Ponty interpreted things (Sachen) as the lived world or
the world of action rather than the world of things and thought.
Although intentionality refers primarily to practical intentionality, Wang
Yang-ming extends it so as to include theoretical intentionality55 and perception and emotion as well. The following passage summarizes his notion of
intentionality as well as his entire philosophy:
Principle is one and no more. In terms of its condensation and concentration in the individual it is called the nature. In terms of the master of this accumulation it is called mind. In terms of its emanation
and operation, it is called the will. In terms of the clear consciousness
of the emanation and operations, it is called knowledge. And in terms
of the stimuli and responses of this clear consciousness, it is called
46
things. Therefore, when it pertains to things it is called investigation,

when it pertains to knowledge it is called extension, when it pertains
to the will it is called sincerity, and when it pertains to the mind it is
called rectication. To rectify is to rectify this, to be sincere is to be
sincere about this, to extend is to extend this, and to investigate is to
investigate this. These are all means of investigating the principle of
things to the utmost so as to develop the nature fully. There is no principle in the world outside nature (and the mind), and there is nothing
outside nature. The reason why the Confucian doctrine is not made
clear and does not prevail is because scholars of today consider principle as external and things as external.56
In essence, therefore, the message of Wang Yang-mings philosophy is the
inseparability of the internal and the external. Basically Wang criticizes the
dualistic thought of the Cheng-Chu school, whose starting point was the
external. In so doing, Wang often shifts his emphasis to what is internal.
However, to misrepresent him as a subjective idealist57 is to ignore totally
his insistence that hsin is not a self-enclosed self but is a being-to-theworld. Certainly Wangs critics remind us of the misguided positivistic and
naturalistic criticism of the phenomenology and existential philosophy of
our own time as being subjectivistic and even solipsistic.
Man, whose ontological structure is the center of Wang Yang-mings philosophical attention, is a unity of mind (or consciousness) and body; mind
and body are mutually dependent: If there is no mind, there will be no body,
and if there is no body, there will be no mind.58 Certainly mind is the master
of the body; however, the relationship between the two is that of the master
and the servant rather than that of the master and the slave. Although the
mind or the true self is not a piece of esh with blood,59 it and the bodily
self are not separated. Thus, death terminates mind as well as body.
Emotion or feeling (ching) is also produced as a result of the activity of
hsin itself. The seven feelingspleasure, anger, sorrow, joy, love, hate, and
desireare natural to man. These feelings are inside the realm of hsin itself.
For instance, the joy that a sage enjoys is not identical with the joy of one
of the seven feelings, but it is nonetheless related to it and may be shared by
the common people. The only problem with the common people, however, is
that, according to Wang, they are blind to joy even if they have itto use his
own analogythey are like those who look for a donkey while riding it. True
joy is consummated only in the realization of hsin and its en-soi, liang-chih.
47
Furthermore, Wangs explanation of sense perception must be understood in terms of the unity of the internal and the external, that is, the unity
of sense organs and the objects presented to them. For Wang, sense organs do
not have any substance of their own, since hsin does not have a substance of
its own. Sense perception thus must be understood only in a functional sense.
First, sense perception and hsin are inseparably linked: The ears, the eyes,
the mouth, the nose, and four limbs are parts of the body. But how can they
see, hear, speak, or act without the mind [hsin]? On the other hand, without
the ears, the eyes, the mouth, the nose, and the four limbs, the mind [hsin]
cannot see, hear, speak, or act when it wants to.60 Second, there is also the
mutual dependence between sense perception and sensed things or objects:
The eye has no substance of its own. Its substance consists of the colors
of all things. The ear has no substance of its own. Its substance consists of
the sounds of all things. The nose has no substance of its own. Its substance
consists of the smells of all things. The mouth has no substance of its own.
Its substance consists of the tastes of all things.61
v. wang yang-mings notion of

liang-chih (good knowledge)
Having examined the notion of intentionality, we shall try next to interpret Wang Yang-mings notion of liang-chih and its implications in the
light of the Lebenswelt, of prereflective knowledge, and of intuition
(Anschauung). Liang-chih is certainly the pillar of the practical as well as
the theoretical aspect of Wangs philosophy. It is originally of and to hsin
and must be sought in relation to hsin; it is not obtained by listening to
discussion and formalistic learning but only by personal cultivation and
experience (ti-jen). Liang-chih is not the knowledge only of those who
are privileged, like a sage, but is within the reach of every man, whether
he be a sage, a man of substance, a common man, or even a fool, because
it is a natural endowment, simple, easy, straightforward, and clear. As
Wang puts it, liang-chih is the seal of hsin; it is omniscient and eternal
because it has no beginning and no ending and because in it there is neither the past nor the future; and it is difficult to understand because it
has neither spatial restriction nor physical form.62 In the final analysis,
it is the fountainhead of all other knowledge: outside liang-chih there is
no other knowledge.63
48
Book 7, Part 1, Chapter 15, paragraph 1 of the Book of Menciusone

of the so-called great Four Bookssays that the ability possessed by men
without having been acquired by learning is intuitive ability, and the knowledge possessed by them without the exercise of thought is their intuitive
knowledge. No Chinese philosopher before or after Wang Yang-ming has
extended this single paragraph in such a way as to give it a major philosophical theme. Two key notions are intuitive ability (liang-neng) and intuitive
knowledge (liang-chih). The literal translations of liang-neng and liang-chih
is good ability and good knowledge, respectively.64 They suggest certain
modes of doing and knowing, both of which are intuitive, that is to say, doing
without having been acquired by learning and knowing without the exercise of thought. As to intuitive knowledge in particular, this intuitive mode
of knowing is prepredicative or prereective knowledge in exactly the same
sense as phenomenologists understand it, because knowledge here is the
knowledge without the exercise of thought.
As I have already intimated in the beginning of this essay, the Lebenswelt
and its place in his philosophical investigations preoccupied Husserl at the end
of his life, and thus he moved closely toward existential philosophy. Relating
the idea of the Lebenswelt to the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming, at least at
the rst glimpse, is not as obvious as in the case of intentionality. Nonetheless,
the meaning of the lifeworld is present in his idea of liang-chih, or intuitive
knowledge refers directly to lived and everyday experience; it is the knowledge
that is intuitive and prereective. It is interesting to compare liang-chih with
Alfred Schutzs notion of the epoch of the natural attitude as contrasted
with the phenomenological epoch. The epoch of the natural attitude is the
suspension of doubt in the reality of the world, whereas the phenomenological epoch is the suspension of existential beliefs in it. What (man) puts in
brackets, writes Schutz, is the doubt that the world and its objects might
be otherwise than it appears to him.65 For Wang, liang-chih is direct, clear,
simple and even unmistakable. It is also clearly suggestive of Husserls natural
concept of the world (natrlichen Weltbegriff) and identical with Macmurrays
knowledge in action.68 Liang-chih is the prepredicative knowledge acquired
by acquaintance with the world rather than predicative knowledge about it.
In other words, it is the knowledge of existence or of the world achieved by
participating directly in it; it is knowledge by which we are guided in our world
of everyday life, and thus this mode of knowledge is with the lifeworld. The
philosophy of Wang Yang-ming, grounded in liang-chih, is, in the nal analysis, more than a theory of knowledge; it is an ontology of manman not as
49
the disinterested thinker and spectator but rather primarily as actor and participant. It is thus substantively phenomenological and existential in its stress
on liang-chih and the extension of liang-chih (chih-liang-chih). We may justly
characterize Wang as a philosopher of lived experience, a radical empiricist in
the best and most persuasive sense: he does not simply talk about lived experience; his philosophy emanates from his own lived experience. In the latter
sense, Wang Tchang-tche affirms that the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming is
essentially one of lived experience.67 Since this is the crucial point of reference
in relating the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming to existential phenomenology,
the Lebenswelt should be examined more closely.
The Lebenswelt is described as the world of concrete existence as projected and lived by men in daily life.68 As Wild explains, by the Lebenswelt
Husserl meant not a thing, not any set of objects, but rather an ultimate
horizon within which all such objects and the individual person himself are
actually understood in the natural attitude of everyday life.69 It refers to
the common and shared world of everyday life and experience characterized
by action, projection, and decision. Therefore, the scientist qua scientist or
the philosopher qua philosopher does not participate in the Lebenswelt as an
actor.70 The lifeworld is primordial and primary in the sense that the world
of theorizing is necessarily presupposed by and grounded in it: it is pregiven
to both the man in the world of working and to the theorizing thinker.71
Theoretical knowing and speaking, writes Wild, presupposes this world.
They are themselves special ways of being in the world.72 Because it is the
world of I live through in contrast to the world of I think, distinctively
philosophical problems do not arise in it, even though they are posterior to it.
The importance of this life-world, as Natanson puts it, is not its status
as knowledge but its focus as the meaningful ground of human action.73
The lifeworld is the primary world of action, whereas the world of thought
is the secondary world. The theory of actionmore specically the primacy
of actionmakes existential phenomenology and the philosophy of Wang
Yang-ming as well as William Jamess radical empiricism and John Macmurrays philosophy of action converge. Man lives or acts before he knows: It is
by acting and in action that man is enabled to know.74
As I have indicated, liang-chih is the cradle of Wang Yang-mings philosophy; and the world implied in liang-chih is the Lebenswelt. As reective
knowledge is to philosophy, liang-chih or intuitive knowledge is to the world
of everyday life. Now liang-chih as immediate apprehension (chih-chou) can
be examined further in the light of the phenomenological concept of intuition.
50
Intuition or intuitive knowledge is related to praxis and reection both in

Husserls phenomenology and Wang Yang-mings philosophy. The importance
of intuition in these two philosophies can hardly be overlooked. Husserl considered the principle of intuition as the principle of all principles (das Prinzip
aller Prinzipien). Inasmuch as phenomenology maintains that what is evident
need not be demonstrated, it is a philosophy of intuition.75 The same is true
for Wang Yang-ming; his philosophy centers on liang-chih and thus may be
appropriately called the philosophy of liang-chih or intuitive knowledge.
To be sure, intuition is a vague, ambiguous, and therefore troublesome
word. But the existence of its referent is hardly questionable, for, as Strasser
points out, any explicit act of reection presupposes something that rst is
grasped without reection.76 As man cannot deny consciousness, so he cannot refute the existence of intuition. Therefore, the theory of intuition rests
on the primacy of consciousness that determines his existence.77 Intuition is
a mode of cognitive consciousness, or is an objectifying intentional act, by
which man comes in contact with being in a direct manner. As Wang Yangming says, liang-chih is clear intelligence and consciousness.78 Intuition is
a direct vision or seeing. Being and transcendence as well are determined by
intuition, and intuition is the idea of the absolute existence of consciousness.79 As a cognitive or objectifying consciousness, intuition has its own
share of intentionality, that is, intuitive intentionality. Thus, phenomena
as properly understood in Husserls phenomenology designate not only
what appears to consciousness but also what can become the object of
intuition.80 Furthermore, if man is to understand intellect as the faculty of
knowing the ideal, intuition is not as foreign to intellect as it is in the philosophy of Bergson. In this way, as Emmanuel Levinas asserts, phenomenological
intuition transcends the Bergsonian antagonism between intellect (or reason)
and intuition.81 Likewise, for Wang Yang-ming, intuition is never opposed
to reason well understood.82 They are not mutually exclusive; on the contrary, intuition as a cognitive act paves the way to reection. Intuitive knowledge cannot be dispensed within either philosophy or science.
Although immediate apprehension is an indispensable stepping-stone to
reective knowledge, intuitive knowledge is of greater interest in its relation to the world of action or the lifeworld. Intuition, or what Strasser calls
prescientic intuition, is an essential element of the lifeworld: Without
this intuition there would be no explanation of why the praxis of the everyday world keeps functioning and why on the prescientic level things run
their orderly course.83 The primacy of the lifeworld affirms that intuitive
51
knowledge is primary to the world of reection: living or acting is primary

and prior to thought. In this sense alone, the meaning of liang-chih as (intuitive) knowledge in action must be understood. As action is the completion
of knowledge, the extension of knowledge is to put intuitive knowledge into
practice. The truth of intuitive knowledge is veried only by action.84
For Wang Yang-ming, the cultivation of personal life is to extend liangchih or intuitive knowledge to human relationships. Just as he applied to
things (wu) the human term affairs and events (shih), so too the investigation of things (ko-wu)which has been an important philosophical
theme in Chinese philosophyis given a human meaning, on the basis of
which he repudiated the doctrine adhered to by the followers of the ChengChu school. According to Chu Hsi, truth is attributed to the external things
themselves. A recorded episode reveals that Wangs attempt to discover the
truth in the bamboos was a total failure. One day he suddenly discovered that
the investigation of things did not mean the investigation of every bamboo,
blade of grass, leaf or branch of a tree, but that, instead, truth and reality are
to be found in hsin and its activities. Thus, Wang concluded that ko-wu really
means ko-hsin (rectication of the mind). Thus, he attributed a new meaning
not only to things but also to investigation (ko) by interpreting the latter as rectication. Reality and truth coincide only when one concentrates
on hsin and its en-soi, liang-chih that, practically speaking, amounts to the
cultivation of personal life: The rectication of the mind, the sincerity of
the will, the extension of knowledge, and the investigation of things are all
means of cultivating the personal life.85 Each of them has its own place, but
they are of one thread. They are different only in procedure: Investigating,
extending, being sincere, rectifying, and cultivating are the tasks performed
in the procedure.86 In this respect, Wang Yang-mings notion of the cultivation of personal life contains an existential element: as Wild points out,
existential philosophy is concerned with the nite existence of the human
person as lived from within.87
vi. wang yang-mings unity of knowledge and action

The last theme in this discussion is Wang Yang-mings notion of the unity
of knowledge and action (chih hsing ho yi). Seriousness, according to Wang,
is the concentration on one thing. In this sense, he is truly a serious thinker,
and the question of the unity of knowledge and action also has to be referred
52
back to the question of hsin, as they are tied together. Hsin is active, that is,
always doing something that may be thinking or acting. Thinking is an activity and man has a natural ability to know.88 Outside consciousness (hsin),
nothing is possible and there will be no problems, philosophical or otherwise. Although the term chih (knowledge) suggests no distinction between
reective and prereective knowledge, it is safe to say that chih here implies
reective knowledge, whereas I have identied liang-chih with prereective
knowledge or knowledge in action. The term hsing refers to bodily movement in general, which may be conscious or unconscious, as well as to action
dened in a meaningful way, that is, action that is both projected and purposive.90 However, it is limited to overt action that precludes thought process.
Thus chih hsing ho yi is tantamount to the unity of theoria and praxis.
The question of the relationship between knowledge and action is coeval
with philosophy itself; and the notion of the unity of knowledge and action
has been a persistent theme in the history of Chinese philosophy from Confucius and Wang Yang-ming down to Sun Yat-sen, Mao Tse-tung (not Confucian but Marxian), and Chiang Kai-shek.91 However, Wang was the rst
philosopher who held the inseparability of knowledge and action. This unity
condemns pure scholasticism, and it is the real substance of existential phenomenology that attempts to bridge the gap between academic philosophy
(knowledge) and culture (action). To return to hsin means going back to
the original source of knowledge and action. Both knowledge and action are
the intentional activities of consciousness. As Wang insists, they are inseparable: Knowledge in its genuine and earnest aspect is action, and action in
its intelligent and discriminating aspect is knowledge.... Knowledge is the
direction for action and action the effort of knowledge,92 and knowledge is
the beginning of action and action is the completion of knowledge.93 Truth,
then, is the dialectic mediation between knowledge and action; and truths
mediator is the intentionality of consciousness. As it has been pointed out,
intention is the fundamental and necessary character of both knowledge and
action: to use the language of Wang Yang-ming, it is the original substance
of knowledge and action.94 Intention was divided into theoretical intention
and practical intention. The theoretical or epistemological aspect of intentionality was discussed extensively when Wangs theory of knowledge was
compared with phenomenology. Now practical intention will be considered
with respect to the existential (pragmatic) aspect of phenomenology.
When intentionality is identied with encounter, it is primarily practical
intentionality. Indeed, the world of lived experience, with which existential
53
phenomenology is concerned, is the world governed not by any theoretical

interest but only by practical interest.95 Action as an intentional activity in
this lived world is encounter that, in turn, represents a nexus of relations
of persons or agents who project, choose, and decide. In this connection,
one can speak of the pragmatism of existential phenomenology. Pragmatism
and existential phenomenology as philosophies of knowledge are concerned
primarily with the knowledge about this lived world rather than the world of
pure thought. The philosophy that is concerned with the lived world becomes
a heterocentric philosophy or a philosophy of jen (humanity)96 because this
world itself is commonly shared and intersubjective. Insofar as the theory
of action or, more specically, the primacy of action is implicit in pragmatism and phenomenology, the two converge.97 Similarly, the philosophy of
Wang Yang-ming contains a pragmatism to the extent that he maintains the
view that consciousness (hsin) is praxis before it becomes theoria, that is,
intentionality is practical before it becomes theoretical. To repeat what Wang
himself wrote, Knowledge is the beginning of action and action is the completion of knowledge. This is the culminating point of convergence between
Wangs philosophy and existential phenomenology.
The extension of knowledge, then, consists of action, and without action,
there is no extension of knowledge;98 similarly, when knowledge is extended,
the will becomes sincere.99 Sincerity (cheng) simply means to carry out
knowledge in action. Furthermore, the investigation of things is the effort to
extend knowledge;100 thus, the investigation of things to the utmost involves
carrying out knowledge in action. Learning that includes study, inquiry,
thinking, and sifting has practice in view: learning is the learning of the fundamental principles of human relationships. To think is to learn, and to learn
is to act, which completes a full cycle of knowledge and action.
vii. closing remarks

As I have attempted to show, the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming has phenomenological and existential elements in its essential forms and stands out as
an indubitable testimony against the familiar dualism of subject and object,
mind and body, theory and practice, reason and emotion, and value and fact.
His philosophy is a unitary system through and through; it is one thread that
opposes every form of bifurcation; and he is a truly serious thinker. Above
all, man cannot philosophize in a vacuum: academic philosophy must link
54
itself to living, the Lebenswelt or the world of hsing (action). In the unity
of the lived world and philosophy, not only the late philosophy of Husserl,
post-Husserlian phenomenology, and the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming,
but also existential philosophy nd their meeting ground. We must not conne ourselves to the convergence of the ne points of philosophical themes
in existential phenomenology and the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming, but,
more signicantly, we must widen the horizon of our vision to the spirit in
which philosophical activities are carried out and to Husserls and Wangs
conceptions of the role of a philosopher dened in a striking manner; put
simply, the philosopher is the civil servant of humanity (fonctionnaire de
lhumanit or funktionre der menschheit).101 I can nd no better description than this one to convey the spirit of Chinese philosophy, the philosophy
that shares with existential phenomenology the urgent and engulng sense
of human existence and humanity. All philosophical controversies in Chinese
philosophy largely reect this sense of urgency. The tradition of Chinese philosophy is that of a philosophy of jen. The ultimate function of philosophy
is tested in the manner in which it serves, albeit indirectly, to sustain and
enhance human existence. To borrow the elegant expression of John Smith,
The products of mans intellect must not be allowed to remain as recondite
adjuncts to life.102
To rejuvenate and elevate the status of Chinese philosophy in the new
light I have indicated, we must rst come to grips with its history, because
philosophy and history of philosophy are inseparably linked. Wang Yangmings philosophy of hsin and liang-chih is largely propounded in the framework of a commentary on the Four Books and Five Classics.103 We have here
suggested a new approach to cultivating (for the West) the almost virgin land
of Chinese philosophy by using the new tools and techniques of existential
phenomenology. By so doing, another bridge may be built between the East
and the West, and we may open a way toward a phenomenology of phenomenologies. Chan Wing-tsit recently pointed out a movement toward synthesis that has been taking place in modern Chinese philosophy, attempting to
combine Western philosophy with traditional Chinese thought.104 However,
so far as I know there is regrettably no sign of the inuence of phenomenology and existential philosophy on recent Chinese philosophers, even though,
as I have shown, there is a close affinity between the philosophy of Wang
Yang-ming and existential phenomenology both in their approaches and
spirit, particularly in their philosophical spirit, which shuns much of the traditional speculative conundrums and chimera of abstraction in the name of
55
humanity. Philosophy in search of truth and reality, beyond doubt, transcends

and must transcend the boundary between the East and the West. Fung Yulan was prophetic; his prophecy will be fullled when the merger of Chinese
and Western philosophy is effected through the common bond of existential
phenomenology.
CHAPTER 4
the unity of knowledge and action

a postscript to wang yang- m i ng s
e xiste ntial phe nom enol ogy
Uniform ideas originating among entire peoples

unknown to each other must have a common ground
of truth.
Giambattista Vico
i. introduction
Chinese philosophy, because of its practical preoccupation, has suffered I
think the same, unfortunate fate as existentialism that has often been victimized as a nonphilosophy in the hand of rationalism or intellectualism because
it dwells allegedly on the irrationality of man. My authoring Wang Yangming and Existential Phenomenology in 1965 in International Philosophical
Quarterly was motivated by two factors.1 In the rst place, I was eager to
prove that Chinaor, for that matter, the Orienthas indeed, a bona de
philosophylogic, cosmology, metaphysics, ontology, and, above all, ethics.
One way of proving this claim was to show that Wang Yang-mings thought
is philosophically comparable to the existential phenomenology of Martin
Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others. In the second place, I intended to show that Chinese philosophy makes its most signicant intraphilosophical contributions to the areas of practical philosophy
in the broadest sense of the term. I am convinced now more than ever before
that Wang Yang-ming is one of the exemplary philosophers in the history of
Chinese philosophy who makes signicant intraphilosophical contributions
in terms of practical philosophy to both world philosophy and the phenomenological movement as a global phenomenon.
57
The questionwhether China has a philosophyoriginates in the main, I

think, from two sources: the rst is comparable to something of what the literary critic Edward W. Said calls Orientalism2 or Western intellectual ethnocentrism particularly since Hegel, and the second is the nature of Chinese
thought characterized in 1929 by H. G. Creel as Sinism3that cluster of
characteristics that are uniquely Chinese. The phenomenon of Sinism should
apply to all the geographical regionsKorea and Japan as well as China
where Chinese ideograms have been and are in use. Many other prominent,
astute observers of Chinese thought, history, and culture such as Fung Yulan, Chan Wing-tsit, Nakamura Hajime, Suzuki Daisetz Teitaro, and Marcel
Granet concur with Creel on the core characteristics of the Sinistic mindset
that is embodied and expressed in its ideographic language.
We may attribute the modern origin of Orientalism to the rationalist
Hegel for whom the EastChina and Indiarepresents the childhood of
history. For him, Chinese historylike the rhythm of naturerepeats itself
endlessly and becomes an unhistorical history, a historical infantilism or
paleography in the progression of world history. Chinese history is the static
and seamless ow of the eternal yesterday. Against Hegels ethnocentrism,
it should be noted, the French existential phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty
entertains the idea of discovering the universal essences of human culture
beyond objectivism and relativitism. He speaks well of ethnological ndings
from Marcel Mauss to Claude Lvi-Strauss. Their ethnological ndings open
up the lateral universal, which is no longer the overarching universal of a
strictly objective method but which is acquired through ethnological experience and its incessant testing of the self through the other person and the
other person through the self. It is a question of constructing a general system of reference in which the point of view of the native, the point of view
of the civilized man, and the mistaken views each has of the other can all
nd a placethat is, of constituting a more comprehensive experience which
becomes in principle accessible to men of a different time and country.4
Unlike Hegel who viewed Oriental thought, history, and culture in a cavalier fashion, it is for Merleau-Ponty immensely interesting, suggestive, and
instructive. Philosophical truth as absolute and universal knowledge is for
Merleau-Ponty not certied by the Occidental seal of approval alone. Rather,
all thought is for him part of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) as the total meaning
horizon of a sociocultural world; all philosophies are sorts of anthropological types, and none has any privileged birthright to a monopoly of truth. If
Western thought is what it claims to be, Merleau-Ponty challenges, it must
prove it by understanding all life-worlds.5
58
For Merleau-Ponty, the arrogant path of Hegel that excludes Oriental

thought ab initio from absolute and universal knowledge and draws a geographical frontier between philosophy and nonphilosophy also excludes a
good part of the Western past. Philosophy as a perpetual beginning is destined to examine its own idea of truth again and again because truth is not
divided among doctrines but is a treasure scattered about in human life before
philosophicalthat is, conceptualformulation. If so, Western philosophy,
too, is destined to reexamine not only its own idea of truth but also related
matters and institutions such as science, economics, and politics. MerleauPonty thus declares,
search of truth or salvation in what falls short of science or philosophical awareness, or of dragging chunks of mythology as such
into our philosophy, but of acquiringin the presence of these variants of humanity that we are so far froma sense of the theoretical
and practical problems our institutions are faced with, and of rediscovering the existential eld that they were born in and their long
success has led us to forget. The Orients childishness has something to teach us, if it were nothing more than the narrowness of our
adult ideas. The relationship between Orient and Occident, like that
between child and adult, is not that of ignorance to knowledge or
non-philosophy to philosophy; it is much more subtle, making room
on the part of the Orient for all anticipations and prematurations.
Simply rallying and subordinating non-philosophy to true philosophy will not create the unity of the human spirit. It already exists
in each cultures lateral relationships to the others, in the echoes one
awakes in the other.6
ii. wangs sinism and phenomenology

As for Sinism, it is that Weltanschauung that accentuates what we would
call the primacy of the practicalthat is, the Sinistic lifeworld, which is
this-worldly, practical, concrete, and particular, rather than otherworldly,
speculative, abstract, and general. It is denitely an orientation of, and an
emphasis on, the vita activa rather than the vita contemplativa, that is, ethics
59
and politics rather than theology and metaphysics. Is the king or ruler not,
etymologically speaking, the unier of heaven, man, and earth in all Chinese
thought? In Sinism, the praxis of man is identiable with a diverse nexus
of social relationships: a variety of the rules and rites of reciprocity. As a
practical humanismif I may use and extend Professor Chan Wing-tsits
characterization of Confucianism to the entire spectrum of Chinese thought,
Chinese philosophy emphasizes not so much what man is (i.e., essence), as
how he acts and ought to act (i.e., existence). In its orientation, it is existentialist rather than essentialist. As it focuses on the nexus of social relationships, it puts a premium on the nature of moral conduct in the everyday
lifeworld culminating in the ideal of humanity (jen)the quality of being
genuinely human, being benevolent, and being humankind as a collectivity. In
short, Chinese thought seeks the unity of knowledge and action (chih hsing
ho i) in terms of the primacy of the latter over the former wherein lies its
affinity with existential philosophy with a difference.
It must be pointed out that the problematic of knowledge and action
is intraphilosophical. In China, it has been the most persistent and perennial theme from Confucius and Wang Yang-ming to Sun Yat-sen and Mao
Tse-tung. In the West, it has persisted from the wise men of Athens
and Jerusalem to Sren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, John Dewey, and JeanPaul Sartre.7 Above all, it is quintessential to moral, political, and social
philosophy. However, both intraphilosophically and in terms of the long,
cherished tradition of Chinese thought, Wang Yang-ming formulated the
idea of the unity of knowledge and action most forcefully and clearly. As
Wang insists, knowledge and action are one single effort: Knowledge in
its genuine and earnest aspect is action, and action in its intelligent and
discriminating aspect is knowledge. . . . Knowledge is the direction for
action and action the effort of knowledge. In essence, knowledge is the
beginning of action and action is the completion of knowledge.8 Unity
here, I suggest, should mean the dialectical interrelatedness of knowledge
and action as two distinctive but inseparable ideas or phenomena that necessarily complement each other. It is neither monistic nor dualistic. Nor is
one reducible to the other. The idea of unity as dialectical interrelatedness,
therefore, avoids monism, dualism, and reductionism at the same time. We
may say that ultimately the sincerity of the will (cheng i) is for Wang
Yang-ming the original source (pen ti) of both knowledge and action.
To put it in the language of phenomenology, knowledge and action are
mediated by consciousness as intentionality, that is, hsin (mind-and-heart)
60
as active extends or directs itself toward the worldthe world of both

persons and objects.9
Unity as dialectical interrelatedness is not, of course, foreign to the tradition of Chinese thought. The twentieth-century Chinese philosopher Chang
Tung-sun ascribes as unique the logic of correlation or correlative duality to Chinese thought that implies, interestingly, political thought rather
than theology and metaphysics as its ultimate background.10 Chang is simply
paraphrasing in the language of modern epistemology the familiar ancient
conception of the unity of yin and yang as complementary whose complexity
is seen fully in the I Ching. The unity of two distinctive phenomena as complementary may pertain to that of subject and object, mind and body, speech
and silence, man and nature, and so on, as well as to that of knowledge and
action. I prefer the term diatactics, which is borrowed from Hayden White,11
for several reasons. First, White wishes to have it replace the term dialectics
in order to avoid the certain ideological overtone of Marx on the one hand
and the transcendental overtone of Hegels thought on the other: diatactics
is neither paratactical (conceptually underdetermined) nor hypotactical
(conceptually overdetermined). Second, just as in the logic of yin and yang,
diatactics avoids the Hegelian and Marxian dialectics as teleological progression toward a higher synthesis, which is ultimately theological or eschatological. In this sense, it returns to its original meaning as practiced by Socrates
and conveyed by Plato as dialoguethe mutual and genuine exchange in a
consociational encounter of questions and answersas a method of disclosing truth (i.e., aletheia).12 Third, diatactics is tactical to the extent to which it
arouses the intimate sense of touch or tactility and emphasizes the pragmatic
or performative side of language in use. Contrary to the duality of conception and perception deeply rooted in that of mind and body in the tradition
of Western rationalism, the meaning to which diatactics is ascribed here is
not just conceptual but perceptual as well.13
It should also be said that the primacy of the practical, which is the hallmark of the Sinistic lifeworld(s) and the centerpiece of Chinese philosophy,
is not contrary to the unity of knowledge and action as diatactical or complementary. Indeed, the primacy of the practical must be made a necessary
component of the unity of knowledge and action because without it Chinese
philosophy would be paradoxical and unable to reconcile itself with its conception of the pinnacle of human existence as social existence. Let me explain.
In the rst place, the primacy of action over thought does not in the least
slight the importance of thought because thought is not just instrumental
61
to action. The presence of thought makes action sincere, intentional,

or purposive.14 Thought precedes the actual performance of action, and
action contains thought as an element in its determination. To deny the presence of thought in action is to deny the existential quality of man as human.
For thought is a faculty of every man who belongs to the noble species called
human. The ability to think and act as human, however, does not refer to the
ability to theorize abstractly or think in abstraction but the ability to make
moral judgments based on the sensus communis (as in Socratic or Confucian wisdom, Aristotelian phronesis, or Kantian categorical imperatives). In
the second place, the overdetermination of thought or intellectualism whose
starting point is the primary of the theoretical is intrinsically and inextricably egocentric. The Scottish philosopher John Macmurraynot unlike
Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel, Karl Jaspers, and Merleau-Pontyis most
forceful in criticizing the egocentric predicament of Western philosophy for
unduly magnifying thought over action.15 In modern philosophy Macmurray contends Descartes embodies this theory-centered, egocentric attitude in
his philosophy of the cogito. According to Macmurray, the predicament of
the philosophy of the cogito is twofold: the dualism of thought and action
on the one hand and egocentricity on the other. The philosophy of the I
think or I know is egocentric and dualistic at the same time because the
cogito is necessarily and always ego cogito, that is, I think or I know with
capital I in isolation from other actors in the social world. The thinking
I isto use Jacques Derridas expressiona cemetery sentinel. In order
to avoid this egocentric and dualistic predicament of the cogito, Macmurray
proposes, We must turn from thought to action as our centre of reference,
and so make action primary. Then the reective activities have their meaning
in their reference to the practical world.16 The philosophy of the I do contains within itself thought and is also heterocentric because action implies an
instantiation of the I and You (i.e., the personal).
iii. clarification of wang yang-mings thought

in relation to existential phenomenology
Having stated my motives for authoring Wang Yang-ming and Existential
Phenomenology in 1965 and outlined Wangs formulation of the unity of
knowledge and action as intraphilosophical contribution, this section will
reexamine my original thesis and defend it in light of recent scholarship on
62
Wang since the publication in 1965 of my essay. In so doing, I will focus on

and critically examine in the following pages the writings of three scholars:
(1) A. S. Cua, (2) Julia Ching, and (3) Tu Wei-ming. Let me summarize briey
the central themes for weaving the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming and existential phenomenology.
First, the concept of the lifeworld is the seminal discovery of Husserls phenomenology. It is dened as the most encompassing horizon of preconceptual
meaning as projected and lived by men and women in everyday life. It is the
founding and funding matrix of all theoretical activitieslogic, science, philosophy, and so on. The importance of the lifeworld lies not in its status as
knowledge but grounds all that we think and do. In short, it refers to the eld
of the practical. We say that Wang Yang-mings formulation of (preconceptual)
knowledge of the good called liang-chih pertains to the everyday lifeworld as
the practical world of values and moral ideals. In his phenomenological study
of moral experience, Maurice Mandelbaum remarks that the phenomenological method is eductive rather than deductive. Its essential methodological
conviction is that a solution to any of the problems of ethics must be educed
from, and veried by, a careful and direct examination of individual moral
judgmentsan examination of moral judgments that men make [in living
their daily lives].17 To put it in a slightly different way, Wang Yang-mings liangchih may be likened to Aristotles phronesis. For phronesis is that moral knowledge that is distinguished from procedures of rigorous and exact episteme or
scientia. Both liang-chih and phronesis are grounded not in a contemplative or
theoretical grasp of the good based on metaphysical elaboration and timeless
immutability but rather in the concrete good a person brings to realization in
his own everyday lifeworldly conduct. In his study of Aristotles moral philosophy with a focus on phronesis, J. Donald Monan concludes, The reality of
[Aristotles] moral knowledge is rather a pre-philosophic given in a double
sense. As an immediate encounter with value in experiential conduct, it is prephilosophic in the sense that it does not presuppose any systematic metaphysic
of the good. But as a genuine encounter with value, it does invite one to evaluate this mysterious encounter critically and to seek its ultimate ground. More
important, the features revealed in Aristotles description of moral knowledge
prescribe that the only method capable of seeking that ground is a reective,
phenomenological one.18 Second, it should be said that the ultimate ground
for encountering the good is, for Wang Yang-ming, no other than the sincerity of the will, that is, moral consciousness as intentionality. Since Wang, following his Confucian philosophical forbearers, is concerned with the moral
63
direction of human conduct and affairs, it may be called practical or existential intentionality, that is, the directionality of consciousness (hsin) toward the
world of human things (affairs) or mans moral encounter with the social
world. This is the reason the so-called second school of phenomenology known
as existential phenomenologyexemplied in such works as Heideggers Sein
und Zeit (1927), Sartres Ltre et le Nant (1943), and Merleau-Pontys Phnomnologie de la Perception (1945)is so germane to the placement of Wang
Yang-ming in the context of contemporary Western philosophy. It is interesting to note that Wangs revolutionary thought or philosophical enlightenment
came about in challenging Chu Hsis famous doctrine of the investigation
of things (ko-wu).19 For Wang Yang-ming, investigation (ko) was turned into
rectication (cheng), while things (wu) were turned into events or affairs (shih):
in short, Wangs revolutionary enlightenment was the discovery of the internal world of morality as compared with Chu Hsis philosophy of the external
world of objects. Similarly, the famous phenomenological battle cry Zu den
Sachen selbst really means the return to meaning(s). More importantly, Heideggers ontological turn in Being and Time called fundamental ontology
(Fundamentalontologie) is the phenomenological analysis of Dasein (mans
existence or human reality) as privileged to the disclosure of Being: ontology is
for Heidegger possible only as phenomenology. In conclusion, as I said in 1965
and can say again now, the following passage of Wang Yang-ming summarizes
his notion of intentionality as well as his entire philosophy:
Principle is one and no more. In terms of its condensation and concentration in the individual it is called the nature. In terms of the
master of this accumulation it is called mind. In terms of its emanation and operation, it is called the will. In terms of the clear consciousness of the emanation and operations, it is called knowledge.
And in terms of the stimuli and responses of this clear consciousness, it is called things. Therefore when it pertains to things it is
called investigation, when it pertains to knowledge it is called extension, when it pertains to the will it is called sincerity, and when it
pertains to the mind it is called rectication. To rectify is to rectify
this, to be sincere is to be sincere about this, to extend is to extend
this, and to investigate is to investigate this. These are all means of
investigating the principle of things to the utmost so as to develop
the nature fully. There is no principle in the world outside nature
(and the mind), and there is no thing outside nature. The reason
64
why the Confucian doctrine is not made clear and does not prevail is
because scholars of today consider principle as external and things
as external.20
III.1.
In his recent study of Wang Yang-ming, The Unity of Knowledge and Action,
A. S. Cua recognizes the unity of knowledge and action as central to Wangs
thought. He advances the argument that it is a contribution to moral psychology: it is in essence a doctrine of moral psychology that depicts the psychological elements involved in understanding moral achievement.21 Although it
is not altogether clear as to why Wangs contribution is to moral psychology
rather than moral philosophy, the following four passages are hints for Cuas
appellation: (1) moral knowledge is discussed in Wang without depending
on a systematic ontology (2) ithe unity of knowledge and action pertains
to the understanding of the actuating import rather than the cognitive content of moral knowledge; (3) being couched in the existentialist language of
Kierkegaard, Wang is not an objective thinker concerned with the elaboration of an ethical theory that can serve as a rational foundation for morality; he is a committed thinker interested in the subjective appropriation of
classical Confucian ideasin brief, Wang is a sagacious man of engagement; and (4) the unity of knowledge and action is concerned with moral
ideals but not epistemology. Cua sees a striking affinity between Wangs
sincerity of the will and Kierkegaards purity of heart. He explains the
will (i) as a complex interplay of motive, desire, volition, intention, and even
commitmentall of which are taken as psychological categories. Moreover, Cua argues that (moral) knowledge is prerequisite to the performance
of (moral) action. Having distinguished between prospective knowledge,
which is anterior to action, and retrospective knowledge, which is posterior
to action, he considers the former as a precondition, presupposition, and
originating source of the latter.22
Despite producing an edifying, analytical scenario, Cuas psychological
appropriation of Wang Yang-mings unity of knowledge and action does
not do full justice to the philosophical weight of his thought as a revolutionary reconstruction of classical Confucianism in lieu of Chu Hsis doctrine of the investigation of things. For Wang Yang-ming does not simply
replace (Chu Hsis) ontology or metaphysics with (his) moral psychology. Rather, his theme of the unity of knowledge and action is a complete
65
philosophyontological, metaphysical, and ethical. Let me explain further. Because consciousness (hsin) is intentional or is made operational by
means of the will (i), it is the originary source of producing knowledge as
well as feelings and volitions in the self as agent. This intentionality thesis is what brings Wang Yang-mings thought close to phenomenology
Husserls philosophy that elevated Franz Brentanos psychological category
to a philosophical one by discovering the general structure of consciousness
as the polar unity of (subjective) noesis and (objective) noema: consciousness (as intentional) is always conscious of something, whether it be thinking, knowing, feeling, willing, and so on. In discussing many ne issues
relating to intentionality, for example, consciousness, subjectivity, reexivity, and metaphysics in Western and Indian philosophy, the phenomenologist Jitendra Nath Mohanty writes, Consciousness is also subjective, but
not all that is subjective is consciousness. Consciousness is also intentional.
But what denes consciousness qua consciousness, not qua subjective, is its
reexivity, not its intentionality. Subjectivity is a necessary but not sufficient
condition of consciousness.23 From this passage, we may conclude that as
there is a radical difference between intentionality and what is called introspection in psychology, intentionality dened phenomenologically is not
just a state of mind, a mental state, or a psychological category. As such,
intentionality may very well be the corner stone of a descriptive metaphysics of subjectivity.24 Therefore, neither intentionality nor subjectivity,
unlike introspection, is exclusively a psychological category.
III.2.
Unlike Cua, neither Julia Ching nor Tu Wei-ming exorcises cosmological,
metaphysical, and ontological speculation from her or his discussion of
Wang Yang-mings thought. Chings To Acquire Wisdom is the most denitive account in the English language of the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming as
a whole. In its key chapter (chapter 2) entitled The Starting Point: Hsin, she
remarks that To him [Wang Yang-ming], the moral dimension of the whole
lived world of human relationships and affairs connotes somehow the inseparability of these relationships and affairs with hsin, the source of morality.25
She approvingly footnotes my statement that Not withdrawal, but involvement, is the essence of Wangs philosophy.... The mind is of centrifugal
character: it extends or directs itself toward the world.26 She is also to the
point in considering Wangs formulation of the unity of knowledge and action
66
as primarily a moral ideal rather than a principle of epistemology27the

point Cua approvingly cites in his discussion of Wangs moral psychology.
The philosophy whose starting point or focus is epistemology, as previously
noted, is necessarily caught in the egocentric predicament that, in turn, nullies the very ground of the possibility of moral conduct since moral conduct
presupposes the intersubjective encounter with other people.
In her discerning article on authentic selfhood, Ching compares Wang
Yang-ming with the founder of existential phenomenology, Heidegger.28
She compares Wangs reforming spirit with Heideggers new way of doing
phenomenology. She writes, Heideggers research for meaning begins with
human existence, as does Wang Yang-mings. Heidegger insists upon this
approach, departing thereby from his master Husserl, just as Wang Yangming parted company from the orthodox thinker, Chu Hsi, whose interest
was more in things themselves (Li).29 Since Heidegger founded existential
phenomenology in combining the existential insights of Kierkegaard and the
phenomenological insights of Husserl, it would also seem judicious to compare the Wang-Chu relationship with the Kierkegaard-Hegel relationship.
For, as Kierkegaards affirmation of the subjective thinker is the revolt against
the objective thought of Hegel, both Kierkegaards and Husserls thought
signies the triumph of subjectivityeach in his own waydespite Hegels
employment of the term phenomenology in his magnum opus. Similarly,
Wangs reformation of Chu Hsis ko-wu (investigation of things) into chengshih (rectication of affairs) is a turn for the moral triumph of subjectivity.
Despite her own insightful comparison of Wang Yang-ming with Heidegger, Ching contended that much of the so-called common ground between
Wang and existential phenomenology as discussed in my Wang Yang-ming
and Existential Phenomenology is also common to the Chinese philosophical mainstream. Precisely! The most common ground for Chinese thought
and phenomenology, I suggest, lies in their mutual respect for experiential
knowledge: Tao is indeed everydayness or lifeworldiness. For the reason of
intentionality as the overall directionality of consciousness (hsin or, as Ching
often translates it, mind-and-heart) toward the world (of both persons and
things) for the sake of both theoria and praxis, Wang Yang-ming is most conducive to a phenomenological interpretation. The recent literature on Wang
Yang-mings philosophyincluding, of course, Chings own article on Wang
and Heideggerstill supports my original thesis that there is no other Chinese philosopher who ts the detailed billing of existential phenomenology
better than Wang Yang-ming.
67
III.3.
Tu Wei-mings work on the formative years of Wang Yang-ming (Neo-Confucian Thought in Action) and some essays in Humanity and Self-Cultivation
best complement or even conrm my existential and phenomenological thesis on Wang Yang-ming.30 Chapter 4 of Neo-Confucian Thought in Action,
which was published in the same year as Chings To Acquire Wisdom, is
entitled The Meaning and begins with Wangs conception of the unity of
knowledge and action. In discussing Wangs transformation of Chu Hsis
ko-wu to chih hsing ho I at the end of this chapter, Tu footnotes my Wang
Yang-ming and Existential Phenomenology as a defense of Yang-mings
principle of subjectivity from the viewpoint of modern European philosophy.31 In discussing Wangs unity of knowledge and action, Tu makes the
distinction between his philosophy of subjectivity and the fallacy of subjectivism. In the rst place, Tu sees Wangs theme on the unity of knowledge and action as an attempt to challenge Chu Hsis dichotomization of
the subject and the object. Tu contends that Wang eliminated the subjectobject dichotomy inherent in Chu Hsis ko-wu by a creative formulation of
the principle of subjectivity.32 Wang rejection of dichotomization or dualism encompasses, according to Tu, a set of four correlationseach of
which is an important aspect of dening the self: (1) the correlation of body
and mind, (2) the correlation of mind and intention, (3) the correlation of
intention and knowledge, and (4) the correlation of intention and thing.33
For Tu as well as for Ching, hsin occupies the central place in Wang Yangmings unity of knowledge and action. The essence of hsin (mind) lies in
its directionality toward knowledge and thing through intention (i) in correlation with body (shen) (i.e., mind as embodied, to use the language of
phenomenology). In the second place, Wangs philosophy of subjectivity is
no subjectivism. For subjectivity embodied in liang-chih (the preconceptual
knowledge of the good or moral knowledge by acquaintance in the sense
William James uses it) is identied with, or corresponds to, the ontological
reality called tien-li or the principle of Heaven. Wang Yang-mings unity of
knowledge and action is, for Tu, the ethics of self-fulllment, which includes
the notion of sincerity most broadly and inclusively conceived of as completion, actualization, consummation, and perfection. Existentialistically speaking, it is, in brief, the ethics of authenticity (Eigentlichkeit). Tus employment
of the concept intentionality necessary to (moral) knowledge in relation to
(moral) action as well as Cuas prospective knowledge may be likened to
68
the existential project (Entwurf) found in Heideggers Being and Time and
Sartres Being and Nothingness. For, Tu suggests, knowing simultaneously
transforms ones present existence into a state of being projected toward the
future ideal.34
iv. conclusion
Now, in this concluding section, I propose that sincerity be the moral ber
that produces the fabric of Chinese philosophy or thread that weaves the
warp of knowledge and the woof of action in the moral fabric of Chinese
philosophy and, for that matter, the Sinistic way of thinking and doing. This
proposal, I submit, is quite consistent with and an extension of Wang Yangmings philosophy because for him, we might say, all the (Confucian) moral
virtueshumanity (jen), liality (hsiao), righteousness (i), propriety (li),
wisdom (chih), and delity (hsin)are grounded in the sincerity of the will
(cheng i), that is, the performance of an existential project or what Cua calls
prospective knowledge. I am more and more convinced that cheng is the
most important moral precept that underpins, motivates, and governs the
thought and action of a Sinistic soul. Some years ago, while I was reading
Ivan Morriss fascinating study of the Japanese mind and tradition called The
Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan,35 I was profoundly
moved by the fact that this is the essence of the Oriental moral soul. This
phenomenon emanates from the Confucian moral ideal of sincerity (makoto
in Japanese), and one cannot minimize the inuence of the philosophy of
Wang Yang-ming or O Yomei in Japan.36 The apotheosis of a tragic hero
is Saigo Takamori from the Meiji Restoration, who was also inuenced by
Wang Yang-ming. Saigo was a corpulent, death-defying hero whose eyes,
legs, hands, and ngers were depicted as ready tools for action.37
Sincerity as a cardinal moral virtue means we mean what we say or we perform in action what we promise in words, which spells syntactically word performed. In other words, the word as performed actually embodies an index
of value. The keyword in translating the concept sincerity, I suggest, is performance, which has a familiar ring to those of us who read John Austins philosophy of speech acts as performative utterances or his themes on How to Do
Things with Words. The idea of performance not only denotes the fulllment
of the spoken word in or as action but also transcends the dualism of mind and
body. For performance as the consummation of ones deed requires corporeal
69
execution.33 The Confucian formulation of the rectication of names (cheng

ming)calling things by their right namesexemplies the ethics of language
in performance. It is the accountability of speaking as moral performance that
is also affiliated with the idea of delity or faithfulness (hsin)etymologically
speaking, man standing by his words. Be that as it may, in the Analects, Confucius said, Without knowing the power of words, it is impossible to know
man (Analects, 20: 2.3). This affirms the following: man as homo linguisticus
for whom language is not merely a transparent medium for representing reality, the centrality of language to human conduct, and the ethics of language
embodying the humanity of man. Take a few more examples of what Confucius says in the Analects: (1) when the superior man is heard to speak, his
language is rm and decided (19: 9); (2) the wise err neither in regard to
their man nor to their words (15: 7); (3) the virtuous will be sure to speak
correctly, but those whose speech is good may not always be virtuous (14: 5);
(4) the superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions
(14:29); and (5) friendship with the glib-tongued is injurious (16: 4).39 Interestingly, moreover, both ideograms to govern and to rectify are pronounced
the same (i.e., cheng), and in Chinese ideographic writing, the former contains
the latter as its radical. In the end, the rectication of names is a political concept par excellence. Although it is an inuential concept in the Chinese body
politic and the history of Chinese political thought, it is mentioned explicitly
and directly only oncein the Analectsin conjunction with the proprietary
conduct of the ruler in the affairs of the body politic: the rst necessary thing
the ruler (of Wei) had to do in administering the government, Confucius suggested, is to rectify names, for if names be not rectied, language is not in
accordance with the truth of things. If language is not in accordance with the
truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success (Analects, 13:3.25).
As the Chinese syntax itself is action, so are Chinese ideograms performative.40 Indeed, Chinese ideography (calligraphy in particular) is a kinetic
art: it is the human body in graceful motion. And the Chinese revere the art
of calligraphy as much as painting: calligraphy is the painting of ideograms
orto intimate the spiritual and personal dimension of the artist himself
characters. In very signicant measure, Chinese ideography is a choreography
of human gestures and, as a family (nuclear and extended) of signiers
(signs or symbols), a conversation of gestures that, because of the presence
of meaning, is not the reduction of ideograms to human physiology. The
ideogram is indeed a vortex that responds to lines of force. It is a corporate
energy.41 For the eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista
70
Vico, who had a keen sense of linguistic autopsia or anatomy and to whom
Confucian thought was not totally foreign, words are carried over from
human bodies to signify nature where the body language animates inanimate things and from the properties of human bodies to signify the institutions of the mind.42 Picassos Swimmer (1929) and Acrobat (1930), which
are the brilliant and elegant strokes of a genius, are two choreographs of the
human body in uent and rhythmic motion that are approaching ideography
or calligraphy. They are, in short, dancing anthropograms. R. G. Collingwood observes that every language is a specialized form of bodily gesture
and, as such, the dance is the mother of all languages.43 With Samuel Beckett
we can conclude that in language as gestures, the spoken and the written
are identical.44 In the end, all this is grounded in the notion of embodiment
or body as subject rather than merely objectthat is, I am my bodyis a
unique and momentous discovery of phenomenology in an effort to overcome the dualism of mind and body and thus of man and the external world
that has plagued Western philosophy particularly since Descartes dichotomization of res cogitans and res extensa. This endeavor conrms once more
the importance of Wang Yang-mings philosophy in which mind and body
are, as shown by Tu Wei-ming, one of its four correlations.
Now, I think, we have begun, just begun, to appreciate earnestly Wang
Yang-mings doctrine of the unity of knowledge and action as a profound
and momentous idea that, in turn, attests to the intraphilosophical importance of Sinism. To compare and affiliate his philosophy with existential phenomenology is to edify and celebrate both the momentousness of Wangs
philosophy and its intraphilosophical importance. His is the great affirmation that we are, morally and otherwise, what we say and what we do all
as performance grounded in the sincerity of the will. Wangs philosophy is
a conrmation of the personal ethics of responsibilitypersonal in the
sense of being neither exclusively subjective nor exclusively objective. Let me
conclude my remarks by quoting a passage with an analogy to music as a
performing art, that is, with an accent on performance as integrating and
consummatory from Herbert Fingarette who is a perceptive American interpreter of Confucius and Confucianism:
Acts that are li are not mere rote, formula-conforming performances;
they are subtle and intelligent acts exhibiting more or less sensitivity to context, more or less integrity in performance. We would do
well to take music, of which Confucius was a devotee, as our model
71
here. We distinguish sensitive and intelligent musical performances

from dull and unperceptive ones; and we detect in the performance
condence and integrity, or perhaps hesitation, conict, faking,
sentimentalizing. We detect all this in the performance; we do not
have to look into the psyche or personality of the performer. It is all
there, public. Although it is there in the performance, it is apparent to us when we consider the performance not as the Beethoven
Opus 3 (that is, from the composer perspective), nor as a public
concert (the li perspective), nor as a post-Mozartian opus (the
style perspective), but primarily as this particular persons performance (the personal perspective).45
CHAPTER 5
jen
an e xiste ntial and p henom enol ogi cal
proble m of intersub ject i vi t y
The sentences of the Chinese sages are like blossoms

which open and unfold before us and close again when
man leaves them, opening anew when he returns.
Max Picard
i. prologue
The subject matter of this essay is an existential and phenomenological interpretation of the spirit of Chinese philosophy, through the understanding of
the idea of jen as a philosophy of intersubjectivity. As such, the purpose of
this paper is to point out a close affinity between Chinese philosophy and
existential phenomenology (or phenomenological existentialism) and to contribute ultimately to the understanding of philosophy as a phenomenon and
to philosophy itself. Although there is a denite relatedness between existential and phenomenological philosophy and the spirit of Chinese philosophy, practically no comparative analysis exists1not to mention the almost
complete lack of inuence of existential philosophy and phenomenology on
todays Chinese philosophy.2
ii. existential phenomenology and

chinese philosophy compared
The new philosophical style that combines the existential thought initiated by
Sren Kierkegaard and the phenomenological thought initiated by Edmund
jen
73
Husserl has become known as existential phenomenology.3 What unites

phenomenology and existential philosophy is an existential interpretation of
the intentionality of consciousness (i.e., existential intentionality4) and the
idea of Lebenswelt (lifeworld) that was developed at the end of Husserls
philosophical career.5 Existentially speaking, intentionality is a precognitive
meeting of the existing self with the world.
However, as Paul Ricoeur points out, there is much of existential phenomenology in Husserls philosophy, but not everything in it is existential
phenomenology. To the extent to which phenomenology is concerned with
the problematic of existence, it converges with existential philosophy. Phenomenology is the descriptive method that serves an existential intention.6 It
thus becomes an indispensable tool in elucidating the modes of mans existence in the world. Philosophy, in this sense, is viewed as a reexive activity
that is concerned with the meaning that the prereexive world (vorwissenschaftliche Welt) has for us all.7 Therefore, the central theme of existential
phenomenology is not pure description. It never describes for the sake of
describing but describes the various aspects of the insertion of man in the
world and attempts to discover the place of man in the world.8
It can be said, therefore, that existential phenomenology is essentially a
philosophical anthropology whose concern is man (anthropos) in the world:
not the inner man who is withdrawn from the world, but the man who is
immersed in the world. It becomes a philosophical anthropology insofar as
it studies the total existence of man in his Lebenswelt.9 The relationship
of Chinese philosophy to existential phenomenology lies in the very fact that
Chinese philosophy is a practical humanism.
Humanism (or the philosophy of man) is the keynote to Chinese philosophy, whose tradition was set by Confucius when he said, Jen is to love man
and chih is to know man.10 The central theme of Chinese philosophy is man
himself. As Wing-tsit Chan unequivocally states, Whether a Chinese is a
Confucianist or a Taoist, a conservative or a radical, a scholar or an illiterate,
he is a humanist. To him, man is the measure of all things.11 This humanistic
bent permeates not only philosophy but government, the arts (poetry, drama,
music, painting), and religion as well.12
In Chinese philosophy, man holds a special place in the universe. This is
also true for Martin Heidegger, who gives a privileged status to man and his
reality (Dasein) and, accordingly, to the study of the being of man (Fundamentalontologie) in his early philosophy. The essence of man for the Confucianist is jen. Jen is what is quintessentially human. Jen as humanity does
not signify a collectivity of all men but instead the human quality of man.13
74
It is a constitutive element or ontological structure of man, that is, being

human. In this precise sense, Chinese philosophy is a humanism that, as
Maurice Merleau-Ponty denes, confronts the relationship of man to man
and the constitution of a common situation and a common history between
men as a problem.14
Chinese philosophy and existential phenomenology, moreover, focus on
man primarily as actor; both are philosophies of human action. They are
concerned with what man does and affirm the primacy of action (praxis) over
thought (theoria), that is, existence (thatness) over essence (whatness). As
Heidegger asserts, The essence of human reality is its existence.15 Chinese
philosophy, as a practical humanism, focuses on what man does. Existential
phenomenology also treats the subject primarily as an actor, participant, or
agent. The proper starting point of a philosophy of action is I am the doer
or active agency.16 The essence of mans existence is action, and the primordial and irreducible structure of action is intersubjectivity.
The development of post-Husserlian phenomenology shows a main concern for two areas: (1) the Lebenswelt and (2) the problem of intersubjectivity.17 However, these are not separate problems; they are interrelated because
the lifeworld is an intersubjective world. Alfred Schutz emphasizes this interrelation when he denes social reality as the sum total of objects and
occurrences within the social cultural world as experienced by the commonsense thinking of men living their daily lives among their fellow-men, connected with them in manifold relations of interaction.18 Jen encompasses
these two areas in one, for it refers to the mundane world of mans action in
relation to other human beings and things.
Having noted a close relationship between Chinese philosophy and existential phenomenology both as philosophical anthropology and, particularly,
as philosophy of human action, one may further demonstrate this connection by examining the place of jen in Chinese philosophy and of intersubjectivity in existential and phenomenological philosophy. Confucian jen,
writes Wing-tsit Chan, whether applied to human beings or to things, is
essentially social and active. These two qualitiessociality and activityare
its outstanding characteristics, and they can be traced back to Confucius.19
In the light of the existential and phenomenological analysis of intersubjectivity and the lifeworld, the following paragraphs will examine jen: rst, as
practical activity (although it is not completely free from a metaphysical and
transcendental bent); second, as sociality; and, third, as love or the feeling of
commiseration, which also is relational.
jen
75
iii. chinese philosophy and existential philosophy

The practicality of Chinese philosophy shuns the intellectualist tradition in the
West and the barren wasteland of essentialism, and avoids what Kierkegaard
called a chimera of abstraction. The spirit of Chinese philosophy is mirrored
in the primacy of the vita activa over the vita contemplativa. As to the proper
relationship between jen (existential) and chih (essential) or action and knowledge, Mencius says that wisdom is to know jen and i (righteousness). Kierkegaard, too, makes the distinctive between essential knowledge and accidental
knowledge, and affirms that the former is knowledge, which has an essential
relationship to existence. Essential knowledge refers to that knowledge that
has a relationship to the knower, who is essentially an existing individual, and
that for this reason all essential knowledge is essentially related to existence.20
For the yin-yang Confucianist Tung Chung-shu, Wisdom without humanity
[jen] means knowledge not translated into action.21 It was Wang Yang-ming
who perfected the Confucian emphasis on the correspondence of words and
action. In his celebrated disquisition on the unity of knowledge and action
(chih hsing ho yi), he insisted that the nality of knowledge is realized only
in action: Knowledge is the beginning of action, and action the completion
of knowledge.22 Later, Kang Yu-wei similarly declared, Both humanity and
wisdom are exercise [in action], but humanity is nobler.23
As Chinese philosophy and the Confucian way are active, so is existence
active and so are existential modes of acting. John Wild points out that the
philosophy of existence focuses not so much [on] what he [man] is as how
he acts.24 Jean-Paul Sartre also stresses that existentialism cannot be taken
for a philosophy of quietism, since it denes man in terms of action... nor
for an attempt to discourage man from acting, since it tells him that the only
hope is in his acting and that action is the only thing that enables a man to
live. Consequently, we are dealing... with an ethics of action and involvement.25 The subject, as Gabriel Marcel sees it, is engaged in the world qua
agent, and his involvement is meaningless unless the self is an agent. Similarly, Chinese philosophy is a telling annal about mansto use Henry G.
Bugbees termactual involvement in reality as an active being.26
Primacy of action over thought connotes that thought is only an intellectual part of reality, which is the total existence of man involved in the
world. To say that thought is primary is to inate thought. As Marcel affirms,
Thought cannot go beyond existence and thought is inside existence.27
76
Thought is inactive.28 Action is the home in which thought dwells. To say that
man is primarily a thinker is to disengage him from worldly involvement precisely because thought is necessarily an abstraction (i.e., disengagement). In
turn, to disengage man from the world is to make him a little abstract effigy,
because he is abstracted from the real and is led to the threshold of dehumanization. To be human is to engage actively in the world. Confucian jen deals
with what to do and how to act, and the Confucian tradition has been a persistent emphasis on the active relationship in human society.29 As jen is a
way of action,30 the world of jen is the mundane and earthly world of everyday action. The character yung in the Chung yung (The Doctrine of the
Mean) signies the everyday life of the ordinary people31 or normalcy.32
It was Confucius who rst made jen a serious and important philosophical idea. In him, not only did Chinese humanism, which incorporated jen,
reach its climax, but humanism and jen became coeval as well. Jen is the
way of human action as well as the way of man, and it is especially the
Confucian Way because, as Chan explains, Confucian jen has been largely
conned to the mundane world,33 and because no other subject . . .
engaged so much attention of the Master and his disciples.34 Jen became
the center and backbone of the thought and teaching of Confucius,
after which it became one of the most signicant subjects in Confucianism
and thus in Chinese philosophy.35 According to Tan Tsu-tung, who wrote
the most comprehensive treatise on jen in the history of Chinese philosophy, jen is the element of all elements.36
Mencius emphasized the importance of the application of jen. By so
doing, he made jen applicable to various human relations (i.e., the gradation
of jen). He considered jen an everyday activity when he wrote, humanity
(jen) is [the distinguishing characteristic of] jen (man). When embodied in
mans conduct, it is the Way.37 The protagonist of Neo-Confucianism,
Han Y, attacked Taoist inaction and Buddhist silence and annihilation in
defense of the Confucian Way of having action.38
Jen is also active and dynamic in that it is the life-giver. It is an originating and generating force (sheng). The idea of jen as sheng is found in the I
Ching (The Book of Changes) and in the I Li (The Book of Rites). It is said
that growth in spring and maturing in summer: these are like the quality of
jen.39 However, it was the pioneer of Neo-Confucianism, Chou Tun-I, who
identied jen with sheng. Later, Wang Yang-ming stated this idea most forcefully when he wrote that jen is the principle of unceasing production and
reproduction.40
jen
77
iv. jen as intersubjectivity

Sociality is correlative to action. The eld of action demands the reciprocity
of the existing self with the other; that is, the structure of action is relational.
Jen as sociality is inscribed in the existential and phenomenological notion of
intersubjectivity. To say that jen is the essence of human existence is to insist
that existence is coexistence. Thus the philosophy of jen is the philosophy of
intersubjectivity par excellence. Intersubjectivity so understood is primarily
an existential relation in a concrete situation rather than an epistemological
concept. It is the direct encounter of one man with another in action. Action
in the true sense implies sociality and is always heterocentric.
Etymologically speaking, jen is composed of two ideograms: man,
which is also jen, and two (i.e., persons in relation, man in society,
or man in the world).41 As Kang Yu-wei explains, the word jen consists
of one part meaning man and another part meaning many. It means that the
way of men is to live together.42 Jen is a nexus of the reciprocal relations of
one actor to other actors in the world. As Bugbee remarks, Not out of this
world, but in this world, we are. In and of this world, as fellow creatures.43
Jen is best described as the liturgy of intersubjectivity44 or the sacrament of dialogue.45 It is the sacred idea that my world is not exclusively
mine, nor is your world exclusively yours; more truly, the world is our world.
As J. Quentin Lauer states,
I exist because others exist; my being as subject is to be related, not
only to objects but also to other subjectsto be with. But, from
another point of view I can say: I am because the world is, and the
world is because I am. I am not swallowed up in the world; I am
not de-individualized. Rather, I am more individualized, because I
am in the worldmy dignity as a man, as an individual, is not distinct from my being in the world, whereby the world is precisely this
world, and I am precisely this man.46
Jen reveals the structure of man as a relational being, and only through the
thou is the I discovered.47 As jen is preserved, writes Cheng Hao, the
self and the other are then identied.48 Here the Confucian notion of jen
is brought together with Bubers dialogical principle, which regards reality
as the mutuality of active relation. All reality, writes Buber, is an activity
78
in which I share without being able to appropriate for myself. Where there
is no sharing there is no reality. Where there is self-appropriation there is no
reality. The more direct the contact with the Thou, the fuller is the sharing.49
Similarly, interpreting Mencius, Fung Yu-lan says, Human relations mean
to carry on the social relations, and to carry out human relations means the
social activities of men.50
Karl Jaspers correctly interprets Confucian jen as what makes man human,
and he brings the Confucian philosophy of jen close to his philosophy of
communication. He considers that to be human means to be in communication and to remove a shell of solitude. For him, furthermore, truth itself
is but communicability.51 As for Tan Tsu-tung, jen is the encounter of one
thing to communicate with another.52
Language or, more precisely, speaking is the primordial form of communication, and its structure shows the nature of intersubjectivity. Speaking is a
reciprocal relation between the speaker and the listener. As Heidegger expresses
it, language is the dwelling place of Being, whose shepherd is man.53 Confucius said, Without knowing the force of words, it is impossible to know men
(Analects, 20.2.3). Jen itself cannot be understood without language because
language is, according to Mikel Dufrenne, a mediation between others [as
well as the world] and myself.54 Language is a medium of ones communication with others and the world. However, the problem of language is not a
problem of words as such but a problem of speaking man and of encounter. In
speaking, as Georges Gusdorf emphasizes, The we is realized in the union of I
and you.55 Thus, speaking discloses the relational being of man.
Jen is an encounter between the existing subject and the other, of which
distance is measured not so much by betweenness as by withness; a
we-relation of I-with-others. It is a network of interhuman relations (or
the bond between beings) that suggests immediacy, intimacy, and directness (i.e., togetherness).56 Jen isto borrow John Macmurrays epigrammatic phrasean instantiation of the I and You.57 It is an immediate and
undifferentiated ow of the reciprocal relation between the I and the you.
In this existential relation, man tends . . . to live more in others than in
himself; more in the community than in his own individual self.58 Insofar
as jen demands the immediate intimacy of interpersonal relations, the terms
participation with commitment (engagement) and encounter (rencontre
or Begegnung) accurately correspond to the meaning of jen.
Furthermore, jen is the source from which all human relationships (jen-lun)
originate. There are ve human relations (wu lun) that are spelled out in The
jen
79
Book of Mencius: (1) father and son, (2) ruler and minister, (3) husband and
wife, (4) old and young, and (5) friendship.59 In Confucian literature lial piety
(hsiao) is regarded as the basic pattern of the ve relations. It is the starting
point of human relations. Mencius related the actuality of jen with lial
piety and the actuality of brotherly respect with i,60 whereas Confucius said,
Filial piety and brotherly respect are the root of humanity (jen).61
v. the concept of jen in chinese philosophy

Another important application of jen as intersubjectivity is love or the feeling
of commiseration. It is important to emphasize from the outset that emotion
or feeling particularly as Kierkegaard and Marcel see it, is the dynamic and
enriching element of the world of existence and human action.62 For Marcel,
feeling is a mode of participation,63 and for Kierkegaard, passion is the
highest expression of subjectivity and the culmination of existence.64 In
Chinese philosophy, from Confucius to Fung Yu-lan, jen as the feeling of
love is the most persistent tradition in jen-analysis.65 Han Y mentions
love as one of seven feelings.66 It seems to be no accident that Chinese philosophy, whose concern has been the everyday world of action, stresses the
importance of jen as the feeling of commiseration, for an emotional contact such as sympathy is a primary level of intersubjectivity.67
Jen as the feeling of love demonstrates fully its intersubjective character,
for as Robert O. Johann describes it, human love in its fullest sense is precisely an experience of inter-subjectivity.68 Jen as love erases all distinction,
not only between the self and other human beings, but also between the self
and things. Similarly, Buber considers an I-Thou relation possible, not only
between man and man, but also between man and beings and things.69
Jen is the Thou of Marcel because, for him, Love moves on a ground
which is neither that of the self, nor that of the other qua other; I call it the
Thou.70 Moreover, Max Schelers description of sympathy and Edith Steins
analysis of empathy are illuminating. For Stein, empathy is an act of feeling, as it is with Menciuss commiseration; we-ness is a true expression
of empathy, and men can experience others only through empathizing: The
feeling of oneness and the enrichment of our own experience become possible through empathy.71
Tung Chung-shu, the rst among Han Confucian thinkers, used love as
the meaning of jen. The ancient philosophers, such as Mo Tzu and Chuang
80
Tzu, used jen as love in several different ways.72 Cheng I represents the prevalent view of Neo-Confucianism when he says that jen is a reality, while love
is a function;73 the substance of jen is universal, while the function of love
is particular. Through the philosophical tendency of Neo-Confucianism,
therefore, jen obtained a more universal quality whereby jen as love (ai) or
affection (chin) is interpreted only as its function: the nature of jen is substance, while the feeling of love is function. As Cheng I says, Love is feeling,
whereas humanity [jen] is the nature.74 As for Chu Hsi, Jen is the principle
of love... and if there is jen, there is love.75
It was Mencius who rst related jen with the feeling of commiseration or
sympathy for the suffering of others. It is a natural tendency in all men in that
it has no ulterior motives. It is the natural tendency that cannot bear (jen)
to see the suffering of others. The empathic feeling is naturally aroused or
born when one sees a child about to fall into a well.76 For Wang Yangming, the feeling of commiseration extended to other animate beings and
inanimate things as well: birds, animals, plants, tiles, and stones.77 Tan Tsutung, who was under the inuence of Buddhism and Christianity, regards the
nature (hsing) of love as Buddha-nature or as compassion and mercy
(tzu pei) and as the Christ spirit (ling hun).78
The importance of jen as love is that it is an intersubjective feeling of the
self toward others. It is ones unconditional care for others. For Scheler, sympathy as an intersubjective feeling of contact is natural, so jen is a spontaneous and natural mode of being in the world. Fellow feeling and sympathy for
sufferings are not only natural but also the beginning of jen. Mencius writes,
The feeling of commiseration is the beginning of humanity.79
vi. the moral virtue of jen

The foregoing analysis of jen as activity, sociality, and the feeling of love is not
meant to diminish or ignore the importance of the differences between the
spirit of the Chinese philosophy of jen and many phenomenological analyses of intersubjectivity or, for that matter, those differences that exist among
existential philosophers and phenomenologists themselves, the complexity
of which this essay cannot attempt to explain. The following paragraphs will
discuss differences, focusing on two themes: rst, the philosophy of jen is
characteristically deontological or prescriptive; second, it affirms the idea
that only in social existence does man acquire his authenticity, which thus
jen
81
opens the door for a social and political theory80 and, more signicantly, for
a program for social action. It will further be maintained that the primacy of
responsibility over freedom conveys the genuine spirit of jen.
The philosophy of jen is axiology, as is the descriptive phenomenology of
values; that is, it is in part the formal description of existential values. However, it goes beyond mere description in that it prescribes existential norms
in guiding human action, and it thus becomes distinct from the formal phenomenology of values. It is one thing to say that the world is a world of values
and another to say that the world ought to be valuable. In this sense it shares,
among others, the thought of John Wild.
Jaspers summarizes Confucian jen well when he writes that it is humanity and morality in one.81 The realm of values (or virtues) is not a superstructure of existence, nor are norms (the ought) and facts (the is) separated
in everyday human existence. Norms are an integrally constitutive element
of everyday existence. In the Lebenswelt, John Wild stresses, value is not
a later addition. It is constitutive of the thing.... A human culture is not a
neutral structure with approvals and disapprovals added on. It is a structure
of approvals and disapprovals.82 Value and norm are parts of the given facticity of existence. The purely descriptive and formal analysis of values, that
is, value theory, is not the genuine way of jen. For Wang Yang-ming, the man
who disengages himself from others is an unworthy man. Thus, the unworthy man is a man without jen,83 and man without jen extols himself, as does
Bubers man of self-appropriation. To extol the self is unreal, because this
magnies the self. In contrast to Wang, Heidegger is morally neutral in his
phenomenological analysis of being in the world.84
Confucius made jen the universal virtue from its pre-Confucian conceptions as the particular virtue of kindness. In this way, jen is regarded as the
standard bearer of all other virtues in interhuman relations. Jen is also
called the perfect virtue because it synthesizes the four other constant virtues:
i (righteousness), li (propriety), chih (wisdom), and hsin (faithfulness). As
Chu Hsi writes, Whenever and wherever humanity (jen) ows and operates,
righteousness will be fully righteousness and propriety and wisdom will be
fully propriety and wisdom.85 Cheng Hao also states, The student must
rst of all understand the nature of jen. The man of jen forms one body
with all things without any differentiation. Righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and faithfulness are all [expressions of] jen.86 Moreover, for Confucius, the man of jen must also practice earnestness, liberality, truthfulness,
diligence, and generosity.87 In summary, jen is the apotheosis of all virtues,
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that is, the moral way of man. Similarly, Remy C. Kwant writes that beingtogether-with-others is also the fundamental realm in which all other values
are disclosed.88
For Kwant, the importance of reciprocity is that it is the origin of our
world of meaning as well as the height of all values.89 Value itself is relational, because only in reciprocity is value created, and it must be understood in the context of meaning, because meaning is a value and value has a
meaning. For Wild, The very heart and soul of meaning is value, for the
lifeworld as the ultimate horizon is ordered around some project directed
toward an ultimate value.90 Since the lifeworld is the world of action, value
is the lan vital of existence and thus of action. Human action is the source
of value: Human action is divine, because it is a creation [of values].91 Raymond Polin maintains that the phenomenological analysis of values is useless
unless it constitutes an introduction to a philosophy of action.92
Meaning is the logos of existence upon which, as Viktor Frankl testies,
human survival depends. Life that is devoid of meaning is not existence but
only death. The meaning of life originates in reciprocity or the world. Only
in reciprocity is there self-transcendence.93 In jen man fullls existential
meaning by going beyond the self. Jen is self-transcendence precisely for the
reason that it demands loyalty to a cause greater than the self.
The moral and other-directed structure of jen can also be found in its
two components of chung (conscientiousness) and shu (altruism), which
stand respectively for the center of mind and like-mindedness. Tseng Tzu
holds that for Confucius The Way is none other than conscientiousness
(chung) and altruism (shu), and The Doctrine of the Mean states, Conscientiousness and altruism are not far from the Way.94 Jen is the unity of chung
and shu. As Fung Yu-lan explains, To say that the all-pervading principle of
Confucius is chung and shu, is the same as saying that it is jen,95 and those
who practice the two do practice jen. Furthermore, chung is called the positive golden rule, for it is the doing to others what one likes oneself; and
shu is the negative golden rule, for it is the not doing to others what one
does not like oneself.96 Fung concludes, therefore, that the virtues of chung
and shu both aim at the extension of ones self to others, so that the one quality can imply the other.97
jen
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vii. jen as moral responsibility

Jen affirms the idea that social existence is authentic existence. Meaning,
value, and norm are grounded in the world that is necessarily intersubjective. Intersubjectivity so conceived is a genuine encounter of the existing
subject with others, that is, other-centered (heterocentric or dialogical). In
this way, it closely shares Bubers dialogical principle. Marcels philosophy
of participation, Jasperss philosophy of communication, Merleau-Pontys
notion of man in the world, and Ludwig Binswangers idea of love.
The existential views of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre are different. For Sartre,98 intersubjectivity as a mutual encounter of two subjects is
impossible, because for instance, the other in the stare (le regard) becomes
objectied; that is, the self petries the other as an object rather than another
subject. Kierkegaard tends to be self-centered (egocentric or monological)
when, for example, he declares that truth is subjectivity, whereas, for Jaspers, it is communicability.99 Although Heidegger declares that the world
of human existence (Dasein) is the intersubjective world (Mitwelt),100 his
analysis of being-with (Mitsein) is essentially self-centered. His analysis of
care (Sorge) as being-in-the-world is, as Binswanger points out, being
of the existence for the sake of myself. In contrast, Binswanger juxtaposes
his notion of love as being-beyond-the-world, which means being
of the existence for the sake of ourselves.101 Moreover, in Heidegger, the
anonymous public (das Man) is the mode of unauthentic existence, whereas
Buber considers that social existence as the genuine We is the authentic
mode of mans existence.102 The self who is enclosed in the cell of his own
being is deprived of his being in the world. The thinking self is necessarily an
enclosed self. In this sense, the philosophy of jen is attuned to Schutzs phenomenology of the everyday self in the social world rather than to Husserls
phenomenology of the transcendental ego.103
Freedom and responsibility as two modalities of action are a related issue
of intersubjectivity, and they clarify the nature of intersubjectivity. The existential analysis is dominantly but not always marked by the emphasis that
existence is freedom. Maurice Natanson epitomizes Sartres philosophy when
he states that, for Sartre, the tragedy and dignity of man lie in the dictum,
to be is to be free.104 Although, strictly speaking, freedom and responsibility
are not an aspect of jen, it can be maintained that jen is consistent with the
idea that responsibility is primary. Indeed, jen is a spark of responsibility.105
84
To say that freedom is primary is to inate the self and therefore infract
mans genuine reciprocity and make it monological, although freedom is
essential in action. Action is freedom only from the standpoint of the self,
whereas action becomes responsibility in the presence of others. The primacy
of responsibility means to recognize the primacy of the Thou. Viktor Frankl
declares that freedom is necessary for self-actualization; but responsibleness
is the location of the meaning of self-transcendence.106 Freedom is, then, a
quality that the individual self possesses, while responsibility is a relation between the self and the other.107 This is the reason the primacy of
responsibility is germane to intersubjectivity and to mans being in the world.
Only a human being, Abraham J. Heschel writes, is said to be responsible.
Responsibility is not something man imputes to himself: he is a self by virtue
of his capacity for responsibility, and he would cease to be a self if he were to
be deprived of responsibility.108
Innite or absolute freedom is only an ontological possibility of the self.
However, freedom in a concrete situation is nite and conditional,109 because
in the eld of action others also exert their own freedom. The loyalty to the
freedom of others is nothing other than responsibility. Absolute freedom is
an unreal abstraction, as is an isolated individual, because the self in the
world exists only in relation to others. Absolute freedom destroys not only its
own being but also responsibility, and therefore, eventually, the meaning of
existence as well. Perhaps in this sense, Georges Gusdorf writes, The highest freedom begins communallyno longer a freedom that separates, but a
freedom that unites.110 It is more proper to say that the dignity of man lies in
responsibility, whereas his tragedy lies in absolute freedom.
Responsibility is an obligation, as is jen. Response is the very beginning
of responsibilityaccording to etymology, responsibility is the response (or
answerability) to the call of the other. Genuine responsibility, writes Buber,
exists only where there is real responding.111 This is what we must mean
by conscience, and responsibility is the call of conscience. Henry G. Bugbee, who takes responsibility as the focal point of human action, considers
responsibility a profound concern of man for man.112 Jen is responsibility.
It is the profound concern of man for his fellow men. It is profound because
it is not only the capacity to respond but also the demand to respond, which
Bugbee insists are the two aspects of responsibility.113
Intersubjectivity or a nexus of interhuman relations is meaningful only
when responsibility takes on a more positive role than freedom. It is the sinew
of social philosophy, because authentic existence is always coexistence. As
jen
85
John Wild writes, Freedom is a partial, negative aspect of responsibility

which is richer and more complete in meaning.114 The ultimate responsibility, writes George Schrader, is existence itself. To exist means to be in a
world, and in a social as well as a natural world. Man is a responsible being,
personally, naturally, socially, politically.115 Jen is the perfect responsibility
because it embraces all of these and more. It demands that, as Bugbee says,
We all stand only together, not only all men, but all things.116
viii. epilogue
The purpose of this essay has been to emulate the spirit of Martin Buber
when he says, I build no towers, I erect bridges. Chinese philosophy has
contributed most signicantly to philosophical anthropology, through which
it converges with existential phenomenology in the West. Philosophical
anthropology is a hermeneutic of everyday existence as it is actually lived
by the ordinary man in the world. Philosophy, when viewed in this way, is
rescued from the quicksand of a mere technicality vastly irrelevant to the
mundane world of living and culture. As John Wild tersely states, Apart
from man, there is no world, no meaning, and no value.117 Chinese philosophy begins with and ends in man, and the philosophy of jen is a signicant
commentary on the lived reality of man in the world. Existential philosophy,
too, has relentlessly been pointing out the danger of reducing man to mere
objectivity and, moreover, of dehumanizing him to the abyss of anonymity.118
In Chinese philosophy man is a harmonious being. In the existential analysis, in contrast, mans tragic modes of absurdity, estrangement, anguish,
dread, despair, and death are often stressed. Consequently, the Confucian
view of man is more consonant with the affirmative view of Paul Ricoeur119
and Gabriel Marcel than with the negativistic analysis of Sartre, who says
that man is nothing but a useless passion. Man the problematic of existential philosophy and man the harmonious of Chinese philosophy might well
be the reection of different cultural settings: one is largely the phenomenon
of industrial culture, while the other the manifestation of preindustrial or
traditional culture.
The philosophy of jen is impeccably a hermeneutic of social existence as
authentic existence. In its truly dialogical form, it departs from the monological view of intersubjectivity. It is therefore most at home with the dialogical
philosophy of Buber, for in his thought the essence of man unfolds itself
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neither in the individual alone nor in the collectivity but only in the reality
of the mutual relation between man and man.120 The philosophy of jen is
not an individualistic existentialism but is properly a social existentialism.
Moreover, its main contribution lies not so much in its formal axiology as in
its existentially normative sociality. It is rooted in the imperative promise that
man will not persist in existence if he does not learn anew to persist in it as a
genuine We.121 The social and political implication of jen is striking in that,
like Bubers dialogical principle, it shuns both the Scylla of extreme individualism, on the one hand, and the Charybdis of collectivism, on the other.122
Philosophy is always perspectival because human existence is. Any ambiguity in jen as a philosophical concept must ultimately be traced back to life
itself, which is ambiguous because it is full of overlapping horizons and their
unmarked boundaries. Jen is not abstractly conceptualized but is embodied
in the personal and mundane existence of the actor who is open to, and participates in, the world as his correlative. Jen must be lived.
In conclusion, it must be emphasized that the philosophical spirit of Confucius and that of an existential phenomenologist are similar. For Confucius
the sage (or the man of jen) is the apogee in human relations, and for
Husserl the philosopher is the civil servant of humanity (Funktionre der
Menschheit). Only with such a view can the philosopher cease to play a game
of mere intellectual jugglery, by which he dehumanizes philosophy and in
the end man himself. In Chinese philosophy, however, there is no need to celebrate a homecoming of the Lebenswelt, because it has never left its home.
Chinese philosophy is a mecca for everyday lived reality, which is its tradition
as well as its starting point. Jen can shelter the modern man who seeks refuge
from the inferno of homelessness and unauthenticity, for the authenticity of
being human must be and can be sought only in genuine reciprocity.
CHAPTER 6
confucianism and existentialism

inte rsubje ctivity as t he way of m an
Entre lOrient et lOccident,... le rapport nest pas

celui de lignorance au savoir, de la non-philosiphie
la philosophie.... Lunit de lesprit humain ne se
fera pas par ralliement simple et subordination de la
non-philosophie la philosophie vraie. Elle existe
dj dans les rapports latraux de chaque culture avec
les autres, dans les chos que lune veille en lautre.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
i. introduction
Jen is a central theme of Confucian philosophy. Since Confucius jen occupied
the mind of every major Chinese thinker. It expresses the idea that the truly
and uniquely human quality of man (i.e., humanity) is intersubjectivity (or
sociality). Man is human by virtue of his sociality, and his existence is social
existence. By way of action, man exists in the world in relation to others.
In this regard, the Confucian idea of jen shares a major concern of Martin
Bubers philosophical anthropology, Maurice Merleau-Pontys existential
phenomenology and Karl Jasperss philosophy of Existenz. As Bubers main
theme is the interhuman or the sphere of the between (das Zwischenmenschliche), so are Merleau-Pontys and Jasperss coexistence and communication.
In contrast, however, the idea of jen diverges from the subjective view of
human existence in the thought of Sren Kierkegaard. In the following pages,
rst, I shall briey discuss an affinity between Confucian philosophy and
existentialism. Second, I shall examine the spirit of Chinese philosophy as a
88
practical humanism and then jen, which embodies the spirit of this practical
humanism in Jen: Confucius Social Way of Man. Third, I shall consider
what I take to be the subjective view of existence in Kierkeggard in contrast
to jen in Subjectivity: Kierkegaards Inward Way of Man. Fourth, I shall
describe Jasperss view of communication, which converges with jen as sociality in Existenz: Jasperss Communicable Way of Man. For the purpose
of comparing Confucian philosophy with existentialism, it is appropriate to
consider Jaspers since, rst, he explicitly acknowledges his direct relationship
with and yet in an essential way differs from Kierkegaard. Second, although
both Buber and Jaspers have made comments on Chinese philosophy from
the standpoint of their philosophical views. Jaspers, unlike Buber, recognizes
specically jen as a problem of sociality.
Kierkegaard seems to have had some idea of the Orient. He mentioned
Ceylon and the attitude of the Tibetans as an example of the crowd mentality
in their blind worship for authority. Husserl, who at the end of his philosophical career regarded the everyday lifeworld (Lebenswelt) as the most universal
problem of philosophy and as the basic matrix of philosophical and scientic
enterprises, spoke of China and India as anthropological specimens. But for
him the crisis of philosophy and humanity meant essentially the crisis of
European philosophy and European manEuropean in not a geographical
but a cultural sense. However, Chinese philosophyConfucianism, Taoism,
and Zen Buddhismis not entirely foreign to the twentieth-century existential thinkers, especially to Buber and Jaspers.
Buber edited a collection of Chinese ghost and love stories in 1911 and
a selection of the parables of Chuang-tzu in 1914.1 As he himself confesses,
Taoism had a place in the early mystical phase of his philosophy. He recognizes
an affinity between Zen and Hasidism, their fundamental differences notwithstanding, in their common concern for the positive relationship to the concrete and for human activity in the world. I think it regrettable, however,
that Buber overlooked Confucianism and its persistent tradition of jen that, as
sociality in the everyday action of man, is attuned to his dialogical philosophy.
In his address delivered at the conference of the China Institute in Frankfurtam-Main in 1928, Buber doubted any contribution of the Confucian culture of
China to the living forces of the West, although he noted the teaching of Laotzu as something genuine and deeply Chinese. Sometime later, Buber spoke
of the exalted, but to me somewhat alien, Confucian teaching.2
Throughout his writings Jaspers often mentions Oriental philosophy, Chinese and Indian, and recently wrote of Confucius and Lao-tzu.3 The sense of
89
openness that keynotes his philosophical attitude indicates that he would not
likely bypass Oriental philosophy although he once came to the conclusion that
it seems far inferior to Western philosophy in scope, in development, and in
inspiring formulations.4 In his discussion of Confucius, Jaspers is highly critical of the followers of Confucius for their rigid formalization and dogmatic
canonization of his teachings, of their making a god of the man who wanted
to remain just a philosopher of the common man and a simple man of the
people and of their turning his philosophy into a utilitarian and a pedantic pragmatism. As for Taoism, Jaspers exalts Lao-tzu for his profound and
humble concern for the Tao in the world. Although they had different views,
Confucius and Lao-tzu nonetheless stood on the same ground in which the
Chinese wisdom of a life is illuminated by their thought. Jaspers comments
that Confucius detoured the Encompassingan obvious reference to his
own philosophyby way of the human order whereas Lao-tzu spoke from
the Encompassing to the Encompassing. Moreover, Jaspers points out that
Lao-tzu was no more a mystic than Confucius. It might be added that Taoism,
however different it may seem from Confucianism, is still the product of the
Chinese mind and is grown in Chinese indigenous soil. Only in this sense can
one agree with Buber that there is something genuine and deeply Chinese
in Taoism. However encompassing the Tao may be and whatever else it may
imply, it is still grounded primarily in the world and, as the Way of man, is in
the world, not beyond or outside of it. Confucianism sees the engagement of
man in the mundane world by action and Taoism by nonaction.
It is obvious that there are divergences within the movement of existentialism. Despite their divergences, all the existential thinkers have one essential
theme in commonessential to a comparison between existentialism and
Confucianism. Existentialism is above all a critique of theoria or speculative
philosophy. The existentialist shuns what Kierkegaard called the chimera
of abstraction in favor of a concrete analysis of human experience as man
lives it. Kierkegaard refused to accept the idea that man is merely an abstract
system objectied by thought. Man is not a little abstract effigy.
Existentialism and Eastern philosophy have in the past been compared
on the basis of Zen (or Chan in Chinese) as known in the West especially
through the writings of Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki.5 At once it must be pointed
out that Suzuki himself and Hajime Nakamura6 have attempted to show that
Zen is a uniquely Chinese or Sinistic7 phenomenon, for it is a phenomenon
of the acculturation of Indian Buddhism by the practical and concrete mind
of the Chinese people. Nakamura takes Zen or the transformation of Indian
90
Buddhism in China as the crucial indictor of the Chinese way of thinking.

Signicantly, Suzuki emphasizes in his discussion of Zen that the Chinese
people, unlike the Indians, are rather practical and devoted to worldly
affairs; they are attached to the earth, they are not stargazers.8 He also cites
Kierkegaard who rejected speculative philosophy that builds a conceptual
palace that is doomed not to be lived in.9 The Zen spirit, which expresses
the unique Chinese mentality of practicality, also shuns empty speculation in
philosophyempty speculation in the sense that philosophical conceptualization is unrelated to the everyday life of manand attempts to go beyond
intellectualism, logicism, and sheer verbalism. If Zen is an embodiment of
the Chinese mentality, then the Chinese way of thinking is existential, for it is
concerned with the everyday experience of man as he lives it. The practically
minded Chinese would therefore agree with Merleau-Ponty who says that
the world is not what I think but what I live through in association with
others and the world as man perceives and lives it precedes the conceptualization of it.10 The Zen spirit is characterized by teaching by action and
learning by doing. The common and sufficient denominator of comparison
between existentialism and Confucianism, whose tradition of practicality is
the main spring of what Suzuki calls the Zen spirit, is the idea that philosophy is not an abstract body of doctrines but a concrete analysis of the ordinary existence of man in the world. Unlike Kierkegaard who revolted against
the tradition of theoria, Confucius took this concrete role of philosophy for
granted simply because there was no tradition of intellectualism and rationalism to revolt against. After Confucius, however, Confucianism tended to
become more speculative, and there was a period when Neo-Confucianists
revolted against otherworldly and contemplative Buddhism. Moreover, this
Neo-Confucian revolt is another indication that the Confucian tradition has
been this-worldly and practical.
The difference between Confucianism and existentialism stems from their
different cultural roots and perspectives. One is deeply rooted in agricultural
society and the other in the background of the scientic and technological
culture of the modern West. Confucianism stresses order and harmony in
the universe, whereas one of the most persistent and dominant themes of
existentialism is alienation or the loss of mans identity as human being. In
a sense existentialism is a philosophy of revolt against mass man and society as a result of modern science and technological industrialization. It is
a revolt against the other-directed or market personality of modern man.
Kierkegaards condemnation of the present age11 was that of the leveling
91
process of individuals in the nineteenth-century industrial society of Europe.

Similarly, Martin Heideggers existential analysis of the anonymous public
or they (das Man) as the inauthentic mode of human reality reects the
prevailing condition of man in this century; Jaspers, Marcel, Berdyaev, and
Ortega all express their concern for depersonalization and dehumanization
in modern mass man and society.12 The twentieth-century existential thinkers are uniformly opposed to a thaumaturgy of science, including naturalism
and logical empiricism as its philosophical expressions.
As to how to overcome mans alienation in the modern age, existential
philosophy attempts to offer at least two solutions. One is the individualistic solution Kierkegaard suggests, which has had considerable inuence on
later existential thinkers. The other is the idea of reciprocity as stressed by
Buber and Jaspers. The rst resorts primarily to the awakening of subjective
inwardness as the authentic mode of human existence, whereas the second
stresses the bond of one individual with another as the key to the overcoming of modern anonymity. Confucian jen applied to the modern condition of
man sides with the latter view.
ii. jen: confucius social way of man13

Chinese philosophy, whether it be Confucianism, Taoism, or Chan Buddhism, is essentially a practical humanism. The Chinese way of thinking, as
Nakamura shows, is practical, concrete, particular, and perceptual. This is
not only the typical expression of Chinese philosophy but also the general
expression of the Chinese people themselves. It is safe to say without falling
into a relativist position that philosophy is a specic modality of culture (i.e.,
it is a cultural fact) and as such is a specimen of the total cultural phenomenon called a lifeworld. As a practical humanism, Chinese philosophy focuses
its attention on man and what he does. Its radical premise is that the root of
man is man himself. Chinese philosophy begins with and ends in man. Unlike
Heidegger, Confucius saw fundamental ontology as an end in itself in his
philosophical analysis rather than a basic means to disclose the hiddenness of
Being (Sein). For Confucius, there was no going beyond humanism. He said,
jen is to love all men and knowledge is to know all men (Analects, Book
12: Chapter 22).14 Jen is the pillar of the practical humanism of Confucius.
It is most commonly agreed that Chinese philosophy, especially its Confucian tradition, is practical and that practicality represents the unique quality
92
of the Chinese mentality. To be practical, philosophy is concerned primarily

with man the actor rather than man the thinker, with the everyday world
of the common people as they live it, and in terms of normative ethics, with
how they ought to live. Wing-tsit Chan states that Chinese philosophy is
dedicated to everyday life and ordinary action. Consequently, the Chinese
did not develop a special terminology for philosophy different from everyday
language and beyond the understanding of the simple man.15 To be radical,
the philosopher must get at the root of things, and this root is the everyday
action of man living with other men in society. The basic premise of this
radical philosophy is the primacy of practice over theory, and it is the idea
that man is ultimately judged by what he does rather than by what he thinks.
The question of the unity of knowledge and action has been a central and
perennial issue in the history of Chinese philosophy, which emphasizes the
priority of action over knowledge. This issue goes back to the ancient Book
of History (Shu Ching) where it is said that it is not the knowing that is difcult, but the doing (The Books of Shang, Book VIII). However, the most
systematic formulation of this question is found in the sixteenth-century
Neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yang-ming in his celebrated doctrine of
the unity of knowledge and action (chih hsing ho yi): knowledge is the
beginning of action, and action the consummation of knowledge.16 The
same question continually occupied the mind of Chinese philosophers and
political leaders in this century such as Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, and
the Marxist Mao Tse-tung.17
As a thoroughgoing practical humanism, Confucianism affirms thisworldly life. When he was asked about the spirits of the dead, Confucius
answered, While you are not able to serve men, how can you serve their
spirits? (Analects, 11: 11). Concerning death, unlike many existentialists,
he queried, While you do not know life, how can you know about death?
(Ibid.). Confucius did not talk about extraordinary things, feats of strength,
disorder, and spiritual beings (Analects, 7: 20). The primary concern of
Confucius is what is immediate here and now with man in the mundane
world, which overshadows the question of the beyond, the far and the transcendent. The Tao is essentially the way of man, and it is not far from man.
When man practices the principle of reciprocity he is not far from the Tao
(Doctrine of the Mean, 13: 1 and 2).
Moreover, to be practical (or to act) implies morality or how man ought
to act. As man lives in relation to others, the practical world has a structure
of approvals and disapprovals as its indispensable element.18 The question
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of moral norms arises only because man lives in the world with others. Take
the example of sincerity as a practical virtue in everyday Chinese life. It is the
correspondence between speaking (verbal act) and doing (nonverbal act). To
be sincere, man must carry out in action what he says he intends to do; and
their discord is bad faith. The primary importance of sincerity as a practical
virtue lies in the actual performance of deed, which is consistent with the
Confucian idea of the unity of knowledge and action. Spoken words have
their practical imports as a prelude to the performance of action.
For Confucius, words have a performatory function. Only in this sense,
must we understand Confucius who said, Without knowing the force of
words, it is impossible to know men (Analects, 20:2.3). Moreover, take the
following examples of what he says in the Analects: (1) When the superior
man is heard to speak, his language is rm and decided (19: 9); (2) The
wise err neither in regard to their man nor to their words (15: 7); (3) The
virtuous will be sure to speak correctly, but those whose speech is good
may not always be virtuous (14: 5); (4) The superior man is modest in his
speech, but exceeds in his actions (14: 29); and (5) friendship with the glibtongued is injurious (16: 4). Confucius also suggested that the rst necessary
thing the ruler (of Wei) had to do in administering the government is to
rectify names, for if names be not correct, language is not in accordance
with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of
things, affairs cannot be carried on to success (Analects, 13:3.25). Unlike
Wittgenstein who was obsessed with the bewitchment of language in philosophical analysis, Confucius saw the importance of ordinary language in its
performatory value. The nality of words is achieved in the performance of
action, and thus the actual performance of action is higher in value than
words themselves.
Confucian philosophy as a practical humanism is based in the premise
of the primacy of praxis over theoria, and praxis is a social event as man
lives his everyday life with others. In this sense, as has been said earlier, jen
embodies the practical humanism of Confucian philosophy. Mencius clearly
stated that jen is the distinguishing characteristic of man (Works of Mencius, 7.2:17). Confucius himself considered jen as an all-pervading unity of
his philosophy (Analects, 4:15.1). The way of jen is found in the encounter of
the common people living their lives in association with others. He insists on
his association with the common people. All anyone can hope to achieve in
his or her lifetime is to practice jen: jen is a rule of practice for all ones life
(Analects, 15: 23). Jen is the ultimate concern of every man.
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The composition of the Chinese character jen itself suggests its central
meaning. Jen is composed of two ideograms, man (also pronounced jen)
and two. It suggests sociality or reciprocity in the everyday action of man.
It is an all-encompassing network of social relationships. Man is involved in
mankind and lives his everyday life in relation to others, that is, in the family,
in the community, and in the nation. Man lives in an atmosphere of humanity.
Man in isolation is not only a ction but also an infraction of being human,
and reciprocity constitutes the very humanness of man. Only through sociality does a man become a man. Thus, for Confucius, jen is the primary existential index of human reality. It is the sacrament of coexistence, and mans
ultimate concern is coexistence.
As it is the way of everyday action and sociality in one,19 jen entails morality. As Jaspers succinctly puts it, jen is humanity and morality in one.20
From the very start, the question of morality assumes the existence of relationships. To be a man of jen, one has to practice it. It is accessible to not just
the privileged few, but, on the contrary, the privileged few are determined by
their practice of jen. Anyone is superior when he or she practices jen. Mans
superiority is determined not by his intelligence alone, as Plato claimed, but
also by the practice of jen of which every man is capable.
Jen is the element of all moral elements. It is often translated as universal
virtue, benevolence, golden rule, love, compassion, and so on. As
the apotheosis of all moral virtues, jen encompasses the other virtues such as
righteousness (i), propriety (li), wisdom (chih), and faithfulness (hsin). And it
is also the unity of conscientiousness (chung) and altruism (shu). As Fung Yulan states, To say that the all-pervading principle of Confucius is chung and
shu, is the same as saying that it is jen, and to practice the two is genuinely to
practice jen. Moreover, chung is called the positive golden rule for it is the
doing to others what one likes oneself, whereas shu is the negative golden
rule for it is the not doing to others what one does not like oneself. Thus Fung
concludes that the virtues of chung and shu both aim at the extension of
ones self to others, so that the one quality can imply the other.21
To say that jen is the standard-bearer and consummation of all human
relationships is not to ignore other human virtues and relationships. To reach
the peak and go the farthest, one has to start from the bottom and the near.
That is to say, jen must be grounded in the primary type of human relationships, for to go to a distance we must rst traverse the space that is
near, and in ascending a height,... we must begin from the lower ground
(Doctrine of the Mean, 15). Among ve types of human relationships (i.e.,
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political, matrimonial, fraternal, friendly, and lial), the lial relationship is

the most basic and primary. Before jen is fullled, rst one must fulll lial
piety (hsiao).22
To summarize, jen has the central place in the practical humanism of Confucian philosophy. Jen is the encompassing way of man in the world. It refers
to the way of everyday action of man in relation to others in his lifeworld.
What stands out in jen is the idea that sociality is the primary index of mans
existence, and as such it entails morality and is regarded as the highest moral
norm attainable to man. Jen epitomizes the human lifeworld as the very
structure of both sociality and values.
iii. subjectivity: kierkegaards inward way of man

To show a subjective tendency in existential philosophy, there is no more
appropriate starting point than the thought of Kierkegaard who is not only the
founder of its movement but also the unswerving dramatizer of subjectivity.
For Kierkegaard, the attainment of mans inward subjectivity is, religiously and
ethically, the quantum satis of every individual as his lifetime task, whereas for
Confucius, in contrast, it is the fulllment of jen or reciprocity as the lifetime
task of every man. It is obvious that Kierkegaard is a Christian existentialist
while Confucius is a nontheist humanist or, as Karl Barth calls him, pagan.
Both the source and end of Kierkegaards existential ethics is the Christian
faith, and his ethics of individualism is derived from what he calls the Christian
principle. Nonetheless, the primary concern for both Kierkegaard and Confucius is ethics rather than the theory of knowledge. They are concerned with the
existential question of how to live rather than what to know. To become a man
of jen (or a sage) for Confucius and a Christian for Kierkegaard is the ultimate
goal of man, including the philosopher.
Kierkegaard is an apostle of subjective inwardness: inward subjectivity is
both the truth and reality of human existence. Existence, he writes, constitutes the highest interest of the existing individual, and his interest in his existence constitutes his reality.23 The focal point of his philosophy is theocentric
subjectivity, for the Christian principle, as he sees it, is nothing but an expression of the inward subjectivity of an existing individual. The religious and ethical principle demands that each individual must exist for himself alone. Even
loving another person is accidental because the essence of love is the lovers
own inwardness. The religious man is that individual who is alone, alone in
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the whole world, alonebefore God,24 and the result of divine providence
is to make everything more inward.25 To be religious, the existing individual
must relate himself to the unconditional in the deepest sense of his inwardness.
However, it is also true that for Kierkegaard to be an individual man has also
to ght against every tyranny, even the tyranny of the unconditional: To live
in the unconditional, inhaling only the unconditional, is impossible to man; he
perishes, like the sh forced to live in the air.26
For Kierkegaard there are two kinds of unforgivable crimes against being
human (i.e., humanity), both of which are equally serious: (1) the reication
of objective thought over the existence of an individual, which reduces man
to the abstract It and (2) the reduction of a particular existing individual to
the mere numerical or crowd.
First, as a philosopher, Kierkegaard expresses his individualism when he
says, For menot personally, but as a thinkerthis matter of the individual
is the most decisive thing.27 Subjectivity is not primarily an epistemological
notion but rather the capacity of a particular individual to exist inwardly,
which includes his thinking. Kierkegaard insists that the existence of a particular individual is never reducible to abstract thought. He does not reject
thought as such but rejects the abstract thinker who deserts existence. In contrast to the abstract or objective thinker, the subjective thinker is the one who
is deeply interested in and relates his thought to his existence as an individual.
Second, Kierkegaard equally rejects the idea of the crowd as a glittering illusion of the modern age. The victory of the crowd is the victory of an
abstraction over the individual. In The Present Age, Kierkegaard attempts to
reveal the ills of mans anonymity in the modern age or, more exactly, in the
nineteenth century. It is the phenomenon that demoralizes individuality by
the rise of the mass, which is vociferous, apathetic, indolent, unrepentant, supercial, and formless. The phenomenon of the crowd is
that which reduces man to nobody. It is a phantom because it does everything
but actually nothing and because it is talkative but says nothing. The phenomenon of the crowd is an immoral confusion because it deprives the moral
character of the individual, that is, it takes away the inwardness of individuality that constitutes mans very moral character.
Subjectivity alone is the truth, whereas the crowd is the untruth. The
victory of an existing individual over anything numerical is an ethical victory. The human sense of responsibility is diminished when the individual is
reduced to a numerical fraction. The multitude makes the individual impenitent and irresponsible. Every responsible man thus stands alone for himself
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in private. Moreover, for Kierkegaard, to be an individual means to become

as impolitic as possible. It is the individual who stands rmly against the
unholy political attitude, as the inward truth of subjectivity cannot be
decided by ballot. The witness of the truth, he stresses, has nothing
to do with politics.28 It is interesting to note how Kierkegaard compares
religion with politics in terms of the symbols of a martyr and a tyrant. On
the one hand, the martyr is one whose duty is to prevent the hordes from
forcing their way through that narrow pass of the individual and to make
every one become an individual. He is the suffering individual who educates others through his Christian love of mankind, translating the masses
into individualsand there is joy in heaven over every individual whom he
thus saves out of the masses. On the other hand, the tyrant is egoistically
the individual who inhumanly made the others into the masses, and ruled
over the masses.29
Despite his religious and ethical edication of a single existing individual,
Kierkegaard is no more a solipsist than he is an egotist. Nor does he preclude
the possibility of communication as such. Rather, he insists that rst and primarily man must be recognized as this or that individual and should not
be reduced to the they or for that matter, an object. His primary task is to
build a sanctuary for the divine growth of inwardness in each individual and
it is only after the individual has acquired an ethical outlook, in face of the
whole world, that there can be any suggestion of really joining together.30 The
self as this or that individual is always in the singular, never in the plural.
On the basis of this concrete particularity of an individual, Kierkegaard asserts
that human equality is absolute. Human equality is not numerical or mathematical equality. The basis of absolute equality is the idea that every man,
absolutely every man, inasmuch as he is a man, can be, indeed must be, an
individual.31 The principle of this absolute equality is found in the Christian
principle of the essential likeness between men only as individuals before God.
Kierkegaard maintains that to love or honor a neighbor is compatible with the
Christian principle of individualism. To honor ones neighbor is to honor him
as a unique individual. The idea of neighbor is the absolutely true expression for human equality. Neighbor (or religious congregation) is not a
collective term, for to love ones neighbor does not imply that man should love
the crowd, which means for Kierkegaard the abasement and denial of man
as an individual and destroys the very Christian principle itself. Concerning
communication, he is opposed to, for example, supercial talkativeness of
the crowd that jabbers on constantly but says nothing. He values silence over
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talkativeness (publicity or advertisement), for silence shows a truer picture of

mans inwardness whereas talkativeness is afraid of the silence which reveals
its emptiness.32 And he says that the exteriorized caricature of inwardness is
vulgarity and talkativeness, and silence is the condition sine qua non of all
educated social intercourse.33
iv. existenz: jasperss communicable way of man

The idea of communication has a central place in the philosophy of Jaspers
as has jen in the philosophy of Confucius. In this respect, where Kierkegaards philosophizing leaves off, Jasperss begins. Their essential continuity
lies in avoiding what Jaspers calls intellectual acrobatics or what Kierkegaard calls abstract thought. Insofar as the question of communication is
concerned, there is a radically new beginning in Jaspers. What Kierkegaard
excepted from his philosophical questioning constitutes the very beginning
or condition of Jasperss philosophy. Kierkegaards philosophizing started
and ended in Denmark, whereas Jasperss started in Germany and continues
to the world. This is in part why Jaspers says that communication is not only
a philosophic task but a historic one as well. For the purpose of this essay, it
suffices to note only one essential difference between the two: for Kierkegaard
truth is the inwardness of subjectivity and is enclosed in subjectivity, whereas
for Jaspers truth is communicability and is innitely open. For the former
the fact of every man existing for himself is his gift and benefaction
(Kierkegaards own terms) whereas for the latter communication is uniquely
a human necessity. The contrast is between the abyss of inwardness and the
openness of communication. For Jaspers, the philosophical faith as the
boundless openness to communication (or the total will to communicate) is
the decision to follow a human road.
What, for Jaspers, is this innite openness? It is both the loving search of
men for mutual communication, which reaches no termination and the indeterminateness of knowledge. Openness is the reasoned search for everything that
can possibly be encountered in the world, that is, the ultimate road to humanity whose horizon is never closed off. Knowledge itself is impermanent because
it is grounded in the historicity (or self-becoming) of Existenz. Openness is also
the road through which men may reach a genuine Transcendence and the
One. Only when openness itself reaches its own limit, then can we say with
Jaspers that the ultimate in thinking as in communication is silence.34
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In Jasperss philosophy, communication, Existenz, truth, and reason are all related terms in which the rst permeates each of the others, and
through communication a nexus of human meanings is woven. The business
of philosophy is to elucidate Existenz and the manifold possibilities of communication. Truth cannot be separated from communication, for abstracted
from communication, truth hardens into an unreality.35 Moreover, truth
itself is grounded in Existenz, as communication is the very condition of
ones Existenz and Existenz is only real in communication.36 Existenz is
an index by which mans authentic being is catalogued, and the very being of
man is dened in terms of communication: communication is every form is
so much a part of man as man in the very depth of his being.37 Man is not
human if he is to live for himself alone as a mere individual. Without communication, humanity is abandoned. Also, community is the condition for the
actualization of Existenz. A new life begins in communication and humanness surges out of mans communication with others. Man is not dehumanized, but his humanity is more elevated by his capacity to communicate and
to live in a community. Jaspers says that to be self and to be true are nothing
else than to be in communication unconditionally.38 The self nds its own
being through his or her communication with another Existenz.
Existential communication involves all the modes of the Encompassing (das Umgreifende), which includes what Jaspers calls empirical existence, consciousness as such, and spirit. Each of the three has its own
mode of communication and stands on its own right: There is no truth
without some kind of communicability, and what is communicable always
belongs on many levels to the various modes of the Encompassing in their
interrelations, and always has its meaning within its sphere, not outside of
it.39 However, the unity of communication in Existenz is possible in the
unity of these three modes of communication. Furthermore, reason becomes
an encompassing bond for all modes of communication in the Encompassing. Reason and Existenz are inseparable and interdependent. One cannot
exist without the other. Reason is the source of communication in Existenz;
it wills Existenz to communicate, while Existenz is absolutely irreducible to
and irreplaceable by another. Reason binds these distant and independent
Existenzen into communication. Because of reason, therefore, Existenz is
not a self-enclosed monad, but it opens itself to the world. Reason becomes
the necessary medium for existential communication, and the selfhood of
Existenz is fullled by communication through reason. Like the principle of
distance and relation in Buber,40 every Existenz not only is independent
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in the sense that it keeps its distance from another Existenz before coming
together in a mutual relation but also presupposes equality as a necessary
step for communication. The unlimited will-to-communicate, Jaspers
says, never means simply to submit oneself to the other as such, but rather
to know that other, to hear him, to will to reckon with him even unto the
necessity of a transformation of oneself.41 In this way, the self-becoming
of Existenz is enriched by coming into contact with others, and possibly it
transforms itself into a better self. As self-becoming is the endless openness
to communication with others, so is the knowledge about Existenz and the
world is never nished. Indeed, the scope of philosophy is perennial.
v. conclusion
Like Kierkegaard, one may insist that to be authentic human existence must
be primarily subjective or, like Confucius and Jaspers, he or she may emphasize the idea that sociality is a primary aspect of human reality. Despite his
critical insights into mans anonymity, Kierkegaard only saw human existence
exclusively in terms of a polarization of either/or: either the individual or
the crowd. The one is the authentic mode and the other the inauthentic mode
of human existence. As a result, he failed to see fully the genuine possibility
of human reciprocity as a way out of the crowd and yet capable of preserving mans individual identity. Kierkegaard overlooked the possibility that, as
Buber puts it, A man is truly saved from the one not by separation but only
by being bound up in genuine communion.42
The fact about human existence, whether one wants to face it or not, is
that man is not and cannot be the prisoner of his own self or, for that matter,
of the crowd. He is not enclosed in his own subjectivity and secluded from
the world. Man is open to the world, and as Merleau-Ponty sees it, man as an
intentional being is nothing but a network of relationships. Man exists, and
he knows himself, in the world, never apart from it. The other is his twin and
the esh of his esh. The self and the other are like interlocking gears.43 To
exist means to coexist, and man is involved with mankind.
Alfred Schutz affirms that as long as man is born of woman, intersubjectivity and the we-relationship will be the foundation for all other categories
of human existence.44 Sociality is as central to ethics and moral philosophy
as it is to social philosophy simply because individuals exist not independently of but in relation to others. As I have indicated in the introduction of
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this chapter, Confucian philosophy and existentialism share their concern

for the world of everyday life as we live it. However, unlike the existential movement, Confucian philosophy is free of a subjective tendency. Jen
expresses the view that human existence is (and ought to be) social, which
is closely shared by the existential philosophers of coexistence. One cannot easily dismiss Confucian philosophy as a rural philosophy irrelevant to
the modern conditions of urban and industrial civilization. For one thing,
precisely because jen is an expression of concern for humanity, it has a
cosmopolitan outlook and a universal appeal for modern man. The truth
about the Way of man is that there is no privileged position, Western
or Eastern; there is neither superiority nor inferiority of one to the other
but only convergences, divergences, and nally the hope for conciliation.
However, there can be no conciliation of the truth about man but only a
conciliation of different philosophies and philosophers.
CHAPTER 7
heideggers way with sinitic thinking
Only connect!
E. M. Forster
By way, or how, we mean something other than
manner or mode. Way here means melody, the ring
and tone, which is not just a matter of how the saying
sounds. The way or how of the saying is the tone from
which and to which what is said is attuned.
Martin Heidegger
i. prologue
The inuence of Heidegger on twentieth-century thought has been immense,
pervasive, and immeasurable. The German critical theorist Jrgen Habermas, though he was by no means totally sympathetic to Heideggers thought,
once summarily acknowledged him as the most inuential thinker since
Hegel. Heideggers intention is to deconstruct or subvert the hegemony
of the metaphysical or logocentric tradition of the West from Plato to
Nietzsche. By deconstruction, Heidegger means a critical procedure in which
the accepted concepts are traced back to their sources for the sake of reconstruction. This deconstructive thought poses challenges for an epoch that has
experienced the planetarization of Western science and technology, that is,
the global domination of what Heidegger himself calls calculative thinking. Of course, there has been a long German tradition in the comparative
study of intercultural thematics from Wilhelm von Humboldt and Johann
Gottfried Herder to Forke. Since Leibniz, however, there has never, I think,
been a mood of Oriental trangisme in philosophy more favorable than the
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one engendered by Heidegger. According to the legendary report by William

Barrett of Heideggers reaction to reading D. T. Suzuki, Heidegger remarked
that he was trying to say exactly what Suzuki had said in his writings on
Zen. And it is JapanSuzukis birthplacethat has been most receptive to
Heideggers philosophy in Asia.1 In fact, Heideggers famous Conversation
on Language (195354) was occasioned by the visit of a Japanese scholar
Professor Tezukaand it shows the liation between Heideggers thought
and Japanese toward the affirmation of poetic language, as well as his keen
interest in Japanese thought. Heidegger frequently expressed his bewilderment that the Japanese tend to forget the beginnings of their own thinking in
their pursuit of the newest and latest trends in European thought.
ii. introduction of heideggers thought to the east

This chapter is an exercise in what Giambattista Vico calls ingenium, that
is, the power of connecting separate and diverse elements in Heidegger and
Sinitic thinking. There are formidable, if not insurmountable, difficulties in
comparing Heideggers thinking with Asian thought in a short essay. First,
it is obvious that Heidegger himself is a prolic and difficult writer. Second,
there is the famous turn or divide (Kehre) between the early and the later
Heidegger or, to use William Richardsons expression, through phenomenology to thought. There is the left-handed (that is, sinister) compliment
certainly in favor of our present studythat Heideggers Being is really the
Chinese Tao, for which there is no comparable term in Western thought. Even
concerning Heideggers Being and Time, there are two diametrically opposed
or conicting interpretations: some view it as historicist because it fails to
advance the timeless or eternal truth beyond all ages and cultures, whereas
others conclude that it is ahistoricist because in it the structures of human
reality are meant to be true of all ages and cultures. Both aporetic views are
wrong because they misunderstandeach in a diametrically opposing way
Heideggers conception of historicity (Geschichtlichkeit): one ignores it as
the redemption of eternity while the other as the recovery of time. Third,
there is a multitude of philosophical thoughts, methods, and approaches in
Asia, and several writers have proposed the compatibility of Heideggers
thought with various aspects of Eastern thought. There have been important
studies that compare Heidegger with individual oriental thinkers: the favorite comparison, for good reason, is between Heidegger and Kitar Nishida.
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The broadest thematic category of East Asian thought comparable to Heideggers thought would probably be Sinismthe title of the early and pioneering work of Herrlee G. Creel. Sinism was meant to accentuate what is
peculiarly or uniquely Chinese in Confucianism, Taoism, and Chan or Zen
Buddhism and was formulated to encompass the important aspects of philosophical, religious, and ethical thought of both Japan and Korea as well as
the Chinese language or ideography.
From the perspective of Heideggers early thought, the only legitimate way
to comparative philosophy is the identication of the philosophical universe
as pluralistic. Heidegger indirectly intimated this when he expressed bewilderment that the Japanese chased after everything new in European thought.
Why such a rush for (Western) truth unless they believe that it is superior
to their own? Nishidathe most important twentieth-century Japanese
philosopher who did more than any other thinker to integrate Western and
Oriental thoughtalso believes in cultural pluralism in that the unity of a
world culture would be based on the specicity of an individual culture. Parenthetically, it must be pointed out from the very outset that from the standpoint of Heideggers thought there can be no separation between truth and
method, as there is equally no separation between language and thought on
the one hand and between language and reality on the other. After all, Heidegger himself advances the notion in Being and Time that ontology is possible only as phenomenology. The separation between truth and method has
been consummated with the rise of positivism or scientism, while the unitary
philosophical claim that the methods of the natural sciences, especially physics, are paradigmatic to all truth claims has been contested by Hans-Georg
Gadamer in Truth and Method, which makes an effective argument within
the context of Heideggers philosophical hermeneutics.
Let us transpose the notion of what the one-time student of Heidegger,
Hannah Arendt, calls human plurality (in her seminal work The Human
Condition) on to cultural pluralism. According to Arendt, human plurality is
the basic condition of both speech and action, and it has the twofold character of equality and distinction. The rst refers to the existence of commonality among human beings and human cultures without which we would not
be able to understand one another, whether they be primitive and modern or
Western and Eastern. On the other hand, without distinction we would need
neither speech nor action to make ourselves understood. This is in essence, I
propose, the principium of ontological difference in Heideggers thought.
The true merit of this philosophical pluralismthe Heideggerian principle
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of ontological difference and the Chinese idea of the complementarity of

the two opposites (yin and yang)lies in a logic of correlation.2 Following
cues from Hayden White, I have also called this logic of correlation diatactics. White wishes it to replaceappropriately, I thinkthe term dialectics
in order to avoid the ideological overtone of Marx and the transcendental
tone of Hegels thought: diatactics is neither paratactical (conceptually
underdetermined) nor hypotactical (conceptually overdetermined). As a nonreductive method of correlation, diatactics conrms the complementarity of
any two given disparate phenomena. It is also tactile to the extent to which
it arouses the intimate sense of touch and accentuates the dialogic, pragmatic side of language in use. In this regard, the principle of diatactics, as we
will later see, is fundamentally Heideggerian as well when Heidegger denes
thinking as a handicraft. Ultimately, in the logic of correlationunlike the
dialectics of Hegel and Marxthe positive (yang) and the negative (yin) are
not resolved categorically or otherwise in terms of a higher synthesis but
preserve the unending ow of their opposition as complementary. In short,
the conceptual advantage that diatactics proffers is the following: it rejects
the facile monism and dualism as well as the reductionism of all kinds that
are likely to fall into the dichotomy of superiority and inferiority in grafting
knowledge and action, mind and body, subjectivity and objectivity, language
and reality, speech and writing, man and nature, and so on.
iii. heideggers affinity to sinism

Questioning, Heidegger declares, is the piety of thinking (Frmmigkeit des
Denkens). Indeed, questioning has been the quintessence of phenomenology
as a philosophical movement. Phenomenology is neither a school, a set of
dogmas, a method, nor a technique in the same way that mathematics is a
technique for the physical sciences today. The founder of phenomenology,
Edmund Husserl, who is also Heideggers mentor, himself conceives of philosophy as a perpetual beginning, as Socratic ignorance. For the true thinker,
philosophy never ceases to be a riddle and wonder to itself. As a vigilance,
philosophy seeks the source of knowledge in the things themselves. Husserl often used the term introduction to characterize a new beginning of
phenomenology in his work. Maurice Merleau-Ponty was fond of using
the term interrogation for his philosophical research to insist that the
questioner himself is always already (immer schon)to use Heideggers
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expressionimplicated in the question he raises. To paraphrase MerleauPonty slightly in order to accent this genealogical spirit in phenomenological thought, the end of phenomenological philosophy is the account of its
beginning. In essence, the true phenomenologist is necessarily a perpetual
beginner. In this selfsame spirit, Heidegger too denes phenomenology as the
possibility of thinking.
The piety of thinking is the thematic abecedarium of comparing Heidegger with Eastern thought in this essay. As the principium of this essay, it
heralds the voice of poetic language in the conversation of humankind and
ultimately acknowledges the thinking poet as the legislator of the world. By
delimiting our discussion to the single theme, the piety of thinking, we do not
betray Heideggers spirit but instead uphold it when he himself affirms that
to think is to conne yourself to a single thought that one day stands still
like a star in the worlds sky.3
In the crisis of man and (his or her) humanity, foremost is the crisis of
thinking. We prefer the word thinking to thought for the simple reason
that while the latter is a passive end-product, the former denotes the active
process of unending activity: it is indeed wayward, on the way. It is, in other
words, the Taothe unending, often meandering road. In What Is Called
Thinking? Heidegger himself explains the twofold meaning of participles
that participate or take part in two meanings in which the one refers to the
other as a pair. In this case, thinkinglike blossomingis an ongoing act.
Be that as it may, what is most needed in our time is a way to think appropriately. There is interest in thinking today as it is engendered by thoughtprovoking events. Paradoxically, however, Heidegger rightly observes that in
our age the most thought-provoking event is that we are still not thinking,
a dangerous condition that leads itself readily to the banality of evil
[to borrow a phrase from Hannah Arendts controversial reporting of Adolf
Eichmann after the model of Heideggers anonymous they (das Man)]. In
such an impoverished state of thinking, we must rst clarify the condition
of our thinking: this is the primary function of philosophy. The opposite
of thinking or thoughtfulness is, of course, thoughtlessness. The banality
of evil refers to the unprecedented phenomenon of evil deeds committed by
Eichmann on a gigantic, hideous scale that cannot be traced to any wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction but to the extraordinary shallowness that is neither monstrous nor demonic but rather the authentic inability
to think. What Arendt is interested in pointing out here is not our ability
to theorize abstractly or think in abstraction but our ability to make moral
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judgments based on the sensus communis (as in Socratic wisdom, Aristotelian phronsis, or Kantian moral judgment) as the abode of mans humanity.
It is thinking as a natural necessity or duty of the examined human life that
is a faculty of every man who belongs to the species called human. To talk
about thinking as the pillar of morality is not to neutralize it but to dig its
arche (origin) itself: thoughtlessness is indeed a moral latitudinarianism. On
the other hand, to moralilze is to trivialize the essence of human thinking.
According to Heidegger, thinking as an autonomous activity is distinguished from both knowing (in an epistemological sense) and acting (in a
pragmatic sense). For it neither produces solely epistemological truths nor is
merely instrumental to action whose manifest aim is measured by its pragmatic cash value. Rather, knowing and acting presuppose thinking. Thinking as altheia is presupposed in both knowledge and action. As such it is
neither scientic, technical, nor utilitarian. In short, genuine thinking is not
calculative. The alternative to calculative thinking (rechnendes Denken) is for
Heidegger meditative thinking (besinnliches Denken). In the following pages,
I will try to show the meaningful nexus of thinking as poisis (the poetic),
praxis, and techn (the artistic) in the original Greek sense of the terms.
In Heideggers ontology, thinking and language are inseparable: language
is the house of Being whose guardian man is. We always already nd ourselves in the midst of language: we are attuned to language as reality rather
than as a surrogate of reality. To think of language is to think of reality. Let
us call mans attunement to language linguisticality (Sprachlichkeit)that
which makes thinking possible. By linguisticality we denote the following four
inseparably related properties: (1) language is intrinsic to human specicity
as social; (2) it is inseparable from our conception of reality, that is, it is not a
mirror to reect, copy, or represent it but is reality itself; (3) it is the primary
medium of human communication; and (4) it is an embodied phenomenon.
In this connection, the most revealing challenge Heidegger poses for comparative philosophy in relation to thinking and language concerns whether
Western languages are ineluctably tied to Western metaphysical thinking
or instead offer other possibilities of thinking. In Heideggers thought one
would suspect that they are more or less two sides of the same coin.
For Heidegger, our attunement to language and thus to the world is not
simply rationalistic in the traditional sense of Western metaphysics. Instead,
language is an embodied phenomenon, for which reason, as I have already
intimated, I use the term diatactics. In the West, it was Giambattista Vicos
linguistic autopsia (or anatomy)in the sense of seeking the evidence
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of the senseswhich discovered language originally as embodied speech

(Sprachleiblichkeit). For Vico, words are carried over from human bodies
to signify nature, where the body language animates inanimate things and
from the properties of human bodies to signify the institutions of the mind,
including, of course, what we call the rhetoric and grammar of language.
For Heidegger, too, the hand is more than an organ, altogether it is peculiarly human, that is, the quiddity of being human. In Heideggers What Is
Called Thinking? occurs a marvelous passage concerning the many ways of
the hand that culminate in thinking as a handicraft in the same way that the
use of languageboth speaking and writingis the techn (art) of the body.
It dees paraphrasing and is worth quoting in full:
We are trying to learn thinking. Perhaps thinking, too, is just something like building a cabinet. At any rate, it is a craft, a handicraft.
Craft literally means the strength and skill in our hands. The hand
is a peculiar thing. In the common view, the hand is part of our
bodily organism. But the hands essence can never be determined,
or explained, by its being an organ which can grasp. Apes, too, have
organs that can grasp, but they do not have hands. The hand is innitely different from all grasping organspaws, claws, or fangs
different by an abyss of essence. Only a being who can speak, that is,
think, can have hands and can be handy in achieving works of handicraft. But the craft of the hand is richer than we commonly imagine.
The hand does not only grasp and catch, or push and pull. The hand
reaches and extends, receives, and welcomesand not just things:
the hand extends itself, and receives its own welcome in the hands
of others. The hand holds. The hand carries. The hand designs and
signs, presumably because man is a sign. Two hands fold into one,
a gesture meant to carry man into the great oneness. The hand is
all this, and this is the handicraft. Everything is rooted here that is
commonly known as handicraft, and commonly we go no further.
But the hands gestures run everywhere through language, in their
most perfect purity precisely when man speaks by being silent. And
only when man speaks, does he thinknot the other way around, as
metaphysics still believes. Every motion of the hand in every one of
its works carries itself through the element of thinking, every bearing of the hand bears itself in that element. All the work of the hand
is rooted in thinking. Therefore, thinking itself is mans simplest,
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and for that reason hardest, handiwork, if it would be accomplished

at its proper time.4
In Heidegger, therefore, thinking, speech and the hand form a lial unity.
He unies the sayings of Anaxagoras and Democritus, which may appear
contradictory at rst glance: Anaxagoras, who said that man is intelligent
because he has a mouth rather than hands, and Democritus, who said that
human progress depends on the working of the hand rather than the mind.
Heideggers thought is indeed the diatactics of Anaxagoras and Democritus.
As the hand is tactile, so are thinking and speaking. If thought is a handy
craft, its opposite, thoughtlessnesswhich is pervasive and rampant in the
modern world, as evidenced in the disembodied (alienated) language and
behavior of Eichmannis an iniction of cutaneous alagia, the condition
of feeling no pain in the skin. The thinking hand or thinking as a handy
work, of which Heidegger speaks, confers upon us the work of the hand as
embodied conduct. As such the hand is not just an extension of the body but
is the body incorporated. The hand is the lived body; it is an organized corporation. As embodied conduct, the hand is pansensory and synesthetic. It
cultivates the workings of the other senses, for example, hearing, seeing, saying, and singing. Indeed, it embodies the sociability of the senses.
The import of Heideggers diatactics of thinking and languageespecially
speakingis, I submit, enormous for comparative philosophy. As Heidegger
himself is an etymological master, the etymological and paleographical study
of Chinese ideography, known as etymosinology, which began with Ernest
Fenollosa and inuenced later the poetry of Ezra Pound (for example, in the
Cantos), should not be left unnoticed. Doubly important, as we will later
see in detail, is Fenollosas view of the Chinese ideogram as an authentic
medium of poetry or the poeticized language par excellence. If the notion
of economy betokens the genius and gift of Chinese ideograms, Chinese
ideography is the exemplar of poetic language. Etymosinology is a dazzling
display of the ideogrammic abracadabra by means of which Fenollosa tried
to celebrate the meeting of the yin of the markedly feminine East and the yang
of the markedly masculine West. Although the feminine and masculine allusions may not be totally appropriate, the correlative logic of the yin and the
yang as one unity is brought close to Heideggers ontological difference.5
Chinese ideographycalligraphy in particularis a kinetic art: it is the
human body in graceful motion. The ideogram as metaphor or imagery of
the body is indeed kinaesthetic, to use Kenneth Burkes phrase. And the
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Chinese revere the art of calligraphy as much as painting: calligraphy is the

painting of ideograms orto intimate the spiritual and personal dimension
of artists themselvescharacters.6 In the genealogy of form, calligraphy is
indeed prior to painting. In very signicant measure, Chinese ideography is a
choreography of human gestures and, as a family of signiers, a conversation
of gestures that, because of the presence of meaning, is not the reduction of
ideograms to human physiology. The rhetoric of an ideogram, whether it is
tree, sun, moon, stream, man, male, female, smile, or cry, lies in its status as
a speaking picture. For instance, the ideographic gesture of human expressivity (for example, smile and cry) is indelibly pantomimicbeckoning
for a similar response in return. Picassos Swimmer (1929) and Acrobat
(1930) are two choreographs of the human body in uent and rhythmic
motion that are approaching ideography or calligraphy. They are, in short,
balletic and frolicking anthropograms. Stphane Mallarm speaks of the
dance as the visual embodiment of idea (lincorporation visuelle de lide).7
In The Principles of Art, R. G. Collingwood observes that every language is
a specialized form of bodily gesture and, as such, that dance is the mother of
all languages. In Not I, the Vichian Samuel Beckett choreographs the dramaticity of speaking as the dance of the mouth. With him we can say that in language as gestures the spoken and the written are identical.8 Since the dance
is the motion of the body in time and space, it may legitimately be claimed
as the birthplace of all visual and auditory arts (for example, painting and
music). Moreover, Marshall McLuhan, who had the romantic vision of writing his antitypographic treatise, The Gutenberg Galaxy, in the ideogrammic
medium, thought of the Chinese ideogram as a vortex of corporate energy
corporate in the twofold sense of being bodily and collective. Several years
ago, the Japanese journalist Takao Tokuoka reported with humor in the editorial column of the New York Times the inventive word towelketa shop
sign written in Japanese phonetic characters (kana)which is a combination
of the two English words towel and blanket (towelket = towel + [blan]
ket). What born Joyceans the Japanese are! Of course, what I have in mind is
Joyces talent or inventiveness for composing chordal vocabularies in Ulysses
and Finnegans Wake. The Joycean decomposition or musicalization of the
abced-minded world or the popeyed world of the scribblative has its
structural parallel in Fenollosas deconstruction or demystication of Chinese ideograms as simple or complex corporations. Joyceanism or Joyces
unique stylistic stands out for its tremendous proclivities for making visible
words chordal and for thinking in chords after the acoustic model of music,
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that is, for the production of chordal meanings by obliterating (auditory) content and (visual) form: thornghts (thorn + thoughts), rhythmatick (rhythm +
mathematics), paupulation (paucity + population), evoluation (evolution +
evaluation), cerebration (cerebrum + celebration), and so on. If Fenollosas
etymological and paleographic deconstruction of Chinese ideograms (kanji)
is correct, the composition of towelket is a result of the natural habitus of
the Japanese mindin fact, of the Oriental mind that is accustomed to the
vorticism of Chinese ideograms. I nd the etymolinguistics of Chinese ideography both enlightening and fascinating. Consider the following examples of
hypograms as the corporate insemination of other ideograms: East is an
entangling of sun with tree (i.e., the sun entangled in the branches of a
tree in the early morning or at sunrise); old or ancient is a composite of
ten and mouth (ten over mouth, presumably referring to what has
come down through the mouth for ten generations); and truth or faithfulness is a composite of man and word (man standing by his word).
Two of my favorite characters are humanity and sage. The former is a
composite of man and two (two men standing together) and the latter
is a composite of ear, mouth, and king. As the king is the unier of
heaven, man, and earth, the sage is the unier of heaven, man, and earth by
speaking and hearing truthfully.
Having shown the correlative logic of thinking and language as embodied
phenomena in Heidegger and Chinese ideography, we should go one step
further in characterizing language as performance. As the poetic is for Heidegger paradigmatic to all thinking, doing, and making, so poeticized or aestheticized language is performance par excellence. This view is of the utmost
importance, as we will later show, for accounting for mans conduct.
Heidegger regards written language as inferior to or a poor substitute for
direct conversation because in writing thinking easily loses its exibility, and
it becomes difficult to retain the multidimensionality peculiar to thinking: he
is an aural or auditory thinker.9 Ralph Waldo Emerson, who spoke eloquently
of thinking as a pious reception, also thought that (written) language is fossil
poetry.10 For the same reason, Heidegger rejects the spectatorial view of knowledge embedded in the Cartesian cogitothe logocentric kernel of modern
Western philosophy, that is, thinking as disinterested, distanced, and detached.
In his studies of Renaissance art and poetry, Walter Pater views music as
the consummate art, in that all art aspires to attain the condition of music.
In The Birth of Tragedy (1967), Friedrich Nietzschethe last metaphysician
of the West, according to Heideggerechoes and rejoices in the voice of
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Orpheus, the singer who moves a world in darkness: it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justied. So
the Nietzschean aesthetic is epitomized by music: music is for Nietzsche one
way to make the aesthetic intelligible and grasp it directly: Quite generally,
only music, placed beside the world, can give us an idea of what is meant
by the justication of the world as an aesthetic phenomenon.11 The prevailing use of auditory metaphors in Heideggers thought is congruent with
his critique of the modern age as the age of world picture (Weltbild), his
general conception of language, thought, and the world in relation to Being:
for example, mood or disposition and attunement (Bestimmtsein).
There is indeed the semantic kinship or liation of the German words to
hear (hren), to hearken (horchen), to belong (gehren), and to obey
(gehorchen). Moreover, hearing and obeying have the same etymological root: the Latin obaudire, to listen from below, is to obey. In Being and
Time, Heidegger conceives of mood (Stimmung) as a primordial, existential
character of man. As a factum brutum, mood (Stimmung) has an ontological
bearing because it is a basic mode of There-being (Dasein). It is the basic
way of nding ourselves in the world. Through it, we attune ourselves to the
world: that is to say, we lend a musical ear to and obey it at the same time.
As disposition, mood is not just the sensitive and emotional side of human
consciousness but rather the essential nature (animus) of man. Mood, Heidegger writes, is never merely a way of being attuned, and letting ourselves
be attuned, in this or that way in mood. Mood is precisely the basic way in
which we are outside ourselves. But that is the way we are essentially and
constantly.12 No wonder, being outside ourselves, moodboth sorrowful
and joyful alikeis highly contagious in a small circle of spouses and close
friends and relatives. In short, mood is the tonality of Dasein as Being-inthe-world (in-der-Welt-sein).
The structure of oral poetry is indeed paradigmatic to language as performance. Oral poetry is rhetoric par excellence because rhetoric, as one author
denes it succinctly, is the signifying act that values oral performance.13
Emerson captures the performative spirit of language when he describes
words as actions and conversely actions as a kind of words. In oral poetry,
poisis, praxis, and techn are rolled into one. In the genealogy of language
(as communication), oral poetry is the rst language, and the oral poet is the
rst born. The persona and (oral) poetry of Homer signify the dawn of Western thinking itself. Like Hermes, Orpheus, and even the Muses (the daughters
of Mnemosyne or Memory), Homer was a singer or bard. The name of the
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god Hermes, in whose name hermeneutics celebrates the sacred and magical
canon of his spoken words, stems from herma, the mute stone monument
that also corresponds phonetically to the Latin sermo (speech)as we know,
muteness or silence is the mother tongue. Hermes was the inventor of language and the magician of spoken words who was spellbinding. According to
the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, the Hermetic legend is synonymous with
the discovery of the universe (uni-verse) as the sounding orbit. Hermes was a
herald (keryx): he was a virtuoso of sound making whose kerygma (message)
was aired by and encoded in the sound of spoken words. The term herald
is related to the Latin carmen (song) and the Sanskrit karuh (to sing) and
karus (bard), whose sole virtue scales the pitch of the signifying excellence
of voice. As the master of speech, Hermes was the messenger of Zeus; in his
capacity as a herald he gave Pandora her voice. No wonder, then, this genuine
Olympian was the friendliest of the gods to men.
The tintinnabulation of oral poetry is consonant with the poetic voice of
Heidegger, which is resonant with the poet Rilke: Gesang ist Dasein where
poisis, praxis, and technthe sung word, the deed, and the art of word
makingcome together as unity in the organization of existence or Being.14
First, oral poetry is oral and auditory (acoustic), that is, in it the mouth and
the ear are the main organs of communication. In Homeric oral poetry as
shown in the works of Milman Parry, Albert B. Lord, Marshall McLuhan,
Eric A. Havelock, Walter J. Ong, and others, speech and music are inseparable simply because it is sung. Second, in oral poetry there is no separation
between composition and performance: composition is spontaneous performance. The oral poemlike jazz or any improvised musicis composed
not for but in performance. Third, in the Homeric culture the oral techn
of poetry was the instrument of preserving the dynamic ow of a collective
life. Poisis was techn, and mimsis was the poetic technique of communication to preserve the acoustic effects (pragmata) of an oral culture. Poetry
is an oral performance in the service of the acoustic effects of culture. The
dynamic ow of this oral culture was preserved in the cornucopia of poetry,
that is, in its repetition, redundancy, and verboseness. The Homeric epic was
metaphorically called a river of songs. In essence, oral poetry is speech sung
as performative utterances. When a person is making a performative utterance, he is doing something rather than merely saying something that may be
true or false, that is, describing or reporting the state of affairs. In language
as speech acts, performance and promise are no longer antithetical lexicons.
The spoken word as performative utterance becomes an index of moral value
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once it is extended to the realm of human conduct: we are, morally or otherwise, what we say (as a performative act).
The Chinese syntax itself, as etymosinologists have tried to show, is action
or performance. The Chinese cardinal moral virtue called sincerity is
spelled syntactically word-performed (for which the Japanese tragic heroes
from ancient to modern times sacriced their lives). As it means what we say
or perform what we promise in words, it personies the Chinese conception
of the circular unity of knowledge and action in the sense that knowledge is
the beginning of action and action the completion of knowledge. There is,
of course, a union or family of moral notions connected with sincerity
jen, piety, faithfulness, rite, and so on. Faithfulness or delity literally means
man-standing-by-his-word, and it refers to the responsibility of the
speaker to his word as ethical performance. The Confucian formulation of
the rectication of names (cheng ming)calling things by their right (rite)
namesexemplies the ethics of language-in-performance. In the Analects,
Confucius said, without knowing the (performative) power of words, it is
impossible to know man. This affirms the following: the centrality of language to human conduct, the ethics of language embodying the humanity of
man, and the spoken word as prescriptive. The following passages from the
Analects express the same idea: (1) when the superior man is heard to speak,
his language is rm and decided; (2) the wise err neither in regard to their
man nor to their words; (3) the virtuous will be sure to speak correctly, but
those whose speech is good may not always be virtuous; (4) the superior
man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions; and (5) friendship
with the glib-tongued is injurious.
It should not be left unnoticed that in recent years Western grammatologists in literary theory have become fascinated with Chinese ideography because it is perceived mistakenly to have the character of pure writing
(criture)the writing that exorcises the phonetic or is devoid of phonetic
genealogy. They echo the voice of Oswald Spengler (the author of The Decline
of the West). Spengler acknowledges writing as an entirely new kind of language that brings about a complete change in the conscious relationships and
associations of men and women. The cardinal virtue of writing, as he sees it,
is the liberation of human consciousness from the bondage and tyranny of
the present embedded in speech. Writing resembles architecture, monument,
pyramid, tapestry, cathedral, or the Acropolis where the immortal god of
abstraction resides. It is the idea of writing as immortal that Spengler wishes
to propagate. Timeless truths are embodied not in speech but only in script.
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He emphasizes that writing is the grand symbol of the Farthe Far East,
perhapsand the will to eternity. In search of the karma of the ideogram,
the thirteenth-century Chinese scholar Tai Tung wrote Six Scripts after, by
his own admission, thirty years of arduous thinking and strenuous work. It
is the exegesis of the six different etymological and paleographic roots of
Chinese ideography whose tradition has been continued and preserved in
the works of Bernard Karlgren. For our analysis here, we ought to mention
only the phonetic principle or rootage of Chinese writing, which traces the
origin of written gures to spoken sounds. Tai is critical of those etymologists who knew nothing of the principle of phonetic composition. According to him, the written is preceded by the spoken in Chinese: writing makes
speech visible. The invisible vapor of speech is distilled, as it were, in visible
writing. Chinese ideography is a silent speech as performative. This does not
mean, of course, that Chinese writing is reduced to the physiology of phonation. Rather, it only means that Chinese writing is, in important measure,
the abstract form of the concrete speech. It is no accident that the Chinese
expressions that denote linguistic activity contain the radical for word. Correlatively, however, without the written, the spoken could not be represented
to the eye. The circle of language, whose epicenter is sociality, is made up of
the spoken yin and the written yang as complementary.
iv. heideggers thought and sinism by way of piety

What is piety? How can piety be related to thinking in this comparative study?
To answer these questions, we must return to the idea that the opposite of
thoughtlessness is thoughtfulness. Discussing Eichmanns real thoughtlessness, which led to the banality of evil, Arendt contends that it was his
inability to think from the standpoint of somebody else. That is to say, Eichmann was not thoughtful. He lacked receptive reciprocity for the thought of
the other, which is tantamount to the absence of genuine communication.
No communication, Arendt writes, was possible with him [Eichmann],
not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all
safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against
reality as such.15
The denition of piety as receptive reciprocity is like the yin principle as
contrasted with the yang principle of the I Ching. In his illuminating discussion of Greek and Roman religion, C. Kerenyi relates the Latin piets to
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religio. In fact, some writers (for example, Cicero) used the former synonymously with the latter. For the ritually performed act (rite) belongs to the
sphere of piets. By examining the legend of the temple that was built in
Rome for the goddess Pietas, Kerenyi observes that
on the site of this temple, so it was related, a mother had once been
imprisoned and had been kept alive by the milk of her own daughters breast. The story may have been adapted from a Greek original,
though this is by no means certain. But it would have been pointless,
had it not represented pietas in the ideal form in which it appeared
to the Romans. The special thing which here stands out is something
bodily and spiritual at the same time. Pietas here shows itself as
a form of absolute reciprocity in nature, a completely closed circle
of giving and receiving. In some variants of the story, the mothers
place is taken by the father. But the example thus revered is always
this same natural circle of reciprocity. While aidos presupposes that
one can also stand outside it, pietas as a matter of course unites
those who give nourishment with those who in uninterrupted
thankfulness return it, unites the source of life with its creatures
from which its sources receive life. The pii and piae are completely
enclosed in this circle.16
It is no accident that economists discuss exchanges as the reciprocal relations
of economic life both primitive and modern, and modern sociologists and
anthropologists recognize the gift as an anthropological specimen for obligatory reciprocity in human relations. Marcel Mausss classic study of the gift
of archaic societies such as Polynesia, Melanesia, and Northwest America is
relevant to the understanding of reciprocity in its primordial form. As a form
of obligation, the gift is the necessary form of exchange and one of the bases
of social life as carried out by the people on the communal basis in the form
of courtesies, entertainment, ritual, dances, feasts, military assistance, marriages, succession to wealth, and so on.
For Heidegger, too, thinking as pious is receptive and reverential. It is
a receptive response to the call or voice of Being: authentic thinking hears
the voice of Being and belongs to it. What must be made absolutely clear
from the outset concerning piety as reciprocity is this: like mood as the
attunement or being attuned (Bestimmtsein), it is not egocentric (autocentric) but heterocentric (allocentric). For Heidegger as for Kerenyi, piety
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as absolute reciprocity approximatesas milking nourishes and is being

nourishedthe touching sense of intimacy and thus stands for the incorporation of the spiritual in the corporeal. For, after all, thinking is for Heidegger
a handicraft. There is in Heidegger as in Kerenyieach in his own different
waya liality between the piety of thinking and thanking. For Heidegger,
the old German word Thanc is memory, and thinking that recalls is thanking.
Moreover, Cicero, who associates piets with religio, enshrines the ears, not
the eyes, as religious (i.e., the aures religiosae of the Attic orators). Although
the scriptural words are the best guide for the understanding of Gods divine
purpose in the universe, St. Augustine, who knew Ciceros writings well and
from whom we inherited some of Ciceros lost writings, thought that arts
such as music and painting contribute to it. In De Musica, however, he contended that music (invisible) is a better guide than painting (visible) for the
attainment of mans religious spirituality and the understanding of the divine
order. Thus, the former is a higher art than the latter. Piety, associated with
hearing, signies nearness, whereas theria, associated with vision, implies
distance. It is no accident, therefore, that Heidegger, who regards speaking as
the primary essence of language and resorts frequently to aural or auditory
metaphors, relates reciprocity to the sense of hearing, hearkening, belonging, and obeying. Hearing is by nature socializing or reciprocating, whereas
vision is inherently narcissistic and isolating.17
Piety as reciprocity is also genuinely SiniticConfucian, Taoist, and
Zen. Indeed, it is the thread that weaves all the Sinitic fabric of such important moral notions as humaneness, lial piety, propriety, and rite as neighboring concepts. Piety as reciprocity signies the sacrament of coexistence
or, as I call it elsewhere, social principle.18 The social principle has two
distinguishable but inseparable elemental components: (1) homopiety and
(2) geopiety. Homopiety refers to the convivial relationships between (wo)
man and (wo)man, which may also be called sociopiety, whereas geopiety
is that part of the social principle that is concerned with the connatural
reciprocity between (wo)man and nature or the earth.19 Homopiety is dominantly a Confucian principle, whereas geopiety is a Taoist and Zen principle.
One may hastily conclude, therefore, that the early humanistic Heidegger
would be closely Confucian, whereas the later ontological Heidegger would
be closely Taoist and Zen. Besides the Tao Te Ching, to which Chung-yuan
Chang has made numerous allusions to Heideggers new way of thinking,
there are the sayings of Chuang-tzu: man is truly a cosmionHeaven and
earth were born at the same time as I was, and ten thousand things [that is,
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Nature as material world] are one with me. However, Confucianism does
not exclude geopiety, nor do Taoism and Chan or Zen Buddhism exclude
homopiety. In Li Chi, Confucius writes, To fell a single tree, or kill a single
animal, not at the proper season, is contrary to lial pietythe subject matter that is also taught through the text Hsia Ching in the classical education
of the Chinese language at early childhood. In this way, the moral objective
of lial piety is not conned to the effect of one mans conduct on another
but is extended to the effect of mans conduct on other nonhuman beings
and things.20 Conversely, there is no shortage, in Taoism and Chan or Zen
Buddhism, of allusions to human reciprocity. By the same token, it is wrong
to associate the early Heidegger with homocentricity or the later Heidegger
with the renunciation of man as such. After all, the fundamental ontology of
Being and Time is the affirmation of man as an earth dweller; homo is rooted
in humus. As Erazim Kohk put it recently, To recover the moral sense of
our humanity, we would need to recover rst the moral sense of nature.21
Harmony, which is the pitch of musicality and the paradigm certainly
of all performing arts and perhaps of the aesthetic itself, underscores the
piety of thinking and thus the performances of both homopiety and geopiety. It is a gathering of many as an ordered whole: it is, musically speaking,
a chorus, polyphonic chord, or orchestration of the differentiated many or,
as the Chinese would say, ten thousand thingsincluding the making of
our thoughts. Therefore, reciprocity that generates and sustains harmony
requires the simultaneous weaving of both equality and distinction (difference). For reciprocity without distinction reduces itself to the relationship
of indolent anonymity, whereas reciprocity without equality brings about
the relationship of rigid hierarchy. To gather our thoughts is to be thoughtful. Gathering denotes nearness, which approximates auditory rather than
visual space.22 There is an episodic account by J. Glenn Gray of the German word Heidegger uses: versammeln, which was translated after considerable deliberation and with Heideggers own approval, as to gather. It is
rooted in the old German gattern (to couple, to espouse, or to join in marriage), which in turn was related to the Greek to agathon (the good).23 The
Greek logos originates from lego (to speak) and the root leg- is to gather.
Logos, like the Hebrew dabhar, originally meant to gather, to speak, and to
think. The Neapolitan philosopher Vico, who heralded poetry as the rst
language and poetic wisdom as the fountainhead of philosophical thought
and to whose rhetorical tradition Heidegger himself belongs, notes the rustic
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origins of the Latin lex as gathering or collecting and then later law,
the assemblage of people, and reading (legere or collecting letters).24
In Sinism there is a liality between the aesthetic and the ethical: the beautiful and the good are synonymous. In characterizing Asiatic thought simply
as aesthetic in The Meeting of East and West, F. S. C. Northrop was not
far from describing its essence. Since the seventeenth century many European minds often created the image of the Orient as the aesthetic paradise on
earth. As the aesthetic is the connatural harmony of man and the wilderness
of nature (that is, geopiety), so is the good the convivial relationship between
(wo)man and (wo)man (that is, homopiety). Harmony is the essence not only
of the aesthetic but also of the social, that is to say, it is both geopious and
homopious. It cannot be overemphasized that serenity, releasement, or repose
(Gelassenheit) is the keyboard on which the idea of harmonyboth connaturality and convivialityis being played out. For it poeticizes or aestheticizes man and the earth. From Li Chi, we also nd the ancient Chinese
sense of things as an ordered whole in which music plays an integrating role:
There are heaven above and earth below, and between them are distributed all the (various) beings with their different (natures and
qualities)in accordance with this proceeded the framing of ceremonies. (The inuence of) heaven and earth ow forth and never
cease; and by their united action (the phenomena of) production
and change ensuein accordance with this music arose. The process of growth in spring, and of maturing in summer (suggest the
idea of) benevolence; those of in-gathering in autumn and of storing
in winter, suggest righteousness. Benevolence is akin to music, and
righteousness to ceremonies.25
Meditative thinking is characterized by serenitythe receptive reverence of
things as they are in themselveswhile calculative thinking implies dominance, manipulation, and utility. Serenity is a nonwilled, nonforced, and nonconcerned activity, that is, an active responsiveness in man to the natural
light of a thing. It is then a will-less letting in of everything, the spontaneity that sets a thing free to be nothing but itself. A higher acting, Heidegger
writes, is concealed in releasement that is found in all the actions within the
world and in the machinations of all mankind.26 Here Heideggers notion
of serenity or releasement parallels the Taoist idea of wu wei and the Zen
way of thinking and doingthe way of refraining from thinking and doing
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contrary to the natural and spontaneous way of things. Just as Heideggers

serenity is a higher acting, so is wu wei both nonanthropocentric in mans
relationships with nature and nonindividualistic in our multiple relationships
with one another (that is, it is both geopious and homopious). It is like the
ow of a river that meanders unconcernedly along the contours of the landscape or the splitting of a bamboo with its natural grain rather than against
it. The Zen way of perfecting archery, as shown in Eugen Herrigels classic
study, lies in the unconcernedness or purposeless detachment. It is the artless, effortless, and self-forgetting immersion in the archer in his performance
without any ulterior, utilitarian ends in view.
The notion of Naturetzu-jan in Chinese, ji-nen in Japanese, and ja-yun
in Koreansignies a serene or reverential composure for the natural spontaneity of all things, the thisness or thatness (or thusness)
of everything living or nonliving. As it is affiliated with serenity, the poetic
discloses or discovers the topology of Beingthe topology that tells the
whereabouts of Beings presence. The poet is destined to discover Being
the ultimacy of thinkingand its true nature, which has too long been
hidden in the metaphysical closet of Western philosophy. He is the thinker
personied who advocates the quadrate (das Geviert) of sky, earth, gods,
and mortals, which allows their free interplay. In the Tao Te Ching, the same
unity is expressed in the circular chain of man that follows the earth, earth
that follows heaven, heaven that follows the Tao, and, nally, Tao that follows Nature or the natural order of things (tzu-jan).27 This splendid, simple
gathering of the elements in serenity is expressed in a haikuesque quality of
meaning, style, and subjects in the last lines found in Heideggers discussion
on The Thinker as Poet:
Forests spread
Brooks plunge
Rocks persist
Mist diffuses
Meadows wait
Springs well
Winds dwell
Blessing muses.28
Compare Heideggers lines with the famous haiku of Bash, Furu ikeya/
Kawazu tobikomu/ Mizu no oto, which should be read and heard as the
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sound of a frog jumping in the water of the old pond, as a concordant continuum of the natural elements in harmony. So the simplicity and wilderness of oto (sound) is the elemental, all-embracing principium of the haiku.
The Zen splendor of the simple and wild in Bashs haiku airs and echoes
the sonorous mood that is being attuned to the seasonal serenade of Being
or Nature. The harmony of the elements is the great topological chain of
Being where the reverberation of the waters sound is perceivedbetter,
conceivedby the poet in the little creatures consonance with nature or
the whole universe as the sounding background of tranquility or beatic
repose. The poetic, which is attuned to the topology of Being, is the acme of
thinking. It does not surmount the earth in order to exploit and conquer it,
but rather it brings man on to, and makes him belong to, the earth: it brings
him dwelling on earth. The poetic embodies the quintessence of geopiety.
The aesthetic or poetic may now be contrasted with the technological: it
is a stark contrast between Gelassenheit and Gestell in Heideggers thought.
One is meditative (spontaneous and natural), whereas the other calculative
(exploitative and utilitarian). Very few, by now, argue against the conclusion
that technology is the consummation of modern civilization, East or West,
South or North. It destroys both homopiety and geopiety. Technology is, as it
were, the ontological x of modern man everywhere. Thus Heidegger writes,
What now is, is marked by the dominance of the active nature of
modern technology. This dominance is already representing itself
in all areas of life, by various identiable traits such as functionalization, systematic improvement, automation, bureaucratization,
communications. Just as we call the idea of living things biology,
just so the presentation and full articulation of all beings, dominated as they now are everywhere by the nature of the technical,
may be called technology. The expression may serve as a term for the
metaphysics of the atomic age. Viewed from the present and drawn
from our insight into the present, the step back out of metaphysics
into the essential nature of metaphysics is the step out of technology
and technological description and interpretation of the age, into the
essence of modern technology which is still to be thought.29
Heidegger contends that we have not yet come fully to grips with the nature
of modern technocentric or technomorphic culture in which man himself
is the functionary of technology. To say that the essence of technology is
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not technological is to deny the idea that technology is merely instrumental.

The lethal network of globalized technology or, as Heidegger calls it, technological frenzy, is a historical nightmare from which we all wish to awaken
or a narcolepsy from which we would never awaken. Its unthinkable potential lies in bringing the entire earth into a necropolis. For Heidegger, it is
innitely inadequate to view modern technology merely as instrumentum
or instrumental facilitation. For it has now acquired the ontological priority
over every form of thinking, making, and doingincluding scientic activity. The worst consequence of misunderstanding the true nature (essence)
of technology merely as instrumental rationality is bound to neutralize it as
amoral. Heidegger proposes the idea of autonomus technology in place
of instrumental technology to understand the essence of technology itself.
Technology as autonomous is no longer simply a means to human activity.
For it is not merely the application of mathematical physical science to praxis
but is an autonomous praxis itself. The traditional rationale of technology
as instrumentum that serves the telos of man is obsolete and anachronistic.
Means has indeed become end. This, in fact, is the categorical imperative of
technology as autonomous.
Representation is the epistemological keyword, after the Cartesian
legacy of the minds unblinking gaze, in the metaphysics of technology as
autonomous. This representational metaphysics of technology may be best
shown in the television technology that enframes modern society. It epitomizes mans channeled existence and his visual narcissism in the modern age
as the age of world picture (Weltbild). Representational metaphysics is a continuation or an extension, therefore, of the Cartesian cogito in which the
subjective (I) and the visual (eye) viewpoint are brought together in the
absolute affirmation and certainty of cognition as clear and distinct ideas
(i.e., the Cartesian legacy of visual and narcissistic metaphysics).30 The world
viewed as picture in television is an aspect (idea) of Gestell (enframing). The
essence of technology is Gestell that, as to set in place (stellen), is eminently
spatial and visual. Television both spotlights and highlights this enframing
in our age as the age of world picture. As the essence of all technology as
enframing is representing, television too represents as picture or structured
image (Gebild), the original presence of the world as it is in itself. To be sure,
there is the fundamental distinction between seeing and seeing as, that
is, seeing a real object and seeing it as a picture, an image, or a mirror. One
is fully visual, fully thought, whereas the other only half visual, half thought.
We must understand here that to capture the essence of reality by means of
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representational metaphysics, that is, an anthology of images, is a forever

Sisyphean task, for image has only a semblance of knowledge, subtraction of
reality, and an appearance of participation.31
The advent of technology, as we have stressed, begins to destroy both geopiety and homopiety. For technology scatters rather than gathers things and our
thoughts. The mathematical is basic to the grammar of modern technology
as autonomous praxis. However, the language of modern mathematics or
of the mathematical sciences has little in common with the original expression of the mathematical by Pythagoras or the ancient PythagoreansAll is
Number or Number is all things. With them it was meant to express the
perfect, ontological ordering of invisible (temporal) harmonia but not visible
(spatial) equations, that is, universal harmonia embodied in the mathematical. In the Renaissance, too, the Vitruvian gure inscribed in a square and a
circle was a symbol of sympathy (symphonia) between microcosm and macrocosm, and Leonardo da Vinci obtained a harmonious smile in La Gioconda
by means of the geometry of a circle. So with Pythagoras the ratio or harmonic proportionality of the octave (2:1), of the fourth (4:3), and of the fth
(3:2) was meant to perfect the ordering of the mathematical. The sum of the
numbers used in these ratios1, 2, 3, and 4is 10, which is for Pythagoras
the perfect number. To Pythagoras, this mathematical order came as a revelation of the harmonia of the natural (heavenly) and the moral world, each
individually and both together. The celestial harmonia is the sound or music
of the heavenly bodies. However, we do not hear this harmonious sound of
music only because from our birth we hear it constantly. What happens in
the modern mathematical sciences with and since Galileo and Descartes,
however, is another story. With them the Pythagorean mathematical became
converted into a technical method rather than an ontological ordering of
the universe. For Husserl, modern mathematics or the mathematization of
nature by Galileo into the geometric boxes of triangles, circles, and squares
inscribed in the Book of Nature is a garb of ideas (Ideenkleid) in which true
being (or reality) has been taken for a method. It is the mathematical sublimation of nature that mirrors and represents, that is, falsies reality, nature,
and the worldit falsies because what is mirrored or represented is only
half true. In modern mathematics and the mathematical sciences, the ontological generality of the mathematical has been replaced by the generality of
method: the birth of methodolatry or the mathematical truth sublimated in
method. For this reason, it is often said that the invention of method but not
the use of mathematics is the hallmark of modern science.
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v. epilogue
In 1969 an important conference on Heidegger and Eastern thought was held
at the University of Hawaii to honor Heidegger on the occasion of his eightieth birthday; the invited speakers included the late J. Glenn Gray, Calvin O.
Schrag, and J. L. Mehta.32 Following Heideggers own hint that a dialogue
between him and Eastern thought was inevitable, the conferees expressed
a strong sentiment that not only might Heidegger serve to build a bridge
between East and West but also his thought might, more importantly, serve as
the basis of uniting world philosophies. Today, after seventeen years, a conclusive study on this projected task remains unavailable, and many hard years
of work on it are already cut out for students of comparative philosophy and
culture. The manifest kinship between Heideggers thought and Sinism can,
of course, be stretched to include the philosophical landscape not only of
China as a region but also of the other regions of East Asia where Chinese
ideographythe indispensable signpost of Chinese inuencehas long been
accepted as their regular linguistic diet.
Heidegger is truly a philosophical deconstructionist33in exactly the same
sense as he himself denes the termwho reenvisions and subverts the longcherished metaphysical tradition of the Westlogocentrism that coincides
often with ethnocentrism or Occidentalism of one kind or another (for example, Hegelianism). It is that tradition of inherited thought that is at the brink of
unleashing awesome, destructive forces ranging from thermonuclear power to
cyberneticsthat almighty tradition of calculative power that may summarily
be called politology. An alternative to illusionary and fateful politology is the
piety of thinking as an ultima philosophia that may serve as the yarn to weave
the woof of Heideggers own thought and the warp of Eastern thought
Confucianism, Taoism, Chan or Zen Buddhism, and others.34
Thought-provoking events should, according to Heidegger, insure the
provocation of eventful thought. The eventful decades in which we live would
certainly provoke serious thinking. As such, Heideggers conception of the
piety of thinking is a seminal thought that teaches us both what and how to
think, where truth and method are integrated into one unity. It is the pathway to gather or orchestrate our thoughtsboth Eastern and Western. Pious
thinking is all poetic thinking that leads both to homopiety and geopiety.
This poetic thinking may be against humanism or the homocentric view of
the world but is never against man as such, that is, for the abolition of man.35
125
Following the poet Hlderlin, Heidegger is convinced that what saves grows
out of danger, impending danger or what the Chinese call crisisthat
idea that combines danger and opportunity or proposes an opportunity in
the presence of danger. This saving power does not occur haphazardly or
by makeshift. Rather, it emanates from a radical turn of the mind by being
attuned reverentially to Being or what the Orient calls Nature. This saving
power is predicated upon the ready acknowledgment and pious reception of
the poet as the supreme and consummate legislator of the world. By speaking
the voice of poetry in the conversation of humankind, the thinker as artist
is able to subvert the monopoly of established reality by virtue of the reversibility of Heideggers thought and the thought of the East or Orient that, as
Heidegger calls it, is the land of dawn. Mutantis mutandis, belonging
(as reciprocity)two in one and one in twois also be-longing.
PART IV
Phenomenology, Literary
Theory, and Comparative
Culture and Politics
CHAPTER 8
reading/misreading the sinogram

f rom f e nollosa to de rri da and m cl uhan
Ex litterarum studiis immortalitatem acquire.

Andrea Alciati
A linguist deaf to the poetic function of language and
a literary scholar indifferent to linguistic problems
and unconversant with linguistic methods are equally
agrant anachronisms.
Roman Jakobson
i. fenollosas introduction of sinograms to the west

Many years ago T. S. Eliot spoke enthusiastically of Ezra Pound as the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time. Eliot had to have in mind the ideogrammic
method employed, for example, by Pound in The Cantos whose alphabetic
architecture is marked by the soaring columns of Chinese ideograms that
are read hierarchically, from top to bottom. These columns shine like the
glittering rays of the sunrise (East) visible in and through the trees branches
and leaves in the early morning. The origin (arche) of Pounds invention of
Chinese poetry and subsequently of his ideogrammic method is traceable
directly to the etymosinology of Ernest Fenollosa whose literary executor he
was. If Pound is the inventor of Chinese poetry for our time, then Fenollosa
deserves to be called its arche-inventor.1
In the double sense of philia and phobia, the ebb and ow of Orientalism
is nothing new in the habitus of Western intellectual and practical thought.
Indeed, it has been chameleon-like. Early European Catholic missionaries
in Japan expressed their unqualied and unrestrained admiration for the
130
Japanese kanji (ideograms) as being superior to Greek and Latin. The degree
of difficulty in learning it did not deter or dampen their admiration. The
ontological difference, as it were, between the alphabetic and the ideographic
deepened the aura and mystery of those little iconographic pyramids. The
newly initiated or neophyte would naturally be enchanted by the ideogrammic abracadabra and its poetic alchemy. This is so despite the judgment of
the grammatologist Hegel who, perfectly consonant with his general view of
world history, was convinced of the superiority of abstract alphabetic writing over concrete ideographic writing in the historical development of human
linguistic systems. Hegel is worth being noted here because Fenollosa went to
Japan to teach philosophy with a favorable disposition for his thought.
Fenollosas youthful literary environment was the American Renaissance
whose masters were Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, and
Melville.2 The American hypnotic fascination with Egyptian hieroglyphics
came from the work of Jean-Franois Champollionthe Frenchman who
deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics with the aid of the Rosetta stone in the
1830s. We do not have to stretch our imagination too far to connect Egyptian
hieroglyphics with Chinese ideograms. The enthusiasm for one can easily
be transferred to the other. In Fenollosas case, his etymosinology has been
related to Emersons conception of nature, language, and poetry, which we
shall explore later. Fenollosas fascination with Chinese ideograms is certainly comparable to Emersons enchantment with Egyptian hieroglyphics:
they all are the emblems of nature beyond whose visual veil there are inscrutable golden secrets that are not readily decipherable to ordinary people.
Whoever unveils or deciphers the emblems of nature is a magician of some
sortlike an ancient Egyptian scribe.
In the long cherished tradition of the American fascination with the mysterious and exotic land of Japan, it is not surprising to see the fantastic success of James Clavells Shogun on television and in classrooms for teaching
modern Japanese history. Conversely, Occidentalism has faced the same kind
of fate in the Orientparticularly in Japan. The Japanese, I think, are notorious for their Occidentalism (especially in their linguistic Anglophilianism)
since the time of the Meiji Restoration in the last quarter of the nineteenth
century during which time Fenollosa spent his most energetic and productive
years in organizing Japanese art and propagating its importance to the indigenous population.3 Some years ago the Japanese journalist Takao Tokuoka
reported on the Japanese inventive word towelket (tsukuriji) that refers to a
large beach towel. Towel and Blanket are made into towelket, into a kind of
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Joycean chordal wordsmithing. Fenollosas decipherment of the golden nuggets of Chinese ideograms (kanji) as emblems has its structural parallel to the
chordal composition of James Joyce in the Ulysses and the Finnegans Wake
[e.g., cerebration (cerebrum + celebration) and paupulation (paucity +
population)]. Fenollosas etymological deconstruction of Chinese ideograms
as cultural hermeneutics is interesting as it is revealing in understanding East
Asian cultures whose daily linguistic diet consists partly or wholly of ideograms. He himself offers one interesting example among many of decomposing the ideogram East, which is a pictogram of the sun skewed into the
branches of trees at the sunrise. Two of my favorite Chinese characters
are humanity and sage. The hypogram of humanity (i.e., two men
standing together or side by side) is made of two satellite ideograms together:
man and two. The hypogram of sage is a complex composite of ear
and mouth on top of king. As king can be read as unier (signied by
a vertical line) of heaven, man, and earth (three horizontal lines), sage is
read as one who unies heaven, man (humanity), and earth by listening and
speaking truthfully. Corresponding to the rules of Chinese logic and aesthetics, I, too, invented my own tsukuriji: jungle. The ideogram tree is a pictogram of one tree; the ideogram woods spells two trees standing side by
side; the ideogram forest is a composite of three trees, that is, one tree
on top of two trees (i.e., woods); and the ideogram jungle (my own tsukuriji) is a composite of four trees: two trees (i.e., woods) on top of
two other trees (i.e., woods woods or forest + one more tree).
Furthermore, for the Chinese nature is signied by the ideograms: ten
thousand and things (i.e., it is ten thousand things).
From the very outset, it must be said that the importance of Fenollosas
etymosinology cannot be underestimated. It is an archaeology of linguistic
terms in the sense of tracing backward. Moreover, etymosinology implies the
inseparable connection between the Chinese language and culture in their
historical patterns.5 Since time immemorial the Chinese have acknowledged
the interrelatedness of external reality and the language that describes it.
Things of nature become real for men by acquiring names. From the rectication of names (cheng ming) emerges the unique conception of language as
both performative and intrinsic to our conception of the world and our conduct in it. By dening language as intrinsic to our conception of the world,
I mean to stress the idea that language is not merely an object among other
objects in the world. For it makes all other objects transparent, that is, an
object becomes for man an object by acquiring a name for itself.
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ii. fenollosas etymosinology

The main topic of our discussion is Ernest Fenollosas An Essay on the Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, which was posthumously
published by Ezra Pound in 1920 in his bettingly titled Instigations.6 To be
truthful to the carefully phrased title, there are three important issues to be
considered: (1) the nature of poetry (Section 2), (2) the conception of Chinese ideograms (Section 3), and (3) the question of language as a medium
of communication (Section 4). The controversial nature of Fenollosas essay
and Pounds use of Chinese ideograms as a medium for his poetry need no
elaborationespecially the pros and cons by sinologists. What is interesting is the fascination with Chinese grammatology of nonsinologists such
as Jacques Derrida and Marshall McLuhan, who are primarily interested in
advancing their own theories of language and literature.
Emersons inuence on Fenollosas conception of poetry seems undeniable
and clearly visible. Emersons essay The Poet (1844) is singularly important
for our discussion of Fenollosa. There are two issues we must analyze: (1) the
relationship between poetry and language and (2) words as actions.
1. Poetry and Language. Poetry is for many the rst language of humanity and the poet is the rst man. This may be the reason why the rst (oral)
poet Homer has agelessly been revered in the West. Before Emerson and
Fenollosa, the eighteenth-century Neapolitan philosopher and philologist
Giambattista Vico advanced the idea that poetry is the origin (arche) of
human language: in the beginning of human language was poetry. Emersons
The Poet echoes the Vichian philosophy of language: according to him,
the poet rst made words which became the archives of history, and thus
language is the fossil poetry.7
Following Emerson, Fenollosa regards Chinese characters as the medium
of poetry because they are a kind of shorthand way of converting material images into immaterial relations.8 What Egyptian hieroglyphics are
to Emerson, Chinese ideograms are to Fenollosa: for example, straight means
right, whereas twisted (or crooked) means wrong.9 When we were elementary
school children in Korea, our Japanese teachers encouraged us to emulate
tall straight bamboos in the bush rather than a lone crooked pine tree on the
roadside.
2. Words as Actions. Words, according to Emerson, are also performatives, and actions are a sort of words performed.10 In the tradition of Emerson, Fenollosa views ideograms as shorthand pictures of actions, when nouns
133
are converted into verbs or action words.11 By the same token, poetry gives us
more concrete truth in the same compass of words than prose.12 It brings
language close to things themselves in nature. We can exemplify what Emerson is alluding to here by way of Japanese haiku composition, which is the
perfectly compact economizing of words more than any other form of poetry
writing I know of in both East and West: writing haiku is done with no more
and no less than 17 syllableswithin the specied limit of 5, 7, and 5 syllables in three lines altogether. Brevity, in short, is simply the most raried
and elegant quiddity of haiku writing.
Moreover, ideograms are performative, that is, they are kinetic. Indeed,
Chinese ideography (calligraphy in particular) is a kinetic art: it is the
human body in motion.13 In very signicant measure, Chinese ideography
is a choreography of human gestures or, to use the phrase of George Herbert Mead, a conversation of gestures.14 However, it is not simply physiographic or pictorial, because to be ideographic the pictures of human
gestures or things must reach the proper level of signs or symbols: as a sign
or symbol, the ideogram must have twofold unity of external indication and
meaningful expression. Be that as it may, I am always impressed with the
fact that such Chinese ideograms as anger, sorrow, and smile depict
the contours of those facial expressions themselves. In this sense, Picassos
Swimmer (1929) and Acrobat (1930) are two choreographs of the human
body in motion or kinegraphs that are approaching ideography or calligraphy. Thus Samuel Beckett is absolutely right when he says that in language
as gestures the spoken and the written are identical.15 R. G. Collingwood
too makes the perceptive observation that every language is a specialized
form of bodily gesture, and thus the dance is the mother of all languages.16
Similarly, Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker declare that In contrast
to phonetic letters, the ideograph is a vortex that responds to lines of force.
It is a mask of corporate energy.17 In essence, each ideogram is the frolicking of a thing or body. Speech itself is the dance of the tongue and the lips
to the ethereal tune of breath. No wonder the ancientsin Greece as well
as in China and Indiaconsidered music, dance, drama, and (oral) poetry
as a familial union of performing arts. Poetry is the primordial union of
the word and the deed. It is of no surprise to know that saying or naming
is performative. For this reason cheng ming (the rectication of names) has
such an important niche in the fabric of Chinese and moral thought.18 Likewise, music too approaches and corresponds to human morality in Chinese
thought: its nomos and ethos constitute morality.
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iii. fashioning fenollosas anatomy of sinograms

Fenollosas conception of the written Chinese characters is based on the
idea that they are ideographical, that is, the highly stylized pictures of things
in motion as symbols or ideas. Following Fenollosa, Pound too views the
Chinese ideogram not as the picture of a sound but as the picture of a
thing.19 Thus, every ideogram is a kind of ars poetica or, better, conrms
the Horatian precept ut pictura poesis. Nonetheless, Oriental children do not
learn how to read, write, or decipher the meaning of an ideogram by decomposing or dissecting it into a picture or into a composite of simpler characters
or radicals. An ideogram is learned as a whole script or a Gestalt: rst, how it
is pronounced and then how to identify its given meaning or meanings. The
Orientals also learn how to write not in terms of a character as the moving
picture of a thing but in terms of a number or combination of strokes.20 This
is not to say, however, that Fenollosas and Pounds etymopoetics of the written Chinese characters is valueless, uninteresting, or uninformative. On the
contrary, I nd the decompositional or deconstructive etymolinguistics
rather enlightening and fascinating.21
Recent grammatology as the literary theory of writing has acquired its
preeminence with Jacques Derrida who considers Hegel as the rst (Western)
philosopher of writing. With Of Grammatology22 he holds the most recent
copyright on grammatology and may even be cast as the visionary father of
a new grammatology. It is a seminal work in the critical philosophy of language in general and of writing in particularwriting in the current French
sense of criture as an act autonomous or independent of the spoken or the
phonetic. It is a deconstruction of photocentrism or logocentrism and ultimately of the (Western) metaphysics of presence since Plato. It is not wrong
to say that Derridas deconstructive grammatology is leaning toward the
superiority of Oriental hieroglyphic or ideographic writing over Occidental
alphabetic writing. Near the end of an important chapter Of Grammatology as a Positive Science in Of Grammatology, Derrida has a passage that
refers to Fenollosas and Pounds etymopoetics. To quote Derridas passage
fully, This is the meaning of the work of Fenollosa whose inuence upon
Ezra Pound and his poetics is well-known: this irreducibly graphic poetics
was, with that of Mallarm, the rst break in the most entrenched Western
tradition. The fascination that the Chinese ideogram exercised on Pounds
writing may thus be given all its historical signicance.23 Furthermore, Derrida uses some Chinese ideas in his Dissemination.24
135
As Derridas deconstructive grammatology, like Fenollosas and Pounds

etymopoetics, seeks an absolute interiorization of writing as an autonomous
act, and because all three found in Chinese ideography what they regard as
a perfect example of such interiorization, it is worth comparing the foundation of their poetic and linguistics. I suggest that this foundation is based on
the issue of sound and sense in language and poetry. It is important to note
that Derridas grammatology, which focuses on the idea of the text and the
decipherment of its (conceptual) signication rather than on the voice and
sense, is perfectly consistent with his conceptualist thought. In the international symposium The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man
organized in 1966 by the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center, Derrida denied
in no uncertain terms the existence of any perception whatsoever, for perception is precisely a concept.25 The contrast between Derridas grammatology and Chinese writing is in a signicant way the same as the contrast
between the poetics of Mallarm and that of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Interestingly enough, Pound himself declares in his ABC of Reading that Music
rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far
from music.26 The ultimate paradoxI say paradox because such concepts
as trace and diffrance (deferment) indispensable to Derridas grammatology are time conceptsof Derridas grammatology lies in the fact that
when it murders the voice and resurrects the text, it tends to shrink time and
stretch space.
Admiring the poetic geniality of Shakespeare and the sense of musical
delightthe rich sweetness of sound, rhythm, and melodySamuel Taylor
Coleridge declared, The man that hath not music in his soul can indeed
never be a genuine poet.27 In recent decades it was Roman Jakobson who
established systematically for the rst time the structural interrelatedness
between poetics and linguistics: as poetics is concerned with verbal structure and linguistics is the global science of verbal structure, the former is
an integral part of the latter.28 Similarly, Fenollosa too argued, My subject
is poetry, not language, yet the roots of poetry are in language. In the study
of a language so alien in form to ours as is Chinese in its written character,
it is necessary to inquire how these universal elements of form which constitute poetics can derive appropriate nutriment.29 Jakobson further mentions
paronomasia as a technique of poetry (in alphabetic writing), that is, the
use of words similar in sound that are drawn together in meaning as well:
dove-love, light-bright, place-space, name-fame, and so on. Of course, the
use of homonyms is an important part of Chinese poetry. It is a technique
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of utilizing the same or similar sounds of multiple characters with different

meanings. To accentuate the sound quality of poetry, we can conjecture that
mans rst poetry was a kind of music, while his rst speech was a kind of
song. While T. S. Eliot spoke of the music of poetry, the composer Igor
Stravinsky talked about the poetry of music that, when desophisticated, is
rooted in folksong or oral poetry.30 It seems quite natural to discover, therefore, that since time immemorial music has been the nomos and ethos of
Chinese culture, and its composition and performance correspond to the
prescription of human conduct in the rite order.31 It is worth noting that
speaking of the art of Chinese poetry, James J. Y. Liu points out that Western
translators and students of Chinese poetry totally ignore its tonal, acoustic,
and auditory effects. Though admittedly it is difficult to translate the musical
quality of poetry, reading a Chinese poem in translation resembles looking
at a beautiful woman through a veil or a landscape through a mist. The veil
or mist of Chinese poetry is monosyllabic sound, homonym, rhyme, tone,
pitch, alliteration, onomatopoeia, metric, consonance, assonance, and so
on. In accordance with the singing effect of the Chinese language in general,
most Chinese readers chant rather than merely read verse aloud; and the Chinese syllables tend to produce a staccato effect rather than the legato rhythm
of English or French verse.32
In our critical commentary on Chinese grammatology and on grammatology as the study of language as writing, we would be remiss if we were to
ignore thirteenth-century Chinese scholar Tai Tungs Six Scripts (Lio Shu
Ku),33 which he confessed was a product of thirty years of hard work. The
work in question deals with the six cardinal principles of Chinese ideographic
writing. In his short but laborious work on Chinese writing, Tai produced
what I. A. Richards has called multiple denitions. One of these principles
is the tracing of the phonetic or oral from which the written or chirographic
developed in the Chinese language. This is the principle of ideographic writing as the articulation of speech. When applied, it becomes a deconstruction
of grammatology by rhetoric or the study of language as speech acts. From
this perspective, Fenollosa, Pound, and particularly Derrida are not so much
wrong as one-sided, however seminal their grammatologies may be. In the
rst place, one script or principle of Chinese writing that Tai discusses is
called pictorial, because the written characters are really the copies of the
physical forms of objects in depiction. In addition, there is another script
or principle called a suggestive compound or, better, an associative compound, which is a union of gures in order to express an idea. These two
137
principles govern Fenollosas and Pounds analyses of Chinese etymopoetics.

The other four scripts are called indicative, deected, adoptive, and
phonetic. Among these six principles of Chinese writing, the most important is the phonetic principle for our critical analysis. According to Tai, this
principle says that Written gures spring from spoken sounds.34 Therefore,
it is one-sided to say that Chinese writing in its total structure is a purely
autonomous act independently of the phonetic. As a matter of fact, Tai is
critical of those etymologists who knew nothing of the principle of phonetic
composition. Ultimately, Tai proposed the idea of the Chinese language as
the diatactics35 of the spoken and the written. In other words, (Chinese)
writing is the abstract form of concrete speech. As Tai wrote, The Sonant
Form precedes, the Written Form follows; but as without written signs, spoken sounds could not be represented to the eye, I place rst the written form
and subjoin the spoken sound. The spoken sound is the yang... , the written
sign the yin... , the spoken sound is the warp, the written sign the woof:
the spoken sound is the circle, the written sign the square: the spoken sound
is complete, the written sign incomplete.36 In essence, according to Tai, the
principal aim of Chinese writing is simply this: to make speech visible.37
iv. sinograms as a medium for the poetics of relation

Fenollosa is not concerned with dening the concept of language as a
medium, although it is a key word in his work in question. Understandably
so, because he is concerned primarily with the nature of poetry and how the
written Chinese character is in itself poetry. The question of language as a
medium of communication is a natural result of the development of highly
sophisticated communication technologies.38 Marshall McLuhan must be
singled out as a high priest of the medium age who heralded the advent
of recent electronic communication technologies. For our purpose here, two
things must be noted. First, McLuhan is an antivisualist, and his opposition
to typographic man and culture is vividly evidenced in his magnum opus, The
Gutenberg Galaxy.39 For him, typography epitomizes visualism and scales
the height of eye culture, and electronic technology is the second coming
of (Homeric) oral culture accompanied by the intimate sense of touch. Oral
culture is preliterate, whereas the advent of electronic technology is postliterary in that it surpasses the world of literacy or writing. Second, McLuhan
has, rightly or wrongly, a romantic sense of the Chinese ideogram as a vortex
138
of corporate energy. Not unlike electricity, the Chinese ideogram arouses the
sense of touch rather than that of sight. McLuhan reportedly said that the
ideal form of his antitypographic treatise, The Gutenberg Galaxy, would
have been ideograms or it would have been written as a galaxy of ideograms.
While Derrida is a conceptualist who seems to have been attracted by the
abstract aspect of Chinese ideography in order to substantiate his philosophical grammatology, McLuhan is, in contrast, a congenital perceptualist who
seems to be attracted by the sensorial aspect of Chinese ideograms as the
medium of communication. No doubt both of them are interested in (Oriental) ideographic writing as opposed to (Occidental) alphabetic writing. For
Derrida ideographic writing is purged of phoneticism, while for McLuhan
it is antivisual and tactile. As a philosophical grammatologist, Derrida has
no use for writing as a medium of communication. McLuhans message and
amboyant style are unmistakably clear in the following passage from his
interview with Playboy in 1969:
Any culture is an order of sensory preferences, and in the tribal
world, the senses of touch, taste, hearing and smell were developed,
for very practical reasons, to a much higher level than the strictly
visual. Into this world, the phonetic alphabet fell like a bombshell
installing sight at the head of the hierarchy of senses. Literacy propelled man from the tribe, gave him an eye for an ear and replaced his
integral in-depth communal interplay with visual linear values and
fragmented consciousness. As an intensication and amplication
of the visual function, the phonetic alphabet diminished the role of
the senses of hearing and touch and taste and smell, permeating the
discontinuous culture of tribal man and translating its organic harmony and complex synaesthesia into the uniform, connected and
visual mode that we still consider the norm of rational existence.
The whole man became fragmented man; the alphabet shattered the
charmed circle and resonating magic of the tribal world, exploding
man into an agglomeration of specialized and psychically impoverished individuals, or units; functioning in a world of linear time
and Euclidean space.40
McLuhan was initially trained in English literature. As we have already
noted, he is interested in Chinese ideography as a unique medium of communication, although he has no direct reference to Fenollosa as far as I can
139
determine.41 However, it is worth noting that in The Gutenberg Galaxy

McLuhan pays a high tribute to his Canadian predecessor and the pioneering
philosopher of the medium, Harold A. Innis, when he acknowledges that it
is a footnote of explanation to Innis work. The Bias of Communication
by Innis42 pertains to the cross-cultural theory of communication in the fast
moving context of history in which the medium or the technology of communication itself is a determining factor. Relying on the work of the French
sinologist Marcel Granet, Innis observes that the Chinese are not noted for
formulating concepts and doctrines discursively, and by the same token,
the Chinese ideogram too is not conducive to abstraction or generality, but
instead it evokes a multitude of concrete images. Neither time nor space is
abstractly conceived by the Chinese: time is circular or round, while space is
square. Innis quotes the idea of Fenollosa that poetry, like music, is a time
art.43 As we have already noted, Tai too used the circle and the square as
metaphors of describing the spoken sound and the written sign, respectively.
For McLuhan as for Innis, the idea of language as a medium of communication is singularly important. McLuhan single-handedly sloganized
the highly charged idea that the medium is the message. For McLuhan (as
for Innis), it is the medium of communication that shapes and controls the
structures of the human mind, sensorium, and association. For, McLuhan
explains, the content of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by
the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.44 Moreover, the content
of any medium is always another medium. For Fenollosa the Chinese written character is a medium or vehicle for poetry, whereas in the language of
McLuhan it is poetry. A critical point must be made here. Certainly the way
of language is the unity of meaning and the medium itself that are inextricably linked. To dichotomize the message and the medium or to reduce one to
the other is to misunderstand this inextricable linkage between the two. In a
very signicant sense, however, language is not merely a medium of communication if by the medium we mean the third factor that facilitates human
communication (i.e., instrumental artifact). For, indeed, it is communication.
To understand the extent to which language is an instrumental artifact of
communication, we must distinguish writing from speaking. Writing is an
artifact, whereas speaking is not. Speech becomes an artifact only when it is
transcribed in visible marks. To be an artifact, writing must be supplemented
by other artifacts (e.g., papyrus, paper, printing, tapes, television screens).
Writing, in essence, is a mediated medium, whereas speaking is an unmediated medium for human communication.
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v. concluding remarks
Fenollosas etymolinguistic analysis of Chinese ideograms has produced
many ripples and waves in the contemporary philosophy of reading, writing,
and communication. Whether Chinese ideography is just a grammatology or
a unique medium of communication is the question that has been essential
to the critical understanding of Derridas philosophical grammatology and
McLuhans medium theory of communication. Whether Fenollosas inuence has been a joy or an anxiety, the important point to be made here is
the fact that in its ultimate efficacy misreading is also a form of reading. We
have attempted to show that Chinese ideography is not a grammatology as
the pure and simple act of writing purged of the phonetic (contra Derrida).
Nor is it a medium devoid of symbolic contents (contra McLuhan). First,
poetry needs music to become alive as does dance. Second, the ideogram is
iconographic; that is to say, it is not just physiographic or the mirror image
of a thing in motion as in painting or choreography. As Fenollosa put it, it is
the verbal idea of action in that it converts material images into immaterial
relations: in every ideogram, which is also a metaphor, the pictorial becomes
the symbolic. As a proper sign or symbol, every ideogram has a double feature: external indication and meaningful expression. Like the Jaina parable
of ve blind men each of whom touches only a portion of an elephant and
claims that his description of the beast is right and the others are wrong and
ignorant, Chinese ideography has had different appeals to and sometimes
blinding or hypnotizing effects on different theoristsamong whom Derrida
and McLuhan are a striking contrastwho siphon from it only what is useful or acceptable for validating and advancing their own theories of language
and communication. Their readings are not so much wrong as one-sided.
In the end we need a method of multiple denitions after the fashion of
Tai Tung in order to remedy this one-sided reading or misreading, that is, to
comprehend the composite picture of Chinese ideography as a whole tapestry with a mosaic of icons woven into it.
CHAPTER 9
ernest fenollosas etymosinology

in the age of global communication
[T]he problem of the reality of the body is shown to

be the central problem and upon its solution everything else depends.
Gabriel Marcel
[T]he body is our anchorage in a world.
Dont bleach language, savor it instead. Stroke it gently or groom it, but dont purify it.
Roland Barthes
i. prologue
This essay explores the idea that the embodiment of language, spoken or
written, is the fundamental precondition of global communication. Because
of the ever-accelerating development and expansion of communication technology and media, the world is at our touching distance. As the Canadian
communication theorist Marshall McLuhan put it, todays shrinking world
has turned into a global village, which invokes the image of communicative
praxis in Homeric oral culture in the development of Western history and
civilization. In the globalizing world of multiculturalism, the embodied networking of more than one language as a medium is a prerequisite for global
communication. What follows is divided into three main topics.
In Fenollosas Etymosinology, I will explore the importance of
the discovery by the American philosopher Ernest Fenollosa of Chinese
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grammatology or sinography whose etymological anatomy became known

as etymosinology.1 As language, thought, and culture constitute an inseparable whole, etymosinology is the way of deciphering Sinic thought and culture by the etymological composition and decomposition of sinograms: it is
indeed a genre of cultural hermeneutics.
In Carnal Hermeneutics and McLuhans Philosophy of Global Communication, I will discuss McLuhan, whose catch phrase the medium is the
message was written after the fashion of Fenollosas ars poetica. McLuhan fancied writing his magnum opus, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962),2 in
the medium of sinograms or in a galaxy of sinograms, as it were. For him,
sinography embodies a vortex of corporate energy (qi) in the double sense
of the term corporatebodily and collective at the same time. Thus McLuhan opens up a gateway of the New Sciencein the spirit of Giambattista
Vico3of cross-cultural communication for the world, which has become a
global village. His theory of embodied communication, just as Fenollosas
etymosinology, has a cosmopolitan outlook in that it not only emulates the
performative kinaesthetics of sinography but also is pursued in the posthumanist venture of the body as a new media.
In Critical Reection on Embodiment in the Philosophy of New Media,
I will be concerned with critical reection on embodiment in philosophy of
new media in terms of two issues: (1) the body as a social phenomenon, that
is, the skin as a passage, not as a barrier, to the outside world and (2) phenomenological critique of new media as technoromanticism.
ii. fenollosas etymosinology

Fenollosa was an American philosopher who went to Japan to teach Hegel
and Herbert Spencer in particular at Tokyo University in 1878. The twentieth century was, as he reected later, a time of re-union for civilizations.
The sense of world community led him to reject cultural parochialism. He
anticipated a relational pattern of thinking that is uniquely Sinic. With his
passage to Japan, he was prepared to nd the cosmos in a blade of grass and
to seek cosmopolis in every village and town, the phenomenon of which is
known today as glocalism or cosmopolitanism.4
While Fenollosa was in Japan, he became fascinated with sinography
(kanji in Japanese) and wrote a gem of a work, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (1964),5 with which he became the inventor
ernest fenollosas etymosinology in the age of global communication
143
of etymosinology. It is not trite to emphasize that, because the language of

ideograms embodies the karma of Sinism, it should be called sinography.
Language is a product of culture as much as culture expresses itself by the
communicative medium of language. They are inextricably intertwined. As
Maurice Merleau-Ponty puts it judiciously, what the mind is to the body,
thought is to language.6
Fenollosas work appealed to and attracted poets such as Ezra Pound (his
literary executor) and T. S. Eliot. Eliot spoke enthusiastically of Pound as
the inventor (in the West) of Chinese poetry for the twentieth century. Eliot,
of course, had to have in mind the ideogrammic method by Pound in, for
example, The Cantos (1969),7 whose alphabetic architecture is sporadically
adorned by the columns of sinograms. These columns purportedly shine like
the glittering rays of the sunrise (East) visible in and through the branches
and leaves of trees in the early morning that signies a new dawn of poetics
or poetic hermeneutics in the West. This new dawn points to Confuciuss performative notion of the rectication of names (zheng ming) in all human
conduct and endeavors, that is, in speech, morals, as well as grammatology.
As Confucius emphasized in the Analects (Book XX, ch. iii, para. 3), without knowing the power of language, it is impossible to know humans. The
motto of Paideuma, the journal devoted to Pound scholarship, is zheng ming
as a new paideuma.
Sinism is the term that was coined in 1929 by the American sinologist
H. G. Creel (1929)8 to specify that cluster of characteristics that are peculiarly
Chinese or the Chinese habitus of thinking and doing. Despite its origin in
China, however, it is not conned to China alone. It encompasses Korea and
Japan as wellnamely, the geographical region called East Asia, where sinograms have been and are in use. The sinographic disposition is embodied and
exemplied in Confucianism, Daoism, and the hybrid religion of Chan/Sun/
Zen Buddhism in Korea and Japan as well as in China. It is manifestly thisworldly, practical, concrete, and particular rather than otherworldly, speculative, abstract and general.9 For our purpose here, Sinism may be summed
up in the two-fold proposition: (1) where there is no social process, there
is no reality and (2) as the body is the material condition of our interbeing in the world, social reality is necessarily an embodied and intercorporeal
phenomenon.
From the very outset, it must be said that the importance of Fenollosas
etymosinology is an archaeology or genealogy of linguistic terms in the
sense of tracing backward. Moreover, etymosinology implies the inseparable
144
connection between the Chinese language and culture in their historical patterns. Since time immemorial the Chinese have acknowledged the interrelatedness of external reality and the language that describes it. Things of nature
become real for men and women by acquiring names. For the rectication
of names emerges the unique conception of language as both performative
and intrinsic to our conception of the world and our conduct in it. By dening language as intrinsic to our conception of the world, I mean to stress the
idea that language is not merely an object among other objects in the world.
Rather, it makes all other objects transparent; that is, an object becomes for
humans an object by acquiring a name for itself.
Fenollosas youthful literary environment was the American Renaissance
or the golden age of American literature whose masters were Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne and Melville. The American hypnotic fascination with Egyptian hieroglyphics came from the work of Jean-Franois
Champollionthe Frenchman who deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics with
the aid of the Rosetta stone in the 1830s. We do not have to stretch our imagination too far to connect Egyptian hieroglyphics with sinograms. The enthusiasm
for one spills over to the other. In Fenollosas case, his etymosinology has been
related to Emersons conception of nature, language, and poetry. Fenollosas
fascination with sinograms is certainly comparable to Emersons enchantment
with Egyptian hieroglyphics: they all are the emblems of nature beyond whose
visual veil there are inscrutable golden secrets that are not readily decipherable
to ordinary people. Whoever unveils or deciphers the emblems of nature is a
magician of some sortlike an ancient Egyptian scribe.
Emersons inuence on Fenollosas conception of poetry seems undeniable
and clearly visible. Emersons essay The Poet (1844)10 is singularly important for our discussion of Fenollosa. There are two issues we must analyze:
(1) the relationship between poetry and language and (2) words as actions.
II.1. Poetry and Language

It is not altogether surprising that many poet-critics have come to the conclusion that poetry is the rst language of humanity, and the poet is the
rst human. For Fenollosa, poetry and language grew up together as twins.
Long before Emerson and Fenollosa, the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, who made no distinction between Egyptian hieroglyphics and
sinograms, propounded the view that poetry is not only inseparable from
language but also is the origin (arche) of language itself. The following
145
passage from The Poet, one of the most eloquent passages in the entire
corpus of Emersons writings, echoes Vicos philosophy of language: The
poets made all the words, and therefore, language is the archives of history,
and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of
most of our words is forgotten, each word was at rst a stroke of genius, and
obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the
rst speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist nds the deadest word to have
been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry (emphasis added).11
For Emerson, language is the very special gift of humans. It is the milieu that
connects invisible spirit and visible nature: it is the sign or emblem of nature.
Following him, Fenollosa too comes to view that sinograms convert material
images into immaterial relations. In this sense, every sinogram is a metaphor
whose function is absolutely indispensable to poetry and poetic imagination.
For Emerson, the words that express our intellectual or moral facts are rooted
directly in material appearance: Right originally means straight; wrong
means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; transgression, the crossing of
a line; supercilious, the raising of the eye-brow. We say the heart to express
emotion, the head to denote thought; and thought and emotion are, in their
turn, words borrowed from sensible things, and now appropriated to spiritual nature.12 What Emerson saw in hieroglyphics is what Fenollosa saw
in sinograms.
I nd the decompositional or unpacking of sino-etymology rather
enlightening and fascinating. Take the following examples of hypograms
as the corporate and concrete insemination of other sinograms (sinograms
upon and by sinograms) provided by Fenollosa himself: East is an entanglement of sun with tree (i.e., the sun entangled in the branches of a
tree in the early morning or at sunrise); ancient is a composite of ten
and mouth (ten over mouth, that is, presumably referring to what
has come down through the mouth for ten generations); and delity is
a composite of human and word (i.e., the human standing by his or
her word). Two of my favorite characters are humanity or humaneness
and sage (shen ren). The former is a composite of human and two
(i.e., two persons standing together) and the latter is a composite of ear,
mouth and king. As the king is the unier of heaven, man, and earth,
the sage is the unier of heaven, man and earth by speaking and hearing
truthfully. Furthermore, for the Chinese nature is also concretely signied
by two sinograms: ten thousand (man) and things (wu) (i.e., it is ten
thousandthings).
146
II.2. Words as Action

According to Emerson, Words are also actions, and actions are a kind of
words.13 By the same token, the poet is one who can articulate the word
in terms of nouns and verbs. In this Emersonian tradition, Fenollosa
describes sinograms as vivid shorthand pictures of actions and processes
in nature.14 Sinograms are the concrete pictures of things in nature. As
the sinogram is an idea in action, there is no separation between thing and
action. Poetry as well as art is concerned not with the general and the
abstract but with the concrete of nature, not with rows of separate particulars.... Poetry is ner than prose because it gives us more concrete truth
in the same compass of words.15 Poetry brings language close to things. If,
in sinography, words are the concrete pictures of nature, nouns are things in
motion and verbs motion in things.
Moreover, sinographyits calligraphic form in particularis kinetic: it
is the human body in motion. Thus its calligraphs are kinaesthetic. And the
Chinese revere the art of calligraphy as much as painting: calligraphy is the
ritualized as well as the stylized painting of sinograms orto intimate the
personal dimension of artists themselvescharacters. In the genealogy of
form, calligraphy indeed precedes painting.
In very signicant measure, sinography is a choreography of human gestures and, as a family of signiers, a conversation of gestures that, because
of the presence of meaning, is not the reduction of sinograms to human
physiology. The American literary critic R. P. Blackmur is most persuasive
in arguing for gesture as indigenous to language: as he stresses, Gesture
is native to language, and if you cut it out you cut roots and get a sapless
and gradually a rotting if indeed not a petrifying language.16 What he has
in mind is spoken language accompanied by gestures. There is a humorous
story about an Italian walking down a New York City street with a friend
on a cold winter day who tries to carry a conversation with him. As Italians are known rightly or wrongly for their gesticulation, the Italian told
his friend that he could not talk because his hands were in his pockets. Sinic
grammatology, that is, writing itself is an expression of human gesture. The
sinographic gesture of human expressivity (for example, smile) is indelibly
pantomimic and performative. Every language, says R. G. Collingwood, is a
specialized form of human bodily gesture.17 With Samuel Beckett, we can also
say that in language as gesture, including sign language and sinography, the
spoken and written are identical.18
147
There is a Chinese dance troupe that performs cursive dancing, that is,
it performs calligraphy as the art form of dance. There was a legendary Chinese calligrapher who claimed that the performance of his calligraphy markedly improved after watching the masterful performance of a great female
dancer. Picassos Swimmer (1929) and Acrobat (1930) are indelibly calligraphic and thus performative. Speaking of their performative qi (energy),
Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker remark that in contrast to phonetic
letters, sinographic calligraphy is a vortex and mask of bodily energy.19
iii. carnal hermeneutics and mcluhans

philosophy of global communication
Technologyincluding media technologyis an inseparable part of ourselves; as Werner Heisenberg put it some time agothe snails shell is to
its occupant or as the web is to the spider. Human communication is inconceivable without the mediation of technology as the instrumentum of
communication.
Marshall McLuhan may be singled out as an eloquent high priest of electronic media technology for whom the medium is the message and the
electric light is pure information. Following the footsteps of his compatriot,
Harold A. Innis, McLuhan has the gift of interpreting the course of Western civilization in terms of the medium of communication. He proposes the
way of conceiving the interplay between the medium and the sensorium in
which the periodization of Western civilization is characterized as (1) tribalization in oral and auditory culture, (2) detribalization in alphabetic and
typographic (i.e., hegemonically visualist or popeyed) culture, and (3)
retribalization in electronic culture, which is quintessentially tactile. The culture of the electronic media has triggered in earnest a movement toward the
creation of the world as a global village at an unprecedented pace. McLuhan
became fascinated and attracted by the audio-tactile morphology of Chinese
ideograms or sinograms, which were introduced by way of the etymosinology of Ernest Fenollosa, whose literary executor was the American poet
Ezra Pound. For McLuhan, the Chinese ideogram or sinogram unleashes a
vortex of corporate energy and arouses the audio-tactile sense rather than
that of sight. He reportedly said that the ideal form of his antitypographic
treatise The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) should have been sinographic. As an
apostle of electronic technology, his thought represents a retrieval of oral and
148
auditory culture and thus the reversal of typographic, visualist culture. He

even associates himself with Heidegger, who allegedly surfboards on the electronic waves. Heidegger, who is familiar with Eastern thought and embraces
it in his planetary thinking, also brings thinking and the agency of the hand
together to a reciprocal relationship.
A decade ago I introduced the neologism carnal hermeneutics as a paradigmatic revolt against the condition of Western modernity, for which the
body is a philosophical orphan ever since Descartes and his preoccupation
with epistemocracy. By carnal hermeneutics, I mean that interpretive art that
reads ways of embodiment as the factum fundamentum et primus or silent
spring of everything we do and think. It reads the body as social inscription
in the world. It is not enough to say that the body is the medium of communication: it is communication itself. Carnal hermeneutics is thus a way of
conceptualizing multiple performative roles of the body.20 Its arrival signies
a sharp turning point in our thinking. As the body is our familiar and primordial way of inhabiting and mediating the parliament of things both human
and nonhuman alike in the world, carnal hermeneutics means to celebrate
what Pierre Bourdieu calls the performative magic of the social,21 in which
the body is the inseparable dancing-partner of the mind.22
It is our common knowledge that language is, and the body expresses
itself as, the medium of communication. What is not common, however, is
the notion that the body is the material condition of all communication as
the active way of relating ourselves to the world both human and nonhuman. That is to say, the body is indisputably the ontological factum of our
very being in the world. We exist as body, as esh. To exist means rst and
foremost to be corporeal, and to be social is thus to be intercorporeal. Body
matters encompass a multiple and multilateral array of issues ranging from
silence and gesture to language (both spoken and written), from laughter to
violence, from tattoo to torture, from eating and dieting to speaking, from
nudity to clothing as the body of the body or the second body, from boxing
to feminism, from health care to immortality, and many more.
McLuhans communication paradigm in the direction of creating a brave
new world as a global village is already imbricated in the phenomenon of
postmodernity, which attempts to transgress and transcend the very limits of
the modern world whose political soul is the inviolable sovereignty of nationstates since the time of Machiavelli. In other words, the postmodern phenomenon of a global village is foreign to modernity governed by nation-states.
McLuhans posthumous work The Global Village: Transformations in World
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Life and Media in the 21st Century23 is evidence of his later attempt to make
the world global rather than national and ethnocentric (e.g., Eurocentric and
Sinocentric). The new science of Laws of Media,24 after the fashion of
the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, also contains McLuhans
attempt at transversalizing the East and the West based on audio-tactile space
in sinography in opposition to the Western hegemony of visual space as a
side effect of the uniform, continuous, and fragmented character of the phonetic alphabet.25
McLuhans The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) is an antivisualist and antitypographic treatise that embraces the poetics of electronic media in which
the electric light is pure information. Television embodies tactility, which
becomes the organizing principle not only of the ecumenism of the senses but
also of the globalization of humankind in the age of electronic technology. In
the pioneering spirit of Fenollosas globalism, McLuhan declares that [i]n
the electric age we wear all mankind as our skin (emphasis added)26 beyond
Eurocentric ocularism, which according to McLuhan, is attributable to the
invention of the alphabet in ancient Greece and intensied with the Gutenberg revolution of printing technology.
For McLuhan, electronic technology challenges and deconstructs the
hegemony of vision. For him, acoustic space is round, whereas visual space
is linear. Sound or acoustic space is itself all relational: it is an unvisualizable
eld of simultaneous relationships. In The Medium Is the Message, McLuhan and Fiore declare the following:
The ear favors no particular point of view. We are enveloped by
sound. It forms a seamless web around us. We say, Music shall ll
the air. We never say, Music shall ll a particular segment of the
air. We hear sounds from everywhere, without ever having to focus.
Sounds come from above, from below, from in front of us,
from behind us, from our right, from our left. We cant shut
out sound automatically. We simply are not equipped with earlids.
Where a visual space is an organized continuum of a uniformed connected kind, the ear world is a world of simultaneous relationships
(emphasis added).27
There is a close connection between globalism and the synaesthesia of the
senses in his philosophy of embodied communication amply and vividly
evidenced in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) in which he fancied writing in
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sinograms. And the sense of touch initiates and consummates the synaesthetic interplay of all the senses. Tactility is no longer a pariah sense: it is the
elemental form of the sensorium upon which the development of the other
senses depends. Here McLuhan draws our attention to the testimony of
Jacques Lusseryran who saw light without the sense of sight. Lusseryrans
inrmity of blindness enhances and amplies his other senses. Like drugs,
he writes in And There Was Light, blindness heightens certain sensations,
giving sudden and often disturbing sharpness to the senses of hearing and
touch.28 It sharpens and accentuates what he calls an audible and tactile
alliance. Of course, there is the most noted case of Helen Keller who lost
sight and hearing at an early age and who, like Lusseryran, saw by touching the bearable lightness of Being in the world. She spoke of a chant of
darkness.29 Kellers hand sees and hears as well as touches. Hearing views,
seeing tones, tasting music, smelling storms, and so on are nothing
but a bundle of digitalia to the hands touch. She intimates that the sense
of touch by hand is her reality. The hand is the conductor, as it were, who
orchestrates her body and its sensorium.
We would be remiss if we fail to acknowledge Merleau-Pontys illuminating phenomenology of perception or sensorium. Only in terms of the body
as the global and participatory locus of perception, according to him, do we
come to grips with the deep notion that the world is made of the same stuff as
the body. In each act of perception, the body participates in the world. Each
perception is an instance or moment of the sensory unity, and it is enclosed
in the synergic work of the body, that is, it is intersensorial. The body is the
carnal eld (champ) in which perception, as it is witnessed by Lusseryran and
Keller, becomes localized as seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching
this or that. Merleau-Ponty, therefore, contends, perceptual consciousness is
not a mental alchemy; it is global, total (emphasis added), that is, synergic.30
The synergic organization of perceptual acts is unimaginable without one
of the most important discoveries by Gabriel Marcel and Merleau-Ponty of
twentieth-century phenomenology: the notion of the lived body (corps vcu)
or the body as subject. The body-subject is never an inert matter or mass
(res) but rather a sentient subject. As such, the body is capable of authoring the world rst before answering it. Merleau-Ponty writes with a touch
of eloquence: my body is not an object, but a means, an organization. In
perception I organized with my body an association with the world. With
and through my body, I inhabit the world. The body is the eld in which
perceptions localize themselves (emphasis added).31 Not unlike electricity,
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sinograms for McLuhan arouse the sense of touch rather than that of sight.
McLuhan is a congenital perceptualist who seems to be attracted by the
sensorial synaesthesia of sinograms as the medium of communication in
contrast to sensorial anaesthesia or fragmentation. For him, in short, sinographic writing is purged of ocularcentric focus and fragmentation: it is
antianaesthetic and tactile. It is worth noting that in The Gutenberg Galaxy
(1962) McLuhan pays a high tribute to his Canadian predecessor and the
pioneering philosopher of communication, Harold A. Inniss The Bias of
Communication, which had a great deal of inuence on McLuhan, relies on
the ndings of the French sinologist Marcel Granet. Innis observes that the
Chinese do not formulate abstract concepts discursively but, instead, they
evoke a multitude of concrete images, which also tend to be metaphorical:
for the Chinese, time is circular or round, while space is square. McLuhans
message is unmistakably clear in the following passage from his interview
with the Playboy magazine in 1969.
McLuhans message is unmistakably loud and clear in his interview with
the Playboy magazine in 1969: every culture is ordered by way of sensory
preferences from touch to taste, hearing, smell and sight. In the alphabetic
culture of the West from ancient Greek to typographic culture of the West,
sight has been the ruling and aristocratic sense in the hierarchy of senses and
as the norm of rational sense.32
McLuhans later philosophy of communication, that is, his New Science of communication that not only is interdisciplinary but also has an
implication for global or cross-cultural communication where, when the
embodied language of sinography is taken into account, intercultural communication becomes a question of translation. In tune with building the
world as a global village, we are in dire need of a cross-cultural perspective in
communicationtheory.
Varela et al.s The Embodied Mind (1991) is a groundbreaking work in
cognitive science that rediscovers that very idea in Asian philosophy, particularly in (Tantric) Buddhism.33 They call this rediscovery a second renaissance
in the cultural history of the West, with the potential to be equally important
as the rediscovery of Greek thought in the European renaissance.34 So is the
discovery by Fenollosa of etymosinology, which includes an embodied dimension of sinography or, as McLuhan characterizes it, a vortex of corporate
energy or a galaxy of teletactile kinetogramsto borrow the language of
posthumanist new media. Varela, Thompson, and Rosch interchangeably
use enaction as embodied cognition and cognition as embodied action.35
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Merleau-Pontys philosophical insight into the openness of a middle

way (entredeux) provides for them a circular continuity rather than a
discontinuous divide between the inner and the outer or the self and the
world.36 Accordingly, Varela et al. are able to negotiate or compromise a
middle path between the Scylla of cognition as the recovery of a pregiven
outer world (realism) and the Charybdis of cognition as the projection of
a pregiven inner world (idealism).37 Merleau-Ponty upholds the negotiated middle path of phenomenology against intellectualism on the one
hand and empiricism on the other. Both are one-sided: one has too much
consciousness and the other too little. This compromised middle path in
Buddhism is known as the way of Maitreya (the future Awakened One,
Bodhisattva).38
In his posthumously published work Laws of Media (1988) as well as The
Global Village (1989), McLuhan undauntingly seeks and weighs evidence in
support of his New Science of media from the ndings of contemporary
post-Newtonian mechanics and neurology. He pays special attention to Milic
apeks Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics (1961)39 and Fritjof
Capras The Tao of Physics (1975).40 One is interdisciplinary and the other
cross-cultural. McLuhans New Science of communication strikes a sympathetic chord with apeks thesis that establishes the dynamic nature of
(physical) reality in terms of auditory models or polyphony as opposed to
pictorial or visual ones. What seems to be most objectionable to apek in
contemporary physics, as McLuhan notes, is the idea that time is regarded as
another dimension of space or the fourth dimension of space. As a result,
times kinesis is reduced to timeless stasis (of visual) space, that is timeless
spatialization.
Most importantly, in the context of our discussion here, McLuhan recognizes Capras The Tao of Physics as a kindred of corpus callosum, which
is capable of dialogizing the East with his own (Western) New Science
of media relying on the acoustic functions of the brains right hemisphere.
What the right hemisphere and the nonalphabetic (sinographic) East is to the
acoustic, the left hemisphere and the alphabetic West is to the visual. One
is simultaneous and synaesthetic, while the other is linear and sequential.
The patterns and operation of electronic media themselves are properties
of the right hemisphere. McLuhan relies heavily on the ndings of Capra
that dissolve the difference or tension between physics and metaphysics in
the ineffable mysticism of the East, that is, Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism,
and Zen by networking of the two radically different systems of thinking.
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In passing, it is worth noting that Capra takes to the heart the intimation
of the physicist Werner Heisenberg, who is at ease with Chinese Daoism as
with modern physics: It is probably true quite generally that in the history
of human thinking the most fruitful developments frequently take place at
those points where two different lines of thought meet.41 By turning in
on the new audile-tactile awareness made available by our electric ground,
McLuhan remarks, Fritjof Capra found that modern physics was, unwittingly, retrieving a world-view harmonious with ancient Eastern wisdom.42
Nonetheless, McLuhan is afraid that the modern Chinese courtship of the
alphabet, or alphabetic literacy endangers the acoustic function of the right
hemisphere in favor of the visual operation of the left hemisphere.43 Again,
McLuhan emphasizes,
In The Tao of Physics, Fritjof Capra remarks the similarities between
the forms of awareness implicit in modern physics and the traditional
philosophy of Eastern, non-alphabetic cultures. The East bypasses
hardware and absolute concepts in favour of percepts, that is, a
direct, non-intellectual experience of reality. The most important characteristic of the Eastern world viewone could almost say
the essence of itis the awareness of the unity and mutual interrelation of all things and events, the experience of all phenomena in
the world as manifestations of a basic oneness. All things are seen as
interdependent and inseparable parts of this cosmic whole; as different manifestations of the same ultimate reality.44
The name given to the interrelatedness of all things and events in the old Chinese Book of Changes (Yijing) is synchronicity. The recent work and practice
of the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh sums up the quintessence
of Eastern thought in a single word, Interbeing, which is necessarily and
inescapably intercorporeal simply because, but for intercorporeality, there
would be no interconnectedness.45 In the end what Hans-Georg Gadamer
calls the fusion of horizons (Horizontverschemelzung), of cultural horizons, will enable us to cross a threshold into another future, into the future
of planetary thinking. To sum up, communication is the sinew of humanitys
existence and coexistence between heaven and earth: the need and necessity
of communication veries the commonplace notion that to be alone is not
to be. Global communication now affirms humanitys global coexistence
beyond cultural, ethnic, and national boundaries.
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iv. critical reflection on embodiment in

the philosophy of new media
We have come a long way to make the embodied mind a philosophically legitimate discourse. The body has been, by and large, an orphan child of philosophical and theological discourse in the West because of Greek idealism,
Christian theology, and Cartesian epistemocracy. The alleged dark grotto
or continent of corporeality has castigated and even crucied as an ephemeral and perishable substance (res) in favor of incorporeal immortality in
the mainstream of Western thought. Origen, the stern Christian ascetic and
theologian who voluntarily castrated himselffor that matter, castration
was not an uncommon practice in his timedepicted corporeality or, more
specically, sexuality as a passing phenomenon and alluded to the eschatological hope of purifying the soul from the esh. As Peter Brown elucidates,
Human life [for him] was but the last dark hour of a long night that would
vanish with the dawn. The body was poised on the edge of a transformation
so enormous as to make all present notions of identity tied to sexual differences, and all social roles based upon marriage, procreation, and childbirth,
seem as fragile as dust dancing in a sunbeam.46 One wonders what Origen
would say about the world in which sex is not even for procreation but for
pure pleasure and about embodying prosthetics or cybersex in the age when
the boundary between real and virtual sex is claimed to be a thing of the past,
that is, when reality and virtuality are folded into one esh fold.
The canonical institution of Descartess cogito is deeply rooted in Western modernity, which is marked by the civilization of printing technology. It is
valorized as disembodied, monological, and ocularcentric: it is the mind (res
cogitans) transcendentalized from rather than immanentized in the body
(res extensa). As thinking substance, the cogito is inherently monological
because it is always and necessarily ego cogito (the I think) in isolation from
others, both other minds and other bodies. The mind is independent of the
body, and it needs nothing more than itself to think. As Merleau-Ponty puts it
concisely, Cartesianism is a philosophy of reection [philosophie rexive]
which identies my being with what I think of it, that is, a reective narcissism.47 As such, it scandalizes sociality. Moreover, the mind as cogito for
Descartes erects the privatized, insulated, and echoless chamber of clear and
distinct ideas. Thus Cartesian metaphysics is identiable with the ocularcentric or panoptic hegemony of vision. Panoptic metaphysics goes hand in
155
hand with the monologism of the cogito because vision is not only isolating
or distancing but also anaesthetic in denying sociability with other senses:
there is a narcissism and social amnesia of and in all hegemonic vision. There
is indeed an identity between the I and the eye. The cogito is video ergo
sum, or the minds I is the minds eye. Heidegger contends that the I (or
the eye) of the cogito as substance becomes the center of thought from
which the I-viewpoint and the subjectivism of modern thought originate:
the subjectivity of the subject is determined by the I-ness (Ichheit) of the
I think. For him, the I-viewpoint of the Cartesian cogito highlights the
modern age as the age of the world picture (Weltbild).48
The American pragmatist Richard Shusterman, who is deeply immersed
in both Eastern and Western aesthetics, has coined the interesting term somaesthetics.49 Not unlike a phenomenologist of the lived body, he speaks
of sentient soma in order to emphasize the body as an unmediated subject
rather than as an objective body. As a matter of fact, Shustermans somaesthetics takes seriously Merleau-Pontys phenomenological conception of the
body as a work of art.
What is most important for our discussion here is the fact that Shusterman takes a cue, as does McLuhan,50 from Ralph Waldo Emersons precocious observation that the human body is the magazine of inventions and
that [a]ll the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs
and senses.51 Shusterman, furthermore, recognizes the body as the most
primordial tool of tools, that is, the most basic medium for interacting
with our various environments.52 In a nutshell, the body is or acts as urmedium. He celebrates the body as medium. Etymologically dened, the
medium (meson, medius, Mittel, moyen) is something that stands between
two other things between which it mediates. Being in the middle, an interface
with two faces, a medium connects the mediated terms, yet also separates
them by standing between them.53
The mediatic function of the body is unquestionably plural or multiple.
As such, it is portrayed as a multimedia conglomerate of different sensory
modalities and technologies.54 Shusterman comes to view that somatic selfconsciousness points to the vision of an essentially situated, relational, and
symbiotic self rather than the traditional concept of an autonomous self
grounded in an individual, monadic, indestructible, and unchanging soul,55
which is undeniably Cartesian. On the question of the body-media relationship, Shusterman concludes that, at the hub of the media revolution, the
central medium of the body gets elevated to the status of constructor
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and locus of the real. Once reality is seen as a construction, he continues,

the media that construct it can no longer be disdained.56 Couched in the
language of somaesthetics, Shusterman, I think, authenticates and refashions McLuhans quintessential expressions: the medium is the message and
the electric light is pure information, in which the reality of the message is
not separated from its medium. However, McLuhan goes further than Shusterman in discriminating the multiple mediatic sensory functions of the body
in favor of the audio-tactile over the purely visual in creating a symbiotic self
in a global village in the age of electronic information.
In connecting McLuhans philosophy of communication equipped with
knowledge of Sinic kinetograms to philosophy of new media, Bernadette Wegensteins Getting Under the Skin: The Body and Media Theory
(2006), which contains the chapter entitled The Medium is the Body,57 is
most interesting and relevant. It is the most erudite and well-read work on the
question of embodying new media with an allusive title and with an elegant
introduction by the avant-garde philosopher of new media, Mark Hansen.58
Wegenstein considers that her work is an inverse complementary to Hansens call for a new philosophy based on the body. Her insight demands that
embodiment be framed in terms of new media. Thus embodiment and new
media for Wegenstein and Hansen go hand in hand.
Wegenstein describes her experience of body discourse as gotten under the
skin. She soon moved to cognitive science, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, literary and cultural studies, and so on. And she learned from Heideggers extensive commentaries on Nietzsche that the body belongs to the order of Being
rather than that of Having, in the same way that Merleau-Pontys phemenology, whose Archimedian point is body-consciousness, was learned from
Henri Bergson and Gabriel Marcelthe body is not an object but a subject
(i.e., lived body, corps vcu). Wegenstein begins her work with a long epigraph
from the German Tantric philosopher Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra,
which happens to be the most poignant passage in all the literature of body
politics: body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word of something about the body.59 When Merleau-Ponty speaks of the body as a work
of art, he is echoing Nieztsche. For Merleau-Ponty, moreover, the carnal landscape is the presupposed foundation of conceptual geography.
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IV.1. Tactility and Embodied Sociality

By embodying media, new media thinkers have overcome the Cartesian
view of the disembodied mind. Unfortunately, however, they bring Cartesian monologic cocoon back from a back door. The title of Wegensteins
work throws some light, though perhaps unintentionally, on the question of
monologism or narcissism. When she speaks of under the skin, she is concerned with happenings or phenomena only internal to the body by being
oblivious to the fact that the skin is the initiating point of social contact or
of tactile sociality, including what Claudia Benthien calls teletactility.60 As
the skin is profoundly shaped by history and culture, she characterizes
rightly, I thinkthe skin as the cultural border between the self and the
world.61 For the newborn (as well as the unborn), she stresses, the skin is
the most important [as well as the most primordial] organ of communication and contact.62 It has no walls to shield us from the outside world. As
the skin covers the entire surface of the human body, it organizes the entire
body, the inside out and the outside in. It serves not only as a protective shield
but also, most importantly, as the Archimedian frontier of social contact. It
is a DMZ, as it were, between the inside and the outside. As such, tactility
(tactus) is the most primordial site of social contact in which the skin denes
the boundary (horismos in Greek) of what is the inside or the outside of the
body. The breast-feeding by a mother of an infant stands for the pure joy of
tactile sociality.
What we need here is a phenomenological sociology of the body that
regards the body as a social phenomenon, the discussion of which is missing from the theory of new media.63 There is indeed a strong tradition in
phenomenology of the body, which regards the body as the umbilical cord
to the social, particularly in works by Merleau-Ponty, Erwin W. Straus, and
Alfred Schutz. Merleau-Ponty is pithy when he declares that Cartesianism
is a scandal for communicability and sociality, for the social dwells in intercorporeality. But for the body, there would be no conception of space at all,
including social space. The body is the spatial axis to determine what is right
and left, up and down, far and near, and so on. The cultural sociologist Norbert Elias has the most intriguing way of dening speech: it is nothing but
social relations turned into sound.64 To emulate him, sexuality, too, is nothing but social relations turned into carnal contact. The body covered with
the skin is our social placement in the world. In dening the social, Straus
favors the primacy of the body over that of the mind because the body of
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an organism is related to other bodies; it is a part of the physical universe.

The mind, however, is related to one body only; it is not directly related to the
world, nor to other bodies, nor to other minds.65 The mind itself becomes a
relatum only because the body is in the world with other bodies. Looking at
the inside of the skin, whatever that might be, would court a disaster for the
social and hence the ethical. To explore the inside under the skin is antisocial
and antiethical unless we are looking for a hobgoblin in our consciousness
or conscience.
Merleau-Ponty speaks of the fulguration of coexistence.66 Auguste Rodin
whose sculptural handiwork The Cathedral is the unsurpassable artistic rendition of sociology of the body or of the sacrament of coexistence, which portrays the rite of two right hands coming together. The psychotherapist Adam
Phillips points out that the pleasure of tickling, which is a skin contact, cannot
be produced in the absence of the other because it requires the enacted recognition of the other.67 Indeed, tickling is a contact sport. The sociologist David
Sudnow, too, describes playing and performing (improvised) jazz on piano as
the socialization of the hand.68 His sociological description of the hand was
inspired by Heideggers telling passage, which describes the ecstatic quality of
the human hand in the following exquisite way:
The hand is a peculiar thing. In the common view, the hand is part
of our bodily organism. But the hands essence can never be determined, or explained, by its being an organ which can grasp. Apes,
too, have organs that can grasp, but they do not have hands. The
hand is innitely different from all grasping organspaws, claws, or
fangsdifferent by an abyss of essence.... The hand does not only
grasp and catch, or push and pull. The hand reaches and extends,
receives, and welcomesand not just things: the hand extends itself,
and receives its own welcome in the hands of others. The hand holds.
The hand carries. The hand designs and signs, presumably because
man is a sign (emphasis added).69
To be sure, Heideggers description of the human peculiarity of the hand is
not out of the arrogance of humanism but a description of the existential
facticity of being human in the world (in-der-Welt-sein).
Chapter 4 of Wegensteins work entitled The Medium is the Body is
most relevant to relating McLuhans philosophy of communication to new
media. In case of sign language, McLuhans formula that the medium is the
159
message is right: if the medium is the message and the body is the medium,
then the body is the message! Both Hansen and Wegenstein repeatedly place
emphasis on the body as mediality: as Hansen puts it, the history of the
body [is] a history of mediation.70 Wegensteins argument, comments
Hansen, marks a triumphant return to McLuhans understanding of media
as prosthesis to the human body, and understanding that has yet to exercise
its full force and signicance.71 Wegenstein interprets McLuhans dictum
that the electric light (medium) is pure information (message) as a medium
without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or
name.72 It seems that McLuhan here is using a rhetorical device to shorten
the circuit of the message and the medium to emphasize the inseparability of
one from the other.73
IV.2. Critique of New Media Theory

The propagation of technology has unquestionably globalized communication. However, the world whose dominant prose is written in the language
of technology with lifelike qualitiesto use the posthumanist termand
the condition of humanity thereof enframed by the hegemony of technology
including informatics, cyberneticization of knowledge, and the computerization of society is a mixed blessing. We are all wired to, and become hostages
of, the network of technology from which there is no exit in sight. In this setting, it is reasonable to suggest with the late German philosopher of technology, Friedrich Dessauer, that in addition to the three classic Kantian forms of
critique, there should be the fourth, that is, the critique of the technological.
It is quite clear that this new critique will become the most important
form of critique in the epoch when technology, including informatics, is
totalizing, one-dimensional, planetary, and terribly banal and normalizing;
when the fundamental project of macrotechnology threatens to create a
vast necropolis for the entire earth and its by-products in the form of global
warming, and climatic change bring the entire earth to the brink of collective
extinction; and when microtechnology claims to have created and cloned our
new self with new media whose soul and body may soon, if it has not
already, become imprisoned behind the invisible walls of the gigantic technological Panopticon. Indeed, the specter of Orwells 1984 has resurfaced.
This specter was questioned by the previous generations of philosophers
such as Heidegger, Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, and
Merleau-Ponty, who is a hero gure of new media thinkers. Unfortunately,
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however, media technomaticsembodied and disembodiedhas not erased

this specter, which new media thinkers have not yet seriously and systematically questioned. It is a technoromanticism pure and simple. In one of
his Collge de France courses between 1952 and 1960, Merleau-Ponty prophetically spoke of the unholy alliance of naturalism and articialism, as a
new prometheism: An extreme naturalism and an extreme articialism are
inextricably associated, not only in the myths of everyday life, but also in the
rened myths which arise, for example, out of the theory of information or
neo-Darwinism.74
Merleau-Ponty was well aware of the manipulative and destructive power
of technology, although he developed no explicit and systematic philosophy
of it. True to his conception of philosophy or philosophical critique as the
perpetual vigilance on everything we do and think, he begins his seminal essay,
Eye and Mind,75 with a contrast between the concrete art of living and the
abstract character of science that manipulates things and rarely comes in contact with the real world of men and women. He observes the emergence of an
entirely new approach, a sort of intellectual fad, as it were, that attempts to
master the sciences as autonomous techniques in which thinking is reduced
to data gathering, testing, operating, experimenting, and transforming.
Merleau-Ponty thus writes, Thinking operationally has become a sort of
absolute articialism, such as we see in the ideology of cybernetics, where
human creations are derived from a natural information process, itself conceived on the model of human machines.76 In operational thinking, in brief,
the human himself or herself becomes simply another information machine.
In Merleau-Ponty we hear a grim echo of Daedaluss voice in James Joyces
Ulysses concerning history as a nightmare. Merleau-Ponty continues, If this
kind of thinking were to extend its reign to man and history; if, pretending to
ignore what we know of them through our own situations, it were to set out
to construct man and history on the basis of a few abstract indices... then,
since man really becomes the manipulandum he takes himself to be, we enter
into a cultural regimen where there is neither truth nor falsity concerning
man and history, into a sleep, or a nightmare, from which there is no awakening.77 Heidegger, too, insists that the essence of technology (Technik) is no
longer technological. Technology is, as it were, an ontological x rather than
instrumental. Whether embodying media (new media) is a fait accompli, a
dream coming true, or a nightmare to be continuedthat is the question yet
to be answered.
161
The French philosopher of social practices, Pierre Bourdieu, is no less concerned with the same question when he speaks of the habitus as an incorporated disposition in all kinds of social practices, which is internalized as a
second nature. It is what enables the institution to attain full realization: it
is through the capacity for incorporation, which exploits the bodys readiness
to take seriously the performative magic of the social.78 Earlier, his compatriot Michel Foucault, too, was fearful of the specter of the Panopticon seen
as the diagram of a mechanism of power or as a gure of political technology. This Panopticon of power is polyvalent in its applications, it serves
to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct school children, to
conne the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work.
It is a type of location of bodies in space... of denition of the instruments
and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons, [and academies].79 In the nal analysis,
the postphenomenologist Don Ihde (1998) does a quick reality check on
virtual bodies in light of Merleau-Pontys phenomenological sense of the
lived body (corps vcu) and he comes to the conclusion that virtual reality bodies are thin or literally skin-deep and never gain the thickness or,
I might add, softness of the body as esh. Incorporating the technologized
medium into our living body is just a fantasy of desire. [W]hen we emerge
from the shadows, effects, and hyper-realities of the theater into the sunlight in the street, Ihde continues, it is not Platos heaven we nd, but the
mundane world in which we can walk, and converse, and even nd a place in
which to eat real but not prosthetic food.80 This distinction, just as the existential facticity that humans can laugh when they are sad and they can cry
when they are extremely happy, does not necessarily, as posthumanists claim,
make us antagonistic to technology, including new media, as our extensions.
One wonders if the technoromanticism81 that folds humanity and technology
into one eshfold is a dream come true or a nightmare to be continued.
CHAPTER 10
the joy of textualizing japan

a me tacomme nta ry on rol and
barthe ss empire of signs
Kogo tokitsukusazare.
[Brevity is the essence of good wording.]
A Zen jakugo
Lcriture est... un satori.
[Writing is a Zen awakening.]
Roland Barthes
Nowadays the way of educating as well as the way
of learning is wrong. True knowledge is not in the
written word. Books are always translations. The
original is what is by its own nature.
Okada Torajiro (Zen Master)
i. introduction to barthess japan

Along with Claude Lvi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault,
Roland Barthes is a major architect of French structuralism. More specically, he is one of the most inventive masters of contemporary literary theory
who fashioned its directions, modes, and trends. He is indeed, as the Japanese would say, a meijin (famous person) of literary theory. He is called by
Jonathan Culler a cultural institution.1 In this sense, interdisciplinarity is
for Barthes not just a slogan or a theoretical speculation but is practiced in
his own writings. Rather than conning himself to a particular discipline or
164
subject mattersuch as literature, anthropology, psychoanalysis, history of

ideashis intellectual taste is vast, versatile, and catholic. His versatile inventiveness as well as his Japonisme (love of things Japanese) are evidenced in
the gem of an essay, LEmpire des signes (1970),2 which is thoroughly Gallic in
taking delight in the dillydally of a myriad of things in Japan. Barthes speaks
fondly of Japan or a system of signs called Japan. Versatility, however, does
not mean the lack or absence of intellectual focus or unity. Empire of Signs is
in itself the mosaic scanning by an itinerant eye of the tantalizing parade of
signs each of which counts and falls in its proper placeits ordered randomness accentuates the carefree and spontaneous sense of natural balance and
unity with no privileged center. It is called a luxurious and eclectic album.3
Empire of Signs is the cultural landscape or, better, the geography of itinerant
cultural topics.
There is indeed some truth in saying that a great thinker thinks only one
single thought. Barthes is no exception. His decentered center is semiology,
whose neutral center is language and particularly literature as writing
(criture). In his Inaugural Lecture at the Collge de France in 1977, he enunciated clearly and decisively, I cannot function outside language, treating
it as a target, and within language, treating it as a weapon.4 And he called
contemporary literature a permanent revolution of language and made it
synonymous with writing or text. Writing makes knowledge festive or full of
asobi (joyous play)to use the expression of Japanese geisha culture. It is, in
short, the gaiety of language in the manner of geisha asobi. The rhetoricity
of Barthess Empire of Signs is, without question, of donjuanesque quality:
it is a seductive exercise in semiological don juanism.5 Barthes is indeed a
writer (crivain) who is the homo ludens par excellence. Knowledge (savoir),
too, is the avoring (saveur) of language or words. No wonder there is a close
diatactics between the knowledge of culture and that of cooking.
Barthess Empire of Signs describes Japan as the vast network of signs or a
galaxy of signiers. It is, as Susan Sontag puts it, the ultimate accolade of
semiology.6 As fashion is the language of fashion and the city is an ideogram,
the country Japan is an empire of signs or an ideographic city. Ludwig
Wittgenstein wittingly likens language to a city: Our language can be seen
as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses,
and of houses with additions from various periods; and these surrounded
by a multitude of new boroughs with straight and regular streets and uniform houses7and much more, more complex with, say, narrow zigzagging
165
alleys and sometimes with unpassable subterranean tunnels, which are even
intriguing and befuddling to the native dwellers.
Moreover, Empire of Signs is inevitably an intellectual autobiography as
well as Gedankenexperiment of his deconstructive semiology as a universal
science in which Japan is one of its laboratories.8 Barthes is indeed a maiko
(apprentice)to use the geisha languagein performing the semiotics of
Japanese culture. Every serious endeavor is in part autobiographicalthe
self becoming the material subject of writing for itself and for others. I am
here reminded of Raymond Savignacs Astral in which de haut en bas and
de bas en haut are dialectically interchangeable. Autobiography or selfindulgence, it should be remembered, is not necessarily navel-gazing and thus
acrimonious or opprobrious. For, on the contrary, radical observation is an
interrogation forto paraphrase Maurice Merleau-Pontya set of observations wherein he who observes is himself implicated by the observation. In
other words, radical observation is a metacommentary in the sense that
Fredric Jameson uses it: every individual interpretation must include an
interpretation of its own existence, must show its own credentials and justify itself: every commentary must be at the same time a metacommentary
as well.9 In this regard, Empire of Signs is an exotic subtext or supplement
to Barthess structural semiology: at least it adds colors and avors to the
texture and fabric of his written corpus as a whole. Without it the main text
itself would be incomplete. The exotic incites and excites his intellectual acumen. It elicits an inciting and exciting reading as well. It would be wrong to
say, however, that Barthes intended to write a scholarly text on Japan and
make a scholarly contribution to Oriental studies in the tradition of his countrymen Paul Masson-Oursel, Marcel Granet, Henri Maspero, and Ren Sieffert. Rather, he is an enthusiastic and observant amateur. Precisely because he
is an amateur, he is able to pump in an air of fresh insight. Barthess Empire
of Signs, as Culler characterizes it judiciously, is a combination of touristic commentary on Japan with a reection on signs in everyday life and
their ethical implications.10 It is indeed a discerning, abecedarian account of
Japanese culture as a system of signs.
In European history, Orientalism has been like a pendulum that cyclically
swings back and forth from the likings and disliking of the Orient. In French
history, it uctuates from Voltaire to Montesquieu. It is certainly a pathological swing. In an imaginary dialogue with a Japanese scholar, Martin
Heidegger once expressed his puzzlement and bemusement that the Japanese forget the beginnings of their own thinking and rush to and chase after
166
anything latest and newest in European thought. In modern history, the Oriental or Japanese love for things Occidental needs no documentation. Particularly because of the Japanese success in industrial development, now the
Occidental love for the OrientJapan in particularabounds. In 1974 the
French Tel Quel group including Phillippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva, and Barthes
visited China. As a result, Kristeva, for example, published in 1977 Des Chinoises, which is destined to become an important chapter in the annals of
womens liberation. Before his China trip, Barthes visited and toured Japan
in 1966 to lecture on structural semiology. According to the account of the
French scholar who was president of the Franco-Japanese Institute in Tokyo
Maurice Pinguet, to whom Empire of Signs was dedicatedBarthess love
for Japan was genuine and deep. In this, I might add, he followed the footsteps of his compatriot Paul Claudel who, more than anyone else, opened up
intercultural exchanges between France and Japan in the twentieth century.
The Japanese, in turn, responded to Barthes by translating his LEmpire des
signes four years after its original publication: Shirushi no Teikoku (1974).11
And they celebrated or, better, commemorated Barthess oeuvre in the June
1980 special issue of Gendai Shiso, which has the French subtitleRevue de
la pense daujourdhui.
The present essay is a commentary on Barthess commentary on Japan. I
think no apology, however, is necessary to the incomparable essayist Michel
de Montaigne, with all due respect and seriousness, who complained about
the profusion of commentaries instead of writing about the order of things
(les choses), that is, interpreting interpretations instead of interpreting
things themselves. Montaignes old but familiar complaint is no doubt a
sober reection on our age of commentaries, criticism, and scholarship.
On the other hand, however, we should not forget that, in the rst place, as
human thought is coextensive with language, the verbum is not the surrogate or disguise of the res (or les choses). Rather, the verbum is also the res.
So interpreting interpretations is willy-nilly interpreting things themselves. In the second place, sincefollowing the lead of Nietzsche or Harold
Blooms disputationinterpretation is and will always be misinterpretation,
the interpreted things or words remain to be reinterpreted. Finally, as we will
see more clearly later, phenomenological reading turns and returns to the
experiential to honor its validity, that is to say, it not only does not bifurcate
interpreting interpretations and interpreting things but actually makes
the bifurcation unnecessary and superuous because in it, as in Zen, things
themselves are the homestead of all interpretations.
167
Be that as it may, the present metacommentary will focus on Barthess

semiological observation of signicant Japanese cultural signs and symbols
as manifested and surfaced particularly in Zen, haiku, and calligraphy in
Barthes Fascination with Things Uniquely Japanese, and then it will critically evaluate the limits of his view of the Japanese empire of signs from
the phenomenology of lived experience in Critique of Barthes Semiological
Sinography. It should be noted from the outset that the question of how
a given text is to be read is a controversial question in the contemporary
hermeneutics of literature. No matter. I only intend to follow Barthess own
deconstructionist injunction that as there is nothing outside it, the text has an
autochthonous status whose fate depends on readership rather than authorship. As, according to Barthes, there is an ineluctable dialectic or even paradox between reading and writing, the only explicit reading is writing. The
only proper response to writing is another writing that is a metacommentary.
By all means, Barthes intended to record in Empire of Signs his fascination
with Japan as the country of writingJapans grammatology, which is
heavily pictographic or ideographic. As the tidal waves of deconstructive
grammatology have been sweeping the contemporary literary scene, the
tendency is rushing toward Chinese ideography as pure, antiphonocentric
writing.12 Barthes is by no means the rst and will not be the last Occidental who has been mesmerized by things traditionally Japanese. Nevertheless,
there is a uniqueness in his oeuvre: unlike the other Occidental students, he
textualizes everything in Japanese culture through deconstructive grammatology whose grand goal is to dismantle logocentrism, which allegedly coincides with Western ethnocentrism. Like Igor Stravinsky who confessed that
he enjoyed the activity of composing (writing) better than the music itself,
deconstructive grammatologists have made writing intransitive: writing is
writing is writing.
ii. barthes fascination with things uniquely japanese

The title of Barthess work is, as it were, the wrapper of the content of Japanese culture as a system of signs. To decipher or zero in on the content, we
must unwrap the wrapper. The content is packaged with a decorous plethora
of cultural bonsai cultivated as miniaturized texts. If, however, the wrapper
were the gift itself, the title would be the content: there would be no inner
soul separate from the textual esh. For Barthes, Japan displays an epicurean
168
menu of exotic icons: Zen, satori, mu, haiku, sumotori, pachinko, ikebana,
Kabuki, Bunraku, Zengakuren, hashi, miso, sashimi, sukiyaki, tempura, and
so on. It would be wrong to conclude that Barthes attends only to the wrapping of Japanese culture while dispensing with its contents. What is to be
recognized here is the need to deconstruct the all-too-commonplace dichotomy between the visible and the invisible, outside and inside, appearance
and reality, wrapping and content, surface and depth, manifest and latent,
concrete and abstract, ritual and choice, text and intention, style and form,
deed and word, and so on. Where there is no dichotomizing doublet, there is
indeed sincerity.13 Since the visible body initiates the rite of passage to the
invisible soul of an alien culture by a foreign observer or tourist, lets look
closer at the outer appearance. It is doubly important in understanding Japanese culture and Barthess Japan because of the extraordinary attention paid
to it by the Japanese themselves and consequently Barthes himself in Empire
of Signs. From a semiological perspective, too, the outer is as important as, if
not more than, the inner.
What is a sign? It is, according to Barthes, the union of the signier and
the signied. The term is translated in Japanese as shirushi (or kigo), which
means any visible markingparticularly nonlinguistic marking. It is interesting to see the unusual Japanese deference to the content is indicated immediately in the outer appearance of the translated copy of Barthess Empire
of Signsin addition to its addenda inside (more pictures, extra explanatory notes and the translators introduction). The translation is boxed and
wrapped with wax paper. The cover of the book is clothed with the printing
paper of excellent quality. Whether or not one can read Japanese, the external
appearance gives one the impression that this is an important work, indeed.
If Barthess work is to be judged by its cover, we should attend to it. The
outer box has a separate wrapper with the photograph of a traditional, aristocratic, anonymous courtly woman, which could easily depict a scene from
the Genji monogatari. The picture is explained in the French original simply
as Fragment dune carte postale reminding us of Derridas recent work
on Freud. Without doubt the woman is the surfacial centerfold of Empire of
Signs, which is consonant with Barthess own semiological approach. As a
picture is worth a thousand words, the woman is the stadium where Barthes
displays the multicolored galaxy of signiers in Japanese culture. First, it is a
picture. As such it de/sign/ates the presence of Japan in absence. In photography, according to Barthes, form and content coincide. The literal message of
the woman (denotation) is not clear, but its symbolic message (connotation)
169
is worth exploring. Clearly, Barthes is interested in signifying the traditional

depth of Japanese culture. Second, the courtly woman is wearing a colorful,
long garment that bets her long black hair. This garment is ingrained, as
it were, in the fabric of Barthess text. Interestingly enough, Barthes in The
Fashion System discusses clothing as protecting, covering, and masking. He
quotes Hegels aesthetics approvingly: as pure sentience, the body cannot
signify; clothing guarantees the passage from sentience to meaning; it is, we
might say, the signied par excellence.14 What then does the garment of the
courtly woman signify in relation to her pure sentience? The absolute privacy
of sex? Speaking about the absence of sex in pachinko, Barthes observes that
in Japan sex is in sexuality, not elsewhere, whereas in the United States, on
the contrary, sex is everywhere, except in sexuality.15
Third and the most important is the activity engaged in by the courtly
woman. In traditional Japan, there was a gender gap between man and
woman in the activity of writing. What Barthes describes as the country of
writing, kanji or ideographic calligraphy, whether or not he is aware of it,
is typically a male activity, whereas for women it was an irreverent activity.
Although there is no denite assurance that she is writing in kanji rather
than (hira)kanawhich is highly improbablethe importance of writing is
accentuated by the woman in the act of letter writing. Man in the act of
writing is normal and usual, whereas woman in the act of writing is rare. As
sexuality and textuality coincide in the portrayal of the woman in the act of
writing, the bridging of the gender gap signies antiphallocentrism as well as
antilogocentrism. If, however, Barthes was only interested in portraying sexuality alone, the more appropriate centerfold of his work would have been the
courtesan (yugo) with a dog in the book, a geisha girl or a shunga (porno)
to satisfy the lascivious eye.16 Now, so much for the outer cover. Zen is the
inner soul of Japanese culture, and writing is for Barthes Zens satorian
inner awakening or enlightenment. He is fascinated with and celebrates the
graphism of all things Japanese. As a nation of ideograms or pictograms,
Japan is a graphic bliss or nirvana. Barthes has a tremendous proclivity to
describe nonlinguistic signs in linguistic terms: every human faceincluding
his own shown in the Kobe Shinbun during his tour in Japan and that of a
corpulent sumotorias a written text, an inscription, or a citation; miso
as adding a touch of clarity; sukiyaki as becoming decentered, like an
uninterrupted text; tempura as a grammar or visibly graphic; the city as
an ideogram; Zengakuren as a syntax of actions; the stationary store as
an ideographic marquetry, and so on. In the context of his deconstructive
170
grammatology, in short, Barthess discovery of Japan as a nation of ideographic inscriptions may be likened to the famous wooden statue in Kyoto
of the enlightened Zen monk Hoshi where the visage of divinity is emerging
through a crevice of his face.
Barthes declares that writing is a satori: Zen and satori are signied by the
void or empty (le vide).17 There is the kanji (ideogram) void calligraphed
for Barthes by a female student. Underneath the kanji is the Japanese pronunciation mu and le vide. In Japan, in the country of writing whose inner
soul coincides with Zen, mu is the abysmal ground or Urgrund of everything or everything is a metaphor of mu. Barthes writes, Writing is after
all, in its way, a satori; satori (the Zen occurrence) is a more or less powerful
(though in no way formal) seism which causes knowledge or the subject, to
vacillate: it creates an emptiness of language. And it is also an emptiness
of language which constitutes writing; it is from this emptiness that derive
the features with which Zen, in the exemption from all meaning, writes
gardens, gestures, houses, ower arrangements, faces, violence.18 The key
expression to understand Barthess Japanand his deconstructive semiologyis an emptiness of language. In the rst place, however, there is an
ambiguity in Barthess own description of the kanji mu as le vide. Mu
is sunyata (emptiness) in Sanskrit. When a Mahayana text was introduced
to the Chinese in the second century, they were not able to grasp with ease
the idea of sunyata (kung [Chinese] and ku [Japanese]) as they did many
other abstract Buddhist concepts, although they found it akin to the Taoist
idea of wu (nothingness) as in the famous wu-wei (no-action) in the Tao
Te Ching.19 Ideogrammatically, mu and ku are two different characters. Mu
(Japanese) or wu (Chinese) is le nant, whereas ku is le vide. The Japanese
translation clearly indicates this difference.
In the second place, the expression an emptiness of language is un vide
de parole in Barthess original French text. Therefore, the English translation of parole as language is rather misleading inasmuch as it makes
little sense to speak of writing as an emptiness of language itself. In the tradition of Saussurean linguistics, langage consists of parole and langue. If
writing is un vide de parole, it is contrasted with speech as event within
the (Japanese) language as a system. For it, too, is an integral part of language (langage). The passage cannot be understood otherwise. Writing as
a satori is antiphonocentric resonating with the general aim of deconstructive grammatology. The dialectical opposite of writing is not language but
speech. The Japanese translation of parole as kotoba (spoken word) is aware
171
of this fundamental distinction between language as speech and language as

writing. Moreover, deeply rooted in Chinese and Japanese thought is the tradition that the dialectical opposite of speech is not writing but rather silence
or the unsayable. There is, however, no glaring contradiction here because
writing is always a silent transgression of verbal acts. In the Zen tradition,
there is a diatactics of speech and silence: speech is the yang of silence, and
silence the yin of speech. Just as in John Cages compositional techniques
sound and silence are posed as complementary, Sontag considers silence not
as an incineration of consciousness but, on the contrary, as a pharmacon
for the pollution of language.20 Silence may be invoked as a copula, hyphen,
punctuation, or even rupture in the dialectical ow of human communication. As such its communicative value exceeds and surpasses that of empty
talk (parole vide).21 To Zen, as the tradition goes, silence is more suitable
than eloquence.
According to D. T. Suzuki, whose name in the West is synonymous with
Zen, Zens satori is realized in performance that may be (1) verbal (speaking) or (2) actional.22 In the rst place, since Zen is an everyday occurrence
in our social life, we need to communicate with one another through the
medium of language. Unlike the rules of linguistics as the science of language
(presumably including semiology), however, Suzuki insists that Zen verbalism is intuitive and experiential, that is, nonconceptual and lived. Cutting
through the conceptual or intellectual sedimentations, Zen attempts to reach
directly or immediately konomama (thisness) or sonomama (thatness)that
is, isness the attainment of which is called satori. Thus the attainment of
satori avoids conceptual detours. According to Barthes,
if this state of a-language is a liberation, it is because, for the Buddhist experiment, the proliferation of secondary thoughts (the
thought of thought), or what might be called the innite supplement of supernumerary signiedsa circle of which language
itself is the depository and the modelappears as a jamming: it is
on the contrary the abolition of secondary thought which breaks
the vicious innity of language. In all these experiments, apparently, it is not a matter of crushing language beneath the mystic
silence of the ineffable, but of measuring it, of halting that verbal
top which sweeps into the gyration the obsessional play of symbolic substitutions. In short, it is the symbol as semantic operation
which is attacked.23
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In the second place, satori is a moral emancipation, that is, moral fulllment
by doing that which is deeply Sinistic24 (i.e., both Confucian and Taoist).
Consider the famous Confucian idea of the rectication of names (cheng
ming) that is addressed to the performative power of speech in human conduct qua moral. The only way to bridge verbalism with moral fulllment
by doing is to regard speaking itself as the act of doing (i.e., the theory of
language both as speech acts and as moral acts). The Japanese as well as
the Chinese consider sincerityliterally meaning the completion of spoken wordsthe acme of moral virtue. Nishida Kitarothe greatest Japanese philosopher of the twentieth centuryregards intuition as the basis of
artistic creativity and moral conduct. Intuition rather than the intellect is the
lan vital of artistic and moral creativity. Mencius, too, considered intuitive knowledge (liang chih or, literally, good knowledge) as the basis of
everyday moral conduct. Culler is right, as noted earlier, that Barthess commentary on Japan as empire of signs is also an ethical one.
In the Japanese as well as the Chinese tradition, painting and writing are
inseparablethe fact of which has not failed Barthess own attention. In calligraphy, writing reaches the status of an art. In it, to inscribe is to paint.
As Guillaume Apollinaire painted his poetry as calligrammes, so does
the contemporary Japanese painter Hiro Kamimura exemplify an attempt to
synthesize painting with ideograms: his Water and Ice is a homonymous
blending of painting and writing. The Obaku sect of Zen excels in kanji
calligraphy, which approximates painting. Painting, moreover, is invariably
accompanied by ideographic inscriptions. Sumiye painting is an example of
how painting approaches writing.25 Japanese photocracythe craze for
pictogramsis too well known to elaborate. Barthess own 1970 painting
after the Italian futurism (which is used on the front cover jacket of the recent
American anthology A Barthes Reader edited by Susan Sontag) looks like
vertiginous Chinese calligraphy. His own handwritten French transcription
of a few Japanese expressions in Empire of Signs resembles calligraphy. Calligraphy may be characterized as a choreography of gestures. It is a ballet
of ideograms in rite orderto paraphrase Marshall McLuhan and Harley
Parkere.26 When sinograms, such as Picassos painted Swimmer (1929) and
Acrobat (1930), are calligraphed as the human body in motion, they turned
into a kinaesthetic art. In this sense, we are compelled to agree with the British philosopher R. G. Collingwood, who perceptively comments that insofar
as language is a specialized form of human gesture, the dance is the mother
of all languages.27
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Haiku is a polyglot
La Vieille mare:
Une grenouille saut dedans:
Oh! le bruit de leau.
Furu ike ya!
Kawazu tobikomu,
Mizu no oto.
[The old pond:
A frog jumps in:
Oh! the sound of the water.]
Barthess unabated enthusiasm for haiku as the elixir of Japanese literature
indeed, all literaturecannot be doubted. S/Z, which was published in the
same year as Empire of Signs, should perhaps be read as Semiology/Zen
that celebrates the Japanese tradition.28 Each of the 561 lexias in S/Z, as noted
earlier by Leitch, is a haiku of criticism whose packaged notation equals a
cultivated bonsai. For Barthes, haiku is merely the literary branch of Zen.29
There is indeed a three-way interfusion of writing, Zen (satori), and haiku.
Barthes, too, notices the ineluctable blending of painting and haiku writing
in the following two examples. The rst is the picture of one cucumber and
two eggplants on a kakemono by an anonymous sixteenth-century author,
which is unfortunately omitted from the English translation. It is found in
the midst of Barthess discussion of haiku. The three vegetables symbolize or parallel three short lines of a haiku. The second is a more suggestive
and seductive example than the rst. It is the mushroom picking by the
eighteenth-century Japanese artist Yokoi: three raw mushrooms are pierced
through a wisp of straw above which is the following three-line haiku (pome
bref en trois vers):
Il se fait cupide
aussi, le regard baiss
sur les champignons
He becomes greedy
his eyes lowered
on the mushrooms
If rawness (crudit) is the kind of a oating signier, the painting and

the haiku are in the state of a sexual, chiasmic invagination. The kakemono
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signiesto use a mycophilial expressionthe bemushroomed state of

ekstasis: the symbolic, spiritual ight of the haiku and the pictured mushrooms from the body of the kakemono. This may explain why the composer
John Cage is interested in fusing Zen and mycology, that is, in ethnomycology. Be that as it may, Barthes goes on to ask (in handwriting) rhetorically
about the mushroom picking: Where does the writing begin? Where does
the painting begin? Set aside the rhetoricity of the questions, and one might
point out that they can be raised only by those for whom Chinese ideography
is an unknown art, although the pictured sketch of the three raw mushrooms
pierced through a straw resembles, and may thus be mistaken easily for, a
polygamous ideogram.
iii. critique of barthes semiological sinography

Empire of Signs is the testimonial of an itinerant pilgrimnot unlike the Zen
monk Hoshi who, too, travelled to China in the beginning of the Tang period
in search of Zen (satori)in search of semiological markings (shirushi) in all
things Japanese whose epicenter is writing (criture). For Barthes, we may
say, Japan was a semiological geisha house where the freeplay (asobi) of signs
takes place.30 Although Barthes succeeds in intellectual deprovincialization
and thus must be applauded for his intention and effort to overcome the conceptual sound barriers of Western narcissism, we cannot answer with certainty whether or not he succeeds in instituting an exogamous link between
semiology and Japanese culture. To be universally valid, his semiology as the
science of all signs must encompass different galaxies of markings of which
Japan is only one.
To discover Japan as the country of writing is not at all contrary to the affluent exhibition of the Japanese photocracy we have all come to know so very well
in recent yearsthe photocracy that, in an extended sense of the term, could
include photography, painting, dramaturgy, fashions, packaging, gastronomy,
and above all calligraphy. Empire of Signs is a belletrism of Japan at its best: as
Barthes himself admitted, he enjoyed writing it more than any other book. No
doubt the most revealing and original formulation of Barthess work is writing
is a satori. As Zen is the inner soul of Japanese culture, there is all the more reason the crivain Barthes is interested in haiku, which he views as the privileged
monument of Zen. The most signicant question is not how many cultural
trophies Barthes gathered but whether or not Empire of Signsthe ultimate
175
accolade of Japanese culture in the eye of a semiologistis the insemination

and dissemination of his semiology. Although every intellectual endeavor for a
savant is, to some extent, autobiographical and Barthess Empire of Signs is no
exception to this rule, one hopes that it is ideally a reciprocation, as in the spirit
of exchanging gifts, of the insemination (taking) of Zen and the dissemination
(giving) of his semiology.
The idea of writing as satori already involves a semiological strategy. By
strategy I mean a chosen set of calculated moves in order to win a conceptual game. Part of this strategy is the very selection of what signs are to
be taken as signicant indicators of Japanese culture. There is, however, a
serious problem in relating Zen and satori to semiology. It is in essence the
problem of reconciling the French cult of writing (criture) and the Japanese cult of inner tranquility, unless of course, writing like Zen calligraphy is
the carnal enjoyment (jouissance or asobi) of a person as a nonutilitarian
activity undertaken solely for serenity or what Martin Heidegger calls Gelassenheit, which has been identied as the common denominator of such Zen
specialists as Suzuki, Eugen Herrigel, and Karl von Drckheim. It is also the
clash between semiology as a conceptual, linguistic system and Zen as an
intuitive, actional experience, which is correlated with the question of the
unity or duality of the inner and the outer, depth and surface, the content and
the wrapping, gastronomic look and actual taste, and meaning and sign.31
The conception of writing as satori raises the unresolved paradox of Zen
as an inner awakening and writing as an outer expression. This paradox is
accentuated in Barthess Japan because structural semiology as a method of
cultural interpretation has a built-in conceptual propensity to disregard the
inner in favor of the outer or, in the case of Japan, to wrap Zen with semiology. Barthes is certainly not unaware of the problem when he denes the sign
as the union of the signier and the signied, and when he acknowledges
that Zen wages a war against the prevarication of meaning (sens) and that
the meaning of a sign is polygamous, not monogamous. John Sturrock thus
observes that In Japanese culture, or at any rate Barthes version of it, the
exterior of a thing is the thing, there is no informing but invisible agency
within. Japan is a country full of rich and intriguing signiers whose charm
is that they have no signieds.32
For Barthes, there is no inner soul or privileged center in Zens satori
because it is mu or the void, which is contradictory to dominant Western
metaphysics. The denial of the inner or depth in favor of the outer or surface may well be a conceptual trapping of structural semiology rather than
176
the understanding of Zen from within. Thus Sturrock speculates that the
opposition deep-set/ush is itself a Western not a Japanese one, and the Japanese might very well employ a different code in order to locate the Oriental
soul.33 There is always the latent danger of catching Zen with a semiological
net. It is for this reason that in his important article the Chinese philosopher
Chang Tung-sun identies Western reasoning with the logic of identity, while
Eastern reasoning with the logic of correlation, which is neither monistic,
nor dualistic, nor reductionistic.34 As clothing is to the body, so is the sign
to culture. As pure sentience without clothing, the body too cannot signify
or at least cannot signify sufficiently. By the same logic, culture cannot signify without signs as external markings (shirushi). However, a marking
is only an external indication, not a meaning. There is a famous saying by
the Chinese Taoist Chuang Tzu that words exist for meaning, and once the
meaning has been gotten, the words can be forgotten. Culture or language is
not like a white oniona subject of Bashos haiku of which Barthes seems
fondevery layer of which is a surface without an inner core or center. Even
in Zen there is mention of the mind of no-mind (mushin no shin). It may
very well be true that surface is as telling as depth, but in language the signier without the signied is babbling or doodling. Culture is like language: to
understand it, we must understand the diatactics of the subjective and the
objective without a facile reductionism. Cultural interpretation is the navigation of the stormy channel between the Scylla of subjectivity and the Charybdis of objectivity.
What is lacking in Barthess structural semiology as a method of cultural
interpretation, therefore, is, and is compensated by, a phenomenology of
lived experience (lexprience vcu) or the lifeworld (le monde vcu: Lebenswelt). In Barthess case of Japan as the country of writing as well as Zen,
we need to hear Zens voice of invisibility as a prerequisite to see its visible surface. There is a lesson to be learned from Ralph Ellisons invisible
man who struggles for his visibility by lighting up his basement with 1,369
light bulbs. The message to be gotten here is not to disregard the outer but
rather to encourage the dialectical coupling of the inner and the outer or the
invisible and the visible, that is, to abandon the facile monism, dualism, or
reductionism.35
Without the benet of a phenomenology of lived experience as the founding and funding matrix of all conceptualization, there is in cultural interpretation the ever-present danger of conceptual entrapment or the prevarication
of meaningespecially in the interpretation of a culture, including its own
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linguistic system, which is unfamiliar or dissimilar to the observers own.36

It is not to suggest go native or think Japanese here but only to intimate that a phenomenology of lived experience is the prerequisite for any
cultural interpretation. Cultural interpretation is necessarily an echo of the
original voice of culture as a network of intersubjective meaningsthose
meanings that are not just in the minds of the individual actors but rooted
in their social and institutional practices including their language. More signicantly, to ignore a network of intersubjective meanings is to openoften
inadvertentlythe safety valve, as it were, that prevents the spillage of ethnocentrism or, as Barthes himself calls it, Western narcissism.37 To attend to
intersubjective meanings is to respect a local turn of mind and not to miss the
cultural contextualization of indigenous signiers. Barthes himself observes
that in the Occident the mirror is a narcissistic object for man to look at himself, whereas in the Orient it is empty and symbolizes the emptiness (ku or le
vide) of all symbols. To be enlightened or to attain a satori, Barthess writing on Japan must be emptied of the preemptive strategies of his semiology.
To deconstruct (phenomenologically) Barthess Empire of Signs is simply to
trace the presence of semiological reection in the mirror of his Japan.
There is no intimation here that Barthes is an ethnocentrist. Nor is it
implied that his understanding of Japanese culture is shallow or supercial.
What is pointed out is simply the potential danger of the categorial grid of
structural semiology or, for that matter, any conceptual system that ignores
consciously or unconsciously a system of intersubjective meanings. Barthes
himself noted that in Japan sex is in sexuality, not anywhere else. This observation assumes, to be sure, the knowledge of the inner working of sexuality
in Japan. Parallel to the problematic of the content of wrapping is Kabukis
onnagata, which is in actuality the male actor playing the staged role of the
female (i.e., the transvestite actor). Without knowing the inner working of
Kabuki, here again, he might be easily mistaken for an actress. Let us make
no mistake: a mask is never a real face, although the former tells on occasion a lot about the latter. Moreover, there is nothing wrong with the good
looks of often decorous gastronomic Japanese dishes pleasing to our (hungry) eye, but they do not always or necessarily guarantee good taste. Taste,
good or bad, is to be known only in the eating.38 In brief, when chained to
the categorial grid of structural semiology, cultural interpretation courts conceptual reication, that is to say, falsication. As, in Zen, the written is only
a copy or translation of something original or real, to textualize the real is
to fabricate it or, at best, to reduce it to a confessional autobiography or a
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cultural narcissism. In the Japanese language, not in its written but only its
spoken form, there is the triple, playful distinction between hashi-ga (chopsticks), haSHI-ga (bridge), haSHI-GA (edge). To wit, with the slightest slip
(lapsus) of the tonguenot a pen or brushone can stand at the bridge of
understanding or at the edge of misunderstanding, or when one means to
ask for a pair of chopsticks at the gastronomic table, he may end up with
getting a bridge! After having said all this, it is not altogether impossible
for anyone to have missed or been off-side (hors jeu) in the staging of the
Bunraku or Kabuki of Barthess semiology in Empire of Signs, that is, the real
semiological face or character behind the mask.39 In that case, he can confess
that at least he enjoyed a brief geisha asobi (disciplined, not promiscuous,
playfulness) of and in Barthess house of signs without perhaps knowing
its inner workings. By so doing he supplements the Nietzschean freeplay for
truth. Ultimately, perhaps we are all playing the labyrinthine game of truthtelling in the Rashomon. As the poem of the thirteenth-century Chinese
Master Mumom reads,
Gateless is the Great Tao,
There are thousands of ways to it.
If you pass through this barrier,
You may walk freely in the universe.40
CHAPTER 11
revolutionary dialectics
mao tse - tung and mauri ce m erl eau- p ont y
The healthy man is not so much the one who has

eliminated his contradictions as the one who makes
use of them and drags them into his vital labors.
i. introductory remarks
We have previously argued that phenomenological hermeneutics is best suited
for understanding Maoism as the Sinicization of Marxism and proposed that
there is a nonreductionist way of treating phenomenology, psychoanalysis,
and Marxism as complementary approaches to the interpretation of cultures. We have also alluded to the fact that Maos integral thought and the
existential phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, when focused on their notion
of the dialectic, not only are complementary, but also contain strikingly
homologous arguments on crucial issues.1 Not only are Mao and MerleauPonty dovetailed, but the latters theoretical thrust also throws into relief the
role of Maoism in the development of Marxism. The aim of our present
study is to explore further why this is the case.
ii. merleau-pontys marxism and maos

sinicization of western marxism
What is the basis of our comparison of Mao and Merleau-Ponty? To be sure,
our comparison is not prompted by ones comment on the other. For, as far
180
as we know, Merleau-Ponty never mentioned Mao. It is simply trite to begin

our comparison by saying that Marxism is an integral texture of the thought
of both men. Yet Maoism as the Sinicized form of Marxism and MerleauPontys interpretation of Marxism as a humanismboth with an emphasis
on the dialecticprompt us to compare them and point to their convergences, despite their differences, on the critical issues of man, history, and society. For Merleau-Ponty in particular, Marxism as a humanistic sociopolitical
philosophy is not just an interlude in his philosophical reections. On the
contrary, it constitutes the very body of his work. That is why allusions to
Marxism appear even at the most strictly philosophical moments of MerleauPontys thoughtfrom Phenomenology of Perception to The Visible and the
Invisible.2 Therefore, it would be as mistaken to separate Merleau-Ponty
the phenomenologist from the Marxian interpreter as it would be wrong
to separate Mao the Chinese from the Marxist. Nor is it sufficient to say
that Merleau-Ponty is a man of thought whereas Mao is the man of action,
because for Merleau-Ponty Marxism is a humanistic critique of history in a
comprehensive sense; the two orders of thought and action intersect at every
point. Moreover, if we regard philosophy as requiring only scholastic rigor
and conceptual exactitude, then Mao and Merleau-Ponty are a world apart.
However, if we regard philosophy as a contribution to the clarication of
the human conditionas does Merleau-Pontythen Maoism is profoundly
philosophical. For Merleau-Ponty, as his close friend Claude Lefort remarks,
Marxism was never simply an object of study. 3 Conversely, for Mao revolutionary praxis always requires revolutionary theory, and the latter precedes
the former.
Mao aims to Sinicize Marxism. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty aims to integrate
it into his existential phenomenology. Although the latters enthusiasm for
Marxism in Humanism and Terror (1947) became somewhat mellowed in
Adventures of the Dialectic (1955),4 this applies not so much to the humanistic fundamentals of Marxism as to their disgured application in Soviet politics. In Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty contends that the decline of
proletarian humanism does not invalidate the whole of Marxism. Marxism is
still valid as a critique of the present world and as an alternative humanism:
In this respect, at least, it cannot be surpassed.... It is the simple statement
of those conditions without which there would be neither any humanism, in
the sense of the mutual relation between men, nor any rationality in history.
In this sense Marxism is not philosophy of history; it is the philosophy of
history and to renounce it is to dig the grave of Reason in history. After that
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there can be no more dreams or adventures.5 For Merleau-Ponty, there is

basically no real difference between the existential and the Marxian conception of history. Marxism is a humanism if by humanism we mean a philosophy which confronts the relationship of man to man and the constitution of
a common situation and a common history between men as a problem.6
Humanism is nothing but a clarication of the intertwining network of the
relationships of man with man, which Merleau-Ponty calls interexistence
(intermonde)we prefer interexistence to coexistence because, unlike
the latters passive toleration of the plurality of subjects, the former affirms
the active urgency of subjects existing together in the world. As MerleauPonty declares, [A] political task is not incompatible with any cultural value
or literary task, if literature and culture are dened as the progressive awareness of our multiple relationships with other people and the world rather
than as extramundane techniques. If all truths are told, none will have to be
hidden. In mans co-existence with men, of which these years have made us
aware, morals, doctrines, thoughts and customs, laws, works and words all
express each other; everything signies everything. And outside this unique
fulguration of existence there is nothing.7 So for Merleau-Ponty, interexistence is not the arrangement where the self exists with the other side or in
mutual tolerance but is incarnate intersubjectivityto the theme of which
we shall later return.
Now, the only reference to Chinese Marxism we nd in Merleau-Pontys
writings is his one-paragraph observation on Andr Malrauxs sympathetic account of the early stage of the Chinese Revolution in La Condition
humaine where, according to Merleau-Ponty, a Marxist-like Kyo confronts
the question of both will and fatality that lies at the heart of Marxism; that
is, the question whether the individual, because of historical contingency
and the ambiguity of the future, should become a victim of collective events
or channel them into a desired direction in exercising his or her freedom.
Merleau-Ponty says that if we are dealing only with the facts of the Chinese
revolutionary situation, the Chinese Communists are probably doomed and
the Kuomintang will become victorious. Since one can be sure of facts only
after giving up the attempt to change them, Merleau-Ponty queries, Is it
not the moment to bring decisive aid to the Communists, thereby forcing
historys hand?8
There are other indications of why Merleau-Ponty would be sympathetic
to Maoism. In the rst place, he would approve of Maoism as the Sinicized
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form of Marxism not only because for him Marxism allows historical vectors, situations, and creative variations but also because, as he says,
To be a Marxist is not to renounce all differences, to give up ones
identity as a Frenchman, native of Tours or Paris, or to forego individually in order to blend into the world proletariat. It is indeed to
become part of the universal, but without ceasing to be what we
are. Even in a Marxist perspective the world proletariat is not a revolutionary factor so long as it only exists objectively, in economic
analysis. It will become such a factor when it realizes that it is a
world proletariat, and this will only happen through the concerted
pressure or a meeting at the crossroads of actual proletarians, such
as they exist in the different countries, and not through an ascetic
internationalism wherein each of them loses his most compelling
reasons for being a Marxist.9
Similarly, Mao speaks of concrete Marxism in contrast to abstract Marxism. For Marxism in China to be concrete means that it must be adapted to
the peculiar, indigenous character and situation of China (i.e., the Sinicization of Marxism).10
In the second place, for Merleau-Ponty humanism is not an abstract moralism. He would justify Maos politics in the same way he does Machiavellis
politics, which comprehend the extreme difficulties of collective life and, to
be effective, refuse to reduce politics to abstract moralism or a heaven of principles. For, according to Merleau-Ponty, pure morality can be cruel and pure
politics may work like a morality. There is a way of upholding Machiavelli
that is not Machiavellian as there is a way of repudiating Machiavelli that is
Machiavellian. To be a humanist or an effective humanist, one does not have
to choose between the ethics of conscience and the ethics of consequences,
that is, between the abstract moralism of ones conscience, which cherishes
the unconditional adherence to ends intended regardless of consequences
they may bring about, and the ethics, which judges action purely according to
its consequences, no matter what its intentions may be. For Merleau-Ponty, a
policy cannot be justied in terms of its good or barbarous intentions alone.
Nor is any policy that succeeds good: The curse of politics is precisely that
it must translate values into the order of facts.... A policy therefore cannot
be grounded in principle, it must also comprehend the facts of the situation.
It was said long ago that politics is the art of the possible.11 Viewed in this
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way, the dominant idea of MarxismMaoism notwithstandingis not the

sacrice of values to facts, of morality to realism; rather, it is the idea of
replacing the verbal morality which preceded the revolution with an effective
morality, creating a society in which morality is truly moral, and destroying
the morality that exists, dreamlike, outside the world, by realizing it in effective human relationships.12 So effective politics rejects only abstract moralism, which is ultimately detrimental to humanity. In enhancing humanity,
effective politics is a judicious reconciliation of values and facts. By the same
token, the moralistic politics, which renounces violence in any form fails to
come to terms with the role of violence in all forms of politicsrevolutionary
or established. For Merleau-Ponty, our choice is not between the presence and
absence of violence but is between justiable (progressive) and unjustiable
(regressive) forms of violence.13 For inasmuch as we are incarnate beings, violence is inescapable: not only is violence the common origin of all regimes,
but political choice also occurs only against a background of violence.14
It is instructive for our purpose to elaborate on the openness of MerleauPontys views regarding Oriental thoughtboth Chinese and Indian. What
interests us in his discussion on Oriental thought is not to test his knowledge of it but to contrast it with Hegels and Husserls commentaries. For
Merleau-Ponty, Oriental thought is immensely interesting, suggestive,
and instructive. As he rightly recounts, Hegel viewed Oriental thought in a
cavalier fashionthat, by the way, Marx himself inherited when he refers to
an Asiatic mode of production that is not yet mature for a Marxist revolution. Oriental thought for Hegel is a state of immature childhood. It is neither
philosophy nor religion, since on the one hand, it is not open to absolute and
universal knowledge, its culture being bound by its own assumptions, and
on the other hand it does not presuppose the principle of freedom and individuality. For Hegel, philosophical truth as absolute and universal knowledge
is certied by the Occidental seal of approval alone. The Oriental represents
the perpetuation of the eternal yesterday; Oriental thought is a philosophical
infantilism or paleography in the progression of world history.15
Husserl too seems to set out on Hegels path in his judgment of Oriental
thought by affirming the privileged position of Western philosophythe entelechy of philosophy and humanity based on Greek theoria, which is absent
in Oriental thought. Husserl traces the origin of (Western) philosophy in the
theoretical attitude called theoria found in the thought of Plato and Aristotle.
Devoid of any practical interest, theoria is the fully disinterested way of seeing the world. As he put it in his Vienna Lecture of 1935, Within European
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civilization, philosophy has constantly to exercise its function as one which is

archontic for the civilization as a whole.16 Man, he continued, becomes
gripped by the passion of a world-view and world-knowledge that turns away
from all practical interests and, within the closed sphere of its cognitive activity, in the times devoted to it, strives for and achieves nothing but pure theoria. In other words, man becomes a non-participating spectator, surveyor of
the world; he becomes a philosopher; or rather, from this point on his life
becomes receptive to motivations which are possible only in this attitude,
motivations for new sorts of goals for thought and methods through which,
nally, philosophy comes to be and he becomes a philosopher.17 Later, Husserl spoke of the test of European humanity bearing within itself an absolute
idea by means of a universal philosophy which grows through consistent
apodictic insight and supplies its own norms through an apodictic method
rather than merely being an empirical anthropological type like China or
India.18 Although the common features between Oriental thought and Greek
philosophy are evident, for Husserl the essential distinction lies in the fact
that the purely theoretical attitude has its historical origin in the Greeks, and
the perfecting of that attitude has become the innite task of the successive
generations of Western inquirers.19
For Merleau-Ponty, however, there is a fundamental difference between
Hegel and Husserl in their respective views of Oriental thought. Even if Husserl, like Hegel, retains the privileged position of Western philosophy, he
does so not by virtue of its right to itas if its possession of the principles
of all possible cultures were absolutely evidentbut in the name of a fact,
and in order to assign a task to it.20 That is to say, for Husserl the privileged
position of Western philosophy is not simply proclaimed but must be proven
and witnessed.
For Merleau-Ponty, moreover, all thought is part of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) as a sociocultural world; all philosophies are anthropological types
and none has any special right to the monopoly of truth. Husserl admitted
the value of primitive cultures for an understanding of our own type of the
lifeworld and the meaning of the lifeworld as the invariant form of generality.
If Western thought is what it claims to be, Merleau-Ponty says, it must
prove it by understanding all life-worlds.21
For Merleau-Ponty, the arrogant path of Hegel that excludes Oriental
thought from absolute and universal knowledge and draws a geographical
frontier between philosophy and non-philosophy also excludes a good part of
the Western past. Philosophy as a perpetual beginning is destined to examine its
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own idea of truth again and again because truth is a treasure scattered about
in human life prior to all philosophy and not divided among doctrines.22 Thus
the lifeworldand its different versions both Occidental and Orientalis the
source from which truth emerges. If so, Western philosophy is destined to reexamine not only its own idea of truth but also related matters and institutions
such as science and capitalism. Merleau-Ponty declares,
search of truth or salvation in what falls short of science or philosophical awareness, or of dragging chunks of mythology as such into
our philosophy, but of acquiringin the presence of these variants
of humanity that we are so far froma sense of the theoretical and
practical problems our institutions are faced with, and of rediscovering the existential eld that they were born in and that their long
success has led us to forget. The Orients childishness has something to teach us, if it were nothing more than the narrowness of our
adult ideas. The relationship between Orient and Occident, like that
between child and adult, is not that of ignorance to knowledge or
non-philosophy to philosophy; it is much more subtle, making room
on the part of the Orient for all anticipations and prematurations.
Simply rallying and subordinating non-philosophy to true philosophy will not create the unity of the human spirit. It already exists
in each cultures lateral relationships to the others, in the echoes one
awakes in the other.23
In search of truth nothing should be taken for granted or prejudged. It is just
here that Merleau-Ponty makes a decisive break with Hegel. As childhood
and adulthood are one inseparable ontological order of man, so are Oriental
and Occidental cultures one integral order of humanity that together point
to philosophical universality. For we learn as much from primitive cultures
as from modern cultures regarding the human condition. Merleau-Ponty
declares that There is not a philosophy which contains all philosophies; philosophy as a whole is at certain moments in each philosophy. To take up the
celebrated phrase again philosophys center is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.24
In the nal analysis, for Merleau-Ponty the Orient must also have a place
in the museum of philosophies to celebrate its hitherto secret, muted
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contribution to philosophy. He writes, Indian and Chinese philosophies

have tried not so much to dominate existence as to be the echo or the sounding board of our relationship to being. Western philosophy can learn from
them to rediscover the relationship to being and initial option which gave
it birth, and to estimate the possibilities we have shut ourselves off from in
becoming Westerners and perhaps reopen them.25 In this spirit, then, we
shall judge the contribution of Maoism to the development of Marxism and
compare it with Merleau-Pontys thought.
iii. maos sinicized marxism and merleaupontys phenomenology compared

Dialectical thought has its modern origin in Hegel. It is the most important
connecting link between Marx, Merleau-Ponty, and Mao. As creative interpreters of history, however, they do not simply repeat what has preceded them but
expand and change (i.e., revise) it in the light of historical circumstances and
integrate it into their own mode of thinkingespecially the revision of Marxs
materialism in Merleau-Ponty and Mao. In the following pages, we shall rst
discuss the Marxian dialectic, examine how Merleau-Ponty and Mao adapt it
to their own patterns of thinking, and then analyze the dialectic of thought and
action based on the primacy of perception in Merleau-Ponty and Mao.
We must immediately note that Marx clearly indicates his opposition to
the Hegelian dialectic in the Grundrisse. Although neither Mao nor MerleauPonty studied the Grundrisse, they come to a similar conclusion per accidens concerning the nature of the (Marxian) dialectic. Marx is, of course,
critical of Hegels identication of the real with that which is thought or
conceptualized, that is, Hegel was wrong when he conceived the real as the
product of thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself out of itself by itself.26 In the second place, Marx speaks of his
(materialistic) dialectic as a conditional mediation rather than the immediate, absolute, and inevitable identity of opposites.27 Speaking of the dialectic
of production and consumption (and distribution and exchange), Marx says
that they are dialectical not because they are identical but because they all
form the members of totality, distinctions within a unity.28 Then he remarks
that nothing [is] simpler for a Hegelian than to posit production and consumption as identical.29 However, production and consumption are two
inseparable but distinguishablethat is, irreducible to each othermoments
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of the economic process as a whole. The dialectic is the way of determining

their boundaries without suspending their real differences. Marx thus writes
that Without production, no consumption; but also, without consumption,
no production; since production would then be purposeless. Consumption
produces production in a double way, (1) because a product becomes a real
product only by being consumed... [and] (2) because consumption creates
the need for new production, that is, it creates the ideal, internally impelling
cause for production, which is its presupposition.30
The most astute student of Maos political thought, Stuart R. Schram,
asserts that the originality of Maoism lies in its rejection of the HegelianMarxian dialectic.31 For us, however, it is the rejection of the Hegelian dialectic
rather than the Marxian dialectic that is decisive and important in Maos conception of contradiction. For Mao, the dialectic is no longer a progressive
series of resolutions of two mutually opposing elements of reality where the
affirmation and the negation result in the negation of the negation, that is, in
a higher affirmation. In one of his two most important philosophical writings,
On Contradiction (August 1937) and the other being On Practice, July
1937, Mao denes the basis of the dialectic not as the resolved identity of two
opposing elements but rather as their perpetual complementarity. Contradiction, he writes, is universal and absolute, it is present in the process of development of all things and permeates every process from beginning to end.32
The struggle of opposites is ceaseless and continues even when they coexist
and transform each other. Thus Maos dialectic reects the old Chinese cosmological principle of the complementarity of the yin (negative) and the yang
(positive) in the working of the cosmos. We Chinese often say, he remarks,
things that oppose each other also complement each other.33 The dialectic is
identity as the asymmetric unity of differences. According to Mao who echoes
the anti-Hegelian, Marxian dialectic of the Grundrisse,
Without life, there would be no death; without death, there would
be no life.
Without above, there would be no below; without below,
there would be no above;
Without misfortune, there would be no good fortune; without
good fortune, there would be no misfortune. Without facility, there
would be no difficulty; without difficulty, there would be no facility. Without landlords, there would be no tenant-peasants; without tenant-peasants, there would be no landlords. Without the
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bourgeoisie, there would be no proletariat; without the proletariat,

there would be no bourgeoisie. Without imperialist oppression of
nations, there would be no colonies or semi-colonies; without colonies or semi-colonies, there would be no imperialist oppression of
nations. It is so with all opposites; in given conditions, on the one
hand they are opposed to each other, and on the other they are interconnected, interpenetrating, interpermeating and interdependent,
and this character is described as identity.34
In this sense, for Mao all human relationships are characterized as contradictions; contradictions are ubiquitous, without them there would be no life, no
history, and no world; they reveal the interconnectedness of two opposing
elements in the natural rhythm of life, reality, and truth.
This dialectic and the related notion of ambiguity go hand in hand
throughout the writings of Merleau-Ponty. In linking the two, we may even
say that the ultimate ambiguityor perhaps magicof the dialectic is that
it contains within itself a dialectical dimension.35 Ambiguity for MerleauPonty is the way of characterizing the irreducibly open horizon of the human
condition, that is, the thickness, density, and transparency of mans
existence, history, and world.36 We may say that for Merleau-Ponty ambiguity
is an existential or ontological theme, whereas the dialectic is a conceptual
theme. To say that human existence is ambiguous is to say that everything in
history has a set of named multiple meanings. The (preconceptual) sense of
life, history, and world has no single meaning but a multiplicity of meanings.37
A world is an organized ensemble; it is multidimensional. It follows that
Merleau-Ponty is interested in replacing the notions of concept, idea,
mind, and representation with the notions of dimension, articulation, level, hinges, pivots, and conguration. 38 In the second place,
human existence is incomplete, unnished, conditional, and always tentative: it is in sum a task to be accomplished. For the world itself is not what
I think, but what I live through. I am open to the world, I have no doubt that
I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible.39
As a sociocultural world, it is already constituted for us contemporaries by
our predecessors, and yet it is never constituted as it will be passed on to
our successors. Ambiguity is the human condition that expresses neither a
skepticism that constantly doubts the existence of the world nor an absolute
dogmatism that merely accepts the ready-made existence of the world. Correlatively, philosophy whose function is to reect on and clarify the meaning
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of prereective lifeworld is also never completeincluding its phenomenological dimension.

Along with the notion of human existence as ambiguity, the dialectic has
an important niche in Merleau-Pontys thought from The Structure of Behavior40 to Adventures of the Dialectic and The Visible and the Invisible. In The
Structure of Behavior, he speaks of the dialectics of the physical (physiology), the vital (biology), and the mental (psychology) that together make up
the whole structure of human behavior as a eld of meaning (i.e., the human
order). Dialectical thought here is opposed to reductionist, dichotomous,
and causal thinking (i.e., physicalism, biologism, and mentalism). Scientic
causality is necessarily reductionistic because in explaining the whole of the
human order it reduces it to a single factor without recognizing the complex
complementarity of the two or more factors that are necessary to make up
a whole (Gestalt). In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty declares
that The dialectic is not a relationship between contradictory and inseparable thoughts; it is the tending of an existence towards another existence
which denies it, and yet without which it is not sustained.41 In reference to
the dialectical conception of history in Adventures of the Dialectic, he also
speaks of a unity rich in nal convergence and not a unity by reduction to
a single order of reality or a single genetic schema.42 Thus the dialectic is
the complicity of two opposing principles. It is an interplay of points and
counterpoints: the visible and the invisible, speech and silence, the subjective and the objective, the true and the false, the human and the natural,
the self and the other, consciousness and history, the individual and society, thought and action, and so on. These paired principles are not divided
into two separate areas. They are interdependent, though mutually distinguishable. In rediscovering its birth certicate and its origins in history,
Merleau-Ponty writes, consciousness perhaps thought it had found a guide
to rely on, but now it is consciousness which must guide the guide. The two
relationshipsconsciousness as a product of history, history as a product of
consciousnessmust be maintained together. Marx unites them in making
consciousness, not the source of social being, not the reection of an external
social being, but a singular sphere where all is false and all is true, where the
false is true as false and the true is false as true.43 Ultimately, for MerleauPonty, phenomenology as a philosophical movement also works like the
dialectic because it affirms the complicity (complementarity) of the conventional pairs of dichotomous or opposing principles such as subjectivism and
objectivism, intellectualism and empiricism, individualism and sociologism
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(or structuralism), spiritualism and materialism (or behaviorism), skepticism

and dogmatism, absolutism and relativism, determinism and indeterminism,
and so on. Sociality or intersubjectivity, for example, may be described as the
dialectic of the self and the other that make up a whole without reducing one
to the other: it is an ongoing complicity of the self and the other. As can be
shown in the works of Frantz Fanon and Paulo Freire, who speak the same
radical language one nds in Mao, there is the dialectical complicity between
the oppressor and the oppressed in which the liberation of the latter inevitably entails that of the former. This is possible because of the inherence of
intersubjectivity as the complicity of the self and the otherin this case, the
oppressor and the oppressed.44
We shall now turn to the affinity between Marx (as opposed to Hegel)
and Merleau-Ponty on the question of the dialectic of man and history. In
his Letter on Humanism (1947), Heidegger claimed that Marx, with the
help of Hegel, was able to recognize both the alienation and homelessness
of modern man and that in so doing he reached into an essential depth of
history. As a result, the Marxist view of history excels all other history.45
Heidegger further maintains that neither the phenomenology of Husserl nor
the existentialism of Sartre was capable of reaching the historical depth of
Being and could not, therefore, engage in a fruitful dialogue with Marxism.
Without lingering on Heideggers observation, which is decient, it should
be pointed out that he failed to notice the existential phenomenology of
Merleau-Ponty, which is capable of carrying out a dialogue with Marxism,
without any dichotomous conict between the existential (or phenomenological) and the Marxian conception of man and history.
In the Inaugural Lecture he delivered at the Collge de France in 1953,
loge de la philosophie, Merleau-Ponty summarizes concisely his views of
history in relation to philosophy and decisively takes the side of Marx (and
Kierkegaard) against Hegel.46 According to Merleau-Ponty, Hegels philosophy of the absolute, which reduces history to the conceptualization of
universals, is incapable of grasping actual history: The universal history of
Hegel is the dream of history. As in our dreams, all that is thought is real,
and all that is real is thought. There is nothing at all for men to do who
are not already taken up in the system.47 In the mode of Alexandre Kojve
and Jean Hyppolite, Merleau-Ponty is of course fully aware of the existential dimensions of Hegelthe Hegel of The Phenomenology of Spirit who
discusses the dialectic of the master and the slave and speaks of unhappy
consciousness, a consciousness not in full possession of itself. Such a state
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of being in the midst of struggling to understand itself as immanent in history is precisely what Kierkegaard and Marx shared with each other as critics
of Hegel.48 Nonetheless, it is Marx as a critic of Hegel who captures the heart
of Merleau-Pontys thought.49 For the Marxian dialectic, real history is not
reduced to philosophy as identity. The novelty of Marx as a critic of Hegel,
according to Merleau-Ponty, is not to identify the mover of history with
human productivity, nor to interpret philosophy as a reection of historical
movement, but rather to denounce the trick by which the philosopher slips
the system into history in order then to recover it and to reaffirm its omnipotence precisely at the moment when he seemed to give it up.50 Marx decisively refuted the Hegelian speculative arrogance that presumed to certify the
birthright of concrete history. For Marx, Merleau-Ponty writes, history is
not merely the order of fact or of reality on which philosophy, with its rationality, will confer the right to exist. History is rather the situation in which
all meanings are deepened, and in particular the conceptual meanings of philosophy, insofar as they are legitimate. What Marx calls praxis is the meaning
which works itself out spontaneously in the intercrossing of those activities
by which man organizes his relations with nature and with other men.51 It is
this dialectical mode of Merleau-Pontys thought, recognizing the complicity of the self and the other, that is in collision with Sartres ontology; the
latter dichotomizes and insulates the two in the name of the Hegelian categories. Merleau-Pontys opposition to Sartre is continuous from Phenomenology of Perception to Adventures of the Dialectic and The Visible and
the Invisible.52 There is a dialectical interplay between the pour-soi and the
en-soi; they are never sealed off from each other. For Merleau-Ponty, as long
as man has a body, as long as he is a laboring and fabricating animal, he is
not insulated from nature, although his existence cannot be reduced to his
natural, economic, or productive activities. In Sartre, he writes, there can
be no dialectic between the being which is wholly positive and nothingness
which is not. What takes its place is a sort of sacrice of nothingness which
devotes itself entirely to the manifestation of being and negates absolutely
the absolute negation that it is itself. Being at once mater and servant, negation and negated, the negative is equivocal in principle: its loyalty is a refusal,
its refusal a loyalty.53
Like the humanism of Marx, Merleau-Pontys humanism is the affirmation of man as (1) the responsible subject of history and (2) the social being,
the ensemble of social relations, or species-being (Gattungswesen).54 The
target of Merleau-Pontys dialectical critique is Sartres spiritualism and
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individualism of the pure consciousness affirming absolute freedom as the

negation of nature. Nor is Merleau-Pontys critique an affirmation of materialism or sociologismthe alleged opposites of spiritualism and individualism. For him, such extreme pairs are undialectical because they are equally
one-sided. He declares that there is history only for a subject who lives
through it, and a subject only insofar as he is historically situated. There
is no one meaning of history; what we do has always several meanings, and
this is where an existential conception of history is distinguishable from
materialism and from spiritualism.55 What he calls the existential conception of history coincides with his expanded interpretation of Marxism. For
Merleau-Ponty, Marxism conceived merely as materialism is one-sided and
therefore as false as the psychoanalytic reduction of the human order to its
sexual component. This does not of course impugn the importance of the
economic and the sexual in the human order. The economic and the sexual
are human by signicance because they are closed systems but are enmeshed
in the network of relationships called the intermonde or interexistence.
Sartre correctly opposes an inevitable solipsism resulting from Cartesian substantialism, which denes persons as thinking substances (res
cogitans).56 To be sure, Sartres phenomenological ontology escapes the
solipsism of substantialism. However, according to Merleau-Ponty, the recognition by Sartre of a plurality of (independent) subjects falls far short of establishing the world of intersubjectivity or interexistence, since interexistence is
not a passive toleration of individual difference but an active recognition of
Mitsein (Being-with). That is, neither self nor other is sovereign, but they are
coextensive with each other. Interexistence is the active intersection of two
or more subjectivities wherein a genuine reciprocity takes place, that is, the
self and the otheror, for that matter, the worldis reversible. We are not
islets but are together inscribed in the world. Thus Merleau-Ponty declares
that in Sartre there is a plurality of subjects but no intersubjectivity.... The
world and history are no longer a system with several points of entry but a
sheaf of irreconcilable perspectives which never coexist and which are held
together only by the hopeless heroism of the I.57 Nor is Merleau-Pontys
intersubjective world justas Hegel would have itthe world of conceived
relationships. On the contrary, it is the world in which people in their concrete and intercorporeal relationships go about their daily activities prior to
any conceptualization. Concrete, lived history as the embodiment of interconnected situations is not inscribed in the abstract books of philosophy;
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history when concretely viewed is an open notebook in which acts and events
are yet to be written.
As opposed to Hegels inverted form of concrete history, therefore,
Merleau-Ponty states, History has no meaning, if this meaning is understood as that of a river which, under the inuence of all-powerful causes,
ows towards an ocean in which it disappears. Every appeal to universal
history cuts off the meaning of the specic event, renders effective history
insignicant, and is a nihilism in disguise.58 Historical meaning is neither
an idea (spiritualism or absolute voluntarism) nor a thing (vulgar or
mechanistic materialism). This is why Merleau-Ponty is Marxian, rather
than Hegelian in affirming an effective humanismembracing effective history, politics, morality, and effective freedomwhich must oppose itself to
abstract humanism. (For Mao, too, universality without particularity is am
empty abstraction. The former depends on and is conditioned by the latter.)
We see the working of Merleau-Pontys dialectical thought clearly in his discussion of effective freedom as opposed to Sartres thesis of absolute freedom
as the pure project of the pour-soi, the negation of the en-soi. For MerleauPonty, the issue of effective freedom is not the dichotomy of freedom (spirit)
and necessity (matter). Nor is the existential conception of history opposed
to the Marxian version of it because (true) Marxism is not a philosophy of
necessity based on the primacy of matter over spirit. On the contrary, Marxism dissociates the rationality of history from any idea of necessity. Rationality
is necessary neither in the sense of physical causality, in which the antecedents
determine the consequents, nor even in the sense of the necessity of a system, in
which the whole precedes and brings to existence what happens.59 Dialectical
thought does not pose man and nature or freedom and necessity in opposition.
Rather, dialectical thought demands a revision in the traditional controversy
between indeterminism and determinism: Man is a historical idea and not a
natural species. In other words, there is in human existence no unconditioned
possession, and yet no fortuitous attribute. Human existence will force us to
revise our usual notion of necessity and contingency, because it is the transformation of contingency into necessity by the act of carrying forward. All that
we are, we are on the basis of a de facto situation which we appropriate to
ourselves and which we ceaselessly transform by a sort of escape which is never
an unconditioned freedom.60 On the one hand, however, to say that freedom
is the recognition of necessity is to sacrice freedom at the altar of necessity in
which the possibility of a dialectical interplay between the two is lost. For while
freedom is conditioned by necessity, necessity is not conditioned in any way by
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freedom. On the other hand, the absolute freedom of the pour-soi that negates
nature (the en-soi) ends up with negating a part of man himself inasmuch as
man is a corporeal being, that is, a part of organic nature. Moreover, MerleauPonty contends that Sartres absolute freedom of the pour-soi is vacuous. To be
effective or meaningful, freedom is rst a mediation of rationality and nature.
Second, history is real history only if there is man who is its subject; and man is
the subject of history insofar as he is historically situated. The world is in part
constituted for us, but it is never completely constituted. Our freedom is limited by the fact that the world is already constituted by our predecessors and
that it is also inhabited by other people: man lives in an atmosphere of humanity. We are not hermetically sealed selves but live in the midst of other people
who are as indispensable for our existence as the natural elements. Effective
freedom means to work within these limitations and possibilities. Unchecked
or unsituated freedom is meaningless because meaning arises only from an
encounter between the self and a situation involving both natural and cultural
constraints; the ambiguity of the human condition makes it possible to accommodate the results of such an encounter.61 To be effective, freedom is neither
completely constituted facticity nor unlimited transcendence but is the choice
of one alternative among others on occasions of action.
History may also be viewed as the dialectical interchange of thought and
action. On the one hand, revolution as a form of praxis is never devoid of
thought or reection. As Paulo Freire observes, praxis is made of action
and reection. Thus praxis without reection is blind activism or adventurism, whereas praxis without action is empty verbalism.62 On the other
hand, philosophy is never a pure theoria; it is an integral part of history and
a special way of involving or situating oneself in the world. For MerleauPonty, however, there is an ambiguity in philosophy that oscillates between
attachment and detachment, between commitment and distanciation. Philosophys concern is to prevent detachment or distanciation from degenerating into indifference, which is the reason philosophy is distinguished
from science. To be meaningful everything must acquire a name in history;
and history is the keyboard of acquired meanings on which the music
of specic acts and events is played and replayed. To speak or name is to
perform; and to rectify speech or naming is to transform the world. When
we speak, we are performing; when we intend to rectify names, we intend
to transform the world. Freire declares that There is no true word that is
not at the same time a praxis. Thus, to speak a true word is to transform
the world.63
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Merleau-Ponty knows well the unhappy consciousness of the philosopher

as a dialectician. The dialectical tension between thought and action in history
is unfolded in that history does not walk on its head, but... it does not think
with its feet.64 The dialectic of thought and action is manifested in the fact
that Truth and action will never communicate if there are not, along with
those who act, those who observe them, who confront them with the truth of
their action, and who can aspire to replace them in power (italics added).65
As a modulation of interexistence, philosophy dwells or participates in life.
But, more than that, it wishes to become the center of life as well, that is, at
the heart of interhuman praxis. The philosopher knows, however, that he is
not a professional in action. In order for him truly to engage in truthnot in
actionhe must gain distance from the world of action. To speak of action
with rigor and authority is to say that he does not desire to act. This, according
to Merleau-Ponty, is the limping of philosophy, which is a deciency from the
standpoint of action but a virtue from the standpoint of thought.
For Merleau-Ponty, Marxism is never simply an object of study. It is concerned with the esh fold of concrete history, just as for Mao revolutionary
theory precedes revolutionary praxis. Complementary to the Marxist theory,
there lurks in the depth of the Chinese tradition the problem of the unity of
knowledge and action; the supreme virtue is viewed as making thought or saying words embodied in acts. From the most primitive Chinese formulations
to Mao, the unity of thought and action is expressed in the idea that knowledge is the beginning of action, and action the completion of knowledge. For
Mao, the materialist theory of knowledge claims that all knowledge depends
on immediate experience (in practice). And he cites an old Chinese proverb
saying, How can you catch tiger cubs without entering the tigers lair?66 In
On Practice, Mao summarizes his view: Discover the truth through practice, and again through practice verify and develop the truth. Start from perceptual knowledge and actively develop it into rational knowledge; then start
from rational knowledge and actively guide revolutionary practice to change
both the subjective and the objective world. Practice, knowledge, again practice, and again knowledge. This form repeats itself in endless cycles, and with
each cycle the content of practice and knowledge rises to a higher level. Such
is the whole of the dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge, and such is
the dialectical-materialist theory of the unity of knowing and doing.67
One of the most interesting aspects of our comparison of Mao with
Merleau-Ponty is the place of perception in the dialectic of thought and
action. The importance of perception in Merleau-Pontys thought is derived
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in large part from his interpretation of Husserls phenomenology of the lifeworld, whereas the importance of perception in Maos thought is imbedded
deeply in the tradition of Chinese culture and mentality. Insofar as action or
revolutionary praxis is in need of perception and insofar as politics constitutes the primary activity of man, there is a dynamic complicity between the
primacy of perception and that of politics.
For Merleau-Ponty, Marxism is basically a perception of history. Marx
himself spoke of man as a natural, sentient, and embodied being and of
perception as a form of labor or work. For Merleau-Ponty, however, perception is not yet a form of labor but the infrastructure that supports all human
activitiesthe activities of both thought and action. Thus all consciousness
self-consciousness notwithstandingis basically perceptual. Perception
summons us to the tasks of knowledge and action.68 Merleau-Pontys thesis of the primacy of perception is a claim neither for perceptions monopoly
of truth nor for denigrating reective rationality but for laying the foundation
for the certainty of thought and action: The perceived world is the always
presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence. This
thesis does not destroy either rationality or the absolute. It only tries to bring
them down to earth.69 As the presupposed foundation of all rationality, perception is not yet a science of the world. It is rather the background from
which all acts stand out, and is presupposed by them.70 The geography of all
acts, all rationality, presupposes the landscape of perception.
In this essay On Practice, Mao too speaks of perception in relation to
revolutionary thought and action. His emphasis on perception is not simply Marxian but deeply Chinese. What is uniquely Chineseincluding its
languageis marked by practicality, concreteness, and experientiality. If
philosophys conceptualization aims to harvest the fruits of human concrete
experience rather than to build its own conceptual castle, then Chinafor
that matter, the entire Orientis rich with experiential data. The ideographic or pictorial nature of the Chinese language embodies the Chinese
lifeworld. For language and the world are mutually implicated, and neither
has an independent life of its own.71 The Chinese language relies heavily if
not exclusively on sense perception. So the sixth-century Chinese thinker Yen
Chin-tui went so far as to say that what a man believes is only his ears and his
eyes. Everything else is to be doubted.72 Consistent with this deeply Chinese,
perceptual tradition, Mao considers the perceptual and conceptual as two
stages in the unied process of cognition or knowledge. According to him,
conceptual knowledge is both quantitatively and qualitatively different from
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perceptual knowledge. The reason rational knowledge is different from perceptual knowledge is that the former is knowledge of a thing or an event in its
entirety, its essence, and its internal relations, whereas the latter is knowledge
of a thing or an event in its individual aspects, its appearance, and its external
relations. Perception is the way of observing things, events, and other people
in their separate aspects (i.e., their external relations), whereas rational
knowledge is the way of knowing all aspects of them as a whole (i.e., their
internal relations). However, perception is without question primary in
that it is the very rst step in cognition, and the true task of cognition is to
arrive at thought or rational knowledge through perception.73 For cognition
without perception is like water without a source or a tree without roots.
Mao illustrates this by citing an old idea from the San Kuo Yen Yi (Tale of
the Three Kingdoms): knit your brows and a stratagem comes to mind.74
Although cognition depends on perception in knowing the world, perceptual
knowledge must be deepened, that is, elevated to the higher level of rational
knowledge. One who denies the dependence of cognition on perception is
called an idealist (or rationalist), whereas one who denies the existence
of rational knowledge is called an empiricist. The dialectical-materialist
theory of knowledge, according to Mao, refutes both idealism and empiricism. Rational knowledge, he writes, depends upon perceptual knowledge
and perceptual knowledge remains to be developed into rational knowledge
this is the dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge. In philosophy, neither
rationalism nor empiricism understands the historical or the dialectical
nature of knowledge, and although each of these schools contains one aspect
of the truth (here I am referring to materialist, not to idealist, rationalism and
empiricism), both are wrong on the theory of knowledge as a whole.75 For
Mao, both rationalism and empiricism are wrong because they are necessarily one-sided; that is, they are not capable of comprehending the dialectic of
perception and cognition. It seems remarkable that Maos critique of rationalism and empiricism in the name of dialectical materialism is similar to Merleau-Pontys critique of intellectualism and empiricism in the
name of phenomenology. Where empiricism was decient, Merleau-Ponty
contends, was in any internal connection between the object and the act
which it triggers off. What intellectualism lacks is contingency on the occasions of thought. In the rst case consciousness is too poor, in the second too
rich for any phenomenon to appeal compellingly to it. Empiricism cannot
see that we need to know what we are looking for, otherwise, we would not
be looking for it, and intellectualism fails to see that we need to be ignorant
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of what we are looking for, or equally again we should not be searching.76

In short, for both Merleau-Ponty and Mao, it is true that the dialectic of
thought and action walks on the feet of perceptual faith; however, it is also
true that it does not think on its feet.
For Merleau-Pontys phenomenology, perception and the body are inseparable since the body is not only the subject of perception but also an active
vehicle of our insertion in the world that is inhabited by other people through
the medium of their bodies in the midst of things both natural and cultural.
Intersubjectivity is necessarily an intercorporeity. Because the body is the
expressive medium of speech as social intercourse, Merleau-Ponty speaks of
singing the world, which can be reduced to neither nave onomatopoetic
theory nor mechanistic theory of phonetics. He says that in so far as, when I
reect on the essence of subjectivity, I nd it bound up with that of the body
and that of the world, this is because my existence as subjectivity is merely
one with my existence as a body and with the existence of the world, and
because the subject that I am, when taken concretely, is inseparable from this
body and this world. The ontological world and body which we nd at the
core of the subject are not the world or body as idea, but on the one hand
the world itself contracted into a comprehensive grasp, and on the other the
body itself as a knowing-body.77 Intercorporeity constitutes the fabric of the
world; phenomenal bodiesmine, yours, and theirs togetherintertwine
the esh of the social world.78
Mao, too, emphasizes perception as the primary stage of cognition that
is further completed in practice. This emphasis, as has already been intimated, is deeply Chinese, as well as Marxian. The language of Maos revolutionary praxis is the language of perception and the body, which is often
interspersed with the Chinese, indigenous anecdotes. His scatological lyricism, as is known to many Western observers of Maoism and Chinese politics with a psychoanalytical bent, has its root in the perceptual and bodily
nature of Chinese mentality itself. Thus to understand fully the language
of Maos revolutionary politics, we must rst understand this perceptual,
wild subtlety of the Chinese language and lifeworld. The Chinese express
abstractions in concrete and graphic imageries, metaphors, and analogies,
which Mao often equates with perception. This may be best shown from
the Chinese way of translating the texts of Buddhismthe texts of Chan
(Zen) Buddhism as the Sinicized form of Indian Buddhism. In Chan Buddhism, abstract ideas are often expressed in concrete images. Mans true
nature is original face and eye, the human body, stinking bag of skin,
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essence, the pupil of the eye, an itinerant monk, clouds and water,
perfection, round, the most perfect doctrine, the round doctrine,
and so on.9
iv. concluding remarks

For Mao, Marxism as dialectical materialism is the philosophy that acknowledges the importance of (1) the universality of contradiction and (2) revolutionary praxis where matter is not the totality of material things but is the
revolutionary will that triggers the radical transformation of society. Inasmuch
as the dialectic is the process of continual transformation in the interplay of
opposing elements, revolution as permanent is coextensive with the dialectic.
For Merleau-Ponty, too, the existential conception of history is distinguished
from both nave spiritualism and vulgar materialism. At the heart of Marxism
is an existential conception of man and history. To be sure, as history itself
is the interplay of the order of men and the order of things rather than pure
spirit or pure matter, the economic as a substructure of the human order has
a human signicance. The meaning of praxis emerges from the intersections
of those activities by which men organize their relations with other men and
with nature. If to existentialize Marxism is to revise it, then revision
or continual renewal is not contrary to the Marxian dialectic of thought and
action. On the contrary, it is indeed inscribed in it. In terms of the dialectic,
Merleau-Pontys theory justies Maos practice; that is, they complement each
other. In practice, the dialectic as continual renewal is inscribed in the notion
of revolution as permanent. As Merleau-Ponty himself stresses, the essential
thrust or fulguration of existence lies in the following idea: It is true neither
that my existence is in full possessin of itself, nor that it is entirely estranged
from itself, because it is action or doing and because action is, by denition,
the violent transition from what I have to what I aim to have, from what I am
to what I intend to be.80 Therefore, the project of action as violent transition
contains the possibility of radical transformation (by action)from facticity
to transcendence in individual consciousness that triggers transformation in
institutions. Consequently, by focusing on the notion of revolution as permanent, we shall now examine an interplay between Merleau-Pontys theory and
Maos practice in the context of Marxism.
To acknowledge the core of Marxism as revolutionary praxis is to admit
rst of all the existential primacy of politics, and second, the priority of
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the revolutionary will over the culturally inherited structures of society.

Thus, according to Merleau-Ponty, whether the history of our time has a
preeminently economic signicance and whether the ideological struggle is
secondary to economic signicance is a question of politics, but the aim of
philosophy is to show only the possibility of how the economic or ideological scenario ts the facts of history.81 For Mao, central to Marxism is the
question of (political) revolution. As such the primacy of politics means to
make politics, that is, revolutionary praxis, the centripetal and centrifugal
force of Chinese society and culture to which everything else is subordinate.
The idea of the primacy of politics is deeply Chinese as well as Marxian.
Even in the alleged political quietism of Taoism, in the Tao Te Ching, the
political sovereign is exalted as one of the four greats of the cosmos. The
paramount importance of political practice is suggested in the Chinese ideogram wang (the political sovereign) that symbolizes the authority of a ruler.
It is composed of three parallel horizontal strokes joined together by one
vertical stroke. These three horizontal strokes represent from top to bottom
each of the three spheres of heaven, man, and earth, and the vertical stroke
connects or unies them. The primacy of politics symbolized in the ideogram
wang is then the political paramountcy of Chinese culture where the sovereign is symbolized as the unier of the most important elements of Chinese
cosmologyheaven, man, and earth. The primacy of politics in Maoism can
be considered a continuation of this perennial Chinese tradition that corresponds to the Marxian emphasis on revolutionary praxis.
For Mao, it is the will of men rather than the administration of things
that is decisive in revolutionary praxis. The subjective creates the objective.
This voluntarism is the target of the Soviet attack on Maoism as antiMarxist, anti-materialist, or revisionist.82 One may even say that the
ultimate proof of Maos voluntarism lies in his deance of Marxs own
dim view of the Asiatic mode of production in bringing revolution to fruition in China.83 This voluntarism is opposed to the fetishism of technology
(technologism)along with economism, industrialism, and bureaucratism.
Thus the best weapon for revolutionary politics is not technologyatomic
bombs, airplanes, tanks, guns, and so onbut the will of the Chinese people.
It is the political education of the masseswhat Freire calls pedagogy
that is the foremost vehicle of social transformation;84 and it is the relations
(human elements) rather than forces (material conditions) of production
that are of paramount importance in Maoism. The economic has primarily a human signicance. Maos singular emphasis on the notion of the
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class struggle as an ideological (subjective) rather than economic (objective) struggle, too, is an aspect of this voluntarism.85 This voluntarism of
Mao must not, however, be mistaken for a merciless voluntarismto use
Merleau-Pontys phrasewhich overburdens the subjective will by ignoring
the objective conditions of a situation. For as a Marxist, Mao knows that
human interexistence is always mediated by things and institutions. Speaking
of class consciousness, Merleau-Ponty writes that what makes me a proletarian is not the economic system or society considered as systems of impersonal
forces, but these institutions as I carry them within me and experience them;
nor is it an intellectual operation devoid of motive, but my way of being in
the world within this institutional framework.86 In the nal analysis, the voluntarism of Maonot being mercilessis closer to Merleau-Pontys theory
of action based on interexistence and effective freedom rather than to Sartres
theory of action based on the unchecked freedom of a pure consciousness
(the pour-soi). For Merleau-Ponty, too, the philosophy of history amounts to
nothing unless it accommodates the idea of men as the responsible subjects
of history who at the same time are mediated by the objective conditions of
things and institutions. For history is nothing but an inscription of concrete
and specic acts and events in institutions.
The dialectic, the primacy of politics, and revolution as permanent are
perhaps the most critical features of Marxism. To show how this is so for our
purpose, it will be revealing to examine Merleau-Pontys masterful Adventures of the Dialectic. This work consists of his commentaries on Webers
vision of Vielseitigkeit (multifarious vectors and vicissitudes of historical
facts), on the Western Marxism of Georg Lukcs as putting subjectivity
back into history,87 on Lenins Bolshevism as a disgured Marxism, on
Trotskys permanent revolution, and above all, on Sartres ultrabolshevism
as anti-dialectical. For Merleau-Ponty, the idea of revisionism is permanently inscribed in the existential and dialectical nature of man and history.
The Marxian dialectic is existential (critical) rather than structural (scientic)
in character; humanity is dened as an innite task to be accomplished rather
than a xed and nished product of history.88 As Merleau-Ponty puts it, it is
through the program of continual criticism and revision in both theory and
practice that revolution earns its good name.89
Adventures of the Dialectic speaks out against disarming or derailing
the Marxian dialectic by disallowing the idea of mens historical responsibility. The Moscow Trials, (which he at one time defended) he notes, were
the revolution which no longer wanted to be revolution, or inversely [he left
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the question open] an established regime which mimics the revolution. It has
often been shown that the Russian Revolution, dened by Lenin as the Soviets plus electrication, concerned itself primarily with electrication and
set up a series of powers, apparatuses, and social priorities which partition
the revolutionary society and little by little make it something else.90 The
unforgettable lessons Merleau-Ponty learned particularly from the Korean
War reconrm the ambiguity and transparency of historyand Marxist history in particular. For him, the issue is no longer the absolute affirmation of
communism or the absolute rejection of anticommunism. For there is more
than one way of approving communism and of renouncing anticommunism.
The Korean War raised a different question that could not be posed or foreseen in 1947. Indeed, there is a double meaning in the Marxian dialectic. The
adherence to Marxism is no longer an unequivocal identication with the
cryptocommunism of Soviet power politics both within and without. For
Merleau-Ponty the ultimate validity of the Marxian dialectic, that is, revolution, now resides in a critique of existing power. The identity of theory and
practice, too, is basically antidialectical, that is, anti-Marxian. Rather, the
logic of the Marxian dialectic demands or requires more than ever before
the distance of theory from practice. For the dialectic may be true in theory
without being true in practice. The ultimate ambiguity or transparency of
revolution lies also in the fact that those who are the most revolutionary
often go over to the opposition, and those who make the revolution are not
always revolutionaries.91
Merleau-Pontys renewed notion of the Marxian dialectic as permanent
revolution is a result of the existential ambiguity of mans participation in
history. This is always a totalizing, rather than totalized process; the future
neither is a nished text nor is determined by past action alone. Marxism is
not the dogma that brings history to a conclusiona millenarianismbut
is a theory of participation at the threshold of truth. For, as Merleau-Ponty
notes, Marx did not speak of an end of history but of an end to prehistory.92 The Marxian dialectic refers to the concrete situation in which revolution is the sublime moment in which reality and values, subject and object,
judgment and discipline, individual and totality, present and future, instead
of colliding, would little by little enter into complicity.93
This dialectical view of revolutionary praxis is certainly compatible with
Merleau-Pontys vision of the philosopher as a perpetual beginner, a notion
deeply rooted in the spirit of Husserls phenomenological perspective. As
Merleau-Ponty affirms, the dialectician is a perpetual beginner with an uneasy
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equilibrium.94 This is why for him Marxismas well as phenomenologyis

not dogmatic. In both philosophies, the knowing subject is not exempted
from the burden of history, from its vectors and vicissitudes. Moreover, the
idea of self-criticism is applied to theory as well as to practice. The idea
of philosophy as a perpetual beginning is found in Socratic ignorance
that knows only that there is no absolute knowledge, and that it is by this
absence that we are open to the truth.95 For Husserl too the true thinker
(Selbstdenker) is the one who examines again and again his own presuppositions (i.e., self-scrutiny), that is, the one who sees what he thinks and
writes not as a nished product but only as an introduction.96 Thus the
true thinker is one who never ceases to regard his own activity of thinking
as a riddle or an astonishment. In the nal years of his philosophical career,
Merleau-Ponty gravitated to the idea of philosophy as interrogation rather
than a rigorous science. For interrogation is nothing but philosophys own
constant vigilance about its own meaning. Thus, it must also be at the same
time the search for the primordial (or savage being) as the underlying
infrastructure of Logos or Being. If thought is dialectical only when it allows,
in the internal structure of its own logic, self-examination, and self-criticism,
then phenomenology is dialectical.97
Although the idea of permanent revolution was popularized by and primarily associated with Leon Trotsky in his opposition to Stalinism, we nd
its germination in Marx. Marx suggested the twofold reason for the necessity
of revolution: (1) there are no other alternatives to dismantling the establishment and (2) only in a revolution can the class which overthrows it
(the power structure), rid itself of the accumulated rubbish of the past and
become capable of reconstructing society.98 Only in this sense can we understand Marx when he spoke of the self-transcendence (Selbstauhebung) of
the proletariat.
Trotsky, who opposed Stalins policy of courting Chiang Kai-sheks
Kuomintang as a reliable ally in 1927, spelled out three aspects of the theory
of permanent revolution in opposition to Stalins doctrine of socialism in
one country (the latter being an extension of Lenins formula of socialism
as Soviet power plus electrication). Trotskys central idea is that for backward countries the relative democracy of the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be established as a regime but only as a direct prelude or passage
to the socialist revolution. Moreover, for an indenite period as a result of
constant internal struggle, all social relations in a given nation undergo political transformation. Revolution in economy, technique, science, the family,
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morals and everyday life, Trotsky writes, develops in complex reciprocal

action and does not allow society to achieve equilibrium.99 And, of course,
Trotskys theory of permanent revolution has an international character that
epitomizes his opposition to Stalins doctrine of socialism in one country.
Trotsky contends that a national revolution is not a self-contained whole; it
is only a link in the internal chain. The international revolution constitutes a
permanent process, despite temporary declines and ebbs.100 He insists that
he is opposed not to the idea of socialism in one country per se but only
to the separation of the interconnected stages of the proletarian revolution.
Stalins socialism in one country is useful only as the temporary tactics
but not as the permanent strategy of Marxist revolution.101
The second point of Trotskys theory of permanent revolution is most relevant to our argument: the continual revolutionary self-criticism within the
boundaries of a Marxist nation, preventing it from becoming an established
regime, which in turn generates rigidly bureaucratized institutions whose
entrenched leaders cut themselves off from communicating with the people
at large. For Mao, the dialectic deals primarily with internal rather than
external relations. The former are the bases of the dialectic, whereas the latter are its conditions. The periodic political upheavals and purges within the
Chinese Revolutiontime-bounded revolutions within the Revolution, as it
wereincluding the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s, manifestly aim at
ridding society of the accumulated rubbish of the past, treating the internal sclerosis of the revolutionary movement itself. When there is no opposition to sublate, perhaps it must be invented.102 By ceaselessly recycling the
revolution, or immortalizing it, Mao hopes to prevent ideas and institutions
from becoming sedimented and ultimately petried. The institutionalized
bureaucracy is, by its very nature, antirevolutionary and is characteristically
charged with reverting to bourgeois mentality. Maos aversion to bureaucratism counteracts Lenins conception of the Party as the vanguard of the proletariat functioning by means of democratic centralism; at the same time
Mao attacks the traditional Confucian hierocracy based on the literati who
became the reexes of the established regime.
In the end, Leninism resembles the Hegelian state rather than the Marxian
revolution as process. While Lenin assigned to the Party and its cadres the
central role in the Russian Revolution, Mao regards the people at large as the
medium for transforming Chinese society, not only with reference to political organization, but also with reference to the ow of ideas from bottom to
top. The Cultural Revolution manifestly intended to dismantle bureaucratic
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sedimentations, and dissolve bureaucratic arrogance, thus minimizing the

gap between the leadership and the people at large. Continual revolutionary
praxis is, therefore, the pedagogy of the masses.
Merleau-Ponty explores contemporary Marxism in Adventures of the
Dialectic without, of course, emulating Trotskys and Maos vision of the
Marxian dialectic as permanent revolution. For Merleau-Ponty, the thesis
of permanent revolutionalong with that of unequal developmentnot
only extends and develops certain of Marxs thoughts but also revolutionizes them, because it introduces a new idea of revolution and its relation to
history. Revolution can take place in societies that did not hatch it; it can
be delayed interminably and must always be repeated in mature societies.
Moreover, revolution is no longer the fulllment of history but is a continual
rupture with history. Revolution viewed as a continual rupture with history
can no longer be proletarian in the strict sense of the term. In China, the
Marxist revolution had to be a peasant revolution. The universality of Marxism depends on and is conditioned by the particularity of Maoism. Mao says
that it is precisely in the particularity of contradiction that the universality
of contradiction resides.103 This does not destroy universality but insists that
universality without particularity is an empty abstraction.
When in Marxism history is perceived as having no ultimate end, the dialectic is neither nave teleology nor dogmatic eschatology. History ceases to
play the role of an external god who can dictate at will the course of revolution or offer absolution to revolution from one privileged position. The
basis of Marxian thought, according to Merleau-Ponty, lies in its attempt to
hold together revolution as an incidental expense of historical development
and history as permanent revolutionand to do so simultaneously.104 In this
light, Maoism as an extended version of Marxism can be more Marxian than
Marxs original thought; it goes beyond his initial vision of revolution and
history. Merleau-Pontys words are pertinent:
Revolution that becomes institution is already decadent if it believes
itself to be accomplished. In other words, in a concrete conception
of history, where ideas are nothing more than stages of the social
dynamic, all progress is ambiguous because, acquired in a crisis
situation, it creates a condition from which emerge problems that
go beyond it.... It is no accident that all known revolutions have
degenerated: it is because as established regimes they can never be
what they were as movements; precisely because it succeeded and
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ended up as an institution, the historical movement is no longer

itself: it betrays and disgures itself in accomplishing itself.
Revolutions are true as movements and false as regimes. Thus the
question arises whether there is not more of a future in a regime that
does not intend to remake history from the ground up but only to
change it and whether this is not the regime that one must look for,
instead of once again entering the circle of revolution.105
If we follow Merleau-Pontys interpretation of the Marxian dialectic, Mao
is more faithful than Trotsky to the idea of permanent revolution. In the rst
place, Trotsky hesitated to situate truth outside the Party because Marxism had taught him that truth could not in principle reside anywhere but at
the point where the proletariat and the organization which embodies it are
joined.106 It never occurred to Mao to consider the Party bureaucracy as a
class, or the dictatorship of the proletariat turning into the fetishism of the
dictatorship of the Party and its bureaucratic apparatus. In the second place,
we can go a step further by saying that Mao is more faithful to the idea of
the Marxian dialectic as permanent revolution than Lenin whose thought
is depicted by Merleau-Ponty as epistemological gnosticism and political
aristocratism. Merleau-Ponty calls Leninism a gnosticism because in Materialism and Empirico-Criticism, for example, he adds a heavy dose of materialistic metaphysics to the dialectic. The diagram of Lenins Bolshevism
places the knowing subject outside the fabric of history, releases it from selfcriticism, inserts the subjective into the objective, and replaces the relations
with the forces of production. In essence, it reduces the order of possibility to
that of fact. On the epistemological plane, Lenins gnosticism shuts itself off
from philosophical challenges concerning man and history. On the practical
plane of translating epistemology into the order of action, Lenins Bolshevism means replacing total praxis by a technician-made action, replacing
the proletariat by the professional revolutionary. It means concentrating the
movement of history, as well as that of knowledge, in an apparatus.107
The Party elitism and bureaucratism of Lenin is a natural result of his
epistemological gnosticism. In short, Lenins Bolshevism is an insertion of
the movement of both historical knowledge and action into an institutionalized and regimented apparatus; that is, both theoria and praxis are functions
or instruments reduced solely to the matters of the apparatchiks or produced and administered by the Party machines. Ultimately, his epistemological and practical bureaucratism is a result of treating the iron law of the
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dialectic as identities: the unequivocal identity of the Soviets with the people,
the Party with the revolution, the professional revolutionaries with the Party,
the Party with the dictatorship of the proletariat, and nally the Party with
the State itself, which is a Hegelian rather than a Marxian concept.
The complementary and convergent contributions of Mao and MerleauPonty to the historical development of Marxism is in clarifying the meaning
of the dialectic in terms of the primacy of politics and in clarifying politics
as permanent revolution. One could claim, further, that in an authentic dialectic of revolutionary theory and practice, Mao is in need of Merleau-Ponty
and vice versa. There is indeed a creative imbalance between Merleau-Ponty
and Mao, as there is between theory and practice; one limps when left alone,
deprived of the aid of the other. Our aim is neither to miscegenate nor to
homogenize Maos and Merleau-Pontys explorations of the dialectic; rather,
we have attempted to show their complicity or, as Mao would say, how the
dialectic walks on two legsthe primarily diagnostic endeavor of MerleauPonty on the one side and the primarily therapeutic (and provisionally prophetic) endeavor of Mao on the other. As the universal depends on and is
conditioned by the particularthe particularity of Maoism as the Sinicized
form of Marxism contributes to the universal development of Marxism. To
this end, Merleau-Pontys adventures of the dialectic help to scale Maoism
to the height of the Marxian dialectic.108
The comparison between Merleau-Ponty and Mao cannot simply be juxtaposed as philosophy and nonphilosophy. This would be so if we dene philosophy as the discipline requiring conceptual exactitude and nonphilosophy
as its opposite. If, however, we dene philosophy as a contribution to the
clarication of the human condition, that is, the clarication of mens interexistence with other men in relation to things both natural and cultural, then
Maoism is profoundly philosophical as well as humanistic. True philosophy
is necessarily a humanism. For philosophy without humanism is empty, while
humanism without philosophy is blind. In this sense, there is an urgent need
for us to reaffirm and renew Marxs unfaltering vision of humanizing man
both radically and effectively. In the rst place, to be radical is to get at the
root of things, and the root of man is man himself. In the second place, to be
effective means that, as universality itself resides in particularity, this radical
humanization must be seen not in abstract generality but in the concreteness
of specic acts, events, and institutions.
For now more than ever before in history the ambiguity of the human condition of man as an incomplete being who is conscious of his own nitude
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and incompletion is a terrifying perspective. We can no longer treat truth in

the cavalier and one-sided fashion of Hegel, the Western censor presiding
over the procession of universal ideas. We cannot divide humanity into two
different campsone as the superior or privileged master and the other as
the inferior or unprivileged slave. On the contrary, an integral and effective
humanism as the esh fold of the human spirit exists, only in the lateral relationships of all cultures in which the echoes of each awaken and are resonant
with the others. Forto repeat Merleau-Pontytruths center is everywhere
and its circumference nowhere.109
PART V
The Fleshfold of the Earth:

Green Thought, East and West
CHAPTER 12
merleau-pontys transversal geophilosophy

and sinic aesthetics of nature
Only connect!
E. M. Forster
i. prelude
At stake is the Earth in its totality, and humanity, collectively. Global history enters nature, global
nature enters history: this is something utterly new in
philosophy.
Michel Serres
Ecology has rightly become our ultimate concern. It has a religious magnitude.
It has turned into the question of to be or not to be. The ecological crisis
persists: there is no warning sign to it. It is a permanent xture of the human
condition everywhere. Alarmingly this earth, our dwelling place, has progressively become an inhospitable, precarious, ruinous, and even deadly place for
all earthlings both human and nonhuman. The ancient Hindu scriptural saying
of Bhagavad Gita captures the dire predicament of the earthly condition today:
I am become death. Indeed, we stand at the edge of history since the end of
the earth or nature is also the end of history. Is there then a saving measure on
earth to overcome our human-induced ecological crisis?
The ecological crisis signals human disembodiment from the earth as a
household (oikos) whose deed is being taken away by natures mutiny
or silent revolt. In sinography, crisis is spelled with two ideograms: danger
and opportunity. It means to seize an opportunity to save a situation from
danger. To overcome the ecological crisis, we are in need of inaugurating
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a geophilosophy grounded in fundamentals that, according to Deleuze and

Guattari, brings together all the elements within a single embrace1only
in fundamentals since, in following the advice of Einstein, not everything
that counts can be counted. Merleau-Pontys ontology or there-being (il
y a) of intercorporeality establishes and secures the rm foothold in such
fundamentals for erecting the edice of geophilosophy as if the earth really
matters.2 Only by way of his intercorporeal ontology are humanity and the
earth said to be bonded or intertwined. Without doubt the intercorporeal
generosity3 of the whole earth will be a promising and dening moment of
humanity in the new millennium.
ii. the way of transversality

[T]hinking about One is not thinking about All.
Edouard Glissant
Transversality is meant to be a term of connectivity, of lateral connectivity.
It makes connections in the face of difference in the environment in which
everything is connected to everythingthe principle of which is called by
the biologist Barry Commoner the rst law of ecology.4 Difference marks
the conditio sine qua non of connectivity. Difference and connectivity are
correlative: but for difference, there would be no need for connectivity. Akira
Kurozawas famed lm Rashomon portrays the reality that truth or truthtelling is diverse and thus the search for it too is truly an adventure of difference (Gianni Vattimos phrase).
Transversality is the term used in geometry (as well as in physics) that
refers to the two diagonally connecting lines of any parallelogram. Flix
Guattari, who was drawn to what he calls ecosophy in resonance with
the Norwegian ecosopher Arne Naess, proposed transversality as a new
way of thinking about the politics of psychiatric institutions.5 Transversality, for Guattari, interrupts the idea of the institutional transference and
allows undisciplined creativity (chaosmosis in Joyces term), which means
to prevent us from falling into seriality (Sartrean term) and bureaucratic sclerosis. It is a genre of social creationism in a multidimensional environment in
which the individual subject too is conceived of polyphonically.
For Calvin O. Schrag,6 transversality is the new way of overcoming the
impasses of modernity and postmodernity. In other words, it is the way of
merleau-pontys transversal geophilosophy and sinic aesthetics of nature
213
dening or redening the task of philosophy after postmodernity. His transversal shifter is meant to scale the continental divide between modernity and
postmodernity and intends to dissolve, as it were, their differences. By way of
transversality, Schrag means to subvert and transgress the dichotomy between
the Scylla of a hegemonic unication/a vacuous universalism on the one
hand and the Charybdis of a chaotic pluralism/an anarchic historicism
on the other.7
The relevance of Maurice Merleau-Pontys lateral universal8 to crosscultural geophilosophy cannot be underestimated. He uses lateral and
transversal interchangeably. In opposition to the Eurocentrism of Hegel
for whom universal knowledge is certied by the Occidental seal of approval
alone, Merleau-Ponty insists that the Oriental past also has an honored place
in the famed hall of philosophies to celebrate its hitherto secret, muted contribution to philosophy.9 He contends that Western philosophy can learn
from Indian and Chinese philosophies to rediscover our relationships to
Being. He challenges, If Western thought is what it claims to be [universal], it must prove it by understanding all life-worlds.10 It would indeed be
presumptuous to claim that what is particular in the West is universalizable,
whereas what is particular in the non-West remains particular or ethnophilosophical. For Merleau-Ponty, the lateral universal is acquired through ethnological experience by testing transversally one culture by way of the other
and vice versa. It is a passport, as it were, that allows us to cross borders
between diverse cultures, enter the zone of intersections, and discover crosscultural connections in pursuit of truth. It, in short, promotes the crossfertilization of ideas and deeds by negotiating differences and facilitates the
conuence of differences. While Eurocentrism claims its validity as universal
truth, Merleau-Pontys lateral universal takes into account local knowledge before global or planetary knowledge by espousing the Gadamerian
hermeneutical autonomy of the other who may very well be right. Thus, it
demands an open and unending dialogue as an end in itself. It opens up the
uninterrupted ow of cultural dialogue based on difference or, in the terminology of Heidegger, Differenz as Unterschied, which may be neither reied
nor erased, neither assimilated nor annihilated, but negotiated and compromised [com/promised].11 As an adventure of difference, the transversal dialogue, like a Zen garden, which allows no dialectical closure, is never nished
oras Mikhail Bakhtins dialogism has itit is unnalizable.
Transversality is, in a manner of speaking, a phoenix rising from the ashes
of universality wedded to Eurocentrism. By decentering or deprovincializing
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Eurocentrism, it may be spelled trans(uni)versality; it intends to go beyond

and transgure the Eurocentric metanarratives of universality. As a paradigm
shift in our thinking, it may be likened to a lateral movement of digging a new
hole instead of digging the same hold deeper and deeper with no exit in sight.
Michel Foucaults lateral projection may have been right when he remarked
in his dialogue with a Japanese priest in 1978, The crisis of Western thought
is identical to the end of imperialism.... [I]t is the end of the era of Western
philosophy. Thus, if philosophy of the future exists, it must be born outside
of Europe or equally born in consequence of meetings and impacts between
Europe and non-Europe.12
As a paradigm shifter in our thinking and doing, transversal geophilosophy, no less than transversality itself, is analogous to the famous wooden
statue of Buddha at a Zen temple in Kyoto whose face marks the dawn of
enlightenment (satori) or signals the beginning of a new regime of knowing and morals. From the crack in the middle of the old face in the Buddhas statue, there emerges an interstitial, liminal face that signies a new
transformation. Since the new face emerges from the middle, it also symbolizes the arrival of Maitreya (i.e., the future enlightened One) or Maitreyan
Middle Way.13 Thus the new face of transversal geophilosophy points to
the emergence of the middle or third term that mediates and facilitates
(1) cultural, (2) disciplinary, (3) speciesistic, and (4) sensorial border crossings. In other words, it is concerned with those matters that are intercultural,
interdisciplinary, interspeciesistic, and intersensorial border-crossings.
iii. intercorporeality and geophilosophy

Body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only
a word of something about the body.
Friedrich Nietzsche
For twenty-ve centuries, Western knowledge has
tried to look upon the world. It has failed to
understand that the world is not for the beholding. It
is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible.
Jacques Attali
The Enlightenment contains the principle ethos of Western modernity. Its
unbridled optimism, which awakened (Western) humanity from the slumber,
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as Kant put it with clarity, of self-incurred tutelage or immaturity, has promoted the idea of innite progress based on the cultivation of pure (Cartesian) and instrumental (Baconian) reason, which spells out the lingua franca
of Western modernity. While privileging and valorizing reason above all the
other human faculties for allegedly human, material progress and emancipation, European modernity marginalizes and disempowers the (reasons) other
whether it be (1) nature, (2) body, (3) woman, or (4) non-West,14 all of whose
categories are genderized interestingly as feminine.
Descartes erected the canonical institution of the cogito, which is by
necessity disembodied, monological and narcissistic, and ocularcentric. He
built an epistemological panopticon15 whose inuence at least in France has
been so extensive that Deleuze and Guattari declare, The French are like
landowners whose source of income is the cogito.16 As it is the act of the
mind as thinking substance (res cogitans), the cogito (the I think) is
the epitome of an incorporeal man in splendid isolation from others, both
other minds and other bodies. As a thinking substance, the mind claims to be
independent of the body (res extensa); it needs nothing other than itself to
exist. Once the self and the other are viewed as disembodied substances, two
self-contained substances, monologismor even solipsism in extremisis
inevitable. Merleau-Ponty puts it succinctly: Sociality... is a scandal for
the I think.17 In geophilosophy, sociality refers to both interhuman and
interspeciesistic relationships.
Francis Bacon18 is unquestionably the most eloquent and Enlightened
voice of Western modernity as the age of science, technology, and quantitative economy. He advocated the convergence of theory and practice, of
knowledge and utility, and of knowing and making. Experimentalism, the
utility of knowledge, power over nature, and philanthropia when combined
together become a paradigmatic attempt to replace the old cult of books
by the new (experimental) cult of nature or the inquisition of nature,
which promotes the direct commerce of the mind with things themselves.
He formulated the principles of Herrschaftswissen in which knowledge and
power converge for the sake of utility. The framework of modern technology
was laid down by Bacon when he insisted on the meeting of human knowledge and power in one (i.e., scientia et potential in idem coincident) and
discovered in the womb of nature many secrets of excellent use. Speaking against the degenerate learning of Scholastics, Bacon felt that they
had sharp and strong wits and an abundance of leisure in the cells of
monasteries and colleges but they knew little history of nature or no great
216
quantity of matter; that is, their cobwebs of learning produced no substance or prot.
Enough has so far been said about the grand narratives of European modernity in the language of the Cartesian bifurcation of mind and body and the
Baconian domination and exploitation by humanity of nature. Merleau-Ponty,
however, offers a radically different scenario in terms of the lived body or
embodiment, which is not only the umbilical cord to the world both social
and natural but also the stage director, as it were, of the body. He speaks of
the lived body as the zero point of orientation that serves as the canon or
norm of perception.19 The body founds and funds perception as a web of the
human sensorium. There is indeed the primacy of perception in everything we
do and think. To cite the often quoted passage of Merleau-Ponty in defense of
his main philosophical thesis of Phenomenology of Perception, The perceived
world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all
existence. This thesis does not destroy either rationality or the absolute. It only
tries to bring them down to earth.20 Not only are all forms of consciousness
perceptual or earthly perception but also the perceived world promises [transversal] relations.21 Insofar as perception is a nascent logos, there can be neither disembodied reason nor alienation of humanity from nature.
For Merleau-Ponty, to perceive natural things in the world is to sense them
as they are through embodied consciousness, to sense the (sauvage, wild)
nakedness of nature. The act of perception as embodied consciousness is
then neither representation nor idea. Rather, perception participates in or
inhabits each reality it senses. It intertwines or interlaces the esh of the body
and the esh of the world: the body and the world form one inseparable esh
fold. Marjorie Grene is perceptive when she writes it is always as lived bodies that we sing the world, maybe out of key, maybe forgetfully, maybe with
ingenious novelty, but really, in the esh.22
Only in terms of the body as the participatory locus of perception do we
come to grips with Merleau-Pontys deep notion that the world is made of the
same stuff as the body or my body is made of the same esh as the world (it
is a perceived [un peru]).23 In each act of perception, the body participates
in the world. Each perception is an instance or moment of the sensuous unity,
and it is enclosed in the synergic work of the body, that is, intersensorial. The
body is the carnal eld in which perception becomes localized as seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, and tasting this or that particular. Merleau-Ponty,
therefore, contends, la conscience perceptive nest pas une alchimie mentale,
elle est globale, totale (perceptive consciousness is not a mental alchemy; it
217
is global, total), that is, synergic.24 The synergic organization of perceptual

acts is unimaginable without one of the most important discoveries of phenomenology: the lived body or the body as subject. The body as subject is
never an inert matter or mass but rather a sentient subject. As such, the body
as esh is capable of authoring the world rst before answering it. Thus,
Merleau-Ponty writes with a touch of eloquence: Mon corps nest pas un
objet, mais un moyen, une organization. Jorganise dans la perception avec
mon corps une frquentation avec le monde. Avec mon corps et par mon
corps, jhabite le monde. Le corps est le champ dans lequel se localisent les
perceptions.25 (My body is not an object, but a means, an organization. In
perception I organize with my body an association with the world. With my
body and through my body, I inhabit the world. The body is the eld in which
perceptions localize themselves.)
The body is an earthword as much as the earth is a bodyword. The
body and the earth inscribe each other in and as one esh fold. As such the
body is quintessentially a place name, a name of location. The feminist Rosi
Braidotti describes it concisely: the primary site of location is the body.26
One does not have to be a woman or feminist to be vindicated by Braidotti. The Anglo-Saxons knew the body as dwelling place, and they named it
banhus (bonehouse) and lichama (bodyhome).27 In locating the identity and
humanity of African Americans, Ralph Ellison begins his narratives in purely
carnal terms in his classic work The Invisible Man: I am a man of substance,
of esh and bone, ber and liquidsand I might even be said to possess a
mind. I am invisible... simply because they refuse to see me.28
Merleau-Pontys conception of the body as esh is radically and preeminently geophilosophical across the measured template of time and space: to
cite his celebrated passage, [the body as] esh is not matter, is not mind, is
not substance. To designate it, we should need the old term element, in the
sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and re, that is, in the sense of
a general thing [chose], midway between the spatio-temporal individual and
the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever
there is a fragment of being. The esh is in this sense an element of Being.
Not a fact or a sum of facts, and yet adherent to location and to the now.29
Inasmuch as an element is matter (chose), the body is said to be the material
condition of our being in the world or lintermonde. There is no thing that
does not occupy space. Only by way of the body are we said to be connected
to the world that is both interhuman and interspeciesistic: as we are social
through and through, intercorporeality is nothing other than that term that
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expresses our primordial and primary way of connecting or socializing ourselves to the world that is inhabited by other bodies, other minds, and other
things. The body, in other words, is our primum relationis in which it and the
world are correlational: one cannot exist without the other. The mind itself
becomes a term of relation only because the body is always already populated in the world with and among other bodies. Intercorporeality inscribes
what Pierre Bourdieu calls the performative magic of the social, which partakes of le sens pratique,30 not of disembodied reason.
By the synergy of the body, Merleau-Ponty means to emphasize the transversal circulation31 of the senses, that is, the intersensorium or intersensoriality. As the sensible sentient (sentant sensible), the two-dimensional body
is the chiasmic coupling of the sensible and the sentient. There is the synergic
sociality of all the senses. As Merleau-Ponty describes it, We must habituate ourselves to think that every visible is cut out in the tangible, every tactile
being in some manner promised to visibility, and that there is encroachment,
infringement, not only between the touched and the touching, but also between
the tangible and the visible, which is encrusted in it, as, conversely, the tangible
itself is not a nothingness of visibility, is not without visual existence. Since the
same body sees and touches, visible and tangible belong to the same world.32
Therefore, the transversal movement or circulation of the sensorium cannot
be painted with one particular sense alone by disallowing the other senses to
inter-be with each other and thus by ending in reductive abstraction against
which Merleau-Ponty warns from The Structure of Behavior to The Visible and
the Invisible. This reductive abstraction is a Cartesian trap in which everything
is streamlined to edify the epistemological panopticon of the cogito that, by
being mesmerized by the eye, is turned into a scopic regime and ocularcentric
machine. Here we should take heed of Johann Gottfried Herder who, as a cultural pluralist, questions the presentation of reason as the single summit of
all human cultures in a single sentence: Is the whole body just one big eye?33
Although vision may be an exemplar sensible, Merleau-Ponty warns that
there is a fundamental narcissism of all vision.34 He also cautions the philosopher not to become a spectator or better yet, kosmostheoros at whose
sovereign gaze the world turns into a panorama. Merleau-Ponty concludes that
a philosophy of reection which identies my being with what I think of it35
scandalizes sociality.36 He claims that philosophy is in need of direct and
immediate contact with the world prior to reection. To be sure, the world is
not something at which we merely gaze, but it is also something we can touch,
taste, smell, and hear.
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In philosophy, sight is thought of as a rational and masculine sense,

whereas touch is denigrated to a pariah status as an irrational and feminine
sense.37 Jos Ortega y Gasset argues against visual primacy: it would be a
grave mistake to think that sight is the most important sense of all and that
touch was the original sense from which the others were gradually differentiated and that the decisive form of our intercourse with things is in fact
touch.8 Therefore, Ortega claims that touch and contact are necessarily
the most conclusive factor in determining the structure of our world.38 Not
unlike Merleau-Pontys interlacing of the sentient body and sensed body as
in a handshake, Ortega argues for the inseparability and the reversibility of
the body that we touch, and our body with which we touch it.39 The synaesthesia of touch inseminates and disseminates the sociability of the senses
and performs the magic of the social.
The primary but not exclusive organ of touching is the hand: Rodins
sculptural masterpiece Cathedral in which the caressing of two right hands
(the rite of sociality) incarnates, certies, and celebrates the sacrament of
coexistenceto use the elegant expression of Henry G. Bugbee Jr.40 Here I
wish to draw attention to the jouissance of tickling and being tickled that,
again like the handshake, is a reversible phenomenon. It cannot transpire in
the absence of the other for the reason that it is a contact (tactus) sport. This
is the reason one cannot tickle oneself.
In the footsteps of Irigaray and Levinas, Cynthia Willett speaks of tactile
sociality,41 which begins and comes with the caress or contact between the
mother and the infant. So she declares, In the beginning is not the word; it is
the touch.42 Without doubt it is the natal bond (Merleau-Pontys phrase)
between the two sentient beings. It is a skin-to-skin or epidermic sociality
that is never just skin-deep. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty
has a cryptic instruction to himself: Do a psychoanalysis of Nature: it is the
esh, the mother.43 When accent is put on Nature, esh, and mother,
it turns into a geopsychoanalysis, that is, Mother Nature and Mother Earth
(Terra Mater and Gaia), that personies the caring and nurturing mother.
The breast-feeding, which is the privileged rite of the mother, is the contact
between the skin-mouth and skin-breast, which is deeper than any other
contact we can imagine. Breast-feeding as the biological act of caring instantiates the ethic of care.
We would be remiss if we forget to mention Irigarays feminist philosophy, which bucks the mainstream or better yet, malestream language of
Western philosophy. She is determined to unpack or denigrate monistic
220
phallogocentrism, which as vision has emasculated touch, is rooted in

scoptophilism or the love of sight.44 By upholding the sense of touch or
to use Merleau-Pontys expressiontactile palpation, Irigaray embraces
the caress of the two sexesman and woman. For Irigaray, touch or caress
enriches and cultivates the intercorporeal contact of proximity.
Following the thread of Irigarays thought, it is worth lending our ears to
the important and fascinating study of women in Tantric (Vajrayana) Buddhism in Nepal and Tibet, of yogini-tantra by Miranda Shaw in Passionate
Enlightenment.45 Tantric Buddhism eulogizes the body or esh as an abode
of bliss or jouissance, as it were, by embracing the jewel of sexuality or
sexual union in which asceticism and celibacy have no place.46 It enlightens the bodys passion. Shaws work presents a gynecological view of Tantrism where yoginis or female Tantrics, who are female practitioners of yoga,
engage in the teachings and practices of blissful intimacy as a path to enlightenment. However, Shaw contends that the body of yoginis teachings and
practices has been overlooked in the West because of the androcentric bias
of Western (male) scholars and interpreters.
Yoginis revolutionized Buddhism, just as Irigarays feminist philosophy
overturned the malestream phallic-logocentric legacy of Western philosophy since Plato, in comprehending the nature of the three S words: sensuality, sexuality, and spirituality. No wonder Irigaray has turned to the East for
her philosophical illumination in Between East and West (Entre Orient et
Occident), in which she expands the horizon of her logic of two (or
betweenness) to the East-West connection. Whatever her critics say about
the work,47 it is the journey worth taking, which I suspect, is far from being
nished or completed. She might very well benet from tossing a peek at
Shaws work as she expands her feminist horizon from corporeal singularity to intercorporeal community (ashram). The attainment of spiritual
enlightenment, according to female Tantrics, is extremely difficult without a
male partner. They seek their spiritual illumination in intimate partnership
with men, which includes a mixing of sexual uids. In a relationship with a
man, touching and massaging a womans feet and ingesting a womans body
are also allowed: a man sips, upon request, sexual uid and menstrual blood
from her vulva and licks any part of her body.
In the nal analysis, there is a direct geophilosophical or ecological message or lesson to be had in Irigarays feminist philosophy in conjunction
with female Tantrics: The gynecological self is the ecological self par excellence. It is an earthlink to the esh of the world where everything touches
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everything else.48 In rejecting the facile dichotomy between nature and culture, her morphology of jouissance and the sociability of the senses in
touch connects what she calls the calendar of the [feminine] esh49 or the
cyclical character of feminine sexuality50 with the repeated cycle of seasonal
changes in nature or the myth of the eternal return.51 There is indeed something jouissanced, if you will, as well as deeply healing and comforting in
the repeated refrains of nature in the serene expression of the incomparable
American ecofeminist Rachel Carson, who writes the following:
Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and
mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. Whatever
the vexations or concerns of their personal lives, their thoughts can
nd reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There
is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds,
the ebb and ow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring.
There is something innitely healing in the repeated refrains of
naturethe assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after
the winter.52
So does Merleau-Ponty with Paul Valry listen to and rejoice in the very
voice of the things, the waves, and the forests.53
iv. the eastern body and geophilosophy

He who knows himself and other,
Will also recognize that East and
West cannot be separated.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Silence is appreciated in the East as a priceless jewel. This may be the reason
Asians are called inscrutable. Foucault was rightly curious about silence,
which denes Japanese Zen culture. It may be said that the East is to silence
as the West is to talk. There is the diacritical or hyperdialectical connection between the East and the West as the inexorable pairing of yin and yang
as complementary, not as a binary opposition.
Norman O. Browns Loves Body has a mystical touch of Taoism and Zen.
It is strikingly Eastern. It resonates with the Eastern conception of silence,
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which is quintessential to the magic of the bodys performance(s). For Brown,

silence is the mother tongue.54 It speaks eloquently. As it speaks, its
deed is performed in silence. As the (m)other tongue, silence has a double
meaning: rst, the genesis of language lies in silence and second, silence is
the other of language or the other language. As a virgin, silence invaginates
language.55 In the beginning was silence, not the word. Only when the word
becomes esh is there silence. To recover the world of silence... , Brown
sums up with brevity, is to recover the human body.56
In Sinism, which encompasses Confucianism, Taoism, and Chan (Sinicized) and Zen (rst Sinicized and then Japanized) Buddhism and blankets the
lands of China, Korea, and Japan, there are fortunately or unfortunately no
hardheaded logocentristslike Descartes and Baconwho separate the mind
(res cogitans) and the body (res extensa), on the one hand and humanity from
nature, on the other. In Sinism it is said that there are four human dignities,
which are all bodily postures and movements: standing, walking, lying, and
sitting.57 Among these dignities, sitting as in zazen (seated meditation) in Zen
is best known to the Western audience. Without zazen, that is, without meditative training (keiko) or cultivation (shugyo),58 there would be no possibility
of enlightenment (satori) that, as a thoroughly embodied phenomenon, may
be juxtaposed to the logocentric and disembodied European Enlightenment. In
zazen, the body is the heart (kokoro) and vehicle of meditation and enlightenment. As hara (abdomen) is the heart of the body, there is the interesting Japanese expression kufu, which is identied with thinking with the abdomen.59
Kufu, not unlike Rodins The Thinker, depicts thinking itself as an embodied
activity. It comes as no surprise that Dogen Kigen (the founder of Soto Zen),60
who is the most renowned Japanese carnal hermeneuticist, proclaims the primacy of the body, which is not far from Merleau-Pontys primacy of perception whose locus is none other than the body itself.
The language of ideograms embodies the soul of Sinism. Therefore, it
may be called sinography. Language and culture are inseparable twins. Language is a product of culture as much as culture expresses itself by the communicative medium of language: as Merleau-Ponty puts it, what the mind is
to the body, thought is to language.61 They are all intertwined. The American
philosopher Ernest Fenollosa62 is the inventor of etymosinology in which
the study of things Sinic is correlated to the etymological anatomy of ideograms. Chinese ideographycalligraphy in particularis a kinetic art: it is
the human body in graceful motion. By the same token, calligraphy is kinaesthetic. The Chinese revere the art of calligraphy as much as, if not more than,
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painting: calligraphy is the ritualized painting of ideograms. In the genealogy

of form, calligraphy precedes painting. In very signicant measure, Chinese
ideography is a choreography of human gestures (including ren, the human
rendered in its upright posture) and, as a family of signiers, a conversation
of gestures, which, because of the presence of meaning, is not to be reduced
to human physiology. Picassos Swimmer and Acrobat are two choreographs
of the human body in uent and rhythmic motion, which approach ideography or calligraphy.63 They are, in essence, balletic and frolicking anthropograms. Marshall McLuhan, who had the romantic vision of writing his
antitypographic treatise64 in the ideogrammic medium (with the sensorium
of touch as its synaesthetic epicenter), thought ofrightly, I thinkthe Chinese ideogram as a vortex of corporate energy (qi).65
Merleau-Ponty would have been delighted to know that the term lived
experience (Erlebnis, exprience vcue) in Japanese phenomenology is translated as taiken (tai/ken) in two sinograms (kanji), bodily or embodied
(tai) experience (ken).66 Moreover, the contemporary Chinese philosopher
Li Zehou coined the neologism subjectality (zhu/ti/xing) in distinction to
subjectivity; that is, the former is embodied while the latter is idealized.67 The Chinese ti and the Japanese tai are one and the same sinogram
although they sound or are pronounced differently. To Sinicize subjectivity
(or the body as subject) in Merleau-Pontys phenomenology is to rename it as
subjectality to follow the hermeneutical injunction of Confucius for whom
the rectication of names belongs to the rst order of performing moral
and speech acts and of performing deeds. Third, for Watsuji Tetsuro who still
lives, justiably or not, under the shadow of Nishida Kitaro and wrote an
important geophilosophical treatise on the impact of climate (fudo)68 on
human civilization, the temporal and spatial difference marks the difference
between the East and the West: the East is spatial, whereas the West is temporal. As he is critical of Heideggers Daseinsanalyse in Being and Time that
is alleged to focus on time rather than space, Watsuji propounds and defends
the thesis that the spatiality of the body maps the social and environmental
issues. In fact, the body is the connecting tissue of humanity to its environing
world both interhuman and interspeciesistic. For Heidegger, the ex-istential
condition of the human is temporally dened by the ecstatic in of Dasein
as Being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein). Watsuji, in contrast, denes the
human in terms of the spatial betweenness (aidagara) as the human itself
is spelled ningen (nin/gen in two sinograms), that is, (the upright pictogram
of) man (nin) and betweenness (gen).69 For Watsuji, accordingly, the true
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humanity of humans is located in betweenness as spatial relationality. The

body is the specic location of human existence (sonzai). As the world is
inhabited by other bodies or embodied beings, intercorporeality belongs to
the frontier of Interbeing. Watsuji speaks of a carnal interconnection70 that
constitutes the rst order of spatial betweenness.71
Sinism, which is expressed in the communicative medium of the corporeal
language of ideography, also incorporates a rich corpus of geophilosophy.72
It is rich in the corporeal poetics of topophilia. The Sinic slogan the body
and the land are not two (but one) is the celebration of the body in defense
of the land.73 The Sinic eco-art called fng shui (geomancy or ideographically spelled wind/water), which is widely practiced as a conventional art
of everyday living even in highly modernized, urbanized Asia, sancties and
ritualizes the inseparability of humans from the land and the energy (qi) of
the cosmic elements. The eco-art of fng shui, whether it be used in building
houses or in planning ancestral burials, means to harmonize human activities
with the land, with the cosmic elements. In the land of Zen where for some
even Heidegger appears to be anthropocentric, the Cartesian and Baconian
possession and mastery of nature is unthinkable. The Japanese have perfected the horticultural art of bonsai, which began in China. It is no accident
that haiku poetry was invented in the land of Zen. By economizing words,
haiku, which is meant to enshrine words, expresses the feeling of reverence
for small creatures and things in nature (ten thousand things) in accord
with the circulation of the seasons.
The way of Daoism as a geophilosophy is synonymous with the way of
homo ecologicus. It deates rather than inates or magnies the importance
of both the self and the human in conceptualizing the earth or cosmos. It is,
in brief, neither egocentric nor anthropocentric. According to the Daodejing,
there is a circulation of four greatnesses in the universe: Man, Earth,
Heaven, and Dao. Dao is the mother of Heaven and Earth or the world:
In the universe we have four greatnesses, and man is but one.
Man is in accordance with earth.
Earth is in accordance with heaven.
Heaven is in accordance with Dao.
Tao is in accordance with that which is.74
At the heart of the circulating wheel of the four greatnesses lies that which is
(ziran), being natural, or thusness in the sense of thisness or thatness
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in depicting the singularity of a particular thing. As it is spelled with two sinograms, it has a twofold meaning. One is physical in that it refers to myriads
of beings and things in nature or ten thousand thingsmountains, rivers,
animals, trees, plants, and so on. The other, more importantly, is ontological.
As thusness, it signies the intrinsic and spontaneous (or uncontrolled)
propensity of beings and things that may be called Natursein.75
In Confucianism, too, there is no absence or lack of geophilosophical
ideas. In it, lial piety (interhuman), for example, is connected to geopiety
as reverence for ten thousand things in nature. The fteenth-century neoConfucian philosopher Wang Yang-ming, who yielded considerable inuence inside and outside China (in Korea and Japan), declared that The great
man [or sage] regards Heaven, Earth, and the myriad things as one body.76
The sages feeling of commiseration for a child falling into a well, his inability to bear the suffering of birds and animals, his feeling of pity for broken
and destroyed plants all show his humanity or humaneness (ren), which
is regarded as the highest Confucian virtue, with all the sentients as they
together form one body as the sensible sentientto use Merleau-Pontys
expression. The feeling of humaneness (ren) embraces the sages feeling
of regret even to shattered tiles and stones.77 Wang extends the Confucian
notion of humaneness to nonhuman things both animate and inanimate and
incorporates the body into the mapping of his geophilosophical idea. Seven
centuries earlier, the Confucianist Zhang Zai envisioned in an encompassing
way when he wrote the following reputed passage: Heaven is my father, and
earth is my mother, and even such a small creature as I nds an intimate place
in their midst. Therefore that which lls the universe I regard as my body
and that which directs the universe I consider as my nature. All people are
my brothers and sisters, and all things are my companions.78 Indeed, Wang
and Zhang celebrate the human as quintessentially an earthly being who is
interconnected by way of the body with other beings and things on earth.
v. coda
We all stand only together, not only all men, but all
things [in harmony].
Henry G. Bugbee Jr.
We have for sometime been disenchanted with the ecological condition of
the whole earth. We are out of touch with and displaced from our dwelling
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place called the earth as oikos. Reenchanting the earth may be as difficult as
repairing a torn spiders web with our ngersto use the evocative expression of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Nonetheless, disenchantment is a promising
precondition for transcendence toward the reenchantment of all earthlings,
that is, humans and ten thousand things alike.
To sum up, the aim of this chapter is to explore Merleau-Pontys geophilosophy as if the whole earth really matters with an accent on intercorporeality by means of which we humans, as the rst principle of ecology dictates,
are said to be interconnected to all other earthlings. The heart of MerleauPontys contribution to geophilosophy, I submit, is his carnal ontology that
provides us with the earthly comprehension that all relationships necessarily
begin with the intercorporeality or interweaving of lived bodies both human
and nonhuman. Indeed, intercorporeality is truly an earthword that means
to inter-be with all earthly bodies or earthbodiesto borrow Glen
Maziss betting term.79 The body as esh, according to Merleau-Ponty, is
our social placement in the world with other species and other humans. As
such it is, in essence, the primum relationis. Intercorporeality belongs to the
rst order of Interbeing: but for intercorporeality, there would be no Interbeing. The former is a species of the latter. If the human body is a boundary symbol,80 intercorporeality or intercorporeal betweenness marks
boundary crossings for the self to inter-be with other bodies on earth. All
relationships begin rst with intercorporeal symbiosis. The body is the primordial earthlink of the self to the esh of the world that humans and ten
thousand things inhabit together.
Moreover, transversality is to be taken as the radically new way of facilitating lateral border crossings by decentering all the centers from one culture
to another (intercultural), from one species to another (interspeciesistic),
from one discipline to another (interdisciplinary), and from one sense to
another (intersensorial). First, transversality as a lateral movement deconstructs and replaces universality as a Eurocentric idea. Second, it unpacks
anthropocentrism (as well as egocentrism), which regards humanity as the
apex of all creation and the measure of all things and as such is the cause of
wanton ecological destruction and the accelerated disappearance of biodiversity. The arrogance of humans as allegedly rational beings breaks off the
ecological continuum of Being or ecological Interbeing and results inevitably
in an incurable nihilism. In anthropocentrism all beings and things exist only
for the sole benet of humans as rational beings. By inating the human
self, anthropocentrism destroys the transversal circulation of all beings
227
and things and is oblivious to the aesthetic principle that small is beautiful. Anthropocentrism queries, why do animals cross the roads we build?
rather than why do we build the roads where animals cross? Third, as the
body is the locus of perception or the human sensorium and the fundamentum of everything we do and think, the ination or domination of one sense
deates the other senses and violates what Merleau-Ponty calls the bodys
synergy or synaesthesia as the chiasmic intertwining of all the senses.
Vision or sight has been the Brahmic sense in Western philosophy, and the
others, particularly the sense of touch, have been reduced to untouchable
senses. However, vision anaesthetizes the other senses and objecties things,
whereas touch synesthetizes them. The feminist Irigaray downplays ocularcentrism or scoptophilism, which is also identied with the malestream
grid of Western philosophy. By replacing the masculine sense of sight with
the feminine sense of touch, she also means to recover not only the place of
femininity in philosophy but also the (feminine) earth (Terra Mater, Gaia).
As Irigaray puts it elegantly, the calendar of the feminine esh is consonant
with natures rhythmic circulation of the seasons.
In the nal analysis, the synaesthesia of the human sensorium is synchronized with the harmony of music. The end of transversality is to measure and
take into account the harmony of sentient beings and insentient things in the
world. All music is harmonious, Mikel Dufrenne proclaims, because harmony is the primary condition of musical being.81 Inasmuch as the sound
of music surrounds the environing world and thus promotes the (round) circulation of beings and things, harmony maintains and preserves the wholesomeness of the whole earth that requires, according to Merleau-Ponty, no
hierarchy of orders or layers or planes.82 John Dewey evokes the Greek
conception of harmony (kalon-agathon) and extends it to human moral
conduct.83 By so doing, he is not far removed from Confucius, who, as an
appassionato of music, champions the kinship between music and the Sinic
cardinal virtue of jen (humaneness), which attends to all living creatures.
Thus, the earthword harmony becomes most promising for the future
cause of geophilosophy in advancing the lateral relationships of all beings
human and nonhumansprimarily as sentient beings who are in need of
the ethics of compassion, civility, hospitality, care, responsibility, kindness,
and generosity.84 In this respect, Erazim Kohk is forthright and unimpeachable when he declares that To recover the moral sense of our humanity, we
would need to recover rst the moral sense of nature.85 For the Amerindians,
the rst inhabitants of America, the entire embodied Turtle Island is the
228
(sacred) kiva where all living creatures are called peoples. The Japanese,
too, enshrine not only Fujiyama but also the island of their inhabitation as
jinja (sacred temple, the dwelling place of gods). Merleau-Pontys transversality as lateral movement opens up a oodgate for gathering and fashioning the cross-cultural corpus and library of earthwords or geophilosophical
ideas that give credence to the ecological motto of thinking globally.
CHAPTER 13
the greening of postmodern philosophy

th e e thical que stion of rei nhab i t i ng t he eart h
The problem of Nature is the problem of human life.

Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki
At stake is the Earth in its totality, and humanity, collectively. Global history enters nature; global
nature enters history: this is something utterly new in
philosophy.
Michel Serres
Luce Irigaray
i. prologue
The earth has become an important element of postmodern thinking. Ecosophy or the philosophic wisdom of the earth (Gaia, Terra Mater), in turn,
informs the postmodern condition: the latter is an effect or propensity of
the former. Inspired particularly by Martin Heideggers later thought, many
French thinkers of the postmodern persuasion have in recent years lent their
attentive ears to ecosophy in an attempt to overturn and reverse the established institution of an anthropocentric metaphysics rooted in the scopic
regime of Descartess cogito or his epistemocracy, which is necessarily
logocentric and disembodied, egocentric, and ocularcentric. It is no mere
accident that Heideggers Letter on Humanism,1 which was originally
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written as a response to Jean Beaufrets query in 1946 and marked the turning point (Kehr) of Heideggers own thought, is a critique in signicant
measure of the arrogance of modernist humanism, particularly of Cartesian
epistemocracy, which infuses the human mastery and possession of nature
and promotes a head-on collision with the earth.
Michel Haar celebrates what I term Heideggers ecosophy, which questions
the nature of Being as if the earth really matters (i.e., the idea of the earth
rst).2 Michel Serres discovers the notion of natural contract, which is meant
to complement Rousseaus earlier social contract as a critique in part of the
possessive, utilitarian individualism of Hobbes and Locke that has dominated
the Anglo-American world for over three long centuries.3 Gilles Deleuze and
Flix Guattari map out the contours of geophilosophy, in which the earth is not
just one element among others (air, re, and water) but that all-encompassing
element that brings all the elements into a single embrace.4 It may be said
that ecosophy in its holistic content and method is the geophilosophy par
excellence, for the simple reason that it is concerned with the quintessentially
Heideggerian question of how to dwell properly on earth.5 Furthermore, Guattari raises a weighty and timely question in his attempt to construct an ethicoaesthetic paradigm in opposition to a scientic one:
The ecological crisis can be traced to a more general crisis of the
social, political and existential. The problem requires a revolution
of mentalities, whereby we cease investing in development based
on productivism, which has lost all human nality. Thus the issue
returns with insistence: how do we change mentalities? How do we
reinvent social practices that would give back to humanity a sense of
responsibilityif it ever existednot only for animal and vegetable
species but likewise for incorporeal species such as music, the arts,
cinema, the relation with time, love and compassion for othersthe
feeling of fusion at the heart of the cosmos?6
ii. the direction of postmodern environmental philosophy

The ecological crisis is by and large the result of the modernization process.
Ecosophy is a postmodern adventure, insofar as it attempts to interrupt
or deconstruct anthropocentric modernity and its principal conditions, all
enframed in disembodied reason and translated into science and technology
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to fuel the engines of industrial civilization in the name of progress. The

enlightened ethos called modernization and based on the Promethean ideology of progress now has a hegemonic and hypnotic grip on the entire globe.
It signals the end of nature as well as the end of history. As a cultural
politics of identity, modernization is that propensity or mentality of the
West that willy-nilly legislates or legitimates itself as the anointed guardian
and the privileged center of the historical telos of the world by colonizing, as
it were, the very future itself.7 In the planetary projector of modernization,
world history is ever more predictable than before and there are no longer
surprises or future shocks.
This postmodern adventure, which is thoroughly interdisciplinary in
method and as yet marginally intercultural in scope and content, attempts
to subvert and transgress the human mastery and possession of the earth
as merely a human resource. For this reason, ecosophy is the critique par
excellence of modernity and in itself constitutes a postmodern paradigm. It
should be made clear, however, that this understanding differs from that of
Heidegger, who identies Being with being human and thus becomes oblivious to ontological difference. Contrary to a common misunderstanding by
ecosophys critics, then, this argument against anthropocentrism celebrates
no abolition of humanity. Rather, it is an argument against the arrogance
and conceit of humans as the absolute lords of the earth. As everything is
connected to everything else on earth or in the cosmos, ecosophy represents
an effort to harmonize human life with nature or earth and thus overcome a
facile and untenable dualism between nature and culture, self and other, and
mind and body. Since the ecological crisis is a sign of human uprootedness
from the earth (i.e., homelessness), we nd it necessary to accent the body as
our umbilical cord to the earth and our foothold and anchorage in the world,
both human and nonhuman. Humans inhabit the world by way of the body,
or our body inhabits the world. To reinhabit the earth, therefore, we need
to conceptualize the body as interbeing since, to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty
slightly, a philosophy of (the body as) esh is the condition without which
ecosophy remains anthropology.8 The body as esh inscribes the morphological midway between uncultured (wild) nature and the cultured world.
The gender of ecosophy, as that of postmodernity, is preeminently feminine, reecting the didactic lesson we learn from the history of nature or earth
as feminine. Moreover, the liberation of nature from human domination is
inseparable from the liberation of women from the domination of men. To
put it more concisely, the gynecological self is an exemplar of the ecological
232
self. In other words, ecofeminism is an exemplar of ecosophy. Body politics,

which happens to be in itself a postmodern subject, is integral to the struggle
of feminism, of corporeal feminism. Ecosophy and body politics merge at a
crossroads in the elegant words of Nancy Mairs: Through writing her body,
woman may reclaim the deed to her dwelling.9 By affirming being human as
being (and not as having) a body after the fashion of Merleau-Pontys carnal
phenomenology, Mairs calls the dualism of body and mind/spirit a classic
Western patriarchal bifurcation.10 As the body is a dwelling place, oras
the old Anglo-Saxons called itbanhus (bonehouse) and lichama (bodyhome), the word habit (habitus)11 refers to the passionate liaison of our
bodies.12 Accordingly, the project of reinhabiting the earth turns to the
body as the liaison between the self and the earth. Corporeal or ecosophic
feminism engenders not only jouissance but also, more importantly, a heteronomic ethic of caring13 that will be exemplied in the following pages in the
criture feminine of Luce Irigaray and the different voice of Carol Gilligan.
iii. embodiment and environmental philosophy

Guattaris ethico-aesthetic paradigm calls for ecosophic wisdom as its
integral element. Terry Eagleton informs us that the bodys opus is twofold.
In the rst place, the aesthetic (aisthesis) is born as a discourse of the body: it
is intrinsically a carnal affair. In the second place, the aesthetic is the bodys
rebellion against the tyranny of the theoretical (theoria).14 Nietzsche, who
called himself a physician of culture, occupies a unique place in the history
of the aesthetic as a discourse of the body. It is no accident that he, who
proposes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that body am I entirely, and nothing
else; and soul is only a word for something about the body,15 challenges and
transgresses the speculative conundrum of theoria and replaces it with aisthesis, also replacing specular theoria with participatory aisthesis. Nietzsche
attempts to invert Platonism that seeks the eternal and heavenly (solar) ideas
(eidos) radiated from the minds eye and abandons the eeing moments
of earthly reality.16 In his rst major work The Birth of Tragedy, the young
Tantric Nietzsche valorizes music as the consummate aesthetic: it is only as
an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justied
and that only music, placed beside the world, can give us an idea of what
is meant by the justication of the world as an aesthetic phenomenon.17
Thinking in, through, and with the body, Nietzsche offers the social and
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political theory of the body. He describes the body as a political structure

in The Will to Power18 and as a social structure composed of many souls in
Beyond Good and Evil.19 The body houses many souls each of which marks a
function or effect of sociality.20 For Nietzsche, a single body is made of many
souls that are inscriptions of the social; the body is made of an ensemble
of social effects (pragmata) and is not a product of theoretical speculation
(theoria). Nietzsches ultimate and most trenchant criticism of the dominant Western tradition of philosophizing, from Platos theoria to Christian
asceticism and Cartesian epistemocracy, is that it is a denial of sociality; it is
elementally and deeply antisocial.21
The body is the carnal locus of the social. Since for Merleau-Ponty (the
body as) esh (la chair) is not matter, is not mind, is not substance, it may
be called a general thing or an element like air, water, re, and earth:
it is an element of Being.22 As the body and the earth form one esh fold,
they inscribe each other. Humans live in the atmosphere of sociality. This
esh fold of sociality may be likened to the omnipresent air surrounding us,
which is so elemental that we take it for granted and seldom notice it. The
most serious consequence of the Cartesian division of mind and body as two
separate substancesone as res cogitans and the other as res extensais
that it denies and is incapable of justifying the concept of socialitythat is,
the interconnection between ourselves on the one hand and between us and
the earth on the other. The Cartesian disembodied cogito is totally blind to
the body as a social phenomenon. Its interiority is sealed from corporeal and
worldly exteriority. Gerald L. Bruns is poignant when he speaks of Descartes jealousy of the subject, that is, the subjects desire to seal itself off
or to keep its thinking pure or uncontaminated by the horizon of the other,23
human or nonhuman. Once the mind becomes a separate substance independent of the body, egocentrism or even solipsism is inevitable.
The body (as esh) is intrinsically a social phenomenon. Everything corporeal, every esh, is social through and through: where there is no body,
there is no sociality and no reality. To be social is rst and foremost to be
intercorporeal. Only because of the body (as esh) are we said to be visible and capable of relating ourselves rst to other bodies and then to other
minds. The body is our social placement in the world. Only in this sense is the
world said to be made of the same stuff as the body. In dening the social, the
phenomenologist Erwin W. Straus favors the ontological primacy of the body
over the mind when he says that the body of an organism is related to other
bodies; it is a part of the physical universe. The mind, however, is related to
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one body only; it is not directly related to the world, or to other bodies, or
to other minds.24 The mind becomes a relatum only through the body living in a world populated with other bodies. It is necessary that we exist as
body, as esh, in order to be social and thus ethical. It stands to reason to
conclude that there is not only the primacy of perception in everything
we do and think but also no disembodied reason insofar as perception is
a nascent logos. Indeed the body is never an object among other (inert)
objects but is a sentient subject or the subject of perception that is capable
of authoring the world before answering it. Perception or the function
of the body as esh, in turn, is informed and dilated by the ecological
milieu of culture.25
iv. critique of disembodied western modernity

Ecosophy is a phoenix rising from the ashes of modernity. More than to
any other thinkers including Descartes, the ethos of modern humanity owes
directly to Francis Bacon, who also masterminded the human control and
possession of nature on his way to erect an epistemocratic panopticon. In
every signicant respect Bacon was the intellectual harbinger and architect of
the modern age as the age of science, technology, and quantitative economy,
leading to the legitimization and glorication of modern humanity as the
insatiable and frenzied consumer of the earth. He is indeed the philosopher
who designed and engineered the technomorphic and industrial ethos of
modernity. Bacon upheld the convergence of theory and practical operations,
of knowledge and utility, and of knowing and making. Experimentalism, the
utility of knowledge, power over nature by way of knowledge, and philanthropia are all the inseparable qualities of Bacons thought that, when put
together, become an all-out attempt to replace the old cult of books by the
new (experimental) cult of nature.
To initiate the technological lan there must be both the knowledge of
nature (or, as Bacon calls it, the inquisition of nature) and power over
nature. Experiment is not only the essence of the natural sciences but also
the way to discover or unveil the feminine secrets of nature. By increasing
knowledge through experiment, humanity is capable also of extending its
dominion over nature. Bacon sees utility to be the end of human knowledge;
he thinks that human utility and power will subdue and overcome the
necessities and miseries of humanity and that the dignity of knowledge
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will be maintained by works of utility and power. He formulates principles of domination in which knowledge and power coincide with each other
for the sake of utility. The framework of modern technology or technomorphic civilization was laid down by Bacon when he insisted on the meeting of
human knowledge and power in one and found in the womb of nature many
secrets of excellent use. As he himself intimates, moreover, the fruits of science do not grow on the dead trees of books. He scorns the idea of idly studying words rather than matter, because the former are only images or
shadows of the latter. To fall in love with words, for Bacon, is to fall in love
with only a picture. Speaking against the degenerate learning of scholastics, Bacon states that they had sharp and strong wits and abundance of
leisure in the cells of monasteries and colleges, but they knew little history of nature or no great quantity of matter, their cobwebs of learning
spinning no substance or prot.26
The idea of philanthropia is unmistakably the pillar of Bacons imperial
discourse of nature. Viewed from the subversive perspective of ecosophy as
a postmodern adventure, his short posthumous work The Masculine Birth
of Time (Temporis Partus Masculus), written in 1603 with the subtitle The
Great Restoration of the Power of Man over the Universe (Instauratio Magna
Imperii Humani in Universum),27 is both fascinating and revealing. Bacons
conception of philanthropia is an anthropocentrism unsaturated and homogenized, for it is predicated upon humanitys absolute knowledge and mastery
of nature justied on the grounds of a Biblical mandate. As the holy inquisition of nature leads to philanthropia, the Bible mandates that nature with
all her children be found and enslaved to serve humanity and achieve the
fructifying and begetting good for humankind. It is quintessentially antiecosophic because it calls for the death of nature. In the rst place, philanthropia proceeds with the worship of God and results from putting into
action Christian duty and charity. Bacon faults intellectuals who are indifferent to the plight of mankind and calls them unholy and unclean, which is
to say they are unphilanthropic or misanthropic. He wages a holy polemic in
the name of Biblical religion in Jerusalem against allegedly wrong-headed
philosophers in Athens as unholy and empty talkers. Second, we should
recall the controversial disputation of Lynn White Jr. who faults Christianity
as the most anthropocentric religion the world has ever known and thus the
root cause of the ecological degradation in the West.28 Bacons philosophy of
nature for the sake of philanthropia personies Christian thought, which is
criticized by White in his epochal essay. In signicant measure White engages
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in a radical critique of Bacons divine inquisition of nature. Christianity is

the most anthropocentric because, while it sacralizes humanity at the apex of
Gods creation, it desacralizes nature: spirituality is the privileged, God-given
possession only of humanity, and nature becomes a mass of inert materiality
that may be wantonly exploited and used or abused for the ennobling ends
of humanity, or what Bacon calls philanthropia. To borrow the incisive and
elegant expression of Loren Eiseley, Christianity took God out of nature
and elevated man above nature.29
Corporeal feminism engenders jouissance (carnal enjoyment). Jouissance scales feminine distinction and measures feminine sagacity in the
etymological sense of the term. Corporeal feminism is an exemplar of the
postmodern ethico-aesthetic paradigm that runs counter to Descartess
epistemocratic panopticon, as well as to Bacons anthropocentric and utilitarian inquisition of nature viewed as feminine. The criture feminine of
Luce Irigaray, I would contend, embodies a (postmodern) subversion of the
Cartesian phallocracy of the cogito, which is logocentric/disembodied/dualistic, egocentric, and ocularcentric. It is also intrinsically ecosophic because
woman and nature have the same calendar of the esh (la chair), to use
Irigarays expression.30 Jouissance, which is the Nirvana principle of corporeal feminism, is what makes the feminine esh resonant and consonant with
the cyclical rhythm of nature.31 Irigarays criture may be called a feminine
diatactics,32 in which the notion of difference and the sense of tactility are
intertwined and complement each other. Feminine difference also celebrates
the radical difference between the identity of modernity and the difference of
postmodernity. Irigarays philosophy of sexual difference is indeed a subversion of identity; for it, sexuality is the capital site of difference. Vive la
diffrence! Sexual difference is for her a substrate of radical alterity, but this
feminine substrate is not just a g leaf hiding difference.33 As a matter of fact,
Irigaray presents feminine difference as a paradigmatic foundation for a new
ontology, a new ethics, and a new politicsto use her own programmatic
language.34 She intends to subvert phallic monism oras Thomas Laqueur
calls ita one-sex model that claims that man is the measure of all things,
and woman does not exist as an ontologically distinct category.35 Irigarays
celebration of feminine difference means to unveil or unmask the phallacy
of (masculine and logocentric) identity. The liberation of women from mens
exploitation and domination must come only by way of sexual difference.
Equality between men and women, she stresses, cannot be achieved without a theory of gender as sexed and a rewriting of the rights and obligations
237
of each sex, qua different in social rights and obligations.36 It is a matter

of social justice, she insists, to give cultural values to female sexuality and
genealogy for the sake of balancing out the power of one sex over the other.
Difference is the negation only of identity and not of the relational. Irigaray argues for feminine difference as a taste for intersubjectivity. Without
difference, sexual or otherwise, there would be no genuine intersubjectivity
or relationship. Heideggers play on Differenz as Unterschied claries the idea
of difference as relational because (Differenz as) Unterschied couples difference with the between (Unter or inter) that at once connects, preserves, and
promotes both difference and the relational. For Irigaray, however, without
difference the very notion of subjectivity itself becomes undermined and,
without radical alterity, intersubjectivity comes to be suspect.37 Here she
would agree with Emmanuel Levinas in asserting that each subjectivity is
different because it is unique, not the other way around. The model without sexual difference, in which man and woman become alike or the same,
is a singular model of subjectivity that has been historically masculine and
hierarchical: man on top and woman at bottom. Against privileging a universal egalitarian model valid for all men and all women, Irigaray proposes
the paradigmatic model of two autonomous and different subjectivities in
order to ensure and promote intersubjectivitythat is, to develop a palatable
taste for their cohabitation and dialogue. She writes, We must move on to
the model of the two, a two which is not replication of the same, nor one
large and the other small, but made up of two which are truly different. The
paradigm of the two lies in sexual difference. Why there? Because it is there
that two subjects exist who should not be placed in a hierarchical relationship, and because these two subjects share the common goal of preserving
the human species and developing its culture, while granting respect to their
difference.38 Jouissance, of which the morphology is an intersection between
mind and body, self and other, and culture and nature, is a feminine moment
of carnal comprehension.39 As jeux de mots, it is also spelled jous sens (I
hear meaning, or I hear the sensible): it means to subvert and transgress
the scopic regime of knowledge or an an epistemocratic panopticon.40 It auscultates and resonates the voice of feminine difference; it is bliss or even the
eroticism of hearing and voicing but not of seeing or voyeurism, which is a
distinctively masculine trait. Irigaray writes, Investment in the look is not
privileged in women as in men. More than the other senses, the eye objecties and masters. It sets at a distance, maintains the distance. In our culture,
the predominance of the look over smell, taste, touch, hearing, has brought
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about an impoverishment of bodily relations.... The moment the look dominates, the body loses its materiality.41 There is indeed a stark contrast or
even opposition between the voyeurism of the minds seeing (eye or I) and
the communal intimacy and contact of the bodys touch. Many feminists
contend that the aristocracy of vision is a peculiarly phallocentric, patriarchal, and matrophobic institution and the objectifying logic of voyeurism
is uniquely a male logic. The participatory sense of touch valorizes the
feminine, whereas spectatorial vision glories the masculine. To feminize
body politics, therefore, is to accent the sense of touch and to decenter or
depanopticize the specter of vision in our thinking, which is to say to issue an
injunction to arrest the Cartesian division of mind and body as two separate
substances. As the sense of touch has traditionally been a pariah sense, to
think through jouissance is indeed to subvert and scandalize philosophizing
itself. In the end, jouissance as feminine distinction cannot be taken lightly.
In its pursuit of clear and distinct ideas, whichit should not escape our
attentionis in itself thoroughly a visual expression, the Cartesian cogito
erects a epistemocratic panopticon. It interlocks egocentrism and ocularcentrism since there is an identity between the eye and the I. It is really video
ergo sum or the minds I is the minds eye. Heidegger contends that the I
(or the eye) of the cogito as sub/stance becomes the center of thought
from which the I-viewpoint and the subjectivism of modern thought originate: the subjectivity of the subject is determined by the I-ness [Ichheit]
of the I think.42 For him, the I-viewpoint of the Cartesian cogito highlights the modern age as the age of the world picture (Weltbild). In this
regard, the British utilitarian Jeremy Benthams grand and ingenious design
of panvisualism serves as a parable of feminist critique of modern philosophy dominated by epistemocracy in a double sense: woman as a victim of
visual incarceration and humanitys panoptic isolation from the earth. It was
a meticulous, architectural plan of observation and surveillance in the last
quarter of the eighteenth centuryduring the Enlightenmentfor the panopticon or Inspection House.43 As a Cartesian architectural plot, the panopticon is literally a prison house of visualism and a panvisualist technique.
Its prisoners in perpetual solitude in the islands of cells protractedly partitioned by impregnable walls may be likened to those victims who become
incarcerated under the panoptic surveillance of the cogito. The panopticon
is, as the term itself implies, the all-encompassing or encircling prison house
of visualism whose surveillance mechanism or disciplinary principle puts
to use the Cartesian oracle of clarity and certitude: it is the interlocking of the
239
life in perpetual solitude of the hypnotized prisoner and the mechanism of

total control. Inspection is control.44 In the very words of Bentham himself,
solitude thus applied, especially if accompanied with darkness and low diet,
is torture in effect, without being obnoxious to the name.45 The Cartesian
cogito, too, makes philosophy a peculiarly panoptic, phallocratic institution.
Indeed, Cartesianism is panopticism par excellence, in which absolute knowledge or knowledge with absolute clarity and certainty is a private possession
of and by sight. The keyword of the panopticon is inspectionthe double
idea of perpetual vision and vigilance in which the prisoner is never out of the
inspectors sight. The idea of inspection is regarded as control by the omnipotent and omnipresent vigilance of seeing without being seen, in which
seeing and being seen are undialectically or, better, undiatactically identied.
To put it slightly differently, the inspector who controls has the unbounded
faculty [and physical facility] of seeing without being seen and the prisoner
is awed to silence by an invisible eye. In the nal analysis, the opticized or
objectivized prisoner in the panopticon is a passive and powerless onlooker
who is the de-subjectivized object of observation and surveillance.
Irigaray speaks of aporia of a tactility that cannot caress itself but needs
the other to touch itself.46 Of course there is no skinless touch. The skin is
the sentient sentinel of human contact. As the skin, particularly in color, is
a social inscription, contact is indeed a skin trade. In Thinking the Difference Irigaray speaks of taking on the male identity as slip[ping] into mens
skin.47 The question of why we cannot tickle ourselves is intriguing and tells
us a great deal about the morphology of the skin as the site of social contact.
The answer for why we cannot tickle ourselves may be that tickling is a contact sport. Tickling requires the enacted recognition of the other,48 and we
cannot engender the jouissance of being tickled in the absence of the other;
we can engender it only in the presence of and contact with the other.
Touch(ing), which is a uniquely feminine sense, is the carnal, Tantric moment of enjoyment and intimacy involving a union of esh folds.49
It engenders contact (touching together) that, being consociational and
requiring the consent of the body as esh, is necessarily a sharing of spatial continuity and the dure of lived time. The sense of touch that engenders
contact is meant to refute the distancing of narcissistic vision. Unlike vision,
contact through a handshake, for example, requires the diatactical intertwinement of touching on the one hand and being touched on the other.
Touch, Walter J. Ong declares, requires contact, which the eyeball cannot tolerate.50 The metaphor of eye contact (e.g., Marshall McLuhans
240
electronic medium, particularly television as tactile) exalts the sense of touch,

not the sense of sight; it means to scale and measure sight in terms of the
intimacy and tenderness of touch. The eye or vision, nevertheless, has only
an appearance of contact, not contact itself. In tracing feminine genealogy
or the history of feminine difference, Irigaray embraces the virtue of Aphrodite, who symbolizes the embodiment of philotes or tenderness, which
combines carnal Eros and spiritual agape.51 Giving birth and mothering are
morphologically integral to the feminine calendar of the esh and exemplify feminine tenderness. In Jesus as Mother,52 Caroline Walker Bynum also
relates to us the affective spirituality of a feminine theology in the Middle
Ages that has rarely been described until now. Affective spirituality modeled
in the maternal image of Jesus is loving, tender, and nurturing. As opposed
to the masculine theology, for example, of St. Augustine and Origen, eneshment or carnality in feminine theology is an engendering principle, while
milk and blood are viewed interchangeably as nurturing (feminine) or as a
Eucharist enactment. The idea of the soul (anima), too, is feminine. Above
all, there is the homey image of the divine, or God, as a woman nursing the
soul at her breast.
The hand is an agent of touch, of contact. It is not just an extension of
the body but the body incorporated. It is the lived body; it is an organized
corporation; that is, it is pansensory. It activates the works of the other
senses such as hearing, seeing, saying, and singing. Indeed it incarnates the
sociability of the senses: as Merleau-Ponty would explain, it is synergic.
The sense of touch is, in short, the regal sense. It is this sociability of the
hand and the regal sense of touch that Toni Morrison urges on to celebrate
the African American esh in her novel Beloved: And O my people they do
not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty.
Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with
them, pat them together, stroke them on your face cause they dont love that
either. You got to love it, you!53
Auguste Rodins sculptural masterpiece, The Thinker, which is the artistic rendition of two hands and the intimate sense of touch, enshrines the
eneshment of thinking and the body as a temple of organized corporation.
By depicting two right (rite) hands tenderly coming together, his Cathedral,
too, inspirits the piety and certies the sacrament of human coexistence.
The moving story of piety (pietas) is original with and told in the Greek
and Roman religions.54 As it unfolds, there is a temple standing in Rome that
was built to honor the goddess Pietas. On its site a mother had once been
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imprisoned and kept alive by the milk of her own daughters breast. The
story tells the meaning of the natural, reciprocal circle of giving and receiving, which is bodily and mental and spiritual at the same time. It signies the
absolute reciprocity between one who gives nourishment and the other who
returns it in uninterrupted thankfulness.
In an eloquent, deep, and unsurpassable passage from his What Is Called
Thinking? Heidegger denes thinking as chirosophia (or the feminine wisdom of the hand) or manual concept, which goes against the inherited
tradition of denigrating and castigating the allegedly least intellectual of all
the senses (touch) and regarding the philosopher as an eye-man who supposedly celebrates the aristocracy of vision and insight. The hand, according
to Heidegger, is a peculiarly human institution. There is an abyss of difference between the hand and grasping organs such as paws, claws, and fangs.
The hand signies the humanity of humans, that is, the human difference in
its sensuousness, its sociability, its speaking, its thinking. Every motion of
the hand in every one of its works, Heidegger writes, carries itself through
the element of thinking, every bearing of the hand bears itself in that element. All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking.55
In addition to chirosophia, there is chiromancy that was coined by the
sixteenth-century Swiss author Paracelsus (Theophrastus Paracelsus von
Hohenheim) as the divination or, better, the enchantment (manteia) of the
hand (chiro), intended to evoke the sense of a microcosm (human) eneshing the macrocosm (the cosmos or earth). Like the eco-art of geomancy
fng shui or wind-water, as it is called in East Asiachiromancy is the
intimate art of interpreting nature by anthropomorphizing it in terms of the
human body and its parts: Paracelsus compared the growth of a plant with
that of a human being, in that it has the bark as its skin, the root as its head
and hair; it has its body and senses; sensibility in the stem: that it dies, if you
hurt it; it is adorned by owers and fruits as man by the ability of hearing,
seeing and speaking. Conversely, he naturalizes the human body itself: it
is a wood, and life a re which consumes it.56
v. cure for western modernity

Ecosophy, corporeal feminism, and postmodern ethics together culminate in
a heteronomic ethic of caring as responsibility. Caring, which is always tender
and involves corporeal and spiritual intimacy, is the ethical site of feminine
242
distinction. It is also a feminine response to and resolution for egocentrism

(Cartesian or otherwise) and liberalism (possessive or otherwise). Since care
is a participial act, the term caring is preferred. What being is to becoming, care is to caring. Unfortunately however, being, like becoming
is a participial gerund whereas care is not. Caring refers to that social or,
more specially, consociational process that is active, ongoing, and unnished.
It is, therefore, the consociational prototype of responsibility as heteronomic.
In the academic discourse of the American feminist movement, Carol
Gilligans In a Different Voice birthed the ethic of caring as the privileged
marker of feminine distinction and thus held forth a radical departure from
traditional ethics. With the intent of making connection in the face of difference, including the difference between the feminine and the masculine, she
contends that Lawrence Kohlbergs inuential psychology of human moral
development, which has been well received and endorsed by philosophers such
as John Rawls and Jrgen Habermas, is prejudiced and awed in method and
substance and as such fell far short of the universal moral point of view he
purports to advance and promote. Gilligan sums up womens moral orientation, which is a radical departure from its male counterpart as formulated by
Kohlberg: The moral problem arises from conicting responsibilities rather
than from competing rights and requires for its resolution a mode of thinking that is contextual and narrative rather than formal and abstract. This
conception of morality as concerned with the activity of care centers moral
development around the understanding of responsibility and relationships,
just as the conception of morality as fairness ties moral development to the
understanding of rights and rule.57 In opposition to Kohlbergs focus on
abstract rights and formal rules for the development of moral conduct, Gilligan centers her ethical concern on concrete relationships and responsibility.
While rights are self-centered, caring is heteronomica relational ethic for
the sake of the Other, which is self-transcending but not self-effacing; that is,
it is receptive to the needs of the Other.
Neither Heidegger in Being and Time58 nor Michel Foucault in his suggestive title The Care of the Self59 is fully aware of caring as self-transcendence
that is, as an ethical notion. For Foucault, on the one hand, care is a matter
of self-indulgence although it intensies social relations and binds a system
of reciprocal obligations. On the other hand, Heidegger in his seminal work
Being and Time60 denes human existence itself (Dasein) as care (Sorge, cura),
which is a feminine category. Invoking the old Latin fable of Hyginus, he intimates that human existence is inspirited with care, which shapes homo with
243
its body (corpus) as the gift of humus (earth). However, his conception of
care is marred by being self-centered (eigentlich), and thus care authenticates
only existential autonomy but not responsibility. Moreover, Mitsein (beingwith-others, other humans), which is a mode of Being-in-the-world (in-derWelt-sein), is concerned exclusively with interhuman relationships and fails
to negotiate with human and nonhuman relationships. By Heideggers own
admission, the turning point (Kehr) of his thought aims to overturn and cure
this exclusively humanist concern. It is Hans Jonas who in The Imperative of
Responsibility61 attends to the heteronomic ethic of responsibility, for which
he considers the primordial form or prototype to be caring. He holds that
parental responsibility for children, which is nonconsenting and nonreciprocal, is the archetype of all responsible action. It is implanted especially in the
natural propensity of maternal humanity. Maternal responsibility is deemed
to be seless care.
We must turn for help to Emmanuel Levinas to comprehend the heteronomic structure of responsibility. For him, ethics is the rst philosophy
(philosophie premire), and he is radically opposed to Heidegger who subordinates the relation with the Other to ontology.62 Moreover, the ontological framework of existential authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) cannot prescribe
an ethical concern, since ethics worthy of its name is constructed on the basis
not of self-centered (eigentlich) absorption but of heteronomic concern. The
ethic of caring commands, most basically, the primacy of the Other (alterity)
over the self. It is heteronomic rather than egocentric. In other words, the
primacy of the Other, of alterity, is the ethical site of responsibility if not the
site of the ethical itself, which is nontransferable because each person who is
responsible is unique and thus different (i.e., singular). Only by way of selftranscendence is an ethic possible in which the Other is not only not an alter
ego but also primary to the self.
The discovery of heteronomy, of a Thou as alterity, comes from the
Copernican revolution of social and ethical philosophy rst introduced by
Ludwig Feuerbach in the mid-nineteenth century. It is called Copernican
simply because what egocentrism is to geocentrism, heteronomy is to heliocentrism. Levinas continues and preserves Feuerbachs Copernican revolution
of heteronomy. The ethical principle of alterity might very well be upheld by
spelling it altarity, to use Mark C. Taylors newly coined word after a fashion of Jacques Derrida.63 What diffrence is to diffrance in Derrida, alterity
is to altarity in Taylor. The term altar is derived from the Latin altare,
which signies a high place. By conforming the primacy of the Other as
244
a singular subjectivity, the idea of altarity elevates the Other to the altar of
interhuman relationships.
Now the heteronomic ethic of caring as responsibility confronts and runs
counter to the sanctied Anglo-American institution of rights talk or the
talk of the Is have it, which places the self at the dead center of the moral
and political universe and lends a deaf ear to the voice of responsibility.
Mary Ann Glendon sides with Gilligans ethic of caring and responsibility
and speaks most critically of the scotoma of the Anglo-American rights
talk.64 Following Hobbes, Locke, Austin, and Blackstone, Ronald Dworkin
has now become the chief spokesperson for this rights tradition after writing Taking Rights Seriously in which he declared, If someone has a right
to something, then it is wrong for the government to deny it to him even
though it would be in the general interest to do so.65 Even C. B. Macpherson, who is most reputed for his single-minded critique of possessive individualism, appears to be swept into the language of Anglo-American rights
talk when he suggests controvertibly if not incomprehensibly that we get
further by treating human rights (i.e., rights to a quality of life) as individual property rights to preserve and reclaim, for example, the ecological
balance of nature.66 The American rights dialect, Glendon retorts, is distinguished not only by what we say and how we say it, but also by what we
leave unsaid.67 We are indeed possessed by rights talk. As every want is
being translated carelessly into a right whose language is extended now to
trees and animals, we tend to trivialize the magnitude of the dire plight of the
weakened and fragile earth, whose well-being is indispensable for the sustainability of all earthbound creatures including humans. For the preservation
of the earth and humanity, we should become caretakers (more properly
caregivers), not rights talkers.
The ideology of liberalism as possessive individualism (i.e., rights talk)
highlights the antisocial principle of relationships between humans, which
has its modern origin in Hobbes and Locke. In Lockeanism, however, there
is a most conscious integration of individualism and possessiveness (i.e., private property rights, the protection of which is the sole function of government); Locke is the possessive individualist par excellence since for him the
concept of the human as laborer or exploiter of nature is necessary for the
acquisition of private property as an absolute right. The ideology of Lockes
liberalism with its philosophical foundation laid out by Hobbes promotes
the ethos of technological civilization, which aims to subjugate nature for
the exclusive benet of humans. The utilitarianism of labor and industry
245
in exploiting and dominating nature or the land, which when uncultivated

by human labor is called by Locke waste, builds the society of acquisitive
individuals (or homo oeconomicus). For Locke, things of nature are useless
unless they acquire values on account of labor and industry. In the end, Lockean possessive individualism incorporates the antisocial principles between
humans on the one hand and between the human and nature on the other.
The possessive individualist in the Lockean tradition, who is also the functionary of technology, is quintessentially self-centered in his or her dealings
with other humans and other things.
There is indeed a paradox and incongruity when rights talk is anthropomorphically extended, albeit well-intended in all quarters of ecosophy, to
stones, trees and animalsthat is, rights of stones and trees and animal
rights. For example, in a recent work, The Natural Contract, Michel Serres
expresses an innovative and admirable sentiment in proposing a holistic and
global approach to ecosophy with the intent of making peace with the ruinous world of nature, in the same way that Rousseau intended with the social
or interhuman world by way of social contract. It was also Rousseau who
warned that you are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to
all and that the earth belongs to no one.68 So far, so good. Nonetheless, there
is a conceptual aw, something unnatural and incongruous about Serress
language of contract, Rousseau notwithstanding, which is invented
ingeniously I might addwhen it contradicts historical and anthropological
facts in order to overcome, as Hobbes alleged, the wretched and unbearable
condition of inhumanity to humanity in the state of nature, but not to
overcome inhumanity to the nonhuman world (i.e., nature).
The ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant in her recent challenging work Earthcare69 attempts to construct a postpatriarchal and ecotopian theory for
the third millennium that would recover the natural world from spoilage and
declension. It is a partnership ethic of earthcare that adopts a two-pronged
approach in a homocentric social-interest ethic of partnership. This ethic
governs interhuman relationships and also promotes an ecocentric ethic of
partnership in dealing with human and nonhuman relationships. Merchant
alleges that in some ecosophic quarters there is the confusion of lumping
together egocentric and homocentric ethics both as anthropocentrism.
While accepting a homocentric ethic, she rejects the egocentric ethic associated with capitalist exploitation of people and nature. Here she refutes
private property rights (i.e., rights talk) and by implication replaces Serress
language of contract with the language of partnership. However, there is
246
a hitch in Merchants formulation of a partnership ethic in relating humans

with nonhuman nature, simply because the idea of partnership is plausible
only between two equals or, to use her own expression, two autonomous
actors. Partnership is no better than Serress contract. Both terms are
categorial mistakes. Moreover, Merchant fails to make the distinction, if any,
between homocentrism and anthropocentrism. In the literature of ecosophy,
the two terms are one and the same. It is also not enough to fault alone the
egocentric ethics associated with capitalism for the exploitation and domination of nature. Rather it is, I would contend, economism (the theory of homo
oeconomicus) or what Guattari calls productivismboth capitalistic and
socialisticthat must be faulted and abandoned. The difference between
capitalism and socialism lies in governing interhuman relationships but not in
dealing with human and nonhuman relationships.70 To be ecocentric, to be in
favor of the earth rst, we must reject both egocentrism and homocentrism
(anthropocentrism).71 In the nal analysis, we are in need of a heteronomic
ethic of caring as responsibility to sustain the earth that includes both human
and nonhuman things. Indeed, this may truly be called an ethic of earthcare
in which all humans are caretakers and caregivers.
vi. epilogue: what to be done

The ecological crisis points to human estrangement and uprootedness from
the earth as household (oikos)a dwelling place whose deed was taken away
from us by natures mutiny. We are becoming homeless because of our selfcentered pursuit of arrogance, exploitation, and carelessness. It awakens us
to the unavoidable recognition that the earth denes and dictates the terms
and limits of history. To sum up, the aim of this essay is to rehabilitate and
reinhabit this earththe only earthand to restore our deed to it. It is principally threefold. In the rst place, it conceptualizes ecological ethics as if
the earth really matters. It proposes the ethics of the earth rst, which
rejects the arrogance of a man-centered worldview as found particularly in
Descartes and Bacon, the two masterminds of modernity and modernization
for whom the sovereign gaze of a philosopher as kosmotheoros rules the
entire globe.72 No wonder, therefore, that feminine jouissance is a threat to,
and a scandal of, philosophizing.
Second, this essay denes the self always in relation to its social and natural
environment, that is, the self immersed in and surrounded by the atmosphere
247
of sociality. Sociality is as elemental as the air we breathe. What is really

central to human existence, as the etymology itself affirms, is the eccentricity
(ex/centricity) of the self toward the world of other humans and other beings
and things. The human as eccentric is a being who is exposed and reaches
out by means of the body toward the exterior world. Thus the true motto
of human existence must be as follows: do not go inside, go outside. The
embodied self is never sealed off from the world: it is rather a synaesthetic or
diatactical process of turning inside out and outside in. As the rst law of
ecology is the synchronistic dictum that everything is connected to everything
else in the universe, this chapter attempts to construct and develop the ecological self. Listen carefully to the sound voice of Zhang Zai, the eleventhcentury Neo-Confucian patron saint of the ecological self and ecopiety
(an enshrined earthword of my own): Heaven is my father, and earth is
my mother, and even such a small create as I nd[s] an intimate place in their
midst. Therefore that which lls the universe I regard as my body and that
which directs the universe I consider as my nature. All people are my brothers
and sisters, and all things are my companions.73 To be interhuman and interspecic requires bodies-in-relation; it is rst and foremost intercorporeal. It
is in corporeal feminism justied by the phenomenology of embodiment or
eneshment that we discover the body as the epicenter of all relationships.
In other words, the gynecological self is an exemplar of the ecological self
whose eccentricity, it must be emphasized, conrms the ineliminable promiscuity between us and the world, between mind and body, and between
nature and culture.74
In the third place, jouissance as feminine sagacity is an ethico-aesthetic
revolt against and subversion of masculine logocentrism, which is disembodied, egocentric, and ocularcentric. Irigarays diatactics, which interlaces
the (postmodern) idea of difference and tactility as the tangible sense of intimacy and proximity, is set forth in opposition to the tangible sense of intimacy and proximity and in opposition to the intangible and distancing sense
of vision. The hegemony of vision as the sense of and reason for phenomena
such as the panopticism or hypervisualism of the Cartesian cogito falters and
is faulted because it denies the possibility of synaesthesia or consensus:
the world viewed rationally is totally blind to the dense texture of the world
as the copresence of bodies in the esh, not just the copresence of humans
(homopiety) but that of nonhumans (geopiety) as well. The hegemony of
vision inhibits and anaesthetizes the sense of touch (and the other senses)
that, as Walter J. Ong judiciously asserts, gives us an intimate sense of
248
ourselves and of otherness simultaneously.75 Thus it stands to reason to conrm that feminine distinction is the mirror and jewel of ecosophy in the Sinic
sense of both terms, holding together the ideas of unmasking actuality and
discovering piety with tenderness. Most important, the ethos of feminine distinction engenders a heteronomic ethic of caring as primordial responsibility
that is an ethic of the earth rst, of earthcare: the healing of and cure
for the ailing and fragile earth is (an ethic of) caring that demotes and refutes
both egocentrism and homocentrism (anthropocentrism). Natures mutiny
against humankind nds its parallel in a heteronomic ethic of caring against
rights talk. For caring is not a right but a responsibility. It may be claimed
for good reason that heteronomy alone is the site for caring as responsibility
if not as the ethical itself. Earthcare is one of the principal effects of the feminization of the ethical itself. As the touchstone of ecological ethics it restores
the connaturality between humanity and nature, involving a rediscovery of
the primeval and eneshed earthwords that would once again enable humans
and animals to talk to one another, to paraphrase Toni Morrison slightly.76
In conclusion, we have overlooked for too long the ethico-aesthetic
paradigm as a postmodern conguration that incorporates ecosophy and
corporeal feminism. As we are living in a time of crisis, or as the Chinese
would say interesting times, the ecological crisis offers us an opportunity
to plant a new tree of earthcare. The power of the aesthetic that cultivates
the eshs sense and sensibility lies in its potential to defy and break loose
the conformist grip of given or established reality.77 The body as our rm and
secure anchor in the world summons the hope of a future redemption that
can muster a renewal of our eneshed solidarity with the earth. The aim of
this redemptive beginning is twofold: rst, to destroy a real world and then to
construct a possible world. The body as esh inscribed in feminine jouissance
can empower us with and legislate for us an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, the
fact of which is yet to be acknowledged. In the land where the eutrophication of rights talk has suffocated, if not been annihilated, all the other
species of talk, the edifying talk of taking responsibility seriously, must
interrupt and will redeem the commonplace and one-sided chatter of taking
rights seriously. In the end, the ethico-aesthetic injunction to begin again, to
reinhabit the entropic earth for the next millennium and beyond, is small is
beautifulto borrow the elegant and frugal expression of E. F. Schumacher.
If we continue to speak the same language together without a radical, continental shift to earthcare, as a household word, we are surely doomed and
heading toward the end of the earth as well as humanity.
N O T E S
introduction
1. Yijing follows the Pinyin transliteration, whereas the Wade-Giles system spells it
I Ching. My earlier essays (chapters 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 11) used Wade-Giles and later
ones (chapters 9, 12, and 13) Pinyin (e.g., jen and ren).
2. Giambattista Vico, The New Science, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max
Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 78 (par. 237).
chapter 1
1. For the general question of the Other as prima philosophia, see Michael
Theunissen, The Other, trans. Christopher Macann (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984).
Unfortunately, however, Levinas is missing from this work. For the classical examination of the Other from a standpoint of cultural anthropology, see Johannes Fabian,
Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Edward W. Saids
inuential and controversial work Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978)
is preoccupied with the non-Western Other. Craig Owens contends that Western
thought including postmodernism has been scandalously in-different to the issue of
the other sex. See The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism, in The
Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 5782. Hwa Yol
Jung examines the body as the question of the minds other. See Phenomenology and
Body Politics, Body and Society 2 (1996): 122. Paul Shepards The Others (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1996) discusses the importance of the nonhuman other in
the growth of humanity.
2. Edward O. Wilson comments, Postmodernism is the ultimate polar antithesis
of the Enlightenment. See Consilience (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 40. His
desire for the unity of knowledge is of Kantian inspiration. John R. Searle recently
advances the idea of doing philosophy in the real world by building a triangular
tower of mind, language, and society. He considers it a modest contribution to the
Enlightenment vision. See Mind, Language, and Society (New York: Basic Books,
1998). By so doing, he also attempts to answer the postmodern challenges to the
Enlightenment projects. It is noteworthy that he typies the Enlightenment visions by
leaving out the vital issues of the body, woman, nature, and the non-West.
250
notes to pages 620
3. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1952).
4. Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime,
trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960).
5. Michael Jackson, At Home in the World (Durham: Duke University Press,
1995), 14.
6. Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
chapter 2
In memory of my wife, Petee.
This essay was prepared for delivery in the Fourth Plenary Session, Rethinking
History of Philosophy and Comparative Philosophy: Traditions, Critique and Dialogue, at the twenty-second World Congress of Philosophy in Seoul, South Korea,
July 30August 5, 2008. The author is grateful for Research in Phenomenology and
its editor, John Sallis, for giving me permission to reprint with some modication
this article, which was published in volume 39 (2009): 41637. The three epigraphs
and Sections I and II are added to the originally published essay in Research in
Phenomenology.
1. Compare Cornel West, The New Cultural Politics of Difference, in Out There,
ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornell West (New York:
The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1990), 1936; Nishida Kitaro, Fundamental
Problems of Philosophy, trans. David A. Dilworth (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1970),
254; and Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1965), 27184.
2. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), xv.
3. See Hwa Yol Jung, Enlightenment and the Question of the Other: A Postmodern Audition, Human Studies, 25 (2002): 297306. (Reproduced in this book as
chapter 1.)
4. Jonathan Culler, Comparative Literature, at Last! in Comparative Literature
in the Age of Multiculturalism, ed. Charles Bernheimer (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 11721.
5. See Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) and Literature as a World, New
Left Review 31 (2005): 7190.
6. See Hwa Yol Jung, Phenomenology, the Question of Rationality and the Basic
Grammar of Intercultural Texts, Analecta Husserliana, vol. 46 (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer, 1995), 169240.
7. John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), 283.
8. Legislators and Interpreters (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 110.
9. David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. T. H. Green and T. H.
Grose, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1875), 1:252.
10. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 11011.
notes to pages 2022
251
11. See Edward de Bono, New Think (New York: Basic Books, 1968).
12. Toward a Marxist Humanism, trans. Jane Zielonko Peel (New York: Grove
Press, 1968), 937.
13. See Calvin O. Schrag, Philosophical Papers: Betwixt and Between (Albany:
State University Press of New York, 1994) and Convergence amidst Difference
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004). Compare also Hwa Yol Jung,
The Tao of Transversality as a Global Approach to Truth: A Metacommentary on
Calvin O. Schrag, Man and World 28 (1995): 1131; Transversality and Geophilosophy in the Age of Globalization, in Calvin O. Schrag and the Task of Philosophy
after Postmodernity, ed. Martin Beck Matutk and William L. McBride (Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 7490; Transversality and Comparative
Political Theory: A Tribute to Fred Dallmayrs Work, in Letting Be: Fred Dallmayrs
Cosmopolitical Vision, ed. Stephen F. Schneck (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2006), 23050; and Transversality and Comparative Culture, Ex/
Change: Newsletter of Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies 16 (2006): 1117.
14. Schrag, Convergence amidst Difference, 76.
15. The Effacement of Difference: Colonialism and the Origins of Nationalism in
Diderot and Herder, in After Colonialism, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 414.
16. J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, trans. and ed. F. M. Barnard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 199 (emphasis added).
17. In phenomenology, meaning is derived from intentionality, which is the meeting of consciousness (ego-cogito) and its object (cogitatum). Thus meaning is in
the middle between consciousness and its object. The American pragmatic semiotician Charles Morris extensively discussed Maitreyism in Paths of Life (New York:
George Braziller, 1956), 15179. See particularly the works of Lou Marinoff, The
Middle Way (New York: Sterling, 2007), and Mary Douglas, Thinking in Circles
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). It is interesting to note that David Farrell Krell sketches das Geviert envisioned by Heidegger in the diagram of a rectangle
that connects sky, earth, gods, and mortals with two diagonal lines having Being at
its epicenter: the cross (X or chi) of Being is not a crossing out (Durchstreichung) but
a crossing through (Durchkreuzen). See Analysis, in Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche,
vol. 4: Nihilism, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 289.
Recently I stumbled on the very important and interesting garden theory
or Gartenkunst in Germany in the mid-eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth
century. Instead of detailing it, I wish to note here only its importance for the concept
of transversality. The core concept of garden theory is Mittelweg (middle way).
The Mittelweg or Mitte was intended to be the way of resolving binary oppositions
such as art and nature, freedom and determinism, rationality and sensibility, and the
city and the country. It includes the between condition as a form of unication that
incorporates elements of both [extremes whatever they may be] (see Michael G. Lee,
The German Mittelweg: Garden Theory and Philosophy in the Time of Kant [New
York: Routledge, 2006], 61). There is an important difference between garden theorys
Mittelweg and transversality. That is to say, the former focuses on the idea of mediation, whereas the latter is intended to create a new paradigm.
18. See Did Philosophers Have to Become Fixated on Truth? trans. Janet Lloyd,
Critical Inquiry 28 (2002): 80324 and China as Philosophical Tool, Diogenes 50
(November 2003): 1521.
252
notes to page 23
19. See Michel Foucault and Zen: A Stay in a Zen Temple (1978), trans. Richard
Townsend, in Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette (New York: Routledge,
1999), 11014. Before he became interested in Japanese aesthetic culture and the Iranian revolution, Foucault wrote with an inerasable sense of a great divide between the
East and the West: In the universality of the Western ratio, there is this divide that
is the East; the East thought of as the origin, dreamt of as the dizzy point that is the
place of birth, of nostalgia and promises of return, the East which offers itself to the
colonizing reason of the West but is indenitely inaccessible, for it remains always as
a boundary, the night of beginning in which the West was formed but where it drew
a dividing line, the East is for the West everything which the West is not, yet it is here
that it has to seek whatever might be its originating truth. It is necessary to do a history of this great divide. Also see Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson, Foucault and
the Iranian Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 18. The physicist
Werner Heisenberg, who is also acquainted with Daoism, noted that [i]t is probably
true quite generally that in the history of human thinking the most fruitful developments frequently take place at those points where two different lines of thought
meet (quoted in Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics, 25th anniversary ed. [Boston:
Shambhala, 2000], 4). Capra was apparently inspired by Heisenberg to network or
interface modern physics and Eastern mysticism. Capra also encouraged others to
discover networkings.
20. Alisdair MacIntyre is impeccable when he observed that a genuine dialogue
[between East and West] is for the most part lacking. It is we in the West who are
impoverished by our failure to sustain our part in this dialogue (quoted in Anindita Niyogi Balslev, Cultural Otherness: Correspondence with Richard Rorty, 2nd
ed. [Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991], 80). Although the late Richard Rorty felt uncomfortable with a tendency in contemporary political discussion to treat the West as
a name for the source of every imaginable oppression (quoted in Anindita Niyogi
Balslev, Cultural Otherness, 101), he agreed with MacIntyre that Eastern writers
and thinkers have done much more work than Western ones to nd out what goes on
the other side of the world and that it is we in the West who are impoverished by
our failure to sustain our part in this dialogue (quoted in Anindita Niyogi Balslev,
Cultural Otherness, 89).
In his recent book Europe, or the Innite Task: A Study of a Philosophical
Concept (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), Rodolphe Gasch provides
a detailed discussion of the idea of Europe or Europa in Husserl, Heidegger, Patoka,
and Derrida. However, he overlooks Merleau-Ponty completely, while mentioning
Levinas several times in discussing Derrida. The importance of Levinas, I think, is his
ethical philosophy of dialogue and responsibility based on the primacy of the other.
Dialogism, Levinasian, or Bakhtinian, celebrates the primacy of alterity that radically
transforms our way of philosophizing ontology, ethics, culture, politics, and economics. Nonetheless, Gasch entertains the idea of multiple universalities. A multiplicity
of singular universalities, European or non-European, may be called multiversity
or what Merleau-Ponty calls lateral universals. What comes after multiversity is
the question Gasch does not raise. On the other hand, transversality goes beyond
the idea of universality, both singular and multiple, in the direction of hybridity or
creoleness in the globalization of the multicultural world. To use the formula of the
incomparable Goethe, what the self is to the other, Europe is to non-Europe. Europe
is implicated in non-Europe and vice versa. The transversal way of thinking based on
notes to pages 2324
253
Heideggers (Differenz as) Unterschied, which fuses difference and the relational
at once, is a radical way of conceptualizing and transforming the very nature of philosophizing itself.
21. Hegels Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane, vol. 1
(London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trber, 1892), 121. In reading Amartya Sens recent
work, I nd an interesting and striking parallel between Hegels comments on Chinese
philosophy and James Mills views of India, both of which have inuenced the generations of specialists on the subjects: both Hegel and Mill ponticated their views
without ever visiting the countries of their subjects and without reading and understanding their languages (Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny [New York:
W. W. Norton, 2006], 8687). Bertrand Russell was the rst Western philosopher in
the twentieth century, I think, who was self-conscious of writing a book on history
of Western philosophy. See History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1945). He also stressed the fact that philosophy cannot be separated from its
social and political context. Robert Bernasconi puts Hegel on trial at the court of the
Ashanti in Ghana (see Hegel at the Court of the Ashanti, in Hegel After Derrida,
ed. Stuart Barnett [New York: Routledge, 1998], 4163). To be post-Hegelian is also
to be postcolonial as well as postmodern (see Stuart Barnett, Introduction: Hegel
Before Derrida, in Hegel After Derrida, 137). In her recent book Hegel, Haiti,
and Universal History (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), Susan
Buck-Morss critically discusses Hegels Eurocentric cultural racism, while she holds
onto his idea of universality or universal history, which is meant, she argues, to be
non-Eurocentric. However, her future projection of universal history, whether it be
Eurocentric or non-Eurocentric, does not justify the globalizing world of multiculturalism or what Glissant calls diversality. His anti-Hegelian and transversal argument
rejects the overarching linear vision of a single history. To reiterate Glissant: thinking
about One is not thinking about All.
22. Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1982), 4.
23. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 353. See also Pascale Casanova,
Literature as a World, New Left Review 31 (Jan.Feb. 2005): 7190.
24. M. Merleau-Ponty, Everywhere and Nowhere, in Signs, trans. Richard C.
McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 13340. Cited as Signs.
25. Natalie Melas points out that the unquestioned universality of us (whites)
versus the irreparable particularism of them (those marked by color or ethnicity or
more ambiguously, gender) is an extraordinarily stubborn structure of thought and
feeling (Re-Imagining the Universal, in Unpacking Europe, ed. Salah Hassan and
Iftikhar Dadi [Rotterdam, Netherlands: NAi Publishers and Museum Boijamans van
Beuningen, 2001], 13451). For her detailed argument, see her work All the Difference
in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2007).
26. John Wild envisions four different kinds of phenomena in the lifeworld (Lebenswelt), each of which requires a distinct model of scientic investigation: man
himself, the realm of nature, other men and the realm of human culture, and, nally,
the transcendent (Interrogations of John Wild conducted by Henry B. Veatch, in
Philosophical Interrogations, ed. Sydney and Beatrice Rome [New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964], 11978). Since phenomenology of the lifeworld is a global
254
notes to pages 2427
exploration, it is worth noting that Wild once remarked at an East-West philosophical

conference that all the major forms of Western philosophical thought are to be found
in a vast variety of Eastern schools. See Certain Basic Concepts of Western Realism and Their Relation to Oriental Thought, in Essays in East-West Philosophy, ed.
Charles A. Moore (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1951), 258; quoted in Hwa
Yol Jung, Wang Yang-ming and Existential Phenomenology, International Philosophical Quarterly, 5 (1965): 612, which is reprinted here as chapter 3.
27. Speaking of Hegels rationalism, which is inveterately wedded to the conceptual decomposition of life, the pluralist William James contends that Hegel was
dominated by the notion of a truth that should prove incontrovertible, binding on
every one, and certain which should be the truth, one, indivisible, eternal, objective,
and necessary, to which all our particular thinking must lead as to its consummation.
This is the dogmatic ideal, the postulate, uncriticised, undoubted, and unchallenged,
of all rationalizers in philosophy. I have never doubted, a recent Oxford writer says,
that truth is universal and single and timeless, a single content or signicance, one
and whole and complete. Advance in thinking, in the Hegelian universe, has, in short,
to proceed by the apodictic words must be rather than by those inferior hypothetic
words may be, which are all that empiricists can use (A Pluralistic Universe [New
York: Longmans, Green, 1909], 100101).
28. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Everywhere and Nowhere, in Signs, 139.
29. Ibid., 133.
30. Ibid., 139.
31. Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1988), 110.
32. See John Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 50.
33. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort and
trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 8995
(emphasis added). Hereafter VI.
34. Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 363 (emphasis added). Compare Hans-Georg
Gadamer concludes his magnum opus: It would be a poor hermeneuticist who thought
he could have, or had to have, the last word (Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd rev. ed. [New York: Crossroad, 1991], 579).
35. See Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York:
Harper and Row, 1969).
36. See Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989) and Poetics of Relation, trans.
Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). See also Hwa Yol Jung,
Edouard Glissants Aesthetics of Relation as Diversality and Creolization, in Postcolonialism and Political Theory, ed. Nalini Terese Persram (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 193225.
37. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 33. In her critique of the French politics of the
veil or headscarf (hijab in Arabic and foulard in French) in school, Joan Willach Scott
judiciously writes that oneness or unanimity produces exclusions that are contrary to democratic ideals of inclusiveness, whereas the concept of wholeness recognizes the existence of disagreement and differences within a multitude of citizens
and thus opens the way for the kind of political engagement that negotiates rather
notes to pages 2829
255
than excludes (Scott, The Politics of the Veil [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2007], 192).
38. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 49.
39. Here Glissant echoes Merleau-Ponty on Hegel in his Inaugural Lecture at the
Collge de France in 1953. Merleau-Ponty emphasized that the universal history of
Hegel is the dream of history. As in our dreams, all that is thought is real, and all that is
real is thought. There is nothing at all for men to do who are not already taken up in the
system (see In Praise of Philosophy, trans. John Wild and James M. Edie [Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 1963], 49). To use this identity logic of the real and
the rational (thought), the non-West is excluded from Hegels system of history. Furthermore, the contingency of human events is the precondition of history. Otherwise,
according to Merleau-Ponty, history has no meaning, if this meaning is understood as
that of a river which, under the inuence of all-powerful causes, ows towards an ocean
in which it disappears. Every appeal to universal history cuts off the meaning of the specic event, renders effective history insignicant, and is a nihilism in disguise (emphasis
added). Merleau-Ponty, too, is a radical empiricist who pays attention to particulars
before abstract universals. Nothing is prexed or predetermined in history under the
guise of Universal History (In Praise of Philosophy, 5253).
40. See Ivan Ivask, Edouard Glissant: The New Discourse of the Caribbean,
World Literature Today 63 (1989): 55758.
41. Robert Young, Postcolonialism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 68. Paul Gilroys
reputed thesis of the black Atlantic also favors double consciousness or hybridity
that sums up the transcultural intermix of African and European things. Hybridity
here is a converging middle path of multiple, interconnecting axes of affiliation and
differentiation. Gilroys black Atlantic is also constructed as a counterculture of
modernity (The Black Atlantic [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993]).
42. Jean Bernab, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphal Conant (Paris: Gallimard
and Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). This is the manifesto
that is preceded by the francophone Swiss Charles Ferdinand Ramuzs 1914 manifesto
of creoleness called Raison dtre, which is appropriately called by Casanova Swiss
creoleness (The World Republic of Letters, 296).
43. Bernab, Chamoiseau, and Conant, In Praise of Creoleness/loge de la
Crolit, 13.
44. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 98.
45. Speaking of global dialogue, Enrique Dussel asks the following interesting
and important question: Should not the constitution of this rst global dialogue
(West/East, North/South) between continental philosophical communities be one of
the initial and central tasks of the twenty-rst century? (Philosophy in Latin America in the Twentieth Century: Problems and Currents, in Latin American Philosophy,
ed. Eduardo Mendieta [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003], 34). Emmanuel
Levinas goes one step further: dialogue and ethics are inseparable. When I speak of
rst philosophy, I am referring to a philosophy of dialogue that cannot not be an ethics (Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith [New York: Columbia University Press, 1999], 97). Indirectly, therefore, Levinass view of ethics, unprecedented
in the history of Western philosophy, restores the dignity of Sinism as a philosophy,
which was regarded by Hegel, for example, as lack of abstract speculation. It would
be interesting to explore the transversal connection between Confucius and Levinas.
46. In reference to Merleau-Pontys seminal work Phenomenology of Perception,
256
notes to pages 3031
trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), Francisco Varela, Evan
Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch offer an exemplary observation: they speak of the
openness of a space between the self and the world as a middle way, an entre-deux
(The Embodied Mind [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993], 3). Jean-Luc Nancys neologism exonomy is proposed to move out of the binary familiarity of the self and the
other (Philosophical Chronicles, trans. Franson Manjali [New York: Fordham University Press, 2008], 10). It signies neither the same nor the other (ibid.). Exonomy
may and can be tied to Nancys idea of human existence as Being-in-Common
or of the commonality of common beings (i.e., communalism). See Of Being-inCommon, trans. James Creech, in Community as Loose Ends, ed. Miami Theory
Collective (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 112. Moreover, it
would be worthwhile to relate Nancys exonomy or the space of in-betweenness to
the East-Asian conception of the human (ingan in Korean and ningen in Japanese).
See particularly Watsuji Tetsuro, Rinrigaku, trans. Yamamoto Seisaku and Robert
E. Carter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996) and Hwa Yol Jung,
Interbeing and Geophilosophy in the Cultural Topography of Watsuji Tetsuros
Thought, in Why Japan Matters! ed. Joseph F. Kess and Helen Lansdowne, vol. 2
(Victoria: Centre for Asia-Pacic Initiatives, University of Victoria, 2005), 691702.
Nancys exonomy moves into the Eastern in-betweenness or Interbeing out of the
Western bipolarity of the self and the other.
47. Martin Jay, Songs of Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2005), 405.
48. While reading Desmond Morris, I came across the fascinating traveling gesture
of g (ca)a slang term in Italian for the female genitaliawhich when we were
youngsters we learned to use as a gesture of sexual insult during the Japanese occupation of Korea. In fact, the g gesture originally traveled from Europe to Japan with
the Portuguese or the rst Europeans in the mid-sixteenth century. Morris comments
that the Portuguese must have traded gestures as well as goods on their expeditious
visits to Japan. To his amazement he discovered the g gesture signied protection
while visiting a geisha house in Kyoto for the purpose of academic research, not of
asobi (play). What is most interesting here is the fact that not only do ideas, oral and
written, travel or transverse, but gestures also migrate (The Human Animal [New
York: Crown, 1994], 2627).
49. In his concluding remarks of a comprehensive study of the teaching and
research of philosophy in Korea, Yersu Kim writes in the kindred spirit of transversality when he invokes a philosophical synthesis that will not be Eastern or Western,
Korean or American, Korean or Chinese, but one whose centre is everywhere and
its circumference nowhere (Republic of Korea, in Teaching and Research in Philosophy: Asia and the Pacic [Paris: UNESCO, 1986], 12667). Here Kim is quoting
Richard Rorty. See Rorty, Genteel Syntheses, Professional Analyses, Transcendentalist Culture, in Two Centuries of Philosophy: American Philosophy Since the Revolution, ed. Peter Caws (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littleeld, 1980), 239.
50. Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
51. Over four decades ago, Chang Tung-sun ably showed and argued that Chinese logic, which is dictated by the social nature of the Chinese language itself, is a
logic not of identity but of correlation that both assumes and allows pluralism (A
Chinese Philosophers Theory of Knowledge, in Our Language and Our World, ed.
S.I. Hayakawa [New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959], 299324). In this connection,
notes to pages 3134
257
it is most important to note the cultural psychologist Richard E. Nisbetts empirical

and collaborative study of the correlational thinking of East Asian peoples. See The
Geography of Thought (New York: Free Press, 2003). Since the mid-1980s, I have been
using the expression relational ontology for the correlational thinking and doing
in East Asia.
52. See Homi K. Bhabba, Afterword: A Personal Response, in Rethinking Literary History, ed. Linda Hutcheon and Mario J. Valds (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2002), 194204. See also his classic and inuential work The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1996). The American journalist T. R. Reid comments
that East is East and West is West, but anybody who still thinks the twain shall never
meet has never been to Baskin-Robbins or Burger King on the far side of the Pacic.
Then he mentions the nouvelle cuisine of Asian hybrid or fusion delicacies: the
squid pizza, the curry doughnut, the bean-paste Danish, the rice burger, the kimchee
burger, the tempura hot dog, the green tea milkshake, the sashimi submarine, and
ever-popular BST (thats bacon, seaweed, and tomato) sandwich (Confucius Lives
Next Door [New York: Random House, 1999], 30). If you like burgers but not kimchee, Danishes but not bean paste, milkshakes but not green tea, or bacon and tomatoes but not seaweed, then you may be a purist or essentialist but not a transversalist.
53. Can Asians Think? (Singapore: Times Books International, 1998).
54. Anthony Pagden, Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and
West (New York: Random House, 2008), 521.
55. Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 311.
56. Edward W. Said, preface to Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978);
quoted in Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization, 322.
57. Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 5.
58. See Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) and Nations without Nationalism, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
59. In Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001),
98106, Bonnie Honig argues for a democratic cosmopolitanism by balancing the local
with the international that puts a stop to the hostility between us and them.
60. Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 1.
61. Jacques Derrida mentions in passing transversality as an interdisciplinary
(interscientic) approach (Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan
Plug et al. [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004], 241). Martha C. Nussbaum
discusses the importance for her program of a new liberal education of cosmopolitanism, non-Western or intercultural studies, and womens studies. See Cultivating
Humanity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). It is instructive for us
to read what Barthes says with regard to the nature of interdisciplinarity: Interdisciplinary studies, of which we hear so much, do not merely confront already constituted
disciplines (none of which, as a matter of fact, consents to leave off). In order to do
interdisciplinary work, it is not enough to take a subject (a theme) and to arrange
two or three sciences around it. Interdisciplinary study consists in creating a new
object, which belongs to no one. The Text is, I believe, one such object (The Rustle
of Language, trans. Richard Howard [New York: Hill and Wang, 1986], 72; emphasis added). So is the hybrid product (Intertext) of what might be called transversal or intercontinental philosophy, which is the crossing of two or more continental
philosophies.
258
notes to pages 3739
chapter 3
1. John Wild, Certain Basic Concepts of Western Realism and their Relation to
Oriental Thought, in Essays in East-West Philosophy, ed. Charles A. Moore (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1951), 258.
2. In recent years there has been a revived interest in vitalizing the philosophy of Wang
Yang-ming. Chan Wing-tsits recent translation of Wangs philosophical work entitled
Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian Writings (IPL) (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1963) is a signpost for future study. Wangs work was previously translated by Frederick Goodrich Henke as The Philosophy of Wang Yang-ming
(Chicago: Open Court, 1961), which has been criticized by Chan and Chang Carsun as
being too defective. For recent writings on Wang Yang-ming, see Chang Carsun, Wang
Yang-ming: Idealist Philosopher of Sixteenth-Century China (New York: St. Johns
University Press, 1962); Wang Yang-mings Philosophy, Philosophy East and West 5
(April 1955): 318; and Iki Hiroyuki, Wang Yang-mings Doctrine of Innate Knowledge of the Good, Philosophy East and West 11 (1961): 2744.
3. A recent translator of Heideggers work lists various English equivalents of
Dasein and, having pointed out their inadequacies, nally decides to use the term
in the original German. Kant and the Problem of Metaphhysics, trans. James S.
Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), xvixvii, n. 3. Similarly,
Wang Tchang-tche gives up translating liang-chih in French and uses the original
Chinese: Une traduction est incapable de render tous les sens que Wang yang-ming
lui a attribu, nous prfrons dire tout simplement le liang-tche [i.e., liang-chih], sans
le traduire. La Philosophie morale de Wang Yang-ming (Shanghai: Librarie de TouS-W, 1936), 208.
4. See Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 2 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1956), 47276.
5. The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, vol. 2 (The
Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 653.
6. Wang Tchang-tche, Phil. morale, 120.
7. IPL, 92.
8. John Wild, Existentialism as a Philosophy, Journal of Philosophy 57 (1960):
61; William A. Luijpen, Existential Phenomenology (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1962), 35. As Luijpen points out, a difference between existential philosophy and phenomenology exists in that Kierkegaard is the founder of existentialism
and Husserl that of phenomenology, but one could hardly call Kierkegaard a phenomenologist or Husserl an existentialist (35). James M. Edie recently notes that In this
country the term existential philosophy is coming to have practically the same meaning as phenomenology and they are used synonymously more and more frequently.
So long as the historical evolution which lies behind this identication is properly
understood, I see nothing against such a usage.... Recent Work in Phenomenology, American Philosophical Quarterly 1 (1964): 155, no. 4.
9. See Sein und Zeit, 9th ed. (Tbingen, Germany: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1960). In
the development of Heideggers thought, we are especially interested in the early Heidegger or what William J. Richardson calls Heidegger I in contrast to Heidegger
II, after the Kehre (reversal) has occurred. See Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963).
notes to pages 3941
259
10. See Ltre et le nant: Essai dontologie phnomnologique (Paris: Librairie

Gallimard, 1942).
11. See Phnomnologie de la perception (PP) (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1945).
12. See Existence and the World of Freedom (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1963).
13. The Lebenswelt is translated most commonly as the lifeworld and often as the
world of everyday life, the world of lived experience, and the pre-reective world.
14. PP, 520. The translation of Colin Smith, Phenomenology of Perception (New
York: Humanities Press, 1962) is used throughout this essay.
15. Luijpen, Exist. Phen., 97.
16. The idea of the Lebenswelt was expounded by Husserl and found in his posthumously published work: Die Krisis der europischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phnomenologie, Husserliana VI, 2nd ed. (The Hague, Netherlands:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), especially 12351.
17. Merleau-Ponty, PP, i.
18. Literature, Philosophy and the Social Sciences (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 203.
19. PP, xii.
20. Among his works, see The Self as Agent (New York: Harper, 1957), Persons in
Relation (New York: Harper, 1961), and Interpreting the Universe (London: Faber and
Faber, 1933). John Wild comments that the second is a lucid expression of radical
empiricism, worked out independently by a British philosopher, which has much in
common with continental phenomenology. Existence and the World of Freedom, 231.
21. For example, see Robert O. Johann: The Return to Experience, Review of
Metaphysics, 17 (1964), 31939, and Experience and Philosophy, in Experience,
Existence, and the Good: Essays in Honor of Paul Weiss, ed. Irwin C. Lieb (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961), 2538.
22. James M. Edie, Introduction to Pierre Thvenaz, What is Phenomenology?
And Other Essays (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1962), 36. Edie does not include
Macmurray and Johann.
23. Sein und Zeit, 2834.
24. The Field of Consciousness (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1964), 167.
25. Dorion Cairns, An Approach to Phenomenology, in Philosophical Essays in
Memory of Edmund Husserl, ed. Marvin Farber (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940), 4.
26. Field, 183.
27. PP, xiv.
28. Field, 181.
29. Dorion Cairns stresses the notion that the methodological principle of phenomenology is an official philosophical attitude of neutrality. Art. cit. (n. 25), 4.
30. Phnomnologie existentielle, in Encyclopdie franaise, XIX (Paris: Socite
nouvelle de lencyclopdie franaise, 1957), 19.108. Compare 19.1021: Ainsi la
phenomenology existentielle fait la transition entre la phenomenology transcendentale, ne de la rduction de toute chose son apparition pour moi, et lontologie,
qui restaure la question du sens de ltre pour tour ce qui est dit exister. See also
Stephan Strasser, Phenomenology and the Human Sciences (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne
31. Ontologie ist nur als Phnomenologie mglich. Sein und Zeit, 35.
260
notes to pages 4146
32. Ibid., 42.

33. Merleau-Ponty, PP, 1.
34. Thvenaz, What Is Phen.? 91.
35. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 1:195.
36. See Alphonse De Waelhens, LIde phnomnologique dintentionalit, in
Husserl et la pense moderne, ed. H. L. Van Breda and J. Taminiaux (The Hague,
Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), 155.
37. There are two wings in the movement of Neo-Confucianism that arose as a
reaction against Buddhism and Taoism during the Sung dynasty (9601279) and in
the Ming dynasty (13681644). One is the rationalist wing of the School of Principle (li-hseh) and the other, the Idealist wing or the School of Mind (hsin-hseh).
The former is sometimes called the Cheng-Chu school because Cheng Yi (1033
1108) and Chu Hsi (11301200) were its prominent leaders and the latter the Lu-Wang
school because Lu Hsiang-shan (11391193) and Wang Yang-ming were its leaders.
For discussion on Neo-Confucianism, see Chang Carsun, The Development of NeoConfucian Thought (New York: Bookman Associates, 1957); Chan Wing-tsit, A
Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963),
450ff.; and Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, vol. 2, trans. Derk Bodde
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 407ff.
38. IPL, 164.
39. See Chang, Wang Yang-ming, 55.
40. IPL, 162.
41. See Chan Wing-tsit, How Buddhistic Is Wang Yang-ming? Philosophy East
and West 12 (1962), 20314, in which he points out that Wang Yang-ming criticized
Buddhism more effectively than Chu Hsi.
42. PP, ix.
43. Merleau-Ponty writes that La plus importante acquisition de la phnomnology est sans doute davoir joint lextrme subjectisme et lextrme objectivisme dans
sa notion du monde ou de la rationalit. PP, xv.
44. IPL, 77 and passim.
45. La phil. morale, throughout which the term coeur is used, 198 in particular.
46. IPL, 278.
47. Ibid., 80.
48. Ibid. Wang Tchang-tche refers to yi as intentionalit au sens phnomnologique (Phil. morale, 198).
49. Cartesianische Meditalionen, Husserliana I, 2nd ed. (The Hague, Netherlands:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), section 14, 7072 and Ideen zu einer reinen und phnomenologischen Philosophie, Husserliana III (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff,
1950), especially sections 3439, 7989.
50. Gurwitsch, Field of Consciousness, 74n25.
51. IPL, 189.
52. Ibid., 128.
53. Ibid., 14 and passim.
54. Ibid., 14.
55. Also, we may say that these principles of lial piety, brotherly respect, loyalty,
and benevolence are things in the sense that they can be the objects of thought or
reective knowledge.
56. IPL, 161.
notes to pages 4649
261
57. Labeling a philosophy by isms is a risky business. It is interesting to note

what J. N. Mohanty says about Husserls philosophy: There is at least one reason
that makes a study of Husserl particularly interesting. He is one of the very few
amongst the pre-analytical philosophers who refuse to be classied by any isms.
In fact, his peculiar method enabled him to combine in his philosophy elements as
diverse as realism and idealism, rationalism and empiricism, positivism and
pragmatism, intuitionism and intellectualism. Edmund Husserls Theory of
Meaning (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 2.
58. IPL, 189.
59. Ibid., 252.
60. Ibid., 189. Compare Merleau-Ponty, PP, 11: ce pur sentir reviendrait ne rien
sentir et donc ne pas sentir du tout. La prtendue vidence du sentir nest pas fonde
sur un tmoignage de la conscience, mais sur le prjug du monde. Nous croyons trs
bien savoir ce que cest que voir, entre, sentir, parce que depuis long-temps la perception nous a donn des objets colors ou sonores. Quand nous voulons lanalyser,
nous transportons ces objets dans la conscience.... comme le peru lui mme nest
videmment accessible qu travers la perception, nous ne comprenons nalement ni
lun ni lautre.
61. IPL, 223. Compare Merleau-Ponty, PP, 10: Je renoncerai... dener la sensation par limpression pure. Mais voir, cest avoir des couleurs ou des lumires, entendre cest avoir des sons, sentir, cest avoir des qualits, et, pour savoir ce que cest que
sentir, ne suffit-il pas davoir vu du rouge ou entendu un la?Le rouge et le vert ne
sont pas des sensations, ce sont des sensibles, et la qualit nest pas un lment de la
conscience, cest une proprit de lobjet.
62. IPL, 225 and 259.
63. Ibid., 150.
64. See Fung, Hist. Chin. Phil., II, 49293, 522, 601; Wang Tchang-tche, Phil.
morale, 208: Ce que lhomme connat sans avoir appris, cest la connaissance naturelle
(le liang-tche, lintuition morale); ce que lhomme peut sans avoir reechi, cest le
pouvoir naturel (la capacit instinctive). Liang-chih has an ethical implication based
on what Mencius believed about human nature as being naturally good. However, to
interpret liang-chih in narrowly moral terms does injustice to its full meaning. Liangchih transcends what is merely ethically good and bad. As Wang Yang-ming himself
says, it knows both the good and the bad. Liang-chih is really practical knowledge
in the sense of prereective knowledge that pertains to lived experience. Although
Wang Tchang-tches interpretation of Wang Yang-ming is predominantly ethical, he
writes that one quality of the philosophy of liang-chih is its essentially practical character in terms of its origin, its expression, and its effects. Phil. morale, 187.
65. Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality, ed. Maurice
Natanson (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 229.
66. Self as Agent, 90ff.
67. Phil. morale, 11.
68. Natanson, Literature, Philosophy and the Social Sciences, 201.
69. Existence, 41.
70. Schutz (n. 64), 137.
71. Ibid., 247.
72. Christian Rationalism, in Christianity and Existentialism by William Earle,
James M. Edie, and John Wild (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1963), 58.
262
notes to pages 4953
73. Maurice Natanson, ed., Philosophy of the Social Sciences: A Reader (New
York: Random House, 1963), 188.
74. Edie, Introduction to Thvenaz, What Is Phen.? 33.
75. Strasser Phenomenology, 253. Compare Emmanuel Levinas, Thorie de
lintuition dans la phnomnologie de Husserl (Paris: Vrin, 1963), 13435.
76. 157.
77. Levinas Thorie de lintuition, 217. Compare Strasser, Phenomenology, 252:
Intuition is the cognitive act corresponding to the being-evident of real being.
78. IPL, 104.
79. Levinas, 216.
80. Ibid., 185n58.
81. Ibid., 219.
82. Wang Tchang-tche, Phil. morale, 68.
83. Strasser, Phenomenology, 156.
84. See ibid., 157: It is in the successful praxis that consists the verication, the
making-true, of prescientic intuition. This verication, therefore, is likewise of an
intuitive nature.
85. IPL, 161.
86. Ibid., 277.
87. Existence, 19.
88. IPL, 15.
89. Ibid., 104.
90. See Schutz, Collected Papers I, 67.
91. The relationship between knowledge and action, writes Chan, had been a
perennial topic for discussion in the Confucian tradition. IPL, xxxiv. See his Chinese Theory and Practice, in Philosophy and Culture East and West, ed. Charles A.
Moore (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1962), 8195 and David S. Nivison,
The Problem of Knowledge and Action in Chinese Thought Since Wang Yangming, in Studies in Chinese Thought, ed. Arthur F. Wright (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1953), 11245.
92. IPL, 93.
93. Ibid., 30.
94. Ibid., 1112.
95. See Schutz, 137 and 208.
96. It would be interesting to compare the phenomenological notion of intersubjectivity or the intersubjective world with the idea of jen. Etymologically, the Chinese
word jen is a combination of the word man and two, signifying man in society
or humanity. Jen is one of the most persistent subjects in the history of Chinese
philosophy (Chan, Source Book, 591), and became an important development in the
Neo-Confucian movement (ibid., 676). Cheng Hao, for example, says that As jen
is preserved, the self and the other are then identied (ibid., 524). Jen is essentially
activity and sociality. For further discussion on jen, see: Chan Wing-tsit, The Evolution of the Confucian Concept Jen, Philosophy East and West 4 (1955): 295319.
97. Thvenaz points out that existential phenomenology is a pragmatism. What
Is Phen.? 34.
98. IPL, 109.
99. Ibid., 107.
100. Ibid., 128.
notes to pages 5458
263
101. Merleau-Ponty, Les Sciences de lhomme et la phnomnologie (Paris: Centre de Documentation Universitaire, 1963), 2: Le philosophe est, dit-il [Husserl], le
fonctionnaire de lhumanit, voulant dire par la que le philosophe est professionnellement destin dner et rendre conscientes les conditions dune humanit, cest-dire dune participation de tous une vrit commune.
102. The Spirit of American Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press,
1963), 186.
103. The Four Books are the Great Learning (Ta Hseh), the Analects (Lun Y),
the Doctrine of the Mean (Chung Yung), and the Book of Mencius, and the Five
Classics consist of the books of History (Shu Ching), Odes (Shih Ching), Changes (I
Ching), Rites (Li Chi), and the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chun Chiu).
104. Syntheses in Chinese Metaphysics, Essays in East-West Phil. (n. 1), 164.
chapter 4
This is a revised version of the paper I read for the International Society for Chinese Philosophy at the Annual Meeting of the American Philosophical Association
(Eastern Division), December 2730, 1984, Hilton Hotel, New York City. I am grateful to my longtime friend Kuang-ming Wu for having invited me to write and read this
paper. My interest in comparative philosophy began in earnest when I met Kuangming at Yale University some eighteen years ago. As we were students of existentialism and phenomenology together, we spent many late hours discussing the infamous
and intriguing question as to whether China or the Orient has indeed a philosophy.
I am also grateful to Professor Tong Lik Kuen for commenting on my paper on very
short notice and both Kuang-ming and Professor A. S. Cua for raising probing questions from the oor during the panel discussion.
1. See Hwa Yol Jung, Wang Yang-ming and Existential Phenomenology, International Philosophical Quarterly 5 (December 1965): 61236. In the context of the
present discussion, I should mention two other essays that are sequels to the Wang
paper: Jen: An Existential and Phenomenological Problem of Intersubjectivity, Philosophy East and West 16 (JulyOctober 1966): 16988 and Confucianism and Existentialism: Intersubjectivity as the Way of Man, Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research 30 (December 1969): 186202.
2. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
3. Herrlee Glessner, Sinism: A Study of the Evolution of the Chinese World-View
(Chicago: Open Court, 1929).
4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richrd C. McCleary (Evanston, IL:
5. Ibid., 138.
6. Ibid., 139. Paul A. Cohens recent work Discovering History in China (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1984) challenges ethnocentrism in American historiography on China. He makes an interesting observation: the Chinese themselves,
both Marxist and non-Marxist, in reconstructing their own history, have depended
heavily on vocabulary, concepts, and analytical frameworks borrowed from the West,
thus depriving Western historians of compelling insider-produced alternatives to our
own outsider perspective (ibid., 1).
264
notes to pages 5961
7. For a sustained discussion of this theme from ancient Greek thinkers to Marx,
see Nicholas Lobkowicz, Theory and Practice (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1967).
8. See Wang Yang-ming and Existential Phenomenology, 633. All these passages
of Wang are taken originally from Instructions for Practical Living and Other NeoConfucian Writings, trans. Chan Wing-tsit (New York: Columbia University Press,
1963).
9. Wang Yang-ming and Existential Phenomenology, 621. Julia Ching often uses
the expression mind-and-heart in translating hsin. See To Acquire Wisdom: The Way
of Wang Yang-ming (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976). It is interesting to
note that the ideogram hsin is used in other ideograms as their component that signies conscious or intentional acts. According to Jitendra Nath Mohanty, some Indian
schools of thought make the distinction between mind and consciousnessthat
is, the latter alone is intentional, whereas the former is nonintentional. See The Concept of Intentionality (St. Louis: Warren H. Green, 1972), 160.
10. See S. I. Hayakawa, ed., A Chinese Philosophers Theory of Knowledge, in
Our Language and Our World (New York: Harper, 1959), 299324.
11. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 4.
12. This original meaning of dialogue is discussed in Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dialogue and Dialectic, trans. Christopher Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1980).
13. There are some close affinities between Wang Yang-ming and Merleau-Pontys
existential phenomenology that need to be examined. Merleau-Pontys phenomenological discussion on corporeality (i.e., the primacy of perception) is an urge to
return to perception as the radical root of conception. Importantly enough, the verb
to conceive is associated with the fertility (or fecundity) of the body in the process of thinking with language. Elizabeth Sewell bemoans the fact that conception
has become an intellectual (i.e., disembodied) term. She writes that The human
organism thinks as a whole, and our division of it into mind and body is the result
of overemphasis on logic and intellect in near isolation which has led us into so onesided a view of the activity and thought, so gross an underestimation of the bodys
forms of thought and knowledge. The Orphic Voice (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1961), 3536. Heidegger has a marvelous passage concerning many ways of the
hand that culminate in thinking as a handicraft: the hands gestures run everywhere through language, in their most perfect purity precisely when man speaks by
being silent. And only when man speaks, does he thinknot the other way around, as
metaphysics still believes. Every motion of the hand in every one of its works carries
itself through the element of thinking, every bearing of the hand bears itself in that
element. All the work of the hand is rooted in thinking. Therefore, thinking itself is
mans simplest, and for that reason hardest, handiwork, if it would be accomplished
at its proper time. What Is Called Thinking? trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray
(New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 1617.
14. For a discussion of the essence of human action as intentional in contemporary Anglo-Saxon philosophy, see Stuart Hampshire, Thought and Action (New York:
Viking Press, 1960). His thesis for action as intentional is also an argument against the
behaviorist conception of human conduct. Hampshire states that The notion of the
will, of action, the relation of thought and action, the relation of a persons mind and
notes to pages 6166
265
body, the difference between observing a convention or rule and merely having a habit
all these problems nd their meeting-place in the notion of intention (ibid., 96).
15. The detailed exposition of John Macmurrays philosophy is found in his 1953
54 Gifford Lectures entitled The Form of the Personal at the University of Glasgow,
which unfortunately have not attracted the scholarly attention they deserve. They
were published in two volumes: The Self as Agent (London: Faber and Faber, 1957)
and Persons in Relation (London: Faber and Faber, 1961). See also the authors paper
The Logic of the Personal: John Macmurray and the Ancient Hebrew View of Life,
The Personalist 47 (Autumn 1966): 53246.
16. John Macmurray, Religion, Art, and Science (Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 1961), 47.
17. Maurice Mandelbaum, The Phenomenology of Moral Experience (Glencoe,
IL: Free Press, 1955), 31.
18. J. Donald Moon, Moral Knowledge and Its Methodology in Aristotle (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1968), 90.
19. Compare Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? trans. W. B. Barton Jr. and Vera
Deutsch (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967).
20. Wang Yang-ming and Existential Phenomenology, 624.
21. A. S. Cua, The Unity of Knowledge and Action: A Study in Wang Yang-mings
Moral Psychology (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1982), 70. The pagination
in the text is from this work.
22. In his History and Will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-tungs Thought
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), Frederick Wakeman Jr. treats Wang
Yang-ming as a precursor of Mao and speaks of Wangs existential commitment.
He regards my Wang Yang-ming and Existential Phenomenology as a case for the
existentialist cast of the Wang Yang-ming school (ibid., 363364, n. 26). Wakeman
makes the following interesting point: Despite the Maoist bridge between them, the
distance separating Marx and Wang Yang-mings theories of practiceat least insofar as they responded to differing philosophic inquirieswas apparently quite vast.
Wangs form of praxis was not devised as a logical solution to the problem of truth. It
was designed to prevent the seeker of good from becoming so infatuated with abstract
principles of being that he overlooked the need for worldly action. Men had lost the
Way precisely because philosophers had been content to know in vacuo.... Marx, on
the other hand, put cognition before action and tried to mediate the familiar Western
philosophical dualism between abstract theory and concrete praxis with his dialectic
(ibid., 273). However, Wakeman is right on Wang Yang-ming, but he is wrong on
Marx. See the authors paper Being, Praxis, and Truth: Toward a Dialogue between
Phenomenology and Marxism, Dialectical Anthropology 12 (1988): 30728 and
Hwa Yol Jung and Petee Jung, Revolutionary Dialectics: Mao Tse-tung and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, Dialectical Anthropology 2 (1977): 3356.
23. The Concept of Intentionality, 174.
24. Ibid., 193.
25. To Acquire Wisdom, 61.
26. Ibid., 289, no. 29.
27. Ibid., 66.
28. Julia Ching, Authentic Selfhood: Wang Yang-ming and Heidegger, The
Monist 61 (January 1978): 327.
29. Ibid., 7.
266
notes to pages 6769
30. Neo-Confucian Thought in Action: Wang Yang-mings Youth (14721509)

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976) and Humanity and Self-Cultivation:
Essays in Confucian Thought (Berkeley, CA: Asian Humanities Press, 1979).
31. Neo-Confucian Thought in Action, 198, no. 74.
32. Ibid., 171.
33. Humanity and Self-Cultivation, 151. Tu draws the following diagram to show
this set of four correlations.
shen
hsin
(body)
(mind)
(intention)
chih
(knowledge)
wu
(thing)
34. Neo-Confucian Thought in Action, 172.

35. Ivan Morris, The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962).
36. For a brief discussion of Wang Yang-mings inuence on Japan, see Ching, To
Acquire Wisdom, 24956.
37. In this connection, I should mention the forgotten work by the American
philosopher Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty (New York: Macmillan, 1908,
1617), in which he denes the concept as the willing and practical thoroughgoing
devotion of a person to a cause. For him, loyalty is a central principle of our moral
life and the other moral concepts such as justice, charity, industry, wisdom, and spirituality are all denable in terms of it. It triggers ones action that, by being social,
transcends the narrow connes of the individual, that is, ego-satisfaction. Of course,
we should be careful not to confuse sincerity with the nationalistic fervor of kokutai
(national polity) in recent Japanese history.
38. In La scandale du corps parlant (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1980), Shoshana Felman evokes the sense of corporeality when she speaks of speech (parole) as corporeal
promise (promesse corporelle) that beckons a conjugal relationship between Austins
philosophy of language and (Jacques Lacans) psychoanalysis as the talking cure.
39. It is extremely important, I believe, to understand the diatactics of speech and
silence in human communication. Tong Lik Kuen astutely observes that in the context of Chinese philosophy, . . . speech and silence are correlative concepts. There
is no speech without silence, and there is no silence without at least the possibility
of speech. . . . We may say, in the metaphysical terminology of the I Ching, that
speech is the yang of silence, and silence the yin of speech. But one-yin-oneoneyang is called Tao. The alternation of speech and silence is thus an instantiation of
the cosmic law of I, the primordial process of Creativity which is the ultimate reality of the universe. The Meaning of Philosophical Silence: Some Reections on
the Use of Language in Chinese Thought. Journal of Chinese Philosophy 3 (1976):
170. Max Picard goes so far as to say that One cannot imagine a world in which
there is nothing but language and speech, but one can imagine a world where there is
nothing but silence. The World of Silence, trans. Stanley Godman (Chicago: Henry
Regnery, 1952), 1. The opposite of language is not silence, but it is noise. In human
notes to pages 6972
267
communication, silence as the horizon of sound resides in the beginning, interlude,

and ending of speech as verbal utterances. It is lack of utterance or enunciation but
not lack of thought, lack of words, or lack of the intention to speak. As a beginning
and ending of speech, it works like the primordial Tao that is silent (unspoken)
and empty (unwritten). In a dialogue or conversation, there is no basic opposition or incompatibility between silence and utterance. Genuine dialogue demands the
diatactics of speaking and listening as an exchange. For it is a doubling or coupling
of saying utterance and silent listening: one who utters and the other who listens
(silently) are reversible or exchangeable. If there is no listening or silence, conversation would be a series of monologues rather than a dialogue. In brief, there is no basic
opposition among silence, utterance, and action.
40. The nineteenth-century American Ernest Fenollosa, who went to Japan to
teach philosophy, became fascinated with Chinese ideograms and discovered etymosinology. See The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Haun
Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein (New York: Fordham University Press,
2008). For an exposition of the implications of etymosinology, see the authors paper
Misreading the Ideogram: From Fenollosa to Derrida and McLuhan, Paideuma 13
(1984): 21127.
41. Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point (New
York: Harper and Row, 1968), 39. For an extensive discussion on the subject, see
Chang Cheng-ming, Lcriture chinoise et le geste humain (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1937).
The most comprehensive anthropological study of human gesture and language is
found in Andr Leroi-Gourhan, Le Geste et la parole, 2 parts in 2 vols. (Paris: ditions Albin Michel, 196465): Part I, Technique et language and Part II, La Mmoire
et les rythmes.
42. See The New Science, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970).
43. The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 24344. Compare Curt
Sachs, World History of the Dance, trans. Bessie Schonberg (New York: W. W. Norton, 1937), 3: The dance is the mother of the arts. Music and poetry exist in time;
painting and architecture in space. But the dance lives at once in time and space.
44. Dante... Bruno. Vico... Joyce, in Samuel Beckett et al., Our Exagmination
Round His Factication for Incamination of Work in Progress (London: Shakespeare,
1929), 11.
45. ConfuciusThe Secular as Sacred (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 53.
chapter 5
1. See my paper, Wang Yang-ming and Existential Phenomenology, International Philosophical Quarterly V, no. 4 (December, 1965), 61235.
2. Y. P. Mei reports that existentialism has no representation at all among contemporary Chinese philosophers. He does not even mention phenomenology. See Chinese Philosophy, in Philosophy in the Mid-Century, ed. Raymond Klibansky, vol. 4
(Firenze, Italy: La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1962), 270. However, it is reported: At one time
even Scheler had quite a following in China. See Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, vol. 2 (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 622.
268
notes to pages 7374
Recently the rst comprehensive work in Chinese on Edmund Husserl was published:
Li Kuei-liang, Husai-erh Hsien-Hsiang Hseh (Husserls Phenomenology) (Taipei: The
Research Institute of Education, Taiwan Provincial Normal College, 1963).
3. See John Wild, Existentialism as a Philosophy, The Journal of Philosophy 57
(January 21, 1960), 61.
4. Calvin O. Schrag writes, It [the existential self] is given to itself as a going
concernthinking, planning, hoping, rejoicing, regretting, and despairing in an
immediately encountered life-world. This pre-cognitive relatedness to a world of
existential concerns we shall call existential intentionality. Existence and Freedom
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1961), 20.
5. Husserls analysis of the Lebenswelt is found in Die Krisis der europischen
Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phnomenologie, ed. Walter Biemel, 2nd ed.
(The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962); and see, further, Gerd Brand,
Welt, Ich und Zeit (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1955), 153.
6. See Paul Ricoeur, La Phnomnologie existentielle, Encyclopdie franaise,
vol. 19 (Paris: Socit nouvelle de lencyclopdie franaise, 1957), 19:10.
7. See Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague,
Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 151; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: The Humanities Press, 1962), ix;
and Gabriel Marcel, Metaphysical Journal, trans. Bernard Wall (London: Salisbury
Square, 1952), 334.
8. Ricoeur, La phnomlogie existentielle, 19.108 and 19.1010.
9. See Sydney and Beatrice Rome, eds., Philosophical Interrogations (New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 177.
10. Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 40. (Hereafter Source Book.)
11. Wing-tsit Chan, The Concept of Man in Chinese Thought, in The Concept
of Man, S. Radhakrishnan and P. T. Raju, eds., 2nd ed. (Lincoln, NE: Jensen, 1966),
158. See Chan, Source Book, 3.
12. Chan, The Concept of Man in Chinese Thought, 15860. T. Raju also writes
that if western philosophy started with reason rst affirming itself as I am, then
Chinese philosophy would start with man affirming himself as I am. Introduction
to Comparative Philosophy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962), 11.
13. Paul Ricoeur, Finitude et culpabilit, I: LHomme faillible (Paris: Aubier ditions Montaigne, 1960), 87; compare Fallible Man, trans. Charles Kelbley (Chicago:
Henry Regnery, 1965), 107.
14. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, IL:
15. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 9th ed. (Tbingen, Germany: Max Niemeyer,
1960), 42: Das Wesen des Daseins liegt in seiner Existenz. John Macquarrie and
Edward Robinson translate this passage as The essence of Dasein lies in its existence. Being and Time (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962), 67.
16. Henry G. Bugbee, The Inward Morning (State College, PA: Bald Eagle Press,
1958), 215. He explains, If you reject the notion that I am the doer in every sense,
you reject the possibility of a philosophy of human action, and you lose all experiential
purchase for reection on reality as sustaining responsibility in an inexpugnable sense.
17. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 1:157. John Wild lists four different kinds of phenomena in the Lebenswelt: man himself, the realm of nature,
notes to pages 7476
269
other men and the realm of human culture, and, nally, the transcendent (Philosophical Interrogations, 177).
18. Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 53. Compare John
Wild, Existence and the World of Freedom (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall,
1963), 41.
19. Wing-tsit Chang, The Evolution of the Confucian Concept of Jen, Philosophy East and West 4 (January 1955): 309, 319.
20. Sren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientic Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941), 17677.
21. Chan, Source Book, 286.
22. Ibid., 66970.
23. Ibid., 730, and Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, trans. Derk
Bodde, vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 685. (Hereafter
History.)
24. John Wild, The Challenge of Existentialism (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1959), 256.
25. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1947), 42. See Jos Ortega y Gasset, Man and People, trans. Willard
R. Trask (New York: W. W. Norton, 1957), 23: Mans destiny... is primarily action.
We do not live to think, but the other way round: we think in order that we may succeed in surviving.
26. Bugbee, The Inward Morning, 143.
27. Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having, trans. Katharine Farrer (Westminster, UK:
Dacre Press, 1949), 27.
28. Compare Alphonse de Waelhens, La Philosophie et les experiences naturelles
(The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), 38: La philosophie . . . deviant un lment de lexprience totale et tend ds lors en quelque sorte sortir de soi
pour orienter directement loeuvre effective de la rationalization en cours dans tous
les domains de lexprience.
29. Chan, Evolution, 309, 319.
30. Ibid., 304. It is important to note how Indian Buddhism, according to D. T.
Suzuki, transformed itself in the Chinese soil. Zen (Chan) acquired the Chinese
mentality of practicalness from Confucianism, which is eminently practical and
ethical. Moreover, Suzuki points out that Mencius Tao meant the everyday life
or mans everyday-life experience when he said, The Tao is near and people seek
it far away. Zen and Japanese Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), 11, 43.
Compare Chan, Source Book, 425.
32. Fung, History, 1:371.
34. Ibid., 16.
35. Fung, History, 1:72; Chan, Evolution, 295; and Source Book, 591.
38. Chan, Evolution, 303, and Source Book, 45051.
270
notes to pages 7779
41. Fung, History, 1:69, and Chan, Source Book, 789. Each of the Four Books
of the Chinese classics contains the term jen: Jen occurs 8 times in Ta hseh (The
Great Learning), 4 times in Chung yung (The Doctrine of the Mean), 108 in Lun y
(the Confucian Analects) and 151 times in Mencius (The Book of Mencius) that is the
longest of the four.
44. F. M. M. Saint-Ina, Confucius: Witness to Being, International Philosophical
Quarterly 3, no. 4 (December 1963): 547.
45. Martin Buber, Between Man and Man (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 17. Bugbee also uses the term sacrament of coexistence (Bugbee, The Inward Morning,
159). The sacrament, Buber says, has rightly been called the most dynamic of all
ritual forms. But what is of greatest importance in its dynamic is that it is stripped
of its essential character when it no longer includes an elementary, life-claiming and
life-determining experience of the other, the otherness, as of something coming to
meet one and acting toward one. Symbolic and Sacramental Existence, in The Origin and Meaning of Hasidim, ed. and trans. Maurice Friedman (New York: Horizon
Press, 1960), 166.
46. Subjectivity of Objectivity, in Edmund Husserl, 18591959, H. L. Van Breda
and J. Taminiaux, eds. (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), 174.
47. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith, 2nd ed. (New York:
Charles Scribners Sons, 1958), 28. See Remy C. Kwant, Phenomenology of Social
Existence (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1965), 104.
49. I and Thou, 63.
51. See The Perennial Scope of Philosophy, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York:
Philosophical Library, 1949), 4546; Way to Wisdom, trans. Ralph Manheim (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1951), 27; and Reason and Existenz, trans. William
Earle (New York: Noonday Press, 1955), 77106.
53. Heidegger writes, Die Sprache ist das Haus des Seins. In ihrer Behausung
wohnt der Mensch. ber den Humanismus, in Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit
(Bern, Switzerland: Francke Verlag, 1954), 53.
54. Mikel Dufrenne, Language and Philosophy, trans. Henry B. Veatch (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), 80.
55. Speaking (La Parole), trans. Paul T. Brockelman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
56. Gabriel Marcel, The Existential Background of Human Dignity (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 41.
57. John Macmurray, Persons in Relation (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961),
128.
58. Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1954), 24647.
59. Chan, Source Book, 6970. Fung also writes, As jen is a name for virtue in its
entirety, Confucius often used it to include all kinds of different individual virtues
(History, 1:72).
60. Chan, Source Book, 76, and Fung, History, 1:125.
notes to pages 7982
271

62. It would be interesting to investigate the place of feeling or emotion and jen
as the feeling (ching) of commiseration in Chinese philosophy in the light of the
growing literature of a phenomenology of emotion today; for a comprehensive phenomenological analysis of emotion in the lifeworld, see Stephan Strasser, Das Gemt:
Grundgedanken zu einer phnomenologischen Philosophie und Theorie des menschlichen Gefhlslebens (Utrecht, Netherlands: Spectrum, 1956).
63. Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being, vol. 1, trans. G. S. Fraser (Chicago:
Henry Regnery, 1951)
64. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientic Postscript, 176, 178.
65. Chan, Evolution, 319.
66. Ibid., 306, and Source Book, 452.
67. Dufrenne, Language and Philosophy, 82.
68. Robert O. Johann, The Meaning of Love: An Essay towards a Metaphysics of
Intersubjectivity (Westminster, UK: Newman Press, 1959), 6.
69. Buber, I and Thou, 124.
70. Marcel, Being and Having, 167.
71. Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein (The Hague,
73. Chan, Evolution, 306.
75. Ibid., 633.
76. Ibid., 65.
77. Ibid., 65960, and Fung, History, 2:599.
80. John Wild points out: No adequate or even noteworthy social philosophy has
as yet come from existentialist sources. This is a striking weakness. They are no doubt
right in pointing to the human individual as the bearer of human freedom, and in
rejecting the totalitarian theories of Hegel and Marx. But so far they have given us no
plausible alternative to take their place (The Challenge of Existentialism, 18485).
81. The Great Philosophers, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Ralph Manheim (New
York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), 59.
82. Wild, Existence and the World of Freedom, 54. Compare Frederick Patka,
Value and Existence (New York: Philosophical Library, 1964), 31.
84. Laszlo Versnyi states, The trouble with Heideggers existentialistic analysis
is not that it is humanistic, but that it is not humanistic enough: for all its preoccupation with man it does not go far enough in clarifying, and providing guidance
for, human existence. Heidegger, Being, and Truth (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1965), 177.
86. Ibid., 523.
87. Ibid., 46.
88. Encounter (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1960), 34.
89. Ibid.
90. Existence and the World of Freedom, 159.
272
notes to pages 8284
91. Raymond Polin, La Cration des valeurs, 2nd ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1952), 241.
92. Ibid., 3.
93. Viktor Frankl, Mans Search for Meaning (New York: Washington Square
Press, 1963), 175.
94. Chan, Source Book, 27; 101.
96. Ibid., 373.
97. Ibid.
98. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New
York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 221. I am not concerned here with Sartres view of
intersubjectivity in his Critique of Dialectical Reason, I: Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith and ed. Jonathan Re (London: NLB, 1976).
99. Compare Schrag, Existence and Freedom, 41: to say that Kierkegaard did
not take seriously the social character of existence and foundered on a radical and
unqualied individualism would seem to be a most questionable generalization.
100. Die Welt des Daseins ist Mitwelt. Das In-Sein ist Mitsein mit Anderen. Das
innerweltliche Ansichsein dieser ist Mitdasein (Sein und Zeit, 118). Compare Macquarrie and Robinson translation, Being and Time, 155: The world of Dasein is
a with-world [Mitwelt]. Being-in is Being-with Others. Their Being-in-themselves
within-the-world is Dasein-with [Mitdasein].
101. Ludwig Binswanger, The Existential Analysis School of Thought, in Existence, ed. Rollo May, Ernest Angel, and Henri F. Ellenberger (New York: Basic Books,
1958), 195. See Buber, Between Man and Man, 16381.
102. Buber writes, By We I mean a community of several independent persons,
who have reached a self and self-responsibility, the community resting on the basis
of this self and self-responsibility, and being made possible by them. . . . The We
includes the Thou potentially. Only men who are capable of truly saying Thou to one
another can truly say We with one another (Between Man and Man, 17576). Compare Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers II: Studies in Social Theory, ed. Arvid Brodersen
(The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), 2063.
103. Schutz considers that Husserls signal contribution to the social sciences consists [not] in his unsuccessful attempt to solve the problem of the constitution of the
transcendental intersubjectivity within the reduced egological sphere... but rather
in the wealth of his analysis pertinent to problems of the Lebenswelt and designed to
be developed into a philosophical anthropology (Collected Papers I: The Problem of
Social Reality, 149).
104. Maurice Natanson, Literature, Philosophy and the Social Sciences (The
Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 75.
105. The term is used by Abraham J. Heschel, Who Is Man? (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1965), 60.
106. Viktor Frankl, The Philosophical Foundations of Logotherapy, in Phenomenology: Pure and Applied, ed. Erwin W. Straus (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University
Press, 1964), 54.
107. This distinction between quality and relation is borrowed from Moira
Roberts, Responsibility and Practical Freedom (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1965), 312.
108. Heschel, Who Is Man? 106.
notes to pages 8489
273
109. See Schrag, The Structure of Moral Experience, 263.

110. Gusdorf, Speaking, 59.
111. Buber, Between Man and Man, 16.
113. Ibid., 100.
114. Wild, Existence and the World of Freedom, 15455.
115. Carl J. Friedrich, ed., George Schrader, Responsibility and Existence, in
Responsibility (New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1960), 70.
117. James M. Edie, ed., John Wild, Authentic Existence: A New Approach to
Value Theory, in An Invitation to Phenomenology (Chicago: Quadrangle Books,
1965), 62. See Heschel, Who Is Man? 2: philosophy was made for man rather than
man for philosophy.
118. See Schrag, Existence and Freedom, 43: Existential philosophy has contributed more to a clarication of this depersonalization and dehumanization in mans
unauthentic being-with-others than all the academic ethical systems propounded in
Western thought.
119. See Paul Ricoeur, Negativity and Primary Affirmation, in History and
Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965),
30528.
120. Buber, Between Man and Man, xi.
121. Martin Buber, What Is Common to All, in The Knowledge of Man, ed.
Maurice Friedman (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1965), 108.
122. Hussserl, Die Krisis der europischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale
Phnomenologie, 15, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Les Sciences de lhomme et la phnomnologie (Paris: Centre de Documentation Universitaire, 1963), 2.
chapter 6
1. Maurice Friedman, ed., Martin Buber: The Life of Dialogue (New York: Harper
and Brothers, 1960), 28. For Bubers comments on Chinese philosophy, see What Is
Common to All, trans. Maurice Friedman, in The Knowledge of Man, ed. Friedman
(New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 89109; The Teaching of the Tao (1910) and
China and Us (1928), in Pointing the Way, ed. and trans. Maurice Friedman (New
York: Harper and Row, 1963), 3158 and 12125; and The Place of Hasidism in the
History of Religion, in The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, ed. and trans. Maurice Friedman (New York: Horizon Press, 1960), 22039.
2. Martin Buber, Afterword: The History of the Dialogical Principle, trans.
Friedman, in Between Man and Man (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 223.
3. Karl Jaspers, The Great Philosophers, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Ralph
Manheim, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962 and 1966):
Confucius,1:4163 and Lao-tzu, 2:388415.
4. Martin Buber, Way to Wisdom, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, CT: Yale
5. A most recent critical comparison is found in Hazel E. Barnes, The Temptation
274
notes to pages 8992
of Eastern Philosophy, in An Existentialist Ethics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,

1967), 21177.
6. Hajime Nakamura, Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples, ed. Philip P. Wiener
(Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1964), pt. II, China, 175294. For the original
and unabridged texts in Japanese, see Toyojin no Shii Hoho, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Misu zu
Shobo, 1948), 1:293554.
7. The term Sinism is coined by H. G. Creel to indicate a uniquely Chinese Weltanschauung in ancient (or pre-Buddhist) China. He emphasizes the practical and
humanistic temper of Chinese thought. See Sinism: A Study of the Evolution of the
Chinese World-View (Chicago: Open Court, 1929).
8. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (New York: Pantheon Books,
1959), 3.
9. Ibid., 11. Suzuki further comments that the Oriental peoples are sometimes
said to be decient in the power of philosophical thinking and analytical preciseness.
Perhaps they are, but they have a richer store of the experience of reality itself, which
refuses to be so sharply dened that yes can never be no and no yes (ibid., 236).
10. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith
(New York: Humanities Press, 1962), xvixvii.
11. Sren Kierkegaard, The Present Age, trans. Alexander Dru (New York: Harper
and Row, 1962).
12. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962), 16368; Karl Jaspers, Man in
the Modern Age, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957);
Gabriel Marcel, Man Against Mass Society, trans. G. S. Fraser (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1952); Nicolas Berdyaev, The Fate of Man in the Modern World, trans. Donald A.
Lowrie (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1935); and Jos Ortega y Gasset,
The Revolt of the Masses (New York: W. W. Norton, 1932). Calvin O. Schrag remarks
that existential philosophy has contributed more to a clarication of this depersonalization and dehumanization in mans unauthentic being-with-others than all the
academic ethical systems propounded in Western Thought. Existence and Freedom
13. For further discussion of jen in relation to existential philosophy and phenomenology, see authors paper: Jen: An Existential and Phenomenological Problem
of Intersubjectivity, Philosophy Eat and West 16:16988, which is reprinted in this
volume of essays as chapter 5.
14. All the translations of the Chinese classics in this essay are those of James
Legge.
15. Wing Tsit Chan, Chinese Theory and Practice, in Philosophy and Culture East
and West, ed. Charles A. Moore (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1962), 85.
16. Concerning Wangs theory of the unity of knowledge and action in relation
to existential phenomenology, see authors paper: Wang Yang-ming and Existential
Phenomenology, International Philosophical Quarterly 5 (December 1965): especially 63235.
17. See David S. Nivison, The Problem of Knowledge and Action in Chinese Thought since Wang Yang-ming, in Studies in Chinese Thought, ed. Arthur
F. Wright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 11245 and O. Brire, Fifty
Years of Chinese Philosophy, 18981948, trans. Laurence G. Thompson (New York:
Frederick A. Praeger, 1965), 54.
notes to pages 9298
275
18. John Wild states that in the Lebenswelt, value is not a later addition. It is
constitutive of the thing.... A human culture is not a neutral structure with approvals
and disapprovals added on. It is a structure of approvals and disapprovals. Existence
and the World of Freedom (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 54.
19. For an excellent discussion of jen as a way of action and sociality, see Chang
Wing-tsit, The Evolution of the Confucian Concept of Jen, Philosophy East and
West 4 (January 1955), 295319. Two comprehensive studies on jen are available in
Japanese: Teruo Takeuchi, Jin no Kogi no Kenkyu (Tokyo: Meiji Shoin, 1964) and Satsujo Yamaguchi, Jin no Kenkyu (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoden, 1937). The rst is devoted
to the early classical writers including Confucius. It also contains a commentary on
Chans article in its epilogue. The second is more comprehensive in scope and includes
brief comments on Western writers.
20. Karl Jaspers, The Great Philosophers, 1:49.
21. Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, trans. Derk Bodde, 2 vols.
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), 1:71 and 373.
22. See Hsieh Yu-wei, Filial Piety and Chinese Society, in Philosophy and Culture
East and West, 41127. The emphasis on lial piety certainly reects the background
of the Chinese agricultural society. Primitive society is an anthropological specimen.
It is a specimen for understanding the human lifeworld that is prescientic. Some
anthropological study of archaic societies shows profound insights that reveal the
other side of modern anonymity. For example, Marcel Mausss study of the gift (le
don) of archaic societies such as Polynesia, Melanesia, and Northwest America is relevant to the understanding of reciprocity in its primordial form. As a form of obligation, the gift is the necessary form of exchange and one of the bases of social life
as carried out by the people on a communal basis in the form of courtesies, entertainment, ritual, dances, feasts, military assistance, marriages, succession to wealth, and
so forth. See The Gift, trans. Ian Cunnison (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1954). It must be
noted that the idea of pao is also a basis for social relations in China. The term pao
in its verb form means essentially to respond or to return. It stands for reciprocity
that has inuenced the shaping of the various modes of social association in China.
See Yang Lien-sheng, The Concept of Pao as a Basis for Social Relations in China,
in Chinese Thought and Institutions, ed. John K. Fairbank (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1957), 291309.
23. Sren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientic Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941), 279.
24. Sren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard, ed. Alexander Dru (New
York: Harper and Row, 1958), 134.
25. Ibid., 145.
26. Sren Kierkegaard, The Point of View for My Work as an Author, trans. Walter
Lowrie (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 158.
27. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientic Postscript, 122.
28. Kierkegaard, The Point of View, 115.
29. Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard, 133 and 151.
30. Kierkegaard, The Present Age, 79.
31. Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard, 149.
32. Kierkegaard, The Present Age, 69.
33. Ibid., 71.
276
notes to pages 98106
34. Karl Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, trans. William Earle (New York: Noonday
Press, 1955), 106.
35. Ibid., 79.
36. Ibid., 119.
37. Ibid., 112.
38. Ibid., 92.
39. Ibid., 124.
40. See Buber, Distance and Relation, in The Knowledge of Man, 5988.
41. Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, 99.
42. Buber, Between Man and Man, 177.43. The notion of coexistence pervades
Merleau-Pontys thought on history, politics, literature, and the arts. The main program of his existential phenomenology is indicated in the preface to Phenomenology
of Perception, viixxi.
44. Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers III: Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy,
ed. Ilse Schutz (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 82.
chapter 7
I wish to dedicate this essay to James J. Heller, who, as the academic dean at Moravian College, has given me his support and encouragement for my work in every way
he could for about twenty-ve years.
An earlier version of this essay appeared as The Piety of Thinking: Heideggers
Pathway to Comparative Philosophy, in The Phenomenology of Man and of the
Human Condition, Part 2 (Analecta Hussertiana, vol. 21), ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Reidel, 1986), 33768.
1. In a recent collection of essays that explore the status of phenomenology in
Japan, it is claimed that in Japan phenomenology became a eld of scholarship [the
Japanese] could explore, evaluate and appropriate in their own terms: ultimately, as it
seems, it became a genuine mode of Japanese philosophizing. The result is a Japanese
phenomenology, that is to say: a reection which is unmistakenly heir to Hussserl,
but reects as much the Japanese intellectual legacy and the philosophical quest of
contemporary Japan, from the Meiji era to World War II and the present [Yoshihiro
Nitta and Hirotaka Tatematsu (eds.), Japanese Phenomenology, Analecta Husserliana, vol. 8 (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Reidel, 1979), x]. It should be noted that a new
East-West dialogue in the movement of phenomenology might very well have begun in
earnest with the recent publication of Phenomenology of Life in a Dialogue between
Chinese and Occidental Philosophy, Analecta Husserliana, vol. 17 (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Reidel, 1984).
2. The twentieth-century Chinese philosopher Chang Tung-sun propounds
the logic of correlation as uniquely Chinese. See A Chinese Philosophers Theory
of Knowledge, in Our Language and Our World, ed. S. I. Hayakawa (New York:
Harper, 1959), 299324. In The Theoretical Foundations of Chinese Medicine (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1974), Manfred Porkert elaborates on the Chinese systems of kinesthetic correlation or correspondence.
3. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New
York: Harper and Row, 1971), 4.
277
4. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn
Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 1617.
5. See my Misreading the Ideogram: From Fenollosa to Derrida and McLuhan,
Paideuma 13 (Fall 1984): 21127. See Zhang Longzi, The Tao and the Logos: Notes
on Derridas Critique of Logocentrism, Critical Inquiry 11 (March 1985): 38598.
For a comparative analysis of Heideggers thought and the Chinese language, see
Johannes Lohmann, M. Heideggers Ontological Difference and Language, in On
Heidegger and Language, trans. and ed. Joseph J. Kockelmans (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 30363. Lohmann writes, A dominating trait manifests itself here in the relationship between Chinese thought and Indo-European, or
Greek and Western, thought, a trait which is manifested equally in the relationship
between Chinese and European cultures. As Humboldt has pointed out for languages,
this trait is unique in the relationships of languages and of cultures to one another;
it can be briey characterized as a total difference within the context of an equally
total comparability. One can observe this trait in various aspects of a culturefrom
such formalities as the mourning color (white or black) or the place of honor (left or
right) to the overall habitus of philosophical thought and of the conception of life and
world view. There is obviously not only a question of two extreme realizations of the
possibilities of mans language which are related to one another in polar opposition,
but a question of two realizations of human possibilities, each of which in its own
way is perfect. From this the incomparable, paradigmatic value which the Chinese
language as well as the Chinese culture and its history have for us becomes evident
(33738). For the most comprehensive study of Oriental thought in this connection,
see Hajime Nakamura, Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples, ed. Philip P. Wiener
(Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1964).
6. For an excellent discussion of the kinaesthetic relationships of calligraphy to
painting, sculpture, and architecture, see Chiang Yee, Chinese Calligraphy, 3rd rev.
and enl. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973). A unique, interesting side of Chinese ideography (kanji) is the invention of a kind of Rorschach test
based on tsukuriji (made-up words) to test the attitudes of the Japanese youth. See
George Fields, From Bonsai to Levis (New York: Macmillan, 1982), 1025.
7. In Puzzles and Epiphanies (New York: Chilmark Press, 1962), Frank Kermode writes that . . . [the American dancer Loe] Fuller is a kind of Ideogram:
lincorporation visuelle de lide, a spectacle defying all denition, radiant, homogeneous (25). For an elegant justication of dancing as the consummate art, see Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), 3667.
8. Somewhere in the genealogy of language we must insert the savage body itself
as a cuneiform tablet, inscription, or graphics. See Alphonso Lingis, Excesses: Eros
and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 2425. For a sociology of the body in relation to contemporary culture, see John ONeill, Five Bodies:
The Human Shape of Modern Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982).
9. In this Heideggerian tradition, Albert Hofstadter writes that the statement, as
a form of oral language, articulates in sound. Not only does it articulate being, both
objective and subjective in their unity, but it makes it audible. Written language is a
score for oral performance, except in extreme cases of articial symbolic languageconstruction. Human being becomes audible in the articulate form of the declarative
sentence. The serial ordering of different phonemes, making use of their sound qualities, rhythms, and other characteristics, constitutes an utterance which is heard as the
278
uttering of the self-world, subject-object complex just described, and which therefore
is the means by which that complex is itself heard as just that complex.... In the
end, every feature of language, from vocabulary, case, tense, and mood to synonymyantonymy, logic, rhyme, rhythm, and rhetorical order, is intelligible as a functioning
constituent of a medium that articulates human existence. Language is the act by
which man brings himself out as man. Truth and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 8283; emphasis added.
10. The following passage from The Poet is one of the most eloquent passages
in the entire corpus of Emersons writings: The poets made all the words, and therefore, language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the
muses. For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at rst
a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the
world to the rst speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist nds the deadest word
to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of
the continent consists of innite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is
made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to
remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or
comes one step nearer to it than any other. Essays: Second Series (New York: Lovell,
Coryell, n.d.), 21; emphasis added.
11. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York:
Random House, 1967), 52, 141.
12. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1, The Will to Power as Art, trans. David
Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), 99. The acoustic side of Zen or
Zens record of things heard is brought forth by David Applebaum in On Turning
a Zen Ear, Philosophy East and West 33 (April 1983): 11522.
13. Geoffrey H. Hartman, Saving the Text (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 120.
14. See my Martin Heidegger and the Homecoming of Oral Poetry, Philosophy
Today 26 (1982): 14870.
15. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, rev.
ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 49.
16. C. Kerenyi, The Religion of the Greeks and Romans, trans. Christopher Holme
(New York: Dutton, 1962), 119. See the following stanzas of pious John Donnes
Valediction: Forbidding Mourning (which is quoted from Hartman, Saving the
Text, 153):
If they be two, they are two so
As Stiffe twin compasses are two,
Thy soule the xt foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if thother doe.
And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth rome,
It leanes, and hearkens after it,
And growes erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to mee, who must
Like thother foot, obliquely runne;
Thy rmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begunne.
279
For my treatment of reciprocity or sociality as the absolute ground of Sinism in general and Confucianism in particular, see Jen: An Existential and Phenomenological Problem of Intersubjectivity, Philosophy East and West 16 (JulyOctober 1966):
16988 and Confucianism and Existentialism: Intersubjectivity as the Way of Man,
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 30 (1969): 186202. These two essays are
reprinted here as Chapters 5 and 6.
17. We have already noted etymological and semantic liation of the German words hren (to hear), horchen (to hearken), gehren (to belong), and
gehorchen (to obey) in addition to the Latin abaudire that has the double meaning
of hearing and obeying. Hans-Georg Gadamer points further to the familial intimacy
of these auditory words when he notes, It is the Greek word oikeion, i.e., that which
pertains to the household, to the oikos. It is an ordinary expression for relatives and
house friends, i.e., for all who belong to the household. Oikos, household, thus has
the broad sense of an economic unit such as the Greek household characteristically
was. But oikeion is just as much an expression for that place where one feels at home,
where one belongs and where everything is familiar. We too have usages similar to the
usage of the Greek oikeion which display this double aspect in the conceptual eld
of household. In German, hoi oikeioi is rendered as die Angehrige, and in abstraction from this normal usage we have to speak of das Angehrige, meaning everything which pertains to the household and not only those people who belong to it.
Dialogue and Dialectic, trans. Christopher Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1980), 18. For a discussion of ecology based on the auditory model of sound
as performance, see my The Orphic Voice and Ecology, Environmental Ethics 3
(1981): 32940.
18. See Hwa Yol Jung and Petee Jung, Toward a New Humanism: The Politics of
Civility in a No-Growth Society, Man and World 9 (1976): 283306.
19. The themes of homopiety and geopiety are inspired by the Heideggerian historical semantist Leo Spitzer in his Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony.
Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word Stimmung, ed. Anna Granville
Hatcher (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963). I am greatly indebted
to the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan for my understanding of geopiety, which is distinctly
Heideggerian. From reading his works, I learned that geography is not conned to the
reading of maps but is a philosophical and humanistic discipline. Among his writings,
see especially Geopiety: A Theme in Mans Attachment to Nature and to Place, in
Geographies of the Mind: Essays in Historical Geosophy in Honor of John Kirtland
Wright, ed. David Lowenthal and Martyn J. Bowden (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1976), 1139. For expositions on geopiety in Heideggers thought, see J. Glenn
Gray, Heideggers Course: From Human Existence to Nature, Journal of Philosophy 54 (1957): 197207; Vincent Vycinas, Earth and Gods (The Hague, Netherlands:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1961); and Michael E. Zimmerman, Toward a Heideggerian Ethos
for Radical Environmentalism, Environmental Ethics 5 (1983): 99131.
20. In the Western Inscription, the eleventh-century Chinese neo-Confucianist
Chang Tsai writes, Heaven is my father and Earth is my mother, and even such a
small creature as I nd[s] an intimate place in their midst. Therefore that which lls
the universe I regard as my body and that which directs the universe I consider as my
nature. All people are my brothers and sisters, and all things are my companions.
Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1963), 497. With this passage, Chang Tsai opens up a philosophical
280
gateway to treat the Confucian concept of jen as the all-encompassing lan vital of
social principle.
21. The Embers and the Stars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 13.
22. Color and sound are two radically different ways of organizing the human sensorium and the world. There is a qualitative difference in human experience between
the visual and the acoustic. As music is the organized movement of sound, the spatiality of sound is most fully actualized in the tones of music. Color does not separate
itself from the object, whereas sound separates itself from its source (e.g., voice or the
sound of a musical instrument). In other words, color is a dependent attribute of an
object, whereas sound is not. While the color we see is the property of a thing itself,
and we confront color in space, the tone we hear is not the property of anything,
and we encounter it out of or from space. Color is locatable and localizable in one
single position with the object, whereas sound, once separated from its source, has
no denite topological property or determination although its source is locatable.
Sound travels in no one direction; it travels in all directions. Musical tones have no
locatable places: they are neither here nor there but everywhere (i.e., placeless or
ubiquitous). In Poetic Thinking: An Approach to Heidegger (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1981), David Halliburton writes that In the performance of a symphony, . . . responsibility may be seen in the interconnecting indebtedness of each
constituent: the musicians, as users of equipment (instruments, chairs, music stands,
and the like), together with their skills; the artisans responsible for the preparation
of the equipment; the members of the audience, together with their capacity to hear
and to sustain attention; the score, a being with a thingly character that allies it with
equipment even as it carries an already constituted inclination (the totality of the
composers notations); the composer, as one who brings forth within the same order
as the artisan; that artisan who is the printer of the score; the manner (in the sense
of melody, timbre, tone) of the score as performed; the space of time in which that
manner emerges through the concerned composure of performance; the space of time
of the tradition without which the music could not move into its own articulation
without which, as the temporal structure that preserves the reciprocal responsibility
of all the constituents, it would not be music; and nally, the space of time which is
the world plays manner of moving, through all that is thus indebted to its own disclosure (217).
23. J. Glenn Gray, Heidegger in Remembering and Remembering Heidegger,
Man and World 10 (1977): 6263.
24. See my Vicos Rhetoric: A Note on Verenes Vicos Science of Imagination,
Philosophy and Rhetoric 15 (1982): 187202.
25. Li Chi: Book of Rites, 2 vols., trans. James Legge (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1967), 2: 1023. Speaking of the locus of the personal as moral performance
embodied in the Confucian thought of rite, Herbert Fingarette writes, We would do
well to take music, of which Confucius was a devotee, as our model here. We distinguish
sensitive and intelligent musical performances from dull and unperceptive ones; and we
detect in the performance condence and integrity, or perhaps hesitation, conict, faking, sentimentalizing. We detect all this in the performance: we do not have to look
into the psyche or personality of the performer. It is all there, public. Although it is
there in the performance, it is apparent to us when we consider the performance not as
the Beethoven Opus 3 (that is, from the composer perspective), nor as a public concert
(the li perspective), nor as a post-Mozartian opus (the style perspective), but primarily
281
as this particular persons performance (the personal perspective). ConfuciusThe

Secular as Sacred (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 53.
26. Heidegger, Poetry, Languge, Thought, 61.
27. David Farrell Krell sketches das Geviert as envisioned by Heidegger in the following pictogram in which the crossing of Being is not a crossing out (Durchstreichung) but a crossing through (Durchkreuzen).
Sky
Gods
Being
Earth
Mortals
See Analysis, in Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 4, Nihilism, trans. Frank A.

Capuzzi (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 289. For a ne discussion of Taoism in
this connection, see Kuang-ming Wu, Chuang Tzu: World Philosopher at Play (New
York: Crossroad, 1982).
28. Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 14.
29. Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York:
Harper and Row, 1969), 5152.
30. For a scathing critique of Cartesianism, see Richrd Rorty, Philosophy and the
Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). In The World
Viewed, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), Stanley Cavell
uses the term automatism. The signicance of automatism for our discussion here
is twofold. First, as a mechanical reproduction or representation, photography, for
example, is of reality but not reality itself; photographic automatism removes the
human agent from the task of reproduction or representation. Second, photography
is not handmade but mechanically reproducedand what is mechanically reproduced
is an absence of the human hand in forming its objects. To put it in the Heideggerian
terminology, in photography thinking is no longer a handicraft.
31. See Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Dell, 1977).
32. See Philosophy East and West 20 (July 1970).
33. See Robert Magliola, Derrida on the Mend (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1984), which is an interesting three-way speculation on Heidegger, Derrida, and Eastern thought.
34. In the Politicus, Plato interestingly likens the practical art of statesmanship
(political praxis) to the art (techn) of weavingthe wholesome handicraft that I
consider to be the opposite of the natural-scientic study of politics.
35. In Zen and Western Thought, ed. William R. LaFleur (Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press, 1985), Masao Abe argues that Dgen grounds his existence on the radically dehomocentric, cosmological dimension whereas Heidegger is not altogether
freed from homocentrism, though he emphasizes transcending towards the world
(65). Heideggers later philosophical orientation would, however, make superuous
Abes contention concerning Heidegger as contrasted with the Zen master Dgen.
282
chapter 8
This chapter was originally published as Misreading the Ideogram: From Fenollosa to Derrida and McLuhan. In A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), Harold Bloom suggests that misreading is a form of reading or
interpretation.
1. For a well-researched article on Fenollosas and Pounds conception of Chinese grammatology, see Achilles Fang, Fenollosa and Pound, Harvard Journal of
Asian Studies, 20 (1957): 21338. Fenollosa belongs to the long genealogy of linguistic
sinology rooted in Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne, William Warburton, and Wilhelm
Leibniz. A critical genealogy of the ideogramic method in American poetry as found
now is Laszlo K. Gn, Ideogram: History of a Poetic Method (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1982). I am grateful to Lloyd Burkhart, my colleague in the English
Department, for bringing this book to my attention.
2. See John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1980). There is neither mention of Fenollosa nor discussion of Chinese grammatology in the book.
3. Fenollosas magnum opus is a posthumously published work on the history of
Chinese and Japanese art. See Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, 2 vols. (London:
William Heinemann, 1912). He also wrote poetry including East and West, which
celebrates the meeting of the yin of the markedly feminine East and the yang of the
markedly masculine West. See East and West: the Discovery of America and Other
Poems (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1893).
4. James A. Winn makes an astute observation when he writes that Pounds fascination with Chinese ideograms, beyond their alleged visual expression, lay in the
fact that one ideogram might be made out of several others like a chord out of several
notes. Unsuspected Eloquence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 297.
5. For discussions of the thesis that Chinese ideography reects the practically
and concretely minded attitude, see Hajime Nakamura, Ways of Thinking of Eastern
Peoples, ed. Philip Wiener (Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1964), 175294; Herrlee Glessner Creek, Sinism (Chicago: Open Court, 1929); and Marcel Granet, La
Pense chinoise (Paris: ditions Albin Michel, 1934).
6. See Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,
ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1964). Also see the recent edition
by Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein with a commentary by Saussy
and additional essays by Fenollosa (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). It is
no secret that there have been the inseparable ties between painting, calligraphy, and
poetry and that painting and calligraphy are the two facets of brushwork. Moreover,
the idea of chi (vital energy) permeates all of these activities. See Mai-mai Sze, The
Elements of a Picture, in The Tao of Painting (New York: Bollingen Foundation,
1963), 75104. In Water and Ice the Japanese painter Hiro Kamimura plays with the
differentiation of the two graphemes by a single stroke or by the absence and presence
of a single stroke. For a recent interartistic treatise on painting and literature, see
Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
7. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays: Second Series (New York: Lovell, Coryell, n.d.),
21.
8. Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character, 22.
283
9. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, ed. Robert E. Spiller
and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 18.
10. Emerson, Essays, 10.
12. Ibid., 23. See Johannes Lohmann who refers to the Chinese as the most economical man on earth and to their language as equally economical, which is not
unlike Fenollosas conception of poetry. See M. Heideggers Ontological Difference
and Language, in On Heidegger and Language, ed. Joseph J. Kockelmans (Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 338.
13. In this regard, Giambattista Vico made the following, interesting observation:
in all languages the greater part of the expressions relating to inanimate things are
formed by metaphor from the human body and its parts and from the human senses
and passions. Thus, head for top or beginning; the brow and shoulders of a hill; the
eyes of needles and of potatoes; mouth for any opening; the lip of a cup or pitcher;
the teeth of a rake, a saw, a comb the beard of wheat; the tongue of a shoe; the gorge
of a river; a neck of land, an arm of the sea; the hands of a clock; heart for center (the
Latins used umbilicus, navel, in this sense); the belly of a sail; foot for end or bottom;
the esh of fruits; a vein of rock or mineral; the blood of grapes for wine; the bowels
of the earth. Heaven or the sea smiles; the wind whistles; the waves murmur; a body
groans under a great weight. The farmers of Latium used to say the elds were thirsty,
bore fruit, were swollen with grain; and our rustics speak of plants making love, vines
going mad, resinous trees weeping. Innumerable other examples could be collected
from all languages. The New Science, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970), 88.
14. See Chang Cheng-Ming, Lcriture chinoise et le geste humain (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1937).
15. Samuel Beckett, Dante... Bruno. Vico... Joyce, in Samuel Beckett et al.,
Our Exagmination Round His Factication for Incamination of Work in Progress
(London: Shakespeare, 1929), 11.
16. R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938),
24344. See Curt Sachs, World History of the Dance, trans. Bessie Schonberg (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1937), 3: The dance is the mother of the arts. Music and poetry
exist in time; painting and architecture in space. But the dance lives at once in time
and space.
17. Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point (New
York: Harper and Row, 1968), 39. The the page opposite of p. 39 is lled with the
Chinese ideogram language or word whose acrobatic character is represented
by printing it upside down. Nevertheless, McLuhan and Parker speak of an alphabetic ballet of words in rite order in order to characterize E. E. Cummingss poem
Chanson Innocent (ibid., 18687).
18. For a discussion on this matter, see Hu Shih, The Rectication of Names and
Judgments, in The Development of the Logical Method in Ancient China, 2nd ed.
(New York: Paragon, 1963), 4652.
19. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960), 21.
20. I am a Korean by birth, and I learned how to read Chinese initially from a
Japanese teacherprobably the same way as Fenollosa learned Chineseand later
from my grandfather.
21. I mean to use the term deconstruction in the original sense that Martin
284
notes to page 134
Heidegger uses the term destruction as a critical process in which the traditional
concepts, which at rst must necessarily be employed, are deconstructed down to the
sources from which they were drawn. See The Basic Problems of Phenomenology,
trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 23. Walter
J. Ong notes that With work such as Derridas, philosophy, which as a formal discipline depends on a certain interiorization of writing, becomes acutely and exquisitely aware of its own chirographic framework, but has not yet much attended to
the orality out of which the chirographic has developed historically and in which it
is always in some way embedded. It may be worth noting that Derridas key distinction between diffrence and diffrance [his neologism] is not phonemic, but chirographic. Interfaces of the Word (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 17n1.
The American deconstructionist Paul de Man plays with the literal meaning and the
gurative meaning of Archie Bunkers rhetoric: Archie Bunker answers, Whats the
difference? when his wife Edith asks him whether he wants to have his bowling shoes
laced over or laced under. When his answer really means, I dont give a damn what
the difference is, the literal meaning of difference is denied by the gurative meaning. Since Derrida is an archie de-Bunker (a debunker of the arche or origin), there
is indeed the difference between diffrence and diffrance in his deconstructive grammatology. See Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1979), 89. Of course, the frequently cited example of the idea of difference
in deconstructive rhetoric is a line from William Butler Yeatss poem Among School
Children: How can we know the dancer from the dance? The following Japanese
haiku is also a play on the imagistic difference: The fallen blossom ies back to its
branch: A buttery.
22. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). The beginning of Derridas deconstructive grammatology can be traced to his long introduction to his 1962 French
translation of Edmund Husserls The Origin of Geometry (1939) where Husserl
makes reference to the important function of writing or written expression as making human communications possible without immediate or mediate personal address.
For Derridas 1962 introduction to Husserls The Origin of Geometry, see Edmund
Husserls Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, ed. David B. Allison and trans.
John P. Leavy Jr. (Stony Brook, NY: Nicolas Hays, 1978). In my judgment, Husserls
critique of the Galilean origin of modern scientism exemplies phenomenology as
philosophical deconstruction. See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences
and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), which includes The Origin of Geometry, 35378. The
most redeeming quality of Derridas grammatology in the context of this paper is
this: his rejection of logocentrism or alphabetic writing as the surrogate of speech,
which is characteristic of Western metaphysics, is also the rejection of Western ethnocentrism or what Edward W. Said calls Orientalism. See Said, Orientalism (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1978). In discussing the origin of language, the eighteenthcentury seminal Neapolitan thinker Giambattista Vico agreed with Aristotle in dening grammar as the art of writing rather than speaking. Vico observed that the rst
nations originally spoke in writing. Mutes made themselves understood by the use of
gestures or objects that were related to the ideas they wished to signify (i.e., by sign
languages). In short, they spoke in hieroglyphics or ideographics. As Beckett already
noted judiciously in the Vichian tradition, the spoken and the written are the same in
285
language as a system of gestures. See Vico, The New Science, especially paragraphs
429, 225, 401, 434, and 435. Compare Leon Pompa, ed. and trans., Vico: Selected
Writings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 233.
23. Of Grammatology, 92.
24. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1981). For the power of hierography and ideography, see also his
Scribble (Writing Power), Yale French Studies, 58 (1979): 11747.
25. Jacques Derrida, Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, in The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 272. In Marxism and Deconstruction (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), Michael Ryan comments that Deconstruction deals for the most part with how we conceive the world
(159). There is, I think, a profound irony or paradox in a deconstructive interplay
between conception and perception in their literal and gurative meanings. Whereas
the notion of conception in Derridas deconstructive grammatology after the tradition of Hegel becomes disembodied and desexualized, there is an embodied and
sexualized way of dening conception or to conceive. In the Vichian tradition,
Elizabeth Sewell points out that the body fertilizes the process of conceptual thinking
with language: in grammar there is a gender as masculine, feminine, or neuter, and
also in grammatical terminology, there are copula and conjugation. In grammar,
the body is as much operative as the mind. If, as Sewell maintains, grammar is a
choreography of language and mind, that is, it is bodily and sexual, then Fenollosas
contention as noted earlier that Chinese ideography, like nature, knows no grammar
must be examined in a different light. For a discussion of the anatomy of grammar as
embodied and sexualized, see Elizabeth Sewell, The Orphic Voice (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1960), 3441. It was Vico who dened man as only mind, body
and speech and speech as standing somewhere midway between mind and body.
See Vico, The New Science, 347, para. 1045, and see also the authors paper Vicos
Rhetoric: A Note on Verenes Vicos Science of Imagination, Philosophy and Rhetoric 15 (Summer 1982): 187202.
26. Pound, ABC of Reading, 61.
27. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographic Literaria, 2 vols. (London: Rest Fenner,
1817), 2:14. In Poetry and the Physical Voice (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1962), Francis Berry comments that I am indeed half-persuaded by those who urge
that the origin of a poem lies not in sound but in seeing (ix). In Six Lectures on
Sound and Meaning, trans. John Mepham (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1976), Roman
Jakobson advances the idea that In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes
on an autonomous value,... sound symbolism [i.e., the symbolic value of phonemes
as signiers] becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the
signied (113).
28. See Roman Jakobson, Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics, in Style in
Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), 35077.
30. The conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein attempts to synthesize music and
linguistics (Noam Chomskys linguistics) in The Unanswered Question (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1976).
31. See one of the Chinese classics: Li Chi: Book of Rites, 2 vols., trans. James
Legge (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1967), 1:92131 (Book 17). Speaking
286
of the locus of the personal as moral performance embodied in the Confucian thought
of li (rite) and jen (humanity), Herbert Fingarette writes,
We would do well to take music, of which Confucius was a devotee, as our model
here. We distinguish sensitive and intelligent musical performances from dull and
unperceptive ones; and we detect in the performance condence and integrity,
or perhaps hesitation, conict, faking, sentimentalizing. We detect all this in
the performance; we do not have to look into the psyche or personality of the
performer. It is all there, public. Although it is there in the performance, it is
apparent to us when we consider the performance not as the Beethoven Opus 3
(that is, from the composer perspective), nor as a public concert (the li perspective), nor as post-Mozartian opus (the style perspective), but primarily as this
particular persons performance (the personal perspective). (ConfuciusThe
Secular as Sacred [New York: Harper and Row, 1972], 53)
32. James J. Y. Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1962), 2038. This is also one of the main arguments that George Kennedy
advances in Fenollosa, Pound and the Chinese Character, Yale Literary Magazine
126 (December 1958): 2436.
33. Tung Tai, The Six Scripts or the Principles of Chinese Writing, trans. L. C.
Hopkins (Cambridge: University Press, 1954).
34. Ibid., 27.
35. I borrowed the term diatactics from Hayden White, who means to modify
Hegels and Marxs notions of dialectic. Diatactics is neither hypotactical (Hegelian conceptual overdetermination) nor paratactical (Marxian conceptual underdetermination). See Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1978), 4. I like the term especially because it implies the intimate sense of touch
or tactility.
36. Tai, The Six Scripts, 33. For an excellent discussion of the Chinese logic of correlations in reference to the theory of language and knowledge, see Chang Tung-sun,
A Chinese Philosophers Theory of Knowledge, in Our Language and Our World,
ed. S. I. Hayakawa (New York: Harper, 1959), 299324.
37. Tai, The Six Scripts, 43. See also passages in 45, 27, and 31. Compare Gerard
Manley Hopkins, The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphry
House (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 267: verse is speech having a marked
gure; it is a gure of spoken sound.
38. For discussions on the various medium issues, see Edmund Carpenter and
Marshall McLuhan, eds., Explorations in Communication (Boston: Beacon Press,
1960).
39. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1962). For a critical assessment of McLuhan, see the authors paper The
Medium as Technology: A Phenomenological Critique of Marshall McLuhan, in
Phenomenology and the Understanding of Human Destiny, ed. Stephen Skousgaard
(Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University
Press of America, 1981), 4580.
40. Marshall McLuhan, Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan, Playboy
(March 1969): 59.
41. It might be of some relevance to our discussion that Hugh Kenner, a noted
287
scholar on Pound, dedicated his The Poetry of Ezra Pound (New York: Kraus Reprint,
1968, 7) to McLuhan: A catalogue, his jewels of conversation.
42. Harold A. Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1951) that has a critical introduction by McLuhan. An account of Innis intellectual achievement is found in Eric A. Havelock, Harold Innis: A Man of His
Times, Et Cetera 38 (Fall 1981): 24268.
43. Innis, The Bias of Communication, 106.
44. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964),
18.
chapter 9
1. See Hwa Yol Jung, The Anatomy of Language: Vico, Joyce, and Etymosinology, Rivista di Studi Italiani 45 (1986/1987): 2946 and Vico and Etymosinology
Revisited, Rivista di Studi Italiani 23 (2005): 11946.
2. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).
3. See Domenico Pietropaolo, Vichian Ascendancy in the Thought of Marshall
McLuhan, New Vico Studies 13 (1995): 5562.
4. See Lawrence W. Chisolm, Fenollosa: The Far East and American Culture (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 332.
5. Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed.
Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1964). Most recently a critical edition has been edited by Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2008). It includes an essay by Saussy entitled Fenollosa
Compounded: A Discrimination (140) and ve essays by Fenollosa, of which the
most interesting and relevant to the present discussion is The Coming Fusion of East
and West (15365).
In his Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, corrected ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 92, Jacques Derrida, who is the
most inuential grammatologist of the twentieth century, gives honorable mention to
Fenollosas oeuvre. Also see Hwa Yol Jung, Misreading the Ideogram: From Fenollosa to Derrida and McLuhan, Paideuma 13 (1984): 21127, which is reprinted in
chapter 8 of this book with a slightly modied title from the original. The French literary meijin Roland Barthes could not contain his enthusiasm for the Japanese Empire
of Signs of which Chinese ideography or sinography was only one component. See
Empire of Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). For a
critical evaluation of the work, see Hwa Yol Jung, The Joy of Textualizing Japan: A
Metacommentary on Roland Barthess Empire of Signs, Special Issue, Self, Sign, and
Symbol, ed. Mark Neuman and Michael Payne, Bucknell Review 30 (1987): 14467,
which is reprinted in this book, chapter 10.
6. Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, trans. Hugh J. Silverman
7. Ezra Pound, The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1969). Also see Hugh
Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (Norfolk: New Directions, 1951).
8. Sinism (Chicago: Open Court, 1929).
288
9. Chang Tung-sun, A Chinese Philosophers Theory of Knowledge, in Our Language and Our World, ed. S. I. Hayakawa (New York: Harper, 1959) and Hajime
Nakamura, Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples, ed. Philip P. Wiener (Honolulu:
East-West Center Press, 1964), 175294.
10. Essays: Second Series (New York: Lovell, Coryell, n.d.).
11. Ibid., 21. I would call Emersons description the ideogrammatization of the
alphabetical. There is the Japanese tsukuriji (made-up word) towelket, which is a
large beach towelas large as a blanket. The wordsmithing of towelket should
be called the alphabetization of the ideogrammatical. The rhetoric of Guillaume
Apollinaires calligram, according to Michel Foucault, aspires playfully to efface
the oldest oppositions of our alphabetical civilization: to show and to name; to shape
and to say; to reproduce and to articulate; to imitate and to signify; to look and to
read. This Is Not a Pipe, trans. and ed. James Harkness (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1983), 21. If so, there is no reason why we cannot ideogrammatize the alphabetical on the one hand and alphabetize the ideogrammic on the other.
Ren Magrittes LArt de la conversation (1950), too, is the ideogrammatization of
the alphabet.
12. Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, ed. Robert E. Spiller and Alfred R. Ferguson
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 18.
13. Essays: Second Series, 10.
14. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, 21.
15. Ibid., 23.
16. Language as Gesture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 34.
17. For recent works concerning the role of the body or phenomenology of the
body in communication and media theory, see Mark B. N. Hansen, Bodies in Code
(New York: Routledge, 2006) and Bernadette Wegenstein, Getting Under the Skin
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006). See also Hwa Yol Jung, The Body, Sociality and Transversal Communication (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, forthcoming) and Phenomenology, Body Politics and the Future of Communication (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton
Press, forthcoming).
18. Dante... Bruno. Vico... Joyce, in Samuel Beckett et al., Our Exagmination
Round His Factication for Incamination of Work in Progress (London: Shakespeare,
1929), 11.
19. Through the Vanishing Point (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 39.
20. See Hwa Yol Jung, Phenomenology and Body Politics, Body and Society
2 (1996): 122 and Writing the Body as Social Discourse: Prolegomena to Carnal
Hermeneutics, in Signs of Change, ed. Stephen Barker (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1996), 26179 and 394416.
21. The Logic of Practice (Le Sens pratigue), trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1990), 57.
22. Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 294.
23. Marshall McLuhan and Bruce R. Powers, The Global Village: Transformations
in World Life and Media in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press,
1989).
24. Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988).
25. Ibid., 35.
289
26. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New

York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 47.
27. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Message (New
York: Bantam Books, 1967), 8.
28. Jacques Lusseyran, And There Was Light, trans. Elizabeth R. Cameron (London: Heinemann, 1964), 345.
29. Helen Keller, The World I Live In (New York: Century, 1908), 183.
30. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl et la notion de natur (notes prises au cours
de Maurice Merleau-Ponty), Revue de Mtaphysique et de Morale, 70 (1965): 261.
31. Ibid.
32. Quoted in Hwa Yol Jung, The Medium as Technology: A Phenomenological Critique of Marshall McLuhan, in Phenomenology and the Understanding of
Human Destiny, ed. Stephen Skousgaard (Washington, DC: Center for Advanced
Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America), 50.
33. Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind:
Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991).
34. Ibid., 22.
35. It is worth noting that the contemporary Chinese philosopher Li Zehou coined
the term subjectality (zhu/ti/xing) in three sinograms to avoid subjectivity (zhu/
guan/xing). The sinogram guan stands for visual idea as a product of subjective
consciousness (cogito) or Platos eidos, whereas the sinogram ti (body) denotes the
material disposition of being human. The signicance of Lis neologism subjectality
lies in the fact that cognition, too, involves a bodily dimension, that is, it is an embodied action. See Li Zehou, Subjectivity and Subjectality: A Response, Philosophy
East and West 49 (1999): 17483.
36. See Varela et al., 3.
37. Ibid., 172. More precisely, Merleau-Pontys word is empiricism (empirisme)
rather than realism. Here it is worth quoting Merleau-Pontys full passage:
Where empiricism was decient was in any internal connection between the
object and the act which it triggers off. What intellectualism lacks is contingency in the occasions of thought. In the rst case consciousness is too poor. In
the second too rich for any phenomenon to appeal compellingly to it. Empiricism cannot see that we need to know what we are looking for, otherwise we
need to be ignorant of what we are looking for, or equally again we should not
be searching. They are in agreement in that neither can grasp consciousness in
the act of learning, and that neither attaches due importance to that circumscribed ignorance, that still empty but already determinate intention which is
attention itself. (Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith [New York:
Humanities Press, 1962], 28; emphasis in the original)
38. See Hwa Yol Jung, Transversality and Comparative Political Theory: A Tribute to Fred Dallmayrs Work, in Letting Be: Fred Dallmayrs Cosmopolitical Vision,
ed. Stephen F. Schneck (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006),
23050 and Merleau-Pontys Transversal Geophilosophy and Sinic Aesthetics of
Nature, in Merleau-Ponty and Environmental Philosophy, ed. Suzanne L. Cataldi
and William S. Hamrick (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 23557.
39. Mili apek, Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics (New York: Van
Nostrand, 1961).
290
40. Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics (Boston: Shambhala, 2000 [1975]).
41. Ibid., 4.
42. McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 723.
43. Ibid., 80.
44. Ibid., 43.
45. Interbeing, revised ed., ed. Fred Eppsteiner (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1993).
See also Hwa Yol Jung, Interbeing and Geophilosophy in the Cultural Topography
of Watsuji Tetsuros Thought, in Why Japan Matters! vol. 2 (Victoria: Centre for
Asia-Pacic Initiatives, University of Victoria, 2005), 691702 and Richard E. Nisbett,
The Geography of Thought (New York: Free Press, 2003). In chaos theory there is
something called the buttery effect. It is a belief that everything is so interconnected in the universe that the apping of a butterys wings in one spot can mysteriously cause a typhoon thousands of miles away.
46. The Body and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 168.
47. The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort and trans. Alphonso Lingis
48. Jung, Writing the Body as Social Discourse: Prolegomena to Carnal Hermeneutics, 262.
49. See Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). If we follow Terry Eagletons denition of the aesthetic (aisthesis) as a discourse of the body and the bodys rebellion
against the tyranny of the theoretical (theoria) (see The Ideology of the Aesthetic
[Oxford: Blackwell, 1990], 13), Shustermans somaesthetics sounds redundant.
50. McLuhan and McLuhan, Laws of Media, 94 n. 1.
51. Richard Shusterman, Performing Live (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
2000), 127 (emphasis added).
52. Shusterman, Body Consciousness, 4.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid., 8, emphasis added.
56. Performing Live, 144.
57. See Bernadette Wegenstein, Getting under the Skin: The Body and Media Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 11962.
58. It is unfortunate that the limited space of this article does not allow a discussion of Hansens new philosophy of new media. A detailed consideration of it
has to be postponed to another occasion, especially in light of the fact that he is a
close reader of Merleau-Pontys phenomenology.
59. I am quoting Walter Kaufmanns translation. Wegensteins quoted translation
reads, Body I am throughout, and nothing besides; and soul is merely a word for a
something in a body.
60. See Skin, trans. Thomas Dunlap (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002),
22134.
61. Ibid., ix. On this crucial point Benthien is in line with Merleau-Pontys
phenomenology of the body as social ontology. She mentions our sexual experience (in teletactility) becoming autoerotic and narcissistic (ibid., 226).
Wegenstein speaks of Emmanuel Levinass face as screen. Granting that the
metaphor screen is interesting for media or cinema, its appropriateness is questionable from the ethical standpoint of Levinas. It may even deface the human
291
face. The term screen also shows and hides at the same time: it is a mixed
metaphor. Benthien emphasizes that as the skin is not a wall, so is the body not
a monad (ibid., 237).
62. Ibid., 7.
63. See Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth, and Bryan S. Turner (eds.), The Body
(London: Sage).
64. The Civilizing Process, vol. 1, The History of Manners, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Urizen Books, 1978), 117.
65. Erwin W. Straus, Phenomenological Psychology (New York: Basic Books,
1966), 211.
66. Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus
67. On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1993), 910.
68. David Sudnow, Ways of the Hand (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1978) and Talks Body (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979).
69. What Is Called Thinking? trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York:
Harper and Row, 1968), 16; emphasis added. See also Hwa Yol Jung, Heideggers
Way with Sinitic Thinking, in Heidegger and Asian Thought, ed. Graham Parkes
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987), 22223. The italicized expression is
meant to emphasize the fact that man (human) is spelled in sinography as sign of
the human upright posture. For a Heideggerian extension of handy craftsmanship
as an expression of the humanity of humans, see Richard Sennett, The Craftsman
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).
70. In Wegenstein, Getting Under the Skin, x. There is no denying that the body
functions as mediality. Phenomenologically speaking, however, the lived body also
inscribes the world, that is, it is the authorial inscriber of the world. Just as sinography is a language of gesturesa vortex of corporate energy or kinetograms in the
language of telecommunicationthe language of the deaf, which is characterized as
seeing voices or talking hands, is the inscription of signs, not just the medium.
Oliver Sacks makes a poignant point:
One has only to watch two people signing to see that signing has a playful
quality, a style, quite different from that of speech. Signers tend to improvise [as in the hands playing/performing jazz on piano], to play with signs,
to bring all their humor, their imaginativeness, their personality, into their
signing, so that signing is not just the manipulation of symbols according
to grammatical rules, but, irreducibly, the voice of a signera voice given a
special force, because it utters itself, so immediately, with the body. One can
have or imagine disembodied speech, but one cannot have disembodied sign.
The body and soul of the signer, his unique human identity, are continually
expressed in the act of signing.
See Seeing Voices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 119.
71. In Wegenstein, Getting Under the Skin, xiv-xv.
72. Ibid., 7172.
73. See Jung, The Medium as Technology: A Phenomenological Critique of Marshall McLuhan.
292
74. Themes from Lectures at the Collge de France, 19521960, trans. John ONeill
75. The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
76. Ibid., 160.
77. Ibid.
78. The Logic of Practice, 5265.
79. Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books,
1977), 205.
80. Bodies, Virtual Bodies and Technology, in Body and Flesh, ed. Donn Welton
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 34957.
81. Hubert L. Dreyfus, who is a close reader of the phenomenological thought of
Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, challenges articial intelligence on the ground of biological, psychological, and ontological assumptions. See What Computers Still Cant
Do (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992). New media thinkers, unfortunately, fail to take
up each of these three assumptions and respond to them.
chapter 10
1. Jonathan Culler, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1983), 9. Among the American literary notables, Susan Sontag is the
most enthusiastic admirer of Barthess literary genius. Recently, she writes, Teacher,
man of letters, moralist, philosopher of culture, connoisseur of strong ideas, protean
autobiographer... of all the intellectual notables who have emerged since World War
II in France, Roland Barthes is the one whose work I am most certain will endure.
Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes, in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1982), vii.
2. Roland Barthes, LEmpire des signes (Geneva: Skira, 1970); Empire of Signs,
trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982).
3. Guy de Mallac, Mtaphores du vide: LEmpire des signes de Roland Barthes,
Sub-Stance 1 (1971): 31.
4. A Barthes Reader, 473. For Barthes, lhomme, cest le langage, A... principle,
particularly important in regard to literature, is that language cannot be considered as
a simple instrument, whether utilitarian or decorative, of thought. Man does not exist
prior to language, either as a species or as an individual. We never nd a state where
man is separated from language, which he then creates in order to express what is
taking place within him: it is language which teaches the denition of man, not the
reverse. To Write: An Intransitive Verb? in The Structuralist Controversy, Richard
Macksey and Eugenio Donato, eds. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1972), 135. See the American semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce who writes that
it is sufficient to say that there is no element whatever of mans consciousness
which has not something corresponding to it in the world; and the reason is
obvious. It is that the word or sign which man uses is the man himself. For, as
the fact that every thought is a sign, taken in conjunction with the fact that life
is a train of thought, proves that man is a sign; so, that everything thought is
293
an external sign, proves that man is an external sign. That is to say, the man
and the external sign are identical, in the same sense in which the words homo
and man are identical. Thus my language is the sum total of myself; for the
man is the thought. (Collected Papers, vol. 5, Pragmatism and Pragmaticism,
ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
press, 1960], 189.)
5. The terms donjuanesque and donjuanisme are borrowed from Shoshana Felman, Le scandale du corps parlant (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1980). If Felman is able
to dramatize John Austins philosophy of language as donjuanisme and impregnate
connaissance with jouissance, we should be allowed to invent the hybrid neologism
jouinaissance after the fashion of James Joyce. The slightest allusion of language to
corporeality as hinted at by Felmanla parole est une promesse corporelleelicits
a liality of the philosophy of language with (Lacanian) psychoanalysis. In Roland
Barthes: A Conservative Estimate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), Philip
Thody observes that Barthess Empire of Signs is one of the most hedonistic of all
his books, and the one in which he writes with the most enthusiasm about his subjectmatter (121). Another observer comments that Barthess thinking shifted from the
themes of culture, the sign, and the text to the notion of pleasure (see ibid., 181). Steven
Ungar, too, aptly characterizes Barthes as the professor of desire in his recent book
Roland Barthes: The Professor of Desire (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983).
More specically, John ONeill coined the term homotextuality to intimate the corporeal kinship between the reader and the text in Barthess work. See Homotextuality: Barthes on Barthes, Fragments (RB), with a Footnote, in Hermeneutics, ed. Gary
Shapiro and Alan Sica (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 16582.
6. Writing Itself, xxiv. Speaking of Empire of Signs, Vincent B. Leitsch describes
the following:
Barthes admires the Japanese custom of attending to wrapping while disregarding contents. The surface of the present, not its hidden gift, elicits appreciation. The preparations and the requisites of meaning, ritual and arbitrary,
hold more interest and importance than the impatient possession of its truth.
Whether the volume is ultimately empty or overfull seems less pressing than
that its packaging be enjoyed. The writing of S/Z celebrates this non-Western
tradition. Thus the lexia, a haiku of criticism, a delicacy of S/Z, is less violent
manhandling than frail handiwork in miniature. A package of notation. Without hidden truth. A ritual of reading. Bonsai cultivated. (Deconstructive Criticism [New York: Columbia University Press, 1983], 204.)
7. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), 84.
8. In discussing the legacy of Saussures linguistics, Jonathan Culler observes that
if everything which has meaning within a culture is a sign and therefore an object
of semiological investigation, semiology would come to include most disciplines of
the humanities and the social sciences. Any domain of human activitybe it music,
architecture, cooking, etiquette, advertising, fashion, literaturecould be approached
in semiological terms. (Ferdinand de Saussure [New York: Penguin Books, 1977],
103. See also 95 and 11011). From a perspective of semiology, language is only one
system of signs, though it is a special or privileged one. Thus, semiology broadens
294
its jurisdiction to include all conceivable cultural objects. Barthess Empire of Signs
should be read in the broad sense of semiology as a cultural science.
9. Fredric Jameson, Metacommentary, PMLA 86 (January 1971): 10.
10. Roland Barthes, 11. Of course, we should not take Cullers use of the term
touristic as nonserious or supercilious. Rather, he seems to use it after a study fashioned by Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New
York: Schocken Books, 1976).
11. Roland Barthes, Shirushi no Teikoku, trans. So Sacon (Tokyo: Shincho, 1974).
Judging from the description of the cover of the Japanese translation, the Japanese
consider the work as the cultural criticism of Japan. I am indebted to my friend
Kazuhiko Okuda of the International University of Japan for sending me a copy of
the Japanese translation of Barthess Empire of SignsShirushi no Teikoku. At the
conference on The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man held under the
auspices of the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center in 1966 (the same year in which he
visited Japan), Barthes spoke of a homology between language and culture and of the
intersection between literature and linguistics as semio-criticism. (See To Write:
An Intransitive Verb? 135.)
12. See the authors paper Misreading the Ideogram: From Fenollosa to Derrida and McLuhan, Paideuma 13 (1984): 2427, which is reprinted here as chapter
8 with a modied title. In this connection, we should single out the following two
important recent works on Japan. One is Nol Burch, To the Distant Observer, rev.
and ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). Burch
admires Barthess Empire of Signs as a pioneer text: it is the rst attempt by any
Western writer to read the Japanese text in the light of contemporary semiotics
(13). After the fashion of Barthes, Burch treats the Japanese cinema as a system of
signs, that is to say, he textualizes it. The other is William R. LaFleur, The Karma of
Words (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). LaFleurs work is concerned
with the interconnection between Buddhism and the literary arts in medieval Japan.
Although his methodology is self-professedly one of the Foucauldian episteme, the
intertextuality of the religious and the literary in terms of the Japanese concept of
funi (nondualism) in his analysis may be likened to the interdisciplinary spirit of
Barthes. I am grateful to David Pollack of the University of Rochester for suggesting
these two works to me.
13. There is another Confucian ethical term that is inseparably related to sincerity:
it is delity that literally means man standing by his word. It refers to the responsibility of the speaker to his word as ethical performance. The American poet and
essayist Wendell Berry dwells on the ethics of delity in Standing by Words (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983), 2463. Ivan Morris writes about the tragic heroes
in the history of Japan from ancient times to the time of the kamikaze pilots based
on this single idea of sincerity (makoto), which has its origin in Confucian philosophy. See The Nobility of Failure (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1962.)
One would immediately recognize, therefore, that I am using the notion of sincerity
in an extended sense. It is preeminently that moral concept that refers to the unity
of knowledge and action (chih hsing ho yi) in Confucian thought: knowledge is the
beginning of action, and action is the completion of knowledge.
14. The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1973), 258.
15. Empire of Signs, 29.
295
16. From the vantage point of Barthess own semiology, one can say that the cover
fashions or dresses the text of a book. However, when he was introducing the
drawings of the fashion designer Ert in 1972, Barthes commented that fashion only
seeks clarity (not voluptuousness), and the cover girl is not a good erotic object
because she is too preoccupied with becoming a sign. (See Thody, Roland Barthes, 99
and 192.)
17. See Isshu Miura and Ruth Fuller Sasaki, The Zen Koan: Its History and Use
in Rinzai Zen (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965), 3: The living heart of
all Buddhism is enlightenment or satori, and it is upon satori that Zen Buddhism is
based. But Zen is not satori, nor is a satori Zen. Satori is the goal of Zen. Moreover,
the satori that is the goal of Zen is not merely the satori experience; it is the satori
experience deepened through training and directed to a denite end. It would be
of some interest to note that France and Buddhism begin with the same ideograman accidental connection between Barthes the Frenchman and his interest in
(Zen) Buddhism. In the most recent collection of critical essays, LObvie et lobtus
(Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1982), Barthes declares that Distinguons... le message, qui
veut produire une information, le signe, qui veut produire une intellection, et le geste,
qui produit tout le reste (le supplment), sans forcment vouloir produire quelque
chose (148). Le geste is also a satori presumably because it produces without being
forced to produce anything at all.
18. Empire of Signs, 4. A Zen master pondered for six years on the koan on mu.
Then he suddenly achieved satori and composed the following Dadaist poem:
Mu! Mu! Mu! Mu! Mu!
Mu! Mu! Mu! Mu! Mu!
Mu! Mu! Mu! Mu! Mu!
Mu! Mu! Mu! Mu! Mu!
See Ben-Ami Scharfstein, Introduction/Zen: The Tactics of Emptiness, in The
Sound of the One Hand, trans. Yoel Hoffman (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 26. This
book is a compilation of Zen koan(s) with answers. To fashion a semiological koan, if
a semiological package is made of the wrapping (sign) and the content (message),
what is the content when the wrapping is all peeled off? (The answer, of course,
is mu or the void!). In Mind and Nature (New York: Dutton, 1979), Gregory Bateson
emphasizes zero as a message when he writes: the deep partial truth that nothing
will come of nothing in the world of information and organization encounters an
interesting contradiction in the circumstance that zero, the complete absence of any
indicative event, can be a message.... The letter that you do not write, the apology
you do not offer, the food that you do not put out for the catall these can be sufcient and effective messages because zero, in context, can be meaningful; and it is the
recipient of the message who creates the context (4647).
19. In recounting Empire of Signs to Guy Scarpetta in 1971, Barthes commented
that le zen est apparemment bouddhique, mais il nest pas du le ct du bouddhisme;
le clivage dont je parle nest pas celui de lhistoire des religions; cest prcisment celui
des langues, du langage. (Roland Barthes, Le Grain de la voix: Entretiens 19621980
[Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1981], 115.)
20. See The Aesthetics of Silence, in Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1966), 334. For Zen all verbalism essentially represents the pollution of reality. See Miura and Sasaki, The Zen Koan, 35: Zen is without words,
296
without explanations, without instruction, with knowledge. Zen is self-awakening

only. Yet if we want to communicate something about it to others, we are forced to fall
back upon words. The positive role of silence in human communication as an ontological issue is explored extensively in Bernard P. Dauenhauer, Silence: The Phenomenon and Its Ontological Signicance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980).
21. In speaking of psychoanalysis as the talking cure, Jacques Lacan regards
empty speech as an impediment to the realization of the truth of the subject: I
have tackled the function of speech in analysis from its least rewarding angle, that
of empty speech, where the subject seems to be talking in vain about someone who,
even if he were his spitting image, can never become one with the assumption of his
desire. I have pointed out the source of the growing devaluation of which speech has
been the object in both theory and technique. (Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: W. W. Norton, 1977], 4546.) In Loves Body (New York: Random
House, 1966), Norman O. Brown speaks eloquently of the metaphysics of silence in
the following passages:
The ego is loquacity, the interior monologue, the soliloquy which isolates. The
way of silence leads to the extinction of the ego, mortication. To become
empty, to become nothing; to be free from the constrictions of the self, to have
no self, to be of no mind, to be a dead man.... The matrix in which the word
is sown is silence. Silence is the mother tongue.... The meaning is not in the
words but between the words, in the silence.... The virgin womb of the imagination in which the word becomes esh is silence; and she remains a virgin....
The word is made esh. To recover the world of silence, of symbolism, is to
recover the human body.... The true meanings of words are bodily meanings,
carnal knowledge; and the bodily meanings are the unspoken meanings. What
is always speaking silently is the body (26465).
22. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1959).
23. Empire of Signs, 75.
24. Barthess own term would be Sinic. The popular French myth of China as
a peculiar mixture of bells, rickshaws and opium dens is referred to by Barthes as
Sininess or Sinity. Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang,
1972), 121.
25. Calligraphy, Bernard Karlgren writes, is the mother of Chinese pictorial art
and always its intimate ally, and an expert calligrapher has always been just as much
esteemed in China as a painter of the rst rank.... From this close connexion between
script and painting it follows that the Chinese artist, who often is both calligrapher
and painter, loves to insert in his picture some lines of writing, which he employs with
decorative effect in a masterly way. (Sound and Symbol in Chinese [London: Oxford
University Press, 1923], 67.) Another unique, interesting side of Chinese ideography
is the invention of a kind of the Rorschach test based on tsukuriji (made-up words)
to test the attitudes of the Japanese youth. (See George Fields, From Bonsai to Levis
[New York: Macmillan, 1982], 1025.)
26. Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point: Space in
Poetry and Painting (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 187.
27. R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938),
24344.
297
28. See Barthes, Le Grain de la voix, Sur S/Z et lEmpire des signes, 6986.
29. The reason for Barthess liking for haiku lies in the fact that it enables the signied to evaporate or disappear, and what is left is only a thin cloud of signier (il ne
reste plus quun mince nuage de signicant). (Le Grain de la voix, 114.) The writing of
haiku appears to be an act of kenosis or even semioclasty. It should be noted, however, that Barthes seems to have been carried away with his enthusiasm of haiku, that
is, his assertion that haiku is merely the literary branch of Zen is a little hyperbolic.
According to Suzuki, for example, although they are exquisitely interfused, Haiku
and Zen... are not to be confused. Haiku is haiku and Zen is Zen. Haiku has its own
eld, it is poetry, but it also partakes of something of Zen, at the point where a haiku
gets related to Zen (Zen and Japanese Culture, 229).
30. In relation to the importance of the surcial, the following description by Liza
Criheld Dalby on geisha is relevant and appropriate: Customers are expected to
give a geisha an honorarium, but the cash (preferably a stiffly virgin 5,000-yen note
or two) must rst be folded into a decorative envelope. A crumpled bill shed from
a pocket would hardly do. The Art of the Geisha, Natural History 92 (February
1983): 49. For her complete treatment of Japanese geisha culture based on her anthropological eld work and personal experience as a geisha, see Geisha (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). The sociological, cultural, and psychoanalytical
approaches to the role of play or playing in relation to human reality is proposed by
George Herbert Meads Mind, Self and Society, ed. Charles W. Morris (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1934); Johan Huizingas Homo Ludens (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1955); and Donald Woods Winnicotts Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971). Notwithstanding their differences, they all treat playing as a universal
element of human reality. Strictly speaking, geisha asobi as a nightly activity that
began as a male entertainment is close structurally to Huizingas conception of play
as an intermezzo in the ow of normal, workaday life. However, I wish to use asobi in
Winnicotts sense of playing as doing. He writes that Psychotherapy takes place in
the overlap of two areas of playing, that of the patient and that of the therapist. Psychotherapy has to do with two people playing together. The corollary of this is that
where playing is not possible then the work done by the therapist is directed towards
bringing the patient from a state of not being able to play into a state of being able
to play, and that it is play that is the universal, and that belongs to health: playing
facilitates growth and therefore health; playing leads into group relationships; playing
can be a form of communication in psychotherapy; and, lastly, psychoanalysis has
been developed as a highly specialized form of playing in the service of communication with oneself and others (Playing and Reality, 38 and 41). I can see no reason
why what is true with playing in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy cannot be true in
(Barthes) semiology.
31. In Maoism, Psychoanalysis, and Hermeneutics: A Methodological Critique
of the Interpretation of Cultures, Asian Thought and Society: An International
Review 9 (1984): 14367, Petee Jung and I challenge shallow cultural hermeneutics
and conceptual overkill that ignore a cultural phenomenology of lived experience: we
point to the facile trappings of cultural interpretation in relation to Maoism as the
Sinicization of Marxism.
32. John Sturrock, ed., Roland Barthes, in Structuralism and Since: From LviStrauss to Derrida (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 77.
33. Ibid., 78.
298
34. Chang Tung-sun, A Chinese Philosophers Theory of Knowledge, in Our

Language and Our World, ed. S. I. Hayakawa (New York: Harper, 1959), 299324.
During the course of modernization in the Meiji Restoration whose acceleration
was sloganized by a group of Japanese intellectuals as America our mother, France
our father, the Japanese unity of the inner (indigenous) and the outer (foreign) was
expressed as Eastern morality and Western science and technology. There may
indeed be the difference here between the Eastern logic of correlation and the Western logic of identity.
35. An interesting contrast can be made between the eighteenth-century anatomical sketch of the vena cava cited by Barthes and the nineteenth-century Japanese acupuncture gure. The contrast between the two may be depicted as that of the universal
semiological man and the particular Japanese man. The vena cava supplements
Barthess notion of how to write the bodyNeither the skin, nor the muscles,
nor the bones, nor the nerves, but the rest: an awkward, brous, shaggy, raveled thing,
a clowns coat. See Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 180. Ironically, however, Barthess vena cava reveals more
of the inside depth of the body than its counterpart, the surcial body of the
Japanese acupuncture gure.
36. See Dean MacCannel and Juliet Flower MacCannel who write that we have
adopted the stance that comparative cultural studies cannot make sense except as
a contribution to a general semiotics of culture. The Time of the Sign (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 3. This semiotic Procrusteanism might easily, I
am afraid, invite conceptual hypostatization that reverses the thesis that language
and culture are the masters of linguistics and anthropology. One of the anecdotes
of Zen monks published around the turn of this century is an instructive parable
for conceptual hypostatization or eutrophication. The edited story begins with the
ideogram emptiness (ku, le vide), which is followed by the title caption A Cup of
Tea. The Zen master Nan-in served tea to a university professor who was visiting
him to inquire about Zen. Nan-in poured the visitors cup full and then kept on pouring. Watching the overow the professor could no longer restrain himself and said,
It is overfull. No more will go in! Thereupon Nan-in replied, Like this cup, you
are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you
rst empty your cup? Paul Reps, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (Rutland, VT: Tuttle, 1957),
19; italics mine. Zen emptying, to which Barthes himself is so attracted, should
serve as a deconstructive lesson for his semiological method. If by metacommentary we mean the piling of conceptual construction upon conceptual construction,
moreover, the word in the subtitle of this paper too should be replaced with a koan
or teishowithout the pretension of being a Zen masteron Barthess Empire of
Signs. It also should not escape our attention that that phenomenological reduction
(epoche) may be called conceptual emptyingthe technique of suspending all
prejudgments so that the observer may construct his thought based directly on actual
experience rather than piling concept upon concept (i.e., conceptual sedimentation).
Zen thinking (nen) is compared with phenomenological reduction in Katsuki Sekida,
Zen Training, ed. A. V. Grimstone (New York: Weatherhill, 1975), 18892. It is of
course beyond the scope of this paper to compare and elaborate on Zen and phenomenology including what, as contrasted with phenomenological reduction, Alfred
Schutz calls the epoche of the natural attitude, which suspends doubt rather than
belief in the reality of the outer world. See Collected Papers, vol. 1, The Problem of
299
Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague, Netherlands: Nijhoff, 1962), 229.
Zen can be a free variation on both types of epoche and more.
37. For an emphasis on the system of intersubjective meanings relevant to our
discussion here, see Charles Taylor, Interpretation and the Sciences of Man, The
Review of Metaphysics 25 (September 1971): 351; Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and
the Human Sciences, trans. John B. Thompson (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1981); and Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic
Books, 1973), especially chap. 1, Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture, 330 and Local Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983), especially chap. 3, From the Natives Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological
Understanding, 5570. In The Conict of Interpretations, ed. Don Ihde (Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), Paul Ricoeur develops most fully the idea
of hermeneutical phenomenology as compared with structural semiology. See David
Carroll, The Subject in Question (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 15:
The structuralist critic in his effort to be for language, for the text, will be
for the most part militantly anti-subject. In fact, the problem of the subject
soon passes into obscurity, into a space radically outside that is no longer analyzed, no longer pertinent. The insistence on the subject and the whole problem of consciousness associated with it is considered by structuralists to have
obscured, if not negated, the problem of language (the work of the signier);
and so now, through a reversal of the problematic, language negates, displaces,
and replaces the subject as origin. The subject remains only as a skeleton of its
former self, as a function of language.
In The Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), Kaja Silverman explores the human subject as the subject of semiotics.
38. See Dalby who writes that it is often said with justication that Japanese
food is more a feast for the eyes than for the palate, so even if I didnt get to taste the
banquets I witnessed, I at least got to view the beautifully orchestrated composition
of dishes (Geisha, 113).
39. The expression hors jeu is used by Richard Macksey during the questioning
of Jacques Derridas talk entitled Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the
Human Sciences. (See Macksey and Donato, eds., The Structuralist Controversy,
268). The limits of the theatrical understanding of the world is explored by Bruce
Wilshire in Role Playing and Identity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).
40. Zenkei Shibayama, Zen Comments on the Mumonkan, trans. Sumiko Kudo
chapter 11
1. See Hwa Yol Jung and Petee Jung, The Hermeneutics of Political Ideology and
Cultural Change: Maoism as the Sinicization of Marxism, Cultural Hermeneutics 3
(August, 1975), 16598 and Maoism, Psychoanalysis, and Hermeneutics: A Methodological Critique of the Interpretation of Cultures, Asian Thought and Society: An
International Review 9 (1984), 14367.
2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New
300
York: Humanities Press, 1962) and The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort
and trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968).
3. Claude Lefort, La politique et la pense de la politique, Lettres Nouvelles 32,
n.d., 45.
4. Humanism and Terror, trans. John ONeill (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969) and
Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, 153. What Jean-Paul Sartre says
in his Critique de la raison dialectique, vol. 1: Thorie des ensembles pratiques (Paris:
Librairie Gallimard, 1960) is reminiscent of this passage of Merleau-Ponty when Sartre speaks of Marxism as the unsurpassable philosophy of our time (marxisme
comme lindpassable philosophie de notre temps) (9).
6. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard G. McCleary (Evanston, IL:
7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and
Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 152.
8. Ibid., 184.
9. Ibid., 150.
10. See Stuart R. Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1963), 11215.
11. Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, xxxivxxxv.
12. Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, 162.
13. Here we cannot overlook Paul Ricoeurs warning against progressive violence
that risks an endless perpetuation or cycle of violence. See Paul Ricoeur, Non-Violent
Man and His Presence to History, in History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Keibley
14. Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror, 109.
15. See G. F. W. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York:
Dover Publications, 1956), 1056 and 11638. Speaking of a permanent cultural revolution, Henri Lefebvre follows this heritage of Hegel in excluding Oriental thought
from philosophy. See Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch
16. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970),
289.
17. Ibid., 285.
18. Ibid., 16.
19. Ibid., 280.
20. Signs, 138.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 133.
23. Ibid., 139.
24. Ibid., 128.
25. Ibid., 139.
26. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy,
trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Random House, 1973), 101. For a systematic
study of the Marxian dialectic from a historical perspective, see Dick Howard, The
301
Development of the Marxian Dialectic (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University

Press, 1972).
27. In the afterword of the second edition of Das Kapital, Marx wrote,
My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct
opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of the Idea, he even transforms into an independent
subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external,
phenomenal form of the Idea. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else
than the material world reected by the human mind, and translated into forms
of thought... I... openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker....
The mystication which dialectic suffers in Hegels hands, by no means prevents
him from being the rst to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned
right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical
shell. (Capital, vol. 1, ed. Frederick Engels and trans. Samuel Moore and Edward
Aveling [New York: International Publishers, 1967], 1920)
28. Grundrisse, 99.
29. Ibid., 93.
30. Ibid., 91.
31. See especially Stuart R. Schram, ed., Introduction to Chairman Mao Talks to
the People, trans. John Chinnery and Tieyun (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 25.
32. Selected Works, vol. 1 (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1975), 318.
33. Ibid., 343.
34. Ibid., 338.
35. All different interpretations of the dialectic attest to this view. Speaking of the
ambiguity of the Hegelian dialectic, Hans-Georg Gadamer writes the following:
the all-encompassing synthesis which Hegels speculative idealism claims to
accomplish contains an unresolved tensionone which is reected in the way
in which the meaning of the word dialectic shifts in Hegel. Specically, dialectical may be said on the one hand to characterize the viewpoint of reason,
which is able to perceive both the unity of the whole and the whole of the
unity in all oppositions and contradictions. But, on the other hand, dialectic,
corresponding to the meaning of the word in antiquity, is also thought of as
the heightening of all contradictions to a xed point of irresolvable contradictoriness, or, put another way, as the working out of the contradictions that
plunge thought into an abyss of meaningless talk, even if from the perspective
of reason the contradictions coexist in tension lled unity. (See Hans-George
Gadamer, Hegels Dialectic, trans. Christopher Smith [New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1976], 110).
36. Alphonse de Waelhens even describes Merleau-Pontys thought as a philosophy of ambiguity. See Une Philosophie de lambguit: LExistentialisme de Maurice
Merleau-Ponty (Louvain, Belgium: Publications Universitaires de Louvain, 1951).
37. In the same vein, Simone de Beauvoir proposes that existentialism is the only
philosophy in which an ethics has its place and that in it ambiguity must not be confused with absurdity because to say that existence is ambiguous is to assert that its
302
meaning is never xed but must be constantly won. See The Ethics of Ambiguity,
trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), 34 and 129.
38. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 224.
39. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, xvixvii.
40. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1963).
41. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 16768.
42. Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, 69.
43. Ibid., 40.
44. Viewed in this way, Sartre exaggerates the role of violence in decolonization
when he says in his prefatory remarks for Frantz Fanons Les Damns de la terre,
which in the end tell more about Sartres own thought and temperament than about
Fanons, The rebels weapon is the proof of his humanity. For in the rst days of the
revolt you must kill: to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone,
to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remain a
dead man, and a free man; the survivor, for the rst time, feels a national soil under
his foot. The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove
Press, 1966), 1819.
45. William Barrett and Henry D. Aiken, eds., Letter on Humanism, in Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, vol. 2, trans. Edgar Ohner (New York: Random
House, 1962), 287. According to Gadamer, it was Friederich Schiller who was the rst
to recognize the problem of alienation to which Hegel assigns a central role in his
philosophy (see Hegels Dialectic, 106).
46. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy, trans. John Wild and James
M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1963). This is far from saying
that Merleau-Ponty is a Marxist. Nor do we wish to minimize his later critical reinterpretation of Marxism itself.
47. Ibid., 49.
48. For Merleau-Pontys discussion on Hegels Existentialism, see Sense and
Non-Sense, 6370.
49. Barry Cooper attempts to discern Hegelian elements in Merleau-Pontys The
Structure of Behavior and comes to the conclusion that Merleau-Pontys philosophical observations no less than his political and ethical opinions can be a blend of
Hegelian ideas and sound, common sense observation of empirical reality. Hegelian Elements in Merleau-Pontys La Structure du comportement, International
Philosophical Quarterly 15 (December, 1975): 423. However, we believe that MerleauPontys social and political thought can be more fruitfully investigated in terms of the
Marxian dialectic as anti-Hegelian.
50. Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy, 50.
51. Ibid.
52. It is interesting to ask whether in Merleau-Ponty the notion of interrogation is opposed to that of the dialectic. This vital interrogation, Alphonso Lignis
notes, is not simply the alternation of faith and doubt, of position and negation,
of affirmation and denial, of expectation and satisfaction, of demand and response.
Merleau-Ponty opposes it to dialectics. Garth Gillan, ed., Being in the Interrogative
Mood, in The Horizons of the Flesh (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1973), 85.
53. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Themes from the Lectures at the Collge de France
303
19521960, trans. John ONeill (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,

1970), 59.
54. See Hwa Yol Jung, The Radical Humanization of Politics: Maurice MerleauPontys Philosophy of Politics, Archiv fr Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie 53 (May,
1967): 23356.
56. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York:
Philosophical Library, 1956), 233. We are also cognizant of Claude Lvi-Strausss critique of Sartre in The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966),
24569, which is dedicated to the memory of Merleau-Ponty. In it Lvi-Strauss claims
the ultimate goal of the human sciences to be not to constitute, but to dissolve man
(ibid., 247).
57. Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, 205. In this respect, MerleauPonty sees that the phenomenology of speech is best suited to reveal something that
is inaccessible to psychologism and historicism on the one hand and dogmatic metaphysics on the other.
58. Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy, 5253.
61. Echoing Merleau-Ponty in his interpretation of Hegel, Charles Taylor comments that Complete freedom would be a void in which nothing would be worth
doing, nothing would deserve to count for anything. The self which has arrived at
freedom by setting aside all external obstacles and impingements is characterless, and
hence without dened purpose, however much this is hidden by such seemingly positive terms as rationality or creativity. Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1975), 561.
62. Paolo Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos
(New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 75.
63. Ibid.
64. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, xix.
66. Mao, Selected Works, 1:300.
67. Ibid., 308.
68. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 25.
69. Ibid., 13.
70. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, xxi.
71. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press,
1975), 4012.
72. Hajime Nakamura, Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples, ed. Phillip P. Wiener
(Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1964), 181.
74. Ibid.
75. Ibid., 3034.
77. Ibid., 408. The initial form of language, Merleau-Ponty writes, ... would
have been a kind of song. Men would have sung their feelings before communicating
their thought. Just as writing was at rst painting, language at rst would have been
304
song, which, if it analyzed itself, would have become a linguistic sign. It is through
the exercise of this song that men would have tried out their power of expression
Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, trans. Hugh J. Silverman (Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 81.
78. At the height of Merleau-Pontys ontology of the body, the esh becomes an
ultimate notion. It is neither spirit nor matter: To designate it, we should need
the old term element, in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and re,
that is, in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual
and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is
a fragment of being. The esh is in this sense an element of Being (The Visible and
the Invisible, 139). It is interesting to note here that from beginning to end MerleauPonty rejects both spiritualism and materialism.
79. Nakamura, Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples, 17782.
81. Ibid., 173.
82. See F. V. Konstantinov and M. I. Sladkovsky, A Critique of Mao Tse-tungs
Theoretical Conception, trans. Yuri Sdobnikov (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972)
and M. Altaisky and V. Georgiyev, The Philosophical Views of Mao Tse-tung: A Critical Analysis, trans. Bryan Bean (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971).
83. See Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, 3637:
The movement is accelerated by violence when established capitalism tries to
take over and control backward societies. Nothing permits one to say that this
transition is necessary, that capitalism is contained within precapitalism as its
inevitable future, or that it contains to any great degree all that has preceded
it, or, nally, that any society, to go beyond capitalism, must inevitably pass
through a capitalistic phase. All these conceptions of development are mechanical. A dialectical conception demands only that, between capitalism, where it
exists, and its antecedents, the relationship be one of an integrated society to
a less integrated one.
84. For a treatment of education as the praxis of cultural liberation, see Paulo
Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness (New York: Seabury Press, 1973). See
John ONeill, Gay Technology and the Body Politic, in The Body as a Medium
of Expression, ed. Jonathan Benthall and Ted Polhemus (New York: E. P. Dutton,
1975), 301: Today, poetry and politics, just as art and technology, can no longer be
separated if we are to remake the connections of mind and body, to restore the community of the senses which is the foundation of our political life. All politics therefore
is ultimately a matter of education and all education a mode of political education. It
is for this reason that there is a long-standing quarrel between poetry and philosophy
over the true nature of the body politic.
85. In his introduction to Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy, trans. Fred Halliday (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), Halliday writes that Before the victory
of the Chinese Revolution, he [Korsch] wrote an introduction to a planned volume of
Mao Tse-tungs essays, stressing their theoretical originality, and he had an optimistic
perspective on developments in Asia and Africa and that Mao Tse-tungs emphasis
on revolutionary ideas as concrete forces has some analogies with Korschs theses on
ideological struggle (25).
305
87. It should be noted here that Merleau-Ponty is defending the Lukcs of

Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (1923). In 1967, Lukcs reproached Maoism
as a form of the Stalinist subjectivist sectarianism and insisted that the truth of
Marxism will in the long run be proven not in the empty propaganda of the Chinese
revolutionary catchphrases but in its technical and economic superiority alone. See
Marxism and Human Liberation, ed. E. San Juan Jr. (New York: Dell, 1973), 7296.
88. John ONeill contends that I see in Merleau-Pontys work, from beginning to
end, a critique of the two principal techniques of reason, namely the analytic method
of experimental science and the structuralist method of the human sciences through
which the tradition of rationalism dominates the world by removing the responsible
subject of human history. Translators Introduction to Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
The Prose of the World, ed. Claude Lefort and trans. John ONeill (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1973), xxvi.
89. Adventures of the Dialectic, 73.
90. Ibid., 72.
91. Ibid., 222.
92. Ibid., 5.
93. Ibid., 7.
94. Themes from the Lectures at the Collge de France 19521960, 56.
95. In Praise of Philosophy, 39.
96. For an exposition of this theme, see John Sallis, Phenomenology and the
Return to Beginnings (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1973).
97. In reference to Leninism, Merleau-Ponty comments that That new dogmatism, which puts the knowing subject outside the fabric of history and gives it access
to absolute being, releases it from the duty of self-criticism, exempts Marxism from
applying its own principles to itself, and settles dialectical thought, which by its own
movement rejected it, in a massive positivity (Adventures of the Dialectic, 60).
98. Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, trans. T. B. Bottomore
and ed. Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956), 65.
99. Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, trans. Brian Pearce (London:
New Park Publications, 1962), 8.
100. Ibid., 9. Whatever its shortcomings may be, Adam B. Ulam at least captures
in his The Unnished Revolution (New York: Random House, 1960) the sense of
the continuation of the Marxist revolution in the Third World. He contends that
Marxism is the natural ideology that accommodates the Third Worlds desire to
become industrialized.
101. In reference to a newly inserted passage in Maos original writing, which
insists on the indivisibility between the Sinicization and the internationalization of
Marxism, Schram comments that it is in agrant contradiction with the whole spirit
of Maos text (The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, 114). In light of Trotskys
exposition on an uninterrupted continuity between the national phase of revolution
as tactics and its international culmination as strategy, however, there is really
no agrant contradiction between the Sinicization and the internationalization of
Marxism.
102. In an interview in 1969, Sartre reluctantly comments on the Chinese Cultural
Revolution. While confessing his ignorance concerning what was then happening in
China, he nonetheless commented that
306
striking are the contradictions within the Cultural Revolution. There is a central discordance between the unleashing of mass initiatives and the cult of the
leader. On the one side, there is the perpetual maintenance of the fused group
with unlimited personal initiatives within it, with the possibility of writing anything in big-character posters, even Chou En-lai to the gallowswhich did,
in fact happen in Peking; on the other side, there is the fetishization of the little
red book, read aloud in waiting rooms, in airplanes, in railway stations, read
before others who repeat it in chorus, read by taxi-drivers who stop their cab
to read it to passengersa hallucinating collective catechism which resounds
from one end of China to the other. (Between Existentialism and Marxism,
trans. John Mathews [New York: Pantheon Books, 1974], 58)
105. Ibid., 39 and 207. Speaking of the way toward a permanent cultural revolution
for which the Chinese Revolution is denitely not a model, Henri Lefebvre comments
that The objective and directive of our cultural revolution is to create a culture that
is not an institution but a style of life; its basic distinction is the realization of philosophy in the spirit of philosophy. The logical outcome of a critical appraisal of culture,
of the prestige and glamour attached to this term, and of its institutionalization, is
a total acknowledgement of philosophy, of its theoretical and practical signicance,
its educational, experiential, intellectual and social importance (Everyday Life in the
Modern World, 203; italics added).
106. Adventures of the Dialectic, 8283.
107. Ibid., 65.
108. The terms scale and height come from Maos poem Chingkangshan
Revisited that, together with Two Birds: A Dialogue, was written in 1965 on the
eve of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in the spirit of perpetuating the
Revolution. To cite the second half of Chingkanshan Revisited,
Wind and thunder are stirring,
Flags and banners are ying
Wherever men live.
Thirty-eight years are ed
With a mere snap of the ngers.
We can clasp the moon in the Ninth Heaven
And seize turtles deep down in the Five Seas:
Well return amid triumphant song and laughter.
Nothing is hard in this world
If you dare to scale the heights.
In Two Birds: A Dialogue, Mao further alludes to the worldwide fervor of revolution, when he says, Look you, the world is being turned upside down. See Peking
Review 19 (January 2, 1976): 56. For a political interpretation of these two poems,
see Yuan Shui-po, Magnicent Poems That Inspire Us in Battle, Peking Review 19
(January 9, 1976): 710.
109. What Lvi-Strauss impresses us deeply with is not his structuralist theory
or techniques but the homage he pays to the savage mind of the primitives,
whose pupil and witness he is, to the end of preserving the lateral continuity of
307
humanity in the same spirit of Merleau-Ponty. See Structural Anthropology, vol. 2,

trans. Monique Layton (New York: Basic Books, 1976), 32.
chapter 12
1. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 85.
2. David Abrams The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a MoreThan-Human World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996) is thus far the unsurpassed
and most creative interpretation of Merleau-Pontys philosophy in applying and communicating it to the language and world of nonhuman beings and things.
3. See Rosalyn Diprose, Corporeal Generosity (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 2002), 190.
4. The term Interbeing is used by the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist Thich Nhat
Hanh. See Interbeing, rev. ed., ed. Fred Eppsteiner (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1993).
5. See Flix Guattari, Psychoanalyse et Transversalit: Essais dAnalyse Institutionnelle (Paris: Franois Maspero, 1972), 7285 and Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry
and Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 1123 and see
also Gary Genesko, The Life and Work of Flix Guattari: From Transversality to
Ecosophy, in Flix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton
(London: Athlone Press, 2000), 10659.
6. See Calvin O. Schrag, The Self after Postmodernity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).
7. See Hwa Yol Jung, The Tao of Transversality as a Global Approach to Truth: A
Metacommentary on Calvin O. Schrag, Man and World 28 (1995): 1131.
8. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard D. McCleary (Evanston, IL:
9. Ibid., 140. Edouard Glissant, who is a Caribbean francophone, uses such terms
as transversality and diversality in criticizing in part Hegel and Eurocentrism in
praise of crolit. See Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989) and Poetics of Relation, trans.
Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
10. Ibid., 138.
11. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of
Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 140.
12. Michel Foucault, Religion and Culture, trans. Richard Townsend (New York:
Routledge, 1999), 11014.
13. When transversality is said to be complicit with the Buddhists Middle Way,
we should keep in mind what Masao Abe says: This Middle Way, however, should
not be taken as a middle point between two poles. On the contrary, the Middle Way
breaks through dipolarity; it is the overcoming of dipolarity itself. Zen and Western
Thought, ed. William R. LaFleur (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985), 157.
14. See Hwa Yol Jung, Enlightenment and the Question of the Other: A Postmodern Audition, Human Studies 25 (2002): 297306.
15. The panopticon is Jeremy Benthams masterly architectural blueprint for an
ideal prison system. For Foucault, it is a gure of political technology that has
308
multiple applications. It is also a type of location of bodies in space. See Michel

Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books,
1977), 205.
16. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? 104.
17. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 155.
18. See Hugh G. Dick, ed., Selected Writings of Francis Bacon (New York: Modern
Library, 1955).
19. Husserl et la Nation de Nature (Notes Prises au Cours de Maurice MerleauPonty), Revue de Mtaphysique et de Morale 70 (1965): 25769.
20. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. James M.
Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 13. Perception, Emmanuel Levinas also writes, is a proximity with being which intentional analysis does not
account for. See Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht,
21. Ibid., 13 (italics added).
22. Marjorie Grene, The Sense of Things, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 38 (1980): 378.
23. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis
24. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Husserl et la notion de nature (notes prises au cours
de Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Revue de Mtaphysique et de Morale, 70 (1965): 260.
25. Ibid., 261 (italics added).
26. Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 238.
27. Nancy Mairs, Remembering the Bone House: An Erotics of Place and Space
28. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 30th anniversary ed. (New York: Random House,
1982), 3.
trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 13940.
30. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1990), 57.
31. For a superb essay on Merleau-Pontys notion of circularity or Being circular, see Thomas W. Busch, Circulating Being from Embodiment to Incorporation:
Essays on Late Existentialism (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), 80106.
Concerning the circularity of philosophy, Merleau-Ponty (The Visible and the
Invisible, 177) notes that the end of a philosophy is the account of its beginning.
Compare Gaston Bachelard who writes that being is round (das Dasein ist rund)
and that everything round invites a caress. The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 234 and 236.
32. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 134 (italics added).
33. Johann G. Herder, J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture, trans. and ed.
F. M. Barnard (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 199.
35. Ibid., 48.
309
36. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 155.
37. See Sander L. Gilman, Inscribing the Other (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1991), 2949.
38. Jos Ortega y Gasset, Man and People, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1957), 72. See Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, who says that
sensibility must be interpreted as touch rst of all and contact is tenderness and
responsibility (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 11618; italics
added.
39. Ortega, Man and People, 72.
40. Henry G. Bugbee, Jr., The Inward Morning: A Philosophical Exploration in
a Journal Form (State College, PA: Bald Eagle Press, 1958), 159. In her Earth Muse
(Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993), Carol Bigwood is ambidextrous
in synchronizing Merleau-Pontys philosophy of embodiment and the aesthetics of
Constantine Brancusis sculpture in developing a feminist geophilosophy.
41. Cynthia Willett, Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities (New York:
Routledge, 1995), 3147. It is interesting to observe that tickling, according to Adam
Phillips, is the pleasure we cannot reproduce in the absence of the other, that is, it
requires the enacted recognition of the other. See On Kissing, Tickling, and Being
Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
42. Willett, Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities, 47.
44. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985) and Martin Jay, Downcast
Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993), 493542.
45. Miranda Shaw, Passionate Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1994), 14078 in particular.
46. There is indeed a stark contrast between female Tantrics and the early Christian Fathers such as Origen who believed that Human life, lived in a body endowed
with sexual characteristics, was but the last dark hour of a long night that would vanish with the dawn. The body was poised on the edge of a transformation so enormous
as to make all present notions of identity tied to sexual differences, and all social roles
based upon marriage, procreation, and childbirth, seem as fragile as dusts dancing
in a sunbeam. See Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual
Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 168.
47. See Penelope Deutscher, A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of
Luce Irigaray (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 16484.
48. See Monica Sj and Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering
the Religion of the Earth (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 428.
49. Luce Irigaray, Love Between Us, in Who Comes After the Subject? ed. Eduoardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991),
16777.
50. Ibid., Between East and West: From Singularity to Community, trans. Stephen
Pluhcek (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 46.
51. The myth of the eternal return is the primordial way of correlating historical time with the cyclical rhythm of nature. For a critique of historicism including
310
the modernist view of progress against this primordial legacy, see Mircea Eliade, The
Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon Books,
1954), 13962.
52. Rachel Carson, The Sense of Wonder (New York: Harper and Row, 1965),
8889.
54. Norman O. Brown, Loves Body (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), 264.
55. According to Roland Barthes, silere (to be silent) denotes a sort of timeless
virginity of things. The Neutral, trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 23.
56. Brown, Loves Body, 265.
57. Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990),
99.
58. Yasuo Yuasa, The Body, ed. Thomas P. Kasulis and trans. Shigenori Nagatomo
and ThomasP. Kasulia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 18.
59. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1959), 104 n. 12.
60. For a comparison between Dogen and Merleau-Ponty, see Carl Olson, The
Human Body as a Boundary Symbol: A Comparison of Merleau-Ponty and Dogen,
Philosophy East and West 36 (1986): 10720.
61. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language,
trans. Hugh J. Silverman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 102.
62. See Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,
ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1936). Also see the recent edition
by Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein with a commentary by Saussy
and additional essays by Fenollosa (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
63. What Michel Foucault says about the calligram would apply to the sinogram:
the calligram aspires playfully to effect the oldest oppositions of our alphabetical
civilization: to show and to name; to shape and to say; to reproduce and to articulate;
to imitate and to signify; to look and to read. This Is Not a Pipe, trans. and ed. James
Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 21.
64. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic
Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).
65. See Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker, Through the Vanishing Point: Space
in Poetry and Painting (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 183.
66. See Yuasa, The Body, 48n.
67. Li Zehou, Subjectivity and Subjectality: A Response, Philosophy East and
West 49 (1999): 174.
68. See Watsuji Tetsuro, A Climate: A Philosophical Study, trans. Geoffrey Bowas
(Tokyo: Ministry of Education, 1961).
69. Ibid., Rinrigaku, trans. Seisaku Yamamoto and Robert E. Carter (Albany:
State University Press of New York, 1996), 2945.
70. Yuasa, The Body, 47 and see further 3748.
71. See Hwa Yol Jung Interbeing and Geophilosophy in the Cultural Topology
of Tetsuro Watsujis Thought, in Why Japan Matters! ed. Joseph F. Kess and Helen
Lansdowne, vol. 2 (Victoria: Centre for Asia-Pacic Initiatives, University of Victoria,
2005), 691702. The authors contention that what Being is to the West, Interbeing
311
is to the East is supported by Robert E. Nisbetts recent empirical ndings. See The
Geography of Thought (New York: Free Press, 2003).
72. See Hwa Yol Jung, The Way of Ecopiety: An Essay in Deep Ecology from a
Sinitic Perspective, Asian Philosophy 1 (1981): 12740.
73. See Dee Brown who describes the attachment of the native Americans to nature
and the earth: for them, the earth is part of our body; and the measure of the land
and the measure of our bodies are the same. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (New
York: Rinehart and Winston, 1970).
74. Chang Chung-yuan, Tao: A New Way of Thinking (New York: Harper and
Row, 1975), 7172.
75. Cho Kah Kyung, Bewusstsein und Natursein (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1987).
76. Wang Yang-ming, Instructions for Practical Living and Other Neo-Confucian
Writings, trans. Winig-tsit Chan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 272.
77. Ibid.
78. Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, trans. Wing-tsit Chan
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 497.
79. See Glen A. Mazis. Earthbodies: Discovering Our Planetary Senses (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2002).
80. See Olson, The Body as a Boundary Symbol.
81. Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans. Edward
S. Casey (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 255.
82. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 270. For my two experimental
essays on environmental ethics and philosophy based on music and its metaphors,
see Hwa Yol Jung, The Orphic Voice and Ecology, Environmental Ethics 3 (1981):
32940 and Hwa Yol Jung and Petee Jung, The Way of Ecopiety: A Philosophic
Minuet for Ecological Ethics, in Commonplaces: Essays on the Nature of Place, ed.
David W. Black, Donald Kunze, and John Pickles (Lanham, MD: University Press of
America, 1989), 8199.
83. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1934), 39.
84. See Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); William Hamrick, Kindness and the Good Society (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2002); and Diprose, Corporeal Generosity.
85. Erazim Kohk, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the
Moral Sense of Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 13.
chapter 13
1. See Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York:
Harper and Row, 1977), 193242.
2. See Michel Haas, The Song of the Earth, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1993).
3. See Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
4. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson
and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 85.
5. See Hwa Yol Jung and Petee Jung, To Save the Earth, Philosophy Today 19
312
(1975): 10817. Without doubt the earliest commentary on the subject is Vincent Vycinas, Earth and Gods (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961).
6. Flix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains
and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955), 19920.
7. The astute observer of modernity, Zygmunt Bauman writes,
From at least the seventeenth century and well into the twentieth, the writing
elite of Western Europe [with] its footholds on other continents considered its
own way of life as a radical break in universal history. Virtually unchallenged
faith in the superiority of its own mode over all alternative forms of life
contemporaneous or pastallowed it to take itself as the reference point for
the interpretation of the telos of history.... Now,... Europe set[s] the reference point of objective time in motion, attaching it rmly to its own thrust
towards colonizing the future in the same way as it has colonized the surrounding space. (Legislators and Interpreters [Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987], 110)
trans. Alphonse Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 267. For
the authors attempt to formulate carnal hermeneutics as a postmodern project, see
Writing the Body as Social Discourse: Prolegomena to Carnal Hermeneutics, in
Signs of Change, ed. Stephen Barker (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1996), 25977. Compare Carl A. Raschke, for example, who says that Postmodernity,
in contradistinction to modernism, is immanently inscribed in the thought of the
body. Fire and Roses (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), vii.
9. Nancy Mairs, Remembering the Bone House (New York: Harper and Row,
1989), 7.
10. Ibid., 8.
11. Compare Pierre Bourdieu. The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 57: The habitus is what enables the institution to attain full realization: it is through the capacity for incorporation, which
exploits the bodys readiness to take seriously the performative magic of the social,
that the king, the banker or the priest are hereditary monarchy, nancial capitalism or
the Church made esh.
12. Mairs, Remembering the Bone House, 78.
13. Caring is preferred to care simply because what care is to being, caring is to becoming, although being, unlike care, is also a gerund. Caring
is that processual or participial act that is always and necessarily active, ongoing,
and unnished. Moreover, all participial acts subvert essentialismthat attempt that
xes truth or being by appealing to or identifying with a set of immutable principles,
doctrines, or dogmas.
14. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 13.
15. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufman
(New York: Penguin Books, 1959), 146. For the carnal origins of European thought,
see Richard Broxton, Onians: The Origins of European Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951).
16. See the corporeal and ecosophic feminist Susan Griffin who registers a complaint concerning the persisting logocentric tradition of the West that began with
Plato: Platos idea of earthly existence as a poor shadow of eternal ideas not only permeates the dominant traditions of Western philosophy but also reects a fundamental
313
posture toward existence, a hierarchy of values in which abstractions, theories, principles, ideas, mathematical equations, logic, and analysis are elevated about what is
called concrete, corporeal, sensible, palpable, tangible, solid, physical, material, and
contextual. The Eros of Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 7778.
17. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York:
Random House, 1967), 52 and 141.
18. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hollingdale and ed. Walter Kaufman (New York: Random House, 1967), 34849.
19. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufman (New
York: Random House, 1966), 26.
20. See George Herbert Mead who denes sociality as the capacity of being several things at once. The Philosophy of the Present, ed. Arthur E. Murphy (Chicago:
Open Court, 1932), 49.
21. The alleged dark continent of corporeality has almost always been castigated
and even crucied as an ephemeral and perishable commodity in favor of incorporeal
immortality in Christian thought. Origen, the stern Christian ascetic and theologian
who voluntarily castrated himselffor that matter, castration was not an uncommon
practice in his timedepicted corporeality or, more specically, sexuality as a passing
phenomenon and hinted at the hope of purifying and redeeming the soul from the
temporary shackles of the esh: Human life [for Origen], lived in a body endowed
with sexual characteristics, Peter Brown remarks, was but the last dark hour of a
long night that would vanish with the dawn. The body was poised on the edge of a
transformation so enormous as to make all present notions of identity tied to sexual
differences, and all social roles based upon marriage, procreation, and childbirth, seen
as fragile as dust dancing in a sunbeam. The Body and Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 168. The Hebraic tradition is an exception. St. Augustine
called it eternal carnality. See Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993).
23. Gerald L. Bruns, What Is Tradition? New Literary History 22 (1991): 3.
24. Erwin W. Straus, Phenomenological Psychology (New York: Basic Books,
1966), 211. For his critique of the Cartesian dualism of mind and body and its implications, see The Primary World of Senses, tr. Jacob Needleman (Glencoe, IL: Free
Press, 1963).
25. See Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 212.
26. My discussion of Bacon from his various works is found in Selected Writings of
Francis Bacon, ed. Hugh G. Dick (New York: Modern Library, 1955).
27. See Benjamin Farrington, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1964).
28. See Lynn White, Jr., The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis, in Machina
ex Deo (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968), 7594.
29. Loren Eiseley, The Firmament of Time (New York: Atheneum, 1960), 138.
30. See Luce Irigaray, Love Between Us (trans. Jeffrey Lomonaco), in Who
Comes After the Subject? ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy
(New York: Routledge, 1991), 170. My discussion here of Irigaray is based on the
following works: This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1985); The Fecundity of the Caress: A Reading of Levinas, Totality and Innity (Section 4, B) and The Phenomenology of Eros, in
314
Face to Face with Levinas, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1986), 3156; An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and
Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Je, Tu, Nous, trans.
Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 1993); Thinking the Difference, trans. Karin
Montin (New York: Routledge, 1994); and The Question of the Other (trans.
Noah Guynn), Yale French Studies, No. 87: Another Look, Another Woman, ed.
Lynne Huffer, 719.
31. The myth of the eternal return is the ancient way of correlating historical time
with the cyclical rhythm of nature. For a critique of historicism including the modernist view of progress against this ancient tradition, see Mircea Eliade, The Terror
of History, in The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1954), 13962.
32. Diatactics, as far as I know, is the neologism of Hayden White, who intended to
replace with it the dialectic that was chartered in modern Western thought by Hegel
and Marx. By diatactics, White means to avoid the certain transcendental overtone of
Hegels thought on the one hand and the ideological overtone of Marxs on the other:
diatactics is neither hypotactical (conceptually overdetermined) nor paratactical
(conceptually underdetermined). See Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1978), 4. The term diatactics is further appropriated in
this essay as the logic of correlating two (or more) disparate phenomena as complementary (i.e., having difference). As it is spelled dia/tactics, moreover, it arouses literally the intimate sense (way) of touch (tactility) and broadly the interplay of the
senses including the incorporation of mind and body. See the authors The Question
of Rationality and the Basic Grammar of Intercultural Texts (Niigata: International
University of Japan, 1990), 11.
33. The best philosophical summation of feminine difference is found in Franoise Collin, Philosophical Differences, in A History of Women in the West. vol.
5: Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century, ed. Franoise Thbaud
and trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994),
26196.
34. Irigaray, The Question of the Other, Yale French Studies, 19.
35. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1990), 62.
36. Je, Tu, Nous, 13. In his remarkable 1869 essay entitled, The Subjection of
Women, John Stuart Mill is critical of one person in law in English jurisprudence,
which may be comparable to the Biblical notion of marriage as one esh, because
it prevents married women from possessing their own property among other things.
It is an example of phallocratic monism or the phallacy of identity in practice. See
On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1989), 117217.
37. In Difference and Subjectivity, trans. Andrew Rothwell (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1991), Francis Jacques advances the primacy of the relation
(primum relationis) without denigrating subjectivity or difference. See Mikhail
Bakhtins philosophy of dialogue as the simultaneous act of decentering subjectivity
and rejecting identity in favor of heteronomy imbedded in the notion of answerability or responsibility that becomes the keystone of his philosophical anthropology.
Speaking of his philosophical protagonist Dostoevsky, Bakhtin writes in no uncertain terms:
notes to page 237
315
at the center of Dostoevskys artistic world must lie dialogue, and dialogue not
as a means but as an end in itself. Dialogue here is not the threshold to action,
it is the action itself. It is not a means for revealing, for bringing to the surface
the already ready-made character of a person; no, in dialogue a person not only
shows himself outwardly, but he becomes for the rst time that which he isand,
we repeat, not only for others but for himself as well. To be means to communicate dialogically. When dialogue ends, everything ends. Thus dialogue, by its very
essence, cannot and must not come to an end. At the level of his religious-utopian
world-view Dostoevsky carried dialogue into eternity, conceiving of it as eternal
co-rejoicing, co-admiration, con-cord. At the level of the novel, it is presented as
the unnalizability of dialogue, although originally as dialogues vicious circle.
(Problems of Dostoevskys Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson [Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984], 252; italics mine)
The best summation of his dialogism is found in The Dialogic Imagination, ed.
Michael Holquist and trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 1981).
38. The Question of the Other, Yale French Studies, 1112.
39. The word com/prehension means etymologically holding hands together.
See Elizabeth Sewell who observes perceptively:
the fertility of the body cooperates in the processes of thinking with language.
There remains a great unresolved problem behind this, as behind the use of
words such as fertile or pregnant of ideas, of the verb to conceive in intellectual terms. To relegate these simply to metaphor is to miss the whole point, for
they are clues to something that is going on in this eld of myth we are exploring.
Grammar maintains that the body is operative there as much as the mind. The
human organism thinks as a whole, and our division of it into mind and body is
the result of overemphasis on logic and intellect in near isolation which has led
[or better, misled] us into so one-sided a view of the activity of thought, so gross
an underestimation of the bodys forms of thought and knowledge. (The Orphic
Voice [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961], 3536)
In his Suspended Animation (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1995), 9293, the historian of the medical body Frank Gonzalez-Crussi conveys to us that the maternal
contribution to conception has been historically devalued. While semen is quintessential in nature as part of mans soul and as such treated as if it were truth serum,
womans alleged coldness is often blamed for producing imperfect conceptions. It
was Aristotle who believed that while healthy sperms produce boys, unhealthy ones
produce girls. In this light, Michel Foucaults idea of power (pou/voir) as a ubiquitous
phenomenon and thus sexuality itself as a form of power relation or an effect of
power exercised is incontrovertible. See The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1878). Indeed the humanity
of humans rests in culture that, for good or bad, is capable of subverting and transgressing biology.
40. The ecological importance of feminine jouissance as meaning hearing is
intimated by Michel Serres when he writes, sight is local; hearing is global. Far
more than the ichnography, which is geometric for the subject or the object, hearing is marked by ubiquity, by an almost divine power to capture the universal. The
316
notes to page 238
optical is singular; the acoustical is total. Panoptic Theory, in The Limits of

Theory, ed. Thomas M. Kavanagh (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989),
40. For the most comprehensive study of antiocularcentrism in twentieth-century
French thought, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1993). For his discussion on Irigaray (and Derrida), see Phallogocularcentrism: Derrida and Irigaray, 493542. Richard Rortys Philosophy and the Mirror
of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979) is one of the most comprehensive critiques of visualist epistemology. Hermeneutics, he asserts, is what we
get when we are no longer epistemological (325). The difference between conversation and inquiry, according to him, is that inquiry, unlike the openness of conversation, turns philosophy into an exchange of views. He proposes that We must get
the visual, and in particular the mirroring, metaphors out of our speech altogether.
To do that we have to understand speech not only as not the externalizing of inner
representations, but as not a representation at all (371).
41. Quoted in Craig Owens, The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism, in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port
Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 70. See also his Beyond Recognition, ed. Scott
Bryson et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 179. There is an interesting parallel or match between the masculine domination of the feminine and the
European conquest of America by way of visualization. Craig Owens contends that
the conquest of America is a European act of denomination since the time of the
nominophiliac Christopher Columbus who was driven to reduce the New World
to a series of sites/sights to be named. Columbuss visual reductionism, which is
the act of both a distancing and a muting, is equivalent to taking possession. In
deconstructing the Eurocentric project of visualizing and prospecting the Other,
which makes the Indians the invisible victims of Western ethnocentrismvery
much like Ralph Ellisons American blacks who are social invisibles, Owens urges
that It is time to stop looking, and listen to what the Indians may have to say. See
Beyond Recognition, Improper Names, 28497. In her interesting discussion of
chora that originates from Platos Timaeus, Elizabeth Grosz writes that it is the
condition for the genesis of the material world and can only be designated by its,
by her, function: to hold, nurture, bring into the world. Space, Time, and Perversion
(New York: Routledge, 1995), 115. The antihero of Jerzy Kosinskis Being There (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970) is Chance, whose channeled existence as an
image-junkie is shaped by television. In it there is a scene between Chance and EE
(Elizabeth Eve) that may serve as a telling story about masculine vision and feminine
touch. EE takes Chance to be very brainy, very cerebral, that is, to be a Cartesian
man. She also believes him to be one who does not practice all of those American
lovers-lane tricks, all of the ngering, kissing, tickling, stroking, hugging. While she
is in her sexual overture, her legs and arms wrapped around him like a web of sprawling branches of a tree in a garden, Chance repeatedly says to her, I like to watch
you as he likes to watch television.
42. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays,
trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), especially The Age of the
World Picture, 11554.
43. See Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, 11 vols. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 4:39248.
317
44. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1977), 195228. Foucault further comments,
The Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram
of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form.... [I]t is in fact a gure of
political technology.... It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform
prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to conne the
insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is a type of
location of bodies in space, . . . of denition of the instruments and modes
of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, workshops,
schools, prisons. (205)
45. Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, 4:74.
46. Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 204.
47. Irigaray, Thinking the Difference, 79.
48. Adam Phillips, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 5.
49. See Sandra L. Gilman, Goethes Touch: Touching, Seeing, and Sexuality,
in Inscribing the Other (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 2949 and
Touch, Sexuality and Disease, in Medicine and the Five Senses, ed. W. F. Bynum
and Roy Porter (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 198224.
50. Walter J. Ong, Word as View and World as Event, American Anthropologist
71 (1969): 644.
51. Irigaray, Thinking the Difference, 9495. It is worth mentioning the recent fascinating study of women in Tantric Buddhism, of yogini-tantra by Miranda Shaw,
entitled Passionate Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
In the rst place, Tantric Buddhism eulogizes the body or esh as an abode of bliss
by embracing sexual desire and pleasure for liberation or enlightenment. In the second place, it is a gynocentric view of Tantrism where women represent the idea of
blissful intimacy as a path to enlightenment. In so doing, Shaw assumes methodologically that regardless of how men may view them, women experience and interpret
their own lives as the subjects of their lives (196).
52. Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1982).
53. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 88.
54. See C. Kerenyi, The Religion of the Greeks and Romans, trans. Christopher
Holme (New York: Dutton, 1962), 119.
55. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn
Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 16.
56. See Otto Benesch, The Art of the Renaissance in Northern Europe (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1945), 4153. Giambattista Vico is an Italian Tantrist
who observes the way in which the language of body politics is capable of enchanting
and enlivening nonhuman things:
It is noteworthy that in all languages the greater part of the expressions relating to inanimate things are [sic] formed by metaphor from the human body
and its parts and from the human senses and passions. Thus, head for top or
beginning; the brow and shoulders of a hill; the eyes of needles and of potatoes; mouth for any opening; the lip of a cup or pitcher; the teeth of a rake,
318
a saw, a comb; the beard of wheat; the tongue of a shoe; the gorge of a river;
a neck of land; an arm of the sea; the hands of a clock; heart for center (the
Latins used umbilicus, navel, in this sense); the belly of a sail; foot for end or
bottom; the esh of fruits; a vein of rock or mineral; the blood of grapes for
wine; the bowels of the earth. Heaven or the sea smiles; the wind whistles; the
waves murmur; a body groans under a great weight. The farmers of Latium
used to say the elds were thirsty, bore fruit, were swollen with grain; and our
rustics speak of plants making love, vines going mad, resinous trees weeping.
Innumerable other examples could be collected from all languages. (The New
Science, trans. Thomas Goodard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch [Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1984], paragraph 405 at 129)
Citing a comparison between the human body and the propensity (shi) of the landscape in Chinese thought, Franois Jullien writes, Regardless a mans posture, whether
he is standing upright, walking, sitting, or lying down, each part of his body, down to
the smallest joint, will be in harmony with that posture. And to push this analogy to its
limitas Chinese critics love to dorocks are like the skeleton of a mountain, forests
are its clothes, grass its hair, waterways its arteries and veins, the clouds its air, mists
its complexion, and temples, belvederes, bridges, and hamlets its jewels. From a total
perspective,... the mountain will stand straight, be bent, or lean. The Propensity of
Things, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 100.
57. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1982), 19. In Friendship, Altruism, and Morality (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1980), Lawrence A. Blum proposes a new conception of the moral self,
based on sympathy and compassion for the well-being of others, which is meant to be
an alternative to both Kantianism and utilitarianism. See also Ross Poole, Morality
and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1991), which seriously entertains gender as the
basis of two different conceptions of morality and argues for the feminine formulation of morality as a genuine concern for others.
58. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962).
59. Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986).
60. Heidegger, Being and Time, 198; and See Martin Heidegger, History of the
Concept of Time, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1985), 302.
61. Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1984). In The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience (New York: St. Martins
Press, 1991), John Llewelyn attempts to develop a philosophy of ecological responsibility based largely on the writings of Heidegger and Levinas.
62. Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonse Lingis
(Dordrecht, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 52.
63. Mark C. Taylor, Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
64. See Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk (New York: Free Press, 1991).
65. Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 269. Also quoted in Glendon, Rights Talk, 40.
66. C. B. Macpherson, Human Rights as Property Rights, in The Rise and Fall
319
of Economic Justice and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985),
7685.
67. Glendon, Rights Talk, 76. The category of what is left unsaid is what Carole
Pateman calls the sexual contract. See The Sexual Contract (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988). Her contention is not that social contract is a species of rights talk but
that it is the patriarchal construction of masculinity as freedom and femininity as subjection, that is to say, it is the installment of patriarchal right. For Locke, for example,
the individual is not a universal human being but a man.
68. Alan Ritter and Julia Conaway Bondanella, ed., Rousseaus Political Writings,
trans. Julia Conaway Bondanella (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), 24. Also quoted in
Glendon, Rights Talk, 33, from another translation.
69. Carolyn Merchant, Earthcare (New York: Routledge, 1996).
70. See the authors Marxism and Deep Ecology in Postmodernity: From Homo
Oeconomicus to Homo Ecologicus, Thesis Eleven 28 (1991): 8699.
71. See the authors The Way of Ecopiety: An Essay in Deep Ecology from a Sinitic Perspective. Asian Philosophy 1 (1991): 12740.
72. The term kosmotheoros is used by Merleau-Ponty in The Visible and the Invisible, 113.
73. A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy, trans. Wing-tsit Chan (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1963), 497.
74. Compare Merleau-Ponty, who writes in The Visible and the Invisible, 234,
We must accustom ourselves to understand that thought (cogitatio) is not an
invisible contact of self with self, that it lives outside of this intimacy with oneself, in front of us, not in us, always eccentric. Just as we rediscover the eld of
the sensible world as interior-exterior (cf. at the start: as global adhesion to the
innity of motor indexes and motivations, as my belongingness to this Welt),
so also it is necessary to rediscover as the reality of the inter-human world and
of history a surface of separation between me and the other which is also the
place of my union, the unique Erfllung of his life and my life. It is to this
surface of separation and of union that the existentials of my personal history
proceed, it is the geometrical locus of the projections and introjections, it is the
invisible hinge upon which my life and the life of the others turn to rock into
one another, the inner framework of intersubjectivity.
75. Walter J. Ong, The Presence of the Word (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1967), 171. I believe, Ong declares elsewhere, that another productive way
to supplement our concept of world view is to move from the concept of world sense
to the concept of world-as-presence. By presence I mean the kind of relationship that
exists between persons, when we say that two persons entails more than sensation.
Insofar as it is grounded in the senses, it appears to be grounded in all of them simultaneously. We speak of a sense of presence, rather than a sight, sound, smell, taste,
or touch of presence (World as View and World as Event, 646). One signicant
drawback of, or omission in, Ongs language of presence is that it is concerned with
interhuman relationships to the exclusion of human and nonhuman relationships,
that is, it is bereft of interspecic relationships.
76. In her Song of Solomon (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), Toni Morrison
writes, No, it was not language; it was what there was before language. Before things
were written down. Language in the time when men and animals did talk to one
320
notes to page 248
another, when a man could sit down with an ape and the two converse; when a tiger
and a man could share the same tree, and each understood the other; when men ran
with wolves, not from or after them (278).
77. See Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978),
9. Elsewhere Marcuse also argues that radical social change entails the emancipation
of the senses, which is a question of the syn/aesthetic. He contends not only that the
liberation of nature is a vehicle of the liberation of humanity but also that femininity holds the promise of liberation. See his Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston:
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I N D E X
A
altarity, 24344
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arche, 107, 129, 144
Archilochus, 33
Arendt, Hannah, 104, 106, 115
Aristotle, 38, 6162, 107, 183
Aufklrung, 3, 9
Austin, John, 68, 244
axiology, 32, 81, 86
B
Bacon, Francis, 67, 21516, 222, 224,
23436, 246
Bakhtin, Mikhail, iv, 2627, 213
Barrett, William, 103
Barth, Karl, 95
Barthes, Roland, ii, v, 141, 16378
Bash, 12021, 176
Beckett, Samuel, v, 70, 110, 133, 146
Being and Interbeing, iiiiv, 11, 153,
22426
Bentham, Jeremy, 4, 238, 239
Benthien, Claudia, 157
Berdyaev, Nicolas, 91
Berger, Gaston, 40
Bergson, Henri, 38, 50, 156

Berlin, Isaiah, 33
Binswanger, Ludwig, 83
bipolar, iiiii, 22
Blackmur, R. P., 146
Bloom, Harold, 166
body, 81, 10810, 14143, 148, 150, 154
61, 16869, 198, 21422, 23137,
23741, 24748
Bourdieu, Pierre, 148, 161, 218
Braidotti, Rosi, 217
Brentano, Franz, 44, 65
Brown, Norman O., 22122
Brown, Peter, 154
Bruns, Gerald L., 233
Buber, Martin, vi, 39, 61, 77100
Buddhism, iv, 78, 22, 4243, 76, 80,
8891, 104, 118, 124, 143, 15153,
17071, 198, 220, 222
Indian Buddhism, 11
Bugbee, Henry G., i, iii, 75, 77, 8485,
219, 225
Burke, Kenneth, 109
buttery effect, iv
C
Cage, John, 171, 174
Calvino, Italo, 26
apek, Milic, 152
Capra, Fritjof, 15253
care (Sorge), 67, 80, 83, 219, 227, 24243
Carson, Rachel, 221
Champollion, Jean-Franois, 130, 144
Chang Tung-sun, 60, 176
394
Chan Wing-tsit, iv, 54, 57, 59, 7376,

92, 143
Cheng-Chu school, 46, 51
Cheng Hao, 77, 81
Cheng I, 80
cheng (sincerity), 53, 59, 68
Chiang Kai-shek, 52, 92, 203
chih (wisdom), 52, 68, 73, 81, 94
Chinese philosophy, ii, 2324, 38, 42,
5155, 5660, 68, 7286, 8792
Ching, Julia, 6267
Chou Tun-I, 76
Christianity, 95, 97, 154, 23336
Chuang Tzu, 79, 88, 117, 176
Chu Hsi, 42, 51, 6367, 8081
chung (conscientiousness), 82, 94
See also shu
Chung yung, 76
Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 23, 11617
Clifford, James, 9
cognition, 15152, 19698
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 135
Collingwood, R. G., 70, 110, 133, 146, 172
Collins, Randall, 11
communication, iv, 1516, 78, 8788,
97100, 11215, 13742, 14761
comparative philosophy, iii, 23, 33, 104,
107, 109, 124
Confucius and Confucianism, iv, 23, 37,
42, 52, 59, 64, 6971, 7386, 87
101, 104, 114, 118, 124, 143, 22227
Copernican reversal/revolution, iv, 22, 243
cosmopolis, 10, 142
See also global village
Creel, Herrlee G., 57, 104, 143
creolization, iii, 2729
See also Glissant, Edouard
Cua, A. S., 6268
Culler, Jonathan, 17, 163, 165, 172
D
Daoism and Chan/Zen Buddhism, iv, 15,
20, 143, 15253, 224
See also Taoism and Chan/Zen
Buddhism
index
Dasein (There-being), 38, 41, 63, 73, 83,

11213, 223, 242
See also Heidegger, Martin
da Vinci, Leonardo, 123
de Beauvoir, Simone, 6
Deleuze, Gilles, 15, 17, 21, 26, 212, 215,
230
Derrida, Jacques, 17, 61, 13240, 168,
243
Descartes, Ren, ivvi, 46, 4344, 61,
70, 111, 12223, 148, 15457, 192,
21518, 222, 224, 22939, 246
Dessauer, Friedrich, 159
Dewey, John, 59, 227
dialectic, 26, 28, 32, 52, 5960, 60, 105,
167, 17071, 176, 17980, 186207,
213
dialogical philosophy, vi, 10, 2627, 77,
8388, 105
diatactics, 60, 1059, 137, 164, 171, 176,
236, 247
See also White, Hayden
difference, iv, 4, 6, 910, 16, 21, 2633,
109, 118, 130, 192, 21213, 223,
231, 23637, 24047
ontological difference, 1045
Differenz as Unterschied, iv, 27, 213, 237
Diogenes, 33
Dogen Kigen, 222
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 2627
Douglass, Frederick, 20
dualism, 42, 53, 59, 61, 67, 68, 70, 105,
176, 23132
See also monism; reductionism
Dufrenne, Mikel, 78, 227
Dworkin, Ronald, 244
E
Eagleton, Terry, 232
earthcare, 8, 24548
ecology, 8, 211, 22535, 24648
ecosophy, 212, 22935, 24548
egocentrism, v, 43, 61, 83, 116, 226, 229,
233, 236, 238, 24248
Eichmann, Adolf, 106, 109, 115
index
395
Eiseley, Loren, 236

Elias, Norbert, v, 157
Eliot, T. S., 129, 136, 143
Ellison, Ralph, 176, 217
Ellul, Jacques, 159
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 7, 11112, 130
33, 14446, 155
empiricism, 197
Enlightenment, iii, 311, 1617, 169,
214, 22022
en-soi (essence), 38, 4243, 46, 51,
19194
See also pour-soi
epistemocracy, 4, 148, 154, 229, 230,
23338
epistemology, 4, 18, 32, 44, 52, 60, 64,
66, 77, 96, 107, 122, 206, 215, 218
epoch, 40, 48
eschatological, 60, 154
ethics, iiiii, 22, 56, 58, 62, 67, 6970,
75, 92, 95, 100, 114, 182, 227, 236,
24148
ethnocentrism, ii, 9, 11, 1618, 24, 29
30, 33, 57, 124, 149, 167, 177
ethnography, 9, 24, 27
ethnology, 57, 213
ethnophilosophical, 24, 213
etymosinology, vi, 109, 12931, 14161,
222
See also ideography; sinography
Eurocentrism, ii, 8, 1011, 1631, 149,
213, 226
existentialism/existential philosophy,
3839, 46, 48, 51, 54, 56, 59, 7276,
85101, 91, 95, 190
existential phenomenology, iii, 3755,
5671, 6163, 6667, 70, 7286, 87,
17980, 190
Existenz, 41, 8788, 98100
Fenollosa, Ernest, vi, 10911, 12951,

222
Feuerbach, Ludwig, iv, 243
lial piety, 45, 79, 95, 109, 117, 118, 225
Fingarette, Herbert, 70
eshfold, 7, 154, 161, 195, 208, 216, 217,
233, 239
Foucault, Michel, 3, 4, 17, 23, 32, 161,
163, 214, 221, 242
Frankl, Viktor, 82, 84
Fukuyama, Francis, iii, 10
Fung Yu-lan, 37, 55, 57, 78, 79, 82, 94
feminine difference, 6, 23640, 248

See also sexual difference
feminism, 6, 232, 236, 24142, 24748
feng shui, 78, 224, 241
Habermas, Jrgen, 5, 102, 242

haiku, 12021, 133, 17374, 224
Hansen, Mark, 156, 159
Han Y, 76, 79
G
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 9, 10, 104, 153,
213
Galileo, 4, 6, 123
Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 33
Geertz, Clifford, 9
geophilosophy, iii, 7, 21115, 22127, 230
geopiety, 11724, 225, 247
Gestell, 7, 12122
Gilligan, Carol, 232, 242, 244
Gilroy, Paul, 33
Glendon, Mary Ann, 244
Glissant, Edouard, ii, 2729, 212
globalization, ii, vi, 1011, 1516, 32
34, 149
global village, 1011, 16, 14142, 14756
glocalization, vi, 16, 25, 3233
grammatology, 13246, 167, 170
Granet, Marcel, 57, 139, 151, 165
Gray, J. Glenn, 118, 124
Grene, Marjorie, 216
Grundrisse, 18687
Guattari, Flix, 21, 212, 215, 230, 232,
246
Gurwitsch, Aaron, 40
Gusdorf, Georges, 78, 84
396
Hardt, Michael, 16
Hasidism, 88
Havelock, Eric A., 113
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, ii, 5,
89, 17, 2332, 5760, 66, 105, 130,
134, 169, 18386, 19093
Heidegger, Martin, ivi, iiiiv, 7, 17, 27,
32, 3841, 56, 63, 6668, 7374,
78, 81, 83, 91, 10225, 148, 15560,
165, 175, 190, 213, 22324, 22931,
23738, 24143
Gelassenheit, 7, 119, 121, 175
Heisenberg, Werner, 147, 153
Herder, Johann Gottfried, i, 17, 22, 102,
218
hermeneutics, 5, 9, 21, 25, 85, 104, 113,
131, 14243, 14753, 167, 179, 213,
22223
carnal hermeneutics, 148
Hermes, 11213
Herrigel, Eugen, 120, 175
Heschel, Abraham J., 84
heterocentrism, 43, 53, 61, 77, 83, 116
heteronomy, 4, 243, 248
hieroglyphics, 13032, 132, 14445
Hobbes, Thomas, 230, 24445
Hlderlin, Friedrich, 125
Homer, 16, 11213, 132, 137, 141
homocentrism, 118, 124, 245, 246, 248
homopiety, 11724, 247
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 135
Hoshi, Zen Monk, 170, 174, 214
hsiao (liality), 68, 79, 95
hsin (delity), 38, 4147, 5155, 59, 63
69, 81, 94
See also Wang Yang-ming
Humboldt, Alexander von, 17, 102
Hume, David, 89, 1920, 30
Huntington, Samuel P., 10
Husserl, Edmund, 3840, 4344, 4850,
54, 62, 6566, 7374, 83, 86, 88,
105, 123, 18384, 190, 196, 2023
hyperdialectic, 26, 221
Hyppolite, Jean, 190
index
I
i (righteousness, will), 6468, 75, 79,
81, 94
I Ching (Yijing), 60, 76, 115, 153
ideography, ivv, 57, 6970, 77, 94,
104, 10911, 11415, 12940,
143, 147, 164, 16774, 196, 200,
211, 22224
kanji, 111, 13031, 142, 16972, 223
See also sinography
Ihde, Don, 161
I Li, 76
in-der-Welt-sein (Being-in-the-world),
41, 112, 158, 243
See also Heidegger, Martin
Innis, Harold A., 139, 147, 151
intentionality, 3853, 59, 6267, 73
intercorporeality, v, 143, 148, 153, 157, 192,
212, 217, 220, 224, 226, 233, 247
interexistence (intermonde), 181, 192,
195, 201, 207, 217
intersubjectivity, 7286, 87, 100, 181,
190, 192, 198, 237
Irigaray, Luce, i, 3, 6, 15, 17, 21920,
227, 229, 232, 23640, 247
J
Jackson, Michael, 9
Jakobson, Roman, 129, 135
James, William, 9, 39, 49, 67
Jameson, Fredric, 165
Jaspers, Karl, 61, 7886, 87101
jen (humanity), 5354, 59, 68, 7286,
8795, 98, 101, 114, 227
Johann, Robert O., 79
Jonas, Hans, 243
jouissance (jous sens), 6, 175, 21921,
232, 236, 23839, 24648
Joyce, James, 110, 131, 160, 212
Jullien, Franois, 2223
K
Kamimura, Hiro, 172
Kang Yu-wei, 75, 77
index
Kant, Immanuel, i, iii, 34, 89, 1722,

30, 61, 107, 159, 215
Karlgren, Bernard, 115
Keller, Helen, 150
Kerenyi, Carl, 11517
Kierkegaard, Sren, 39, 59, 64, 66, 72,
75, 79, 83, 8791, 95100, 19091
kinaesthetic, 109, 142, 14647, 172, 222
Kipling, Rudyard, 10
Kohk, Erazim, 118, 227
Kohlberg, Lawrence, 242
Kojve, Alexandre, 190
Kolakowski, Leszek, 20
Kristeva, Julia, 33, 166
Kwant, Remy C., 82
L
Lacan, Jacques, 163
Lao-tzu, 8889
Laqueur, Thomas, 236
lateral universal/lateral thinking, 11, 18,
20, 2327, 5758, 185, 208, 21214,
22628
Lauer, J. Quentin, 77
Leibniz, G. W., 17, 102
Lenin, Vladimir, 2016
Levinas, Emmanuel, iv, 17, 50, 219, 237,
243
Lvi-Strauss, Claude, 9, 24, 57, 163
li (reason, propriety), 38, 42, 6771, 81,
94
liang-chih (good knowledge), 38, 4254,
62, 67, 172
liang-neng (good ability), 48
Li Chi, 11819
lifeworld (Lebenswelt), iii, 10, 16, 24
25, 3233, 3841, 43, 4750, 54,
5762, 7374, 8182, 86, 88, 91, 95,
176, 18485, 189, 19698
See also Husserl, Edmund
linguistics, v, 38, 69, 107, 111, 115, 124,
12931, 134, 143, 169, 175
Liu, James J. Y., 136
397
Li Zehou, 223
Locke, John, 230, 24445
logocentrism, 4, 6, 102, 111, 124, 134,
167, 169, 220, 222, 229, 236, 247
logos, 5, 15, 21, 3839, 82, 118, 216, 234
Lord, Albert B., 113
Luijpen, William A., 39
Lukcs, Georg, 201
Lusseryran, Jacques, 150
Lyotard, Jean-Franois, 5, 17, 21
M
Machiavelli, Niccolo, 148, 182
Macmurray, John, 39, 4849, 61, 78
Macpherson, C. B., 244
Mahbubani, Kishore, iii, 31
Mairs, Nancy, 232
Maitreya (Middle Way), ii, 22, 34, 152,
214
malestream, 17, 21920, 227
Mallarm, Stphane, v, 110, 13435
Malraux, Andr, 181
Mandelbaum, Maurice, 62
Mao Tse-tung, 52, 59, 92, 179207
Marcel, Gabriel, 39, 61, 75, 79, 83, 85,
91, 141, 15051, 156
Marcuse, Herbert, 159
Marx, Karl, 8, 17, 26, 33, 59, 105, 179
207, 183, 186208
materialism, 18687, 190, 19293,
19799
mathematics, 123
Mauss, Marcel, 9, 24, 57, 116
Mazis, Glen, 226
McLuhan, Marshall, 11, 16, 110, 113, 129
40, 14142, 14761, 172, 223, 239
Mead, George Herbert, 133
Mehta, J. L., 124
Mencius, 37, 48, 7576, 7880, 93, 172
Merchant, Carolyn, 24546
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, v, 5, 9, 21, 23
33, 3945, 5658, 61, 63, 74, 83, 87,
90, 100, 1056, 143, 15061, 165,
179208, 21128, 23133, 240
398
metaphysics, 8, 25, 44, 5965, 1078,

12024, 154, 229
Mitsein (being-with-others), 83, 192,
243
modernity, i, 311, 1620, 21, 22, 148,
154, 21214, 21516, 23031, 234
41, 24146
Mohanty, Jitendra Nath, 65
Monan, J. Donald, 62
mondialisation, 15
See also globalization
monism, 6, 59, 105, 176, 236
See also dualism; reductionsim
monoculturalism, 11
monological, v, 4, 1011, 8385, 154,
157, 215
morality, i, 10, 1819, 23, 5969, 8182,
92101, 1067, 11314, 11718,
123, 133, 145, 172, 18283, 193,
223, 227, 242, 244
Morris, Ivan, 68
Morrison, Toni, 240, 248
Mo Tzu, 79
mousike, 34
multiculturalism, 11, 1534, 141
See also globalization
Mumford, Lewis, 159
Mumon, 15
music, 70, 11023, 113, 13340, 158,
227, 232
N
Naess, Arne, iii, 212
Nakamura, Hajime, 57, 89
Natanson, Maurice, 39, 49, 83
nature, 11623, 130, 14445, 146, 191
94, 199, 21127, 22948
Negri, Antonio, 16
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5, 17, 31, 102, 111
12, 156, 166, 23233
Nishida Kitaro, 1034, 172, 223
noema/noesis, 44, 65
Northrop, F. S. C., 119
index
O
Occidentalism, 30, 31, 124, 130
See also Orientalism
ocularcentrism, 4, 151, 154, 215, 218,
227, 229, 236, 238, 247
oikos (household), 211, 226, 246
Oken, Lorenz, 8
Ong, Walter J., 113, 239, 247
ontology, iivi, 22, 28, 41, 48, 56, 6364,
67, 104, 107, 19192, 212, 226, 236,
243
fundamental ontology, 41, 63, 91, 118
Orientalism, 30, 31, 57, 129, 165
See also Occidentalism
Origen, 154, 240
Ortega y Gassett, Jos, 91, 219
Other, iiiv, 311, 17, 2427, 29, 3033,
5760, 7784, 115, 15859, 18992,
219, 222, 233, 239, 241, 24244
humanity and nature, i, iii, 47, 17,
20, 60, 105, 108, 117, 21516
man and woman, 4, 6, 17, 20, 215, 237
masculine and feminine, 57, 109,
219, 227, 23638, 24042, 247
mind and body, iiiv, 46, 17, 20, 22, 46,
53, 60, 6770, 105, 21516, 238
Orient and Occident, ii, 17, 2526,
5658, 8788, 119, 130, 16566,
177, 185, 220
West and non-West, i, 4, 710, 213,
215
O Yomei, 68
P
Pagden, Anthony, 22
Panopticon, 4, 159, 161, 215, 218,
23439
Paracelsus, Theophrastus, 241
Parker, Harley, 133, 147
Parry, Milman, 113
Pater, Walter, 111
Paz, Octavio, 10
index
perception, 5, 45, 47, 60, 135, 150, 195

98, 21617, 222, 227, 234
phallocentrism, 5, 6, 169, 220, 238
phenomenology, iii, 2324, 3755, 56
71, 7274, 8087, 1036, 150, 152,
155, 157, 161, 16667, 17677, 179
80, 186, 18992, 19698, 2023,
217, 223, 232, 247
Phillips, Adam, v, 158
philosophy of language, 132, 134, 145
phronesis, 6162
See also Aristotle
physics, 104, 15253, 212
Picasso, Pablo, 70, 110, 133, 147, 172, 223
piety, i, iv, 3, 45, 79, 95, 1056, 11418,
124, 240, 248
Plato, 60, 94, 102, 134, 161, 183, 220,
23233
poetry, 109, 11113, 118, 12945
Polin, Raymond, 82
postmodernity, iv, 45, 8, 9, 17, 21, 32
33, 148, 212, 22948
Pound, Ezra, 109, 129, 132, 13437, 143,
147
pour-soi, 19194, 201
See also en-soi (essence)
praxis, 50, 5253, 59, 66, 74, 93, 107, 112
13, 12223, 141, 180, 191, 194207
See also theoria
printing technology, 16, 139, 149, 154
Pythagoras, 123
R
reductionism, 59, 105, 176
See also dualism; monism
res cogitans and res extensa, iv, 5, 70,
154, 192, 215, 222, 233
Richards, I. A., 136
Richardson, William, 103
Ricoeur, Paul, 40, 73, 85
Rilke, Rainer Maria, iv, 113
Rodin, Auguste, iii, v, 5, 158, 219, 222,
240
399
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 17, 230, 245
S
Sachen (things), 40, 42, 45, 63
Said, Edward W., ii, 11, 31, 57
Saigo Takamori, 68
Saint-Exupry, Antoine de, 39
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 21, 39, 56, 59, 63, 68,
75, 83, 85, 19094, 201
satori (enlightenment), ii, 22, 16375,
177, 214, 222
See also Zen
Savignac, Raymond, 165
Scheler, Max, 7980
Schrader, George, 85
Schrag, Calvin O., 15, 21, 124, 21213
Schram, Stuart R., 187
Schumacher, E. F., 248
Schutz, Alfred, 48, 74, 83, 100, 157
semiology, v, 16478
Serres, Michel, 211, 22930, 24546
sexual difference, 6, 23640
See also feminine difference
sexuality, v, 154, 157, 169, 177, 22021,
23637
shu (altruism), 82, 94
Shusterman, Richard, 15556
See also somaesthetics
Sinism, iv, 7, 5759, 70, 1045, 11525,
143, 22224
sinography, ivv, 1516, 129, 134, 137,
14251, 172, 211, 22225
See also ideography
Smith, John, 54
Socrates, 6061, 105, 107, 203
somaesthetics, 15556
See also Shusterman, Richard
Sontag, Susan, v, 164, 17172
sound (acoustical), v, 113, 12123, 135
39, 149, 227
Spengler, Oswald, 114
Spiegelberg, Herbert, 38, 41
spiritualism, 190, 19293, 199
400
St. Augustine, 117, 240

Stein, Edith, 79
Strasser, Stephan, 50
Straus, Erwin, W., 157, 233
Stravinsky, Igor, 136, 167
Sturrock, John, 17576
subjectality, 223
subjectivity, 46, 6467, 79, 83, 87101,
105, 155, 176, 198201, 206, 223,
23738, 244
Sudnow, David, 158
Sun Yat-sen, 52, 59, 92
Suzuki Daisetz Teitaro, 57, 8990, 103,
171, 175, 229
synaesthesia, 138, 14952, 219, 227, 247
index
trans(uni)versality, 20, 30, 214

Trotsky, Leon, 2016
Tseng Tzu, 82
Tung Chung-shu, 75, 79
Tu Wei-ming, 6270
U
universal truth, 21, 2427, 213
V
Valry Paul, v, 31, 221
Vattimo, Gianni, iv, 17, 212
Vico, Giambattista, ivv, 5, 69, 103, 107
8, 118, 132, 142, 14445, 149
vision (optical), 50, 117, 149, 15455,
218, 220, 227, 23841, 247
T
Tagore, Rabindranath, 7
Tai Tung, 115, 13637, 13940
Tantric Buddhism, 151, 156, 220, 232,
239
Tan Tsu-tung, 76, 78, 80
Taoism and Chan/Zen Buddhism, 78,
42, 66, 8892, 1036, 11725, 170
78, 22125
Tao Te Ching, 117, 120, 170, 200
Taylor, Charles, 30
Taylor, Mark C., iv, 243
techn, 1078, 11213
technology, 67, 12123, 14749, 159
61, 200, 215, 230, 23435
technomorphic, 7, 121, 23435
theoria, iii, 5253, 66, 74, 8990, 9293,
117, 18384, 194207, 215, 23234
See also praxis
Thvenaz, Pierre, 41
Thich Nhat Hanh, 153
Todorov, Tzvetan, 10
Tokuoka, Takao, 110, 130
toleration, 10, 33, 181, 192
transcendental, 40, 41, 60, 74, 83, 105,
154
transversality, ii, iiv, vi, 1011, 1334,
21215, 22627
W
Wang Tchang-tche, 43, 49
Wang Yang-ming, ii, 3755, 5671, 75
76, 8081, 92, 225
Watsuji Tetsuro, 22324
Wegenstein, Bernadette, 15659
Weltanschauung, 58
Weltbild, 112, 122, 155, 238
White, Hayden, 60, 105, 235
See also diatactics
Wild, John, 37, 39, 4951, 75, 8182, 85
Willett, Cynthia, 219
Wittfogel, Karl, 17
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, v, 22, 93, 164, 226
Woolf, Virginia, 33
wu-wei, 11920, 170
Y
Yen Chin-tui, 196
yi (will, thought), 4344
yin-yang, iii, 23, 31, 60, 75, 105, 109,
115, 137, 171, 187, 221
Young, Robert J. C., 28
Z
Zen, 163, 16677
Zhang Zai, 225, 247

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Hwa Yol

series in continental thought

Transversal Rationality and Intercultural Texts

International Advisory Board

OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

This book of thirteen essays is dedicated to my late mentor

Part I. Prelude to Phenomenology and Comparative Philosophy

Part II. Transversality, Phenomenology, and Intercultural Texts

Part III. Transversal Linkage between Phenomenology and

Chapter 4. The Unity of Knowledge and Action:

Chapter 5. Jen: An Existential and Phenomenological Problem of

Chapter 6. Confucianism and Existentialism:

Chapter 7. Heideggers Way with Sinitic Thinking

Part IV. Phenomenology, Literary Theory,

Chapter 9. Ernest Fenollosas Etymosinology in the

Chapter 10. The Joy of Textualizing Japan:

Chapter 11. Revolutionary Dialectics:

Chapter 13. The Greening of Postmodern Philosophy:

A note of apologies to my offspring for sacricing my quality time with

Questioning is the piety of thought.

concerning the universal formulation of reason as the single summit and

bipolarity itself (theory and practice, philosophy and nonphilosophy, mind

in the world. As an authorial inscriber of the world, it authors the world

corporeal writing (criture corporelle). There is a Chinese dance troupe

enlightenment and the question of the other

The Other is itself always other than itself.

transversal rationality and intertextual texts

guarantees humanitys progress in perpetuity. Kants critique of pure reason

enlightenment and the question of the other

Neapolitan Giambattista Vico, whose anti-Cartesianism, sensus communis,

transversal rationality and intertextual texts

enlightenment and the question of the other

transversal rationality and intertextual texts

exemplies earthcare. To think in terms of feng shui is to cherish and to

enlightenment and the question of the other

transversal rationality and intertextual texts

touch of intellectual humility, which is conducive to philosophical dialogue,

enlightenment and the question of the other

on and perpetuate the Eurocentric myth of truth as universal, or modernity

transversality and the philosophical politics of

Gateless is the Great

i. prologue: the idea of globalization

transversal rationality and intertextual texts

the late Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan fashioned

ii. western modernity and the legacy of eurocentrism

transversality and the philosophical politics of multiculturalism

transversal rationality and intertextual texts

transversality and the philosophical politics of multiculturalism

philosophers: David Hume and Immanuel Kant. They were unquestionably

transversal rationality and intertextual texts

object of veneration and of invocation in swearing oaths. The blacks

iii. the dao of transversality

transversality and the philosophical politics of multiculturalism

jesterly play of difference aims at the creation of an alternative or reversible

transversal rationality and intertextual texts

sameness or unitariness. In transversal engagement what is lacking in one

transversality and the philosophical politics of multiculturalism

very concept of truth itself with that of intelligibility, because truth

transversal rationality and intertextual texts

transversality and the philosophical politics of multiculturalism

Western thought is what it claims to be, he challenges further, it must prove

transversal rationality and intertextual texts