Reading the Zhuang-zi

what the fuck does this even mean? is this the quality of discussion now? it's far too dull and vague to be bait, lurk more plebeian underling for i can stand it no longer

the brevity of the work is what I find most pleasing when reading zhuang-zi

no convoluted or awkward prose, something which is prevalent with many german philosophers of the late 19th century - naming no names

I think he means because the West believed that there is an objective basis to reality they were the one's that got the furthest in studying reality. We are so stubborn about it to this day we still have camps that believe science produces absolute truth.

This. Also, three field crop rotation, Mediterranean trade. To get the money. That's really about it. If you look back to all the reasons why Europe over China it goes back to either three field crop rotation or having the Mediterranean.

Why was China not a great trade hub? It kinda was, as much as it could be, but the mountains locked it up and the Sea of Japan wasn't as fun for boat experiments, which gave us the Phoenicians, trade empires and trade routes, warships, enough naval advances to get their gunpowder, get the spices, invade the places.

Three field crop rotation just allowed us to produce enough calories to grow our population comparitively. Rice yields more calories per acre than wheat, but three field allowed us to kinda keep.

Cultural Revolution, you fucking brainlet

Why on earth would early development of relativism, scepticism, and language games give people an advantage in practical technology?

Probably would be a disadvantage if anything, hard to develop a better cannon if you keep stopping to wonder if you're a dreaming butterfly.

define lose

Well they aren't the dominate culture. All of the big things: art, philosophy, success in war, are Western now. Even China is pretty western, in fact the measurement of how western you are is pretty much the metric for civilization now.

That make sense. The time when the west zoomed way past China in technology was during the enlightenment when they had the highest belief in objectivity. Seems like you don't know the relativism until later on

whenever someone picks an eastern philosopher's teachings as a way to show that these insights were "discovered" before western philosophy got to them, it just shows they have no idea what philosophy actually is.

any given "discovery" of a philosopher has usually been thought of by someone else before, but what a great philosopher does with an insight is to place it in a larger context where the insight has explanatory power for multiple phenomena. for instance, it doesn't matter that nietzschean perspectivism was essentially already developed by the sophists, it matters that nietzsche elucidates that truth is only sensible in a society that has selected certain beliefs for "truth" as a way to maintain that society, so that therefore every fact represents a force that is appropriating the world for some purpose or another. both nietzsche and the sophists might agree that "truth is relative," but to reduce their system to this insight is to destroy how their thought functions in creating a self-consistent set of practices to interpret the world.

really, most good philosophers aren't trying to claim that they've discovered something no one else has. the point of philosophy is to make explicable in an academic context what before was only accessible to art and metaphor. meanwhile, the point of eastern philosophy is more to develop ways to meditate on the world so you can improve yourself. there are common beliefs between certain eastern schools and certain western philosophers, sure, but the means and the ends by which they are elucidated are so incommensurate as to be fundamentally different.

interesting thanks

because of mei ban fa

>he thinks the west won
suicide isn't a victory, and the west committed suicide long before china did. no one is a winner here

wait one hundred years

objectively the best writing of ancient China

Those are too the basic ideas of the ancient sophists.

Not only has the west won but all the other cultures are fucking dead. Not even China believes in Chinese philosophy anymore.