Cook Ting was cutting up an ox for Lord Wen-hui. As every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder...

Cook Ting was cutting up an ox for Lord Wen-hui. As every touch of his hand, every heave of his shoulder, every move of his feet, every thrust of his knee — zip! zoop! He slithered the knife along with a zing, and all was in perfect rhythm, as though he were performing the dance of the Mulberry Grove or keeping time to the Ching-shou music.

“Ah, this is marvelous!” said Lord Wen-hui. “Imagine skill reaching such heights!”

Cook Ting laid down his knife and replied, “What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now — now I go at it by spirit and don’t look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and following things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon, much less a main joint.

“A good cook changes his knife once a year — because he cuts. A mediocre cook changes his knife once a month — because he hacks. I’ve had this knife of mine for nineteen years and I’ve cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the blade is as good as though it had just come from the grindstone. There are spaces between the joints, and the blade of the knife has really no thickness. If you insert what has no thickness into such spaces, then there’s plenty of room — more than enough for the blade to play about it. That’s why after nineteen years the blade of my knife is still as good as when it first came from the grindstone.

“However, whenever I come to a complicated place, I size up the difficulties, tell myself to watch out and be careful, keep my eyes on what I’m doing, work very slowly, and move the knife with the greatest subtlety, until — flop! the whole thing comes apart like a clod of earth crumbling to the ground. I stand there holding the knife and look all around me, completely satisfied and reluctant to move on, and then I wipe off the knife and put it away.”

“Excellent!” said Lord Wen-hui. “I have heard the words of Cook Ting and learned how to care for life!”

-Chuang Tzu

Other urls found in this thread:

dataspace.princeton.edu/jspui/handle/88435/dsp01v692t624c
faculty.smcm.edu/jwschroeder/Asian_Religions_2015/textdownloads_files/Confucius chp1&2.pdf
indiana.edu/~p374/Analects_of_Confucius_(Eno-2015).pdf
genius.com/Nick-land-meltdown-annotated
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

Zhuangzi has some cool stories, my fav is the one about the pipes of man and the pipes of heaven. All men are just vessels that resonate at different frequencies as the winds of the universe blow across our gaping orifices.

Analects are harder to get into but more likely to change your life in a practical way. A secular religion (but not an atheistic religion).

Assigning these diverse collections of texts to single authors is fun, like how Borges talks about scholars in orbis tertius pass the time by assigning 1001 nights and Don Quixote to the same author and then puzzling over the authors personality. Similarly taking the bible as a continuous story, it's a much more rewarding exercise than pulling it apart.

So the Zhuangzi is a text composed by multiple groups of heterodox authors over centuries. It's arrangement is due to both deliberate editing and to happenstance, misreadings, textual corruption.

Despite this the most satisfying readings are those that start with the premise that every character is significant and part of the whole, and that the arrangement on the level of sentence, paragraph, and chapter was done with God -like care and deliberation.

Similarly with the Analects. I just read a paper about how it was probably created in the Han dynasty from dozens of different sources, and has as much relation to the 6th century BC Confucius as a modern day anthology of the sayings of Robin Hood would have to an outlaw from the Middle Ages. Depressing.

dataspace.princeton.edu/jspui/handle/88435/dsp01v692t624c

>I just read a paper about how it was probably created in the Han dynasty from dozens of different sources, and has as much relation to the 6th century BC Confucius as a modern day anthology of the sayings of Robin Hood would have to an outlaw from the Middle Ages. Depressing.

That is depressing. I like the Analects but a lot of it derives from my faith that there are wise people out there who are capable of giving instruction that just seems immediately true. The attraction to the sage-ideal - perhaps more specifically, to following an Old Wise Man Who Knows What He Is Doing is very strong. Of course, I'm not alone in this; Confucius also follows Laozi, who follows the Tao itself, and so on.

I've had that sense that the TTC was a collaborative effort built up over time as a collection of ancestral folk wisdom also, but I haven't looked into this all that much.

>All men are just vessels that resonate at different frequencies as the winds of the universe blow across our gaping orifices.

This could lead one equally well to serenity or schizophrenia. Probably some harmonious balance of both is required.

I'm reading a fair bit of analysis stuff these days and kind of pondering the legacy of Freud and Lacan in China (that is to say, there isn't much of one). With the Tao it's almost like an inversion of Freud: instead of "Where id was, there I will be, it's the reverse: where I was, there the Tao will be."

That's my pseud-interpretation of it, but anyways.

>With the Tao it's almost like an inversion of Freud: instead of "Where id was, there I will be, it's the reverse: where I was, there the Tao will be."

Yeah I don't really understand that. I don't have a clear picture of the scope of the definition of Dao in Zhuangzi and Laozi.

I get that in Confucius and Mencius the transcendent is 天Tian Heaven, and that in Laozi and Zhuangzi it is the Dao. I once came across a taxonomy of the uses of Tian in Confucius (creator, sustainer, judge, guide etc.) and that cleared things up a lot, I wonder if there is anything similar for the various uses of Dao in Lao-Zhuang.

It makes me wonder, stuff like this, if it isn't these differences in epistemology that in the end result in the notorious guilt culture vs shame culture.

Where is the guilt of being a 'subject supposed to know' vis-a-vis the Tao, the will of heaven? The whole idea of the Tao is that it can only be intuitively known, not cognitively or otherwise Platonically understood.

I'm in a mood presently to talk about analysis, and my own feeling about neurosis is that it ultimately deals with these themes, of knowing, responsibility, failure, tragedy and so on. But all of this is predicated ultimately on a sense that knowledge of the truth is a priori possible. But there is a lot of stuff in Chinese thought that I like, concepts of ren, or the heart-and-mind being one thing, the need for conscience. The Western psychoanalytic tradition has these notions of 'God being unconscious' and so on, that we have this Hegelian mandate to know the mind of God, stuff like this. But the one thing you can know about the Tao is that ultimately it can't be known, so there is no injunction, as it were, to 'speak' it...

Sorry, I know this isn't making much sense. I'm sort of wrestling with these concepts of neurosis and responsibility, knowing and so on, what people are required to know. With Cook Ting, all of his knowing is practical in this way, he just intuitively knows what to do without thinking about it. And in this way he becomes this moral exemplar for the lord, who is delighted in this.

There really isn't much room for existential suffering over there in China. Things work or they don't. Sometimes it's appealing.

I've heard it said that Confucianism is a response to ethical nihilism and Daoism is a response to existential nihilism.

I've never heard of guilt culture/ shame culture distinction. I guess guilt is more inner conscience, and shame is fear of the opinions of the community?

In the Analects having a sense of shame 恥 is seen as positive and necessary, but I wouldn't say it is only fear of criticism from others, it's also about your own conscience. In the analects the development of your moral intuition is inseparable from a sense of your responsibilities towards others. Zhuangzi is much more individualistic.

>I've heard it said that Confucianism is a response to ethical nihilism and Daoism is a response to existential nihilism.

That's got to be one of the most interesting things I've ever heard on this board. What do you think of that claim? Personally that makes a lot of sense. Especially since I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to make existentialism and ethics go together in some kind of theory of action that does nothing except drive me under increasingly large stones. I'd be more interested to hear what you think about that, though.

>I've never heard of guilt culture/ shame culture distinction. I guess guilt is more inner conscience, and shame is fear of the opinions of the community?

Really? You might read pic related. Anyways, yes, that's about right. Of course, there's a kind of chicken-and-egg dimension involved as well, since guilt can lead to shame and vice-versa. But ask a guy who seems to perversely enjoy living in these dark and cold places: I think both of these have a connection to Truth that may not be able to be understood any other way. I'm more or less obsessed with psychoanalysis these days. Started with philosophy, now all I think about is angst.

This is a good read as well, you might enjoy this. Mostly just chapter two, conscience and epistemology.

faculty.smcm.edu/jwschroeder/Asian_Religions_2015/textdownloads_files/Confucius chp1&2.pdf

>In the analects the development of your moral intuition is inseparable from a sense of your responsibilities towards others. Zhuangzi is much more individualistic.

No wonder those guys are fighting all the time (although they are, to me at least, only two halves of a larger whole, possibly even a dialectic).

Having, or acquiring, a sense of shame is necessary. I'm with Lacan on this, there has to be a point where you realize that *you are not complete.* It's just part of acquiring a mature self-consciousness. Otherwise you live in a bubble like a fool or a child. We *do* have responsibilities towards others; I'll even go full Levinas (or Hegel?) and say that we can't even understand who we are without reference to others.

But sometimes, of course, your sense of self-awareness can become paralyzing, even crippling. Neurosis enters. But it would be hard to imagine Zhuangzhi having a Woody Allen response to this kind of stuff. The Way is just too smart for that, simpler.

Another good quote: the more you know, the less you need.

I started thinking that Daoist sages don't seem to suffer from self-awareness, then I remembered that the first chapter of the zhuangzi is partially about how to deal with getting laughed at. That plus some expansive visions of freedom and transformation, whose target presumably is a mind closed in on itself, feeling trapped.

I think an inescapable criticism of zhuangzi is that daydreaming will only take you so far. Cook Ding is more practical, but still on the magical end of practical.

The traditional background story of Confucius is that he lived during an age of constant war and the disintegration of the Zhou dynasty system. Early on war between states was highly ritualised, by Confucius' time they were just massacring each other. Instead of being advised by nobility familiar with the old ways, states employed specialists in war and put ritual and morality to one side.

Confucius had to justify a system of ethics from the ground up, because no one believed in it any more.

Yeah I think the two kinds of nihilism thing works well.

Everybody suffers from self-awareness. Even sages. I love the Cook Ding story because it's just so perfectly illustrative of these Taoist ideas, how demonstrable everything is, how it's all so magically simple. Who knows? Maybe it is that way.

One of the things about Chinese philosophy that I find interesting is how much of it is political philosophy, and how that in turn gets wrapped up with decision-making and so on. Personal decisions are public ones and vice-versa, and so you get this ideal of the sage-king, the one who can do the bidding of Heaven, arrange the state, which is also like a family or a household. And with this, of course, the ultimate form, wu-wei, how to make things happen without actually doing anything (or, rather, without appearing to do anything.)

And perhaps this is also what helps Sun Tzu to understand that warfare is deception, that you help or lure the other guy into making the wrong move. Or scenes like pic related, where the two great swordsmen play out the entire duel in their minds before striking a single blow. Or in the duel between Zhuge Liang and Sima Yi in Three Kingdoms.

>That plus some expansive visions of freedom and transformation, whose target presumably is a mind closed in on itself, feeling trapped.

Yeah. No traps, no terra firma, no hidey-holes. This is there in the West too, of course.

>Confucius had to justify a system of ethics from the ground up, because no one believed in it any more.

Yup. And yet isn't the experience of the Legalists instructive in this regard, that you can't govern people with cruelty? I sometimes wonder if in the end one turns to virtue not because one is good but because one eventually becomes frustrated with the limitations of being an asshole...

Seriously though, ethical nihilism/existential nihilism is a thing. Confucius and Laozi have you coming and going.

Maybe I should visit that country some time and see what life is like there.

The spacing in these posts is killing me. You don't need to use a double space everytime

t. autist

p.s.: continue your discussion, it's very interesting

We shape shit into a post, but it is the empty space *between* the posts that holds whatever we want.

Come on, in a thread that begins with the story of Cook Ding and the spaces between the joints of his edgeless knife a joke this stupid just had to be made.

Cook Ding reminds me of this verse in the Dhammapada in the early Buddhist canon. There's something to be said for approaching complex problems as a craftsman rather than as a philosopher.

Just as the irrigates a field
Just as a fletcher fashions an arrow
Just as a carpenter shapes a piece of wood
So the sage tames the self.

*Just as the farmer irrigates a field

I'm familiar with this sort of interpretation, that is, approaching (i'm avoididing the term "philosophy" here) whatever wise men do like it's engineering, rather than abstract thought-operations.

>There's something to be said for approaching complex problems as a craftsman rather than as a philosopher.

Yes. This. There's another one that comes to mind here too: 'Govern a large state like cooking a small fish.' This is the whole idea, the avoidance of these abstract metaphysics and, just as you say, approaching complex problems as a craftsman. The sage doesn't have to be wise, perhaps, he just doesn't fuck up the things that he does not want to fuck up.

I should say, I *like* metaphysics, and I do believe that there's something absolutely necessary about them. I'm a big psychoanalysis fag, and there is no other way to talk about the unconscious except with reference to all kinds of exciting Being and Non-Being.

But the Chinese have this whole other way of dealing with problems, which I very much like, and it is as you say by making things metaphorical, allegorical, so that they can be understood, perhaps that certain relationships between the subject and those problems can be established.

Wise Men are not necessarily philosophers in this sense, all-knowing gurus. They're wise in the sense of knowing this one thing, perhaps knowing the Way of that thing. And maybe some of the charm or appeal of this, as the story of the Cook indicates, is that every one thing is analogous to every other: the lord derives some deeper understanding of the whole nature of life from watching a dextrous butcher at his craft *unprepossessingly* talking about what he does. The lesson is not *deliberately* instructive (although of course Zhuangzhi has selected it for a reason); it becomes instructive, powerful, meaningful precisely at the point where the wisdom in it is *most common,* most obvious.

I likes it muchly, I does. There are things that undoubtedly require funky metaphysics, but what the fuck gets you *out* of those? Maybe only the serious nondual stuff, craft, practices.

Bump

>This could lead one equally well to serenity or schizophrenia. Probably some harmonious balance of both is required.

yo. this was dumb

Just wanted to say this is a 5 star thread. Really enjoyed reading the interpretations. Please continue. Perhaps a starter pack for Confucianism/dao?

So I am an Asiatic born in the West who has always enjoyed a more or less intuitive understanding of most of the Eastern philosophical musings, while being organically educated in the fine Western tradition in a way that I hope precludes any potential difficulties specific to expressing thought across cultural contexts.

Listening to you fine people discussing in this thread brings to mind two poets musing about prose, as if across some great fundamental divide of culture or meaning.

Can any of you go into more detail what you find elusive or distinct about eastern thought? I would appreciate the opportunity to hold myself up as a mirror to your ideas.

True.

Cheers fella.

As for books, pic related is good and gets recommended on Veeky Forums fairly frequently. Michael Puett, Roger Ames, and HG Creel have all published interesting texts. Fung Yu-Lan's short history is good for an overview. I'm personally a big fan of those two small chapters written by Fingarette, linked above, because to me they really articulate how conscience and epistemology seem to connect.

But what you want is probably this. The document below has other links to the core texts, all available free; you can do worse than to start there, with the Analects, Great Learning, and DoTM. Those plus Mencius, Mozi, Han Fei, and Xunzi will keep you busy for a while. As for the Tao, the TTC and Zhuangzhi are core books, the Liezi also. Cleary's translation of the Wen-Tzu is a personal favorite of mine. I still haven't read Mencius yet.

indiana.edu/~p374/Analects_of_Confucius_(Eno-2015).pdf

Confucius is underrated. Frankly I can't imagine anything more redpilled than virtue, but the concept of redpilling is somewhat loaded. If we're talking about ways of getting beyond postmodern nihilism, various methods of Sorting Yourself Out as an alternative to total futility - and maybe that's a really important task for philosophy today! - then Confucianism is attractive to me.

Of course, it has a legacy of totalitarianism behind it, and there's no need to overly romanticize any one thinker. Peterson's hand-waving at the legacy of French and German poststructuralism is often uncharitable, and it gives a weird impression of Foucault, Derrida, Lacan and others. That's another story. But in general I agree with much of what he is saying, and I certainly feel it too; people need something to pry themselves off the floor of the abyss sometimes. I take the side of Lacan/Freud over Jung but really whatever helps one to be capable of love and work...yes?

>this thread brings to mind two poets musing about prose, as if across some great fundamental divide of culture or meaning.

You're too kind user. Let me ask you this: do you think there is a great fundamental divide of culture or meaning? Does it make sense to conceive of the world in these East-West terms?

What aspects of Eastern (or Western) thought do you like or *not* like? What aspects of that thought do you think are commonly misinterpreted or misrepresented?

>Can any of you go into more detail what you find elusive or distinct about eastern thought?

There's nothing quite like the Tao. In the West, we might say, God is dead, God is the unconscious, or so on. But what about the Tao? It would make no sense to say, 'The Tao is Dead' or any of this. Or even to presume to *know* the Tao.

Even apparently good things, like etiquette or love of country only appear when the Tao is *lost.* This is stuff that I find interesting, and it's also very much related to Heidegger's concern with the technological mode of understanding and the metaphysics of production: *stop forcing things into being.* Allow things to reveal themselves, perhaps find yourself in a deeper or more profound understanding of Being. By giving your attention to a thing, you can allow that thing to become; and this to me seems very much related to the ideal of wu-wei. And I can be as pessimistic or as nihilistic as I want, but Laozi always seems to shrug and laugh at me. I find that incredible.

One more. I'll call it 'skepticism about the will.'

I've read Nietzsche up and down and he's a beast. Maybe *the* philosopher who will wind up having the Aristotle-tier championship reign over the next thousand years: why not? Creating ubermensch is a project that isn't going to go away anytime soon.

Beyond a certain horizon I guess I'm just cognizant that the ubermensch doesn't happen in a vacuum. Nor is their appearance necessarily a good thing. Having doubled down on individuality and identity in my own perverse ways, and having found that it leaves me feeling rather lonely and dissipated, I suppose I'm looking for a way to comport myself towards living in a society which is chock-full of ubermenschen-in-progress and wondering if maybe the thing for me to do is help somebody else get where they want to be rather than thinking of myself all the time like a selfish cunt. Even though it's frustrating, because I'm profoundly disappointed with myself for having failed to accomplish any of the stuff I wanted to do.

Taoist thought doesn't think highly about the arbitrary nature of desires - and I am convinced that we live on Planet Desire. Everything we see around us is there because some human *wanted* it to be there, consciously or otherwise; I agree with Bloch that capitalism is as much about failed dreams and thwarted desires as it is about happiness. It doesn't necessarily *make sense* - even if you ask people to tell the truth, if you ask them "what they really want." People are least capable of articulating that which is most important to them. This is all Freud.

So what else is one to do? Try and find a way to get along with the nature of things, maybe, and not be continually getting your shirt stuck in the gears of the machines that are turning all around you. They have a reason for being there too.

It's an elusive way of getting through life, I admit. Hardly heroic. But again, heroism. I'm fascinated with Peterson and sympathetic to his attempt to single-handedly Jung people out of nihilism. The fact that he has appeared at all suggests to me that some kind of crisis of meaning has occurred, perhaps even a proto-Axial age.

So what do you do when you are surrounded by heroism, by people looking for existential meaning? Who gets to go first? Who's the most aggrieved, who's the most offended? Who does America belong to? In the end it amounts to so much mimetic destruction. The tragic mode of perception is noble. But a lot of lives can also get ruined along the way. Lacan himself probably did more harm than good in many of his sessions.

So in Chinese thought there's a skepticism, perhaps, about how much we can know, and I find that an enlightening attitude to take. Because speaking for myself, I have *no* idea what I'm doing, but trying to persuade myself that I do has caused me a lot of grief. My own infinite desires would seem to suggest more ignorance than anything.

I do think there is a great divide of culture or meaning, though it is not absolute or eternal and certainly does not trump the human condition. Much up my young life is felt across that yawning chasm, which I must say was infinitely less surmountable back then. That we can have this conversation at all is startling in the way that you can just wander into a Western grocery today and buy fresh dragonfruit, rambutan, soursop, durian, tamarind, rose apples, or any of a host of eastern fruits that just a few decades ago would have required a pilgrimage to procure.

Thinking of the world in East-West terms is essential to synthesizing a framework of understanding that explores and potentially bridges that gap. It is impossible as a society (even or perhaps especially in academia) to try and pretend the distinctly diffeerent is "just like us" and to try and analyze/digest it by the same standards without expecting some loss of clarity; in this case, like in most monumental cultural divides, the slow aggregate process of bridging a gap one stone at a time will outperform the most incisive and expressive intellect trying to force broadcast understanding to his contemporaries at home who have not made the pilgrimage themselves.

I dislike the various glaring blind spots in traditional Eastern (individualism, etc.), for they are functionally devastating in way that is sad to me personally and an intellectual lead which will be arduous for the East to overcome without losing touch with its own unique and valuable perspective. Eastern philosophical thought also suffers from issues of deeply rooted and explicit cultural predisposition to orthodoxy that impede progress in a way that is most unsavoury to me.

Much of Western thought is precious for being able to "see the forest for the trees", as it were. But I believe that it suffers a bit from this laser focus in its inclination to study the overall shape of a thing, preferring to reserve that for "geniuses" or those whose achievements are so great that their approach is no longer assailable.

>Philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons

The most common misinterpretation / misrepresentation in the East-West dynamic is the conflation of the yin/yang concept with dualism, which draws my ire without exception. To mistake what is essentially a transcendent repudiation of dualism for dualism itself is missing the point by an unforgivable margin.

(continued)

Cook ting's tale is kino

(continued from in response to )
I'm always a bit cautious about scholarly questions about the Tao, as they are traps in function even when they are not traps of intent. It takes some doing to testify to the nature of what is ostensibly unknowable by definition. One has to accept here that there is some evocative license at work in these formulations of the Tao in order to get anywhere. This is endemic to the Taoist method of obscuritant teaching, somewhere between a koan and Wittgenstein's ladder.

The trap described above rather connects with what I was saying about yin/yang being confused for dualism. In many ways, the Tao is to yin/yang what the Catholic conception of the Holy Spirit is to the Father and the Son. If that makes any sense. (Keep in mind that I am not an absolute authority and that experts and laymen alike in the East will disagree on various aspects of their philosophical corpus.)

Your confusion about "good" things only appearing when the Tao is lost confuses me in turn. Why would this not be so? Your comparisons with Heidegger are well taken, and reminds me how anathema it is to traditional Western thought to countenance the possibility of the kind of "benevolent doublethink" (for my lack of a better term) that many minds seem to require to grasp the meaning of any given aspect of the Tao.

By "benevolent doublethink" I mean the construction of a dilemma / duality / contradiction whose horns are each valid on their own merit and whose simultaneous validity can only be grokked by an elevation of frame from that in which the individual and opposing truths were conceptualised. In this way the Tao is touched on but not bounded by such old Western standbys as Hegel's synthesis... I could talk about this sort of thing for far too long, and I have commitments rearing their head soon.

I will end this part of my reply by saying that the Tao is probably best understood by the Western mind as Reality, but without the regular trappings of the term and used instead in the same way as Creation (as in "all of Creation"), but stripped of all religious or Demiurgic undertones - Reality as the full multiplicity of possibility and context.

I hope the thread is still alive when I return, so that I can reply to . Thanks for your thoughts!

>inclination
should be
>disinclination

It was a bad word to express what I meant, anyway.

>definition of Dao

>zip! zoop!

Care to spell that one out for us, chief?

Wow, this is really thought-provoking. Thanks for sharing!

>like in most monumental cultural divides, the slow aggregate process of bridging a gap one stone at a time will outperform the most incisive and expressive intellect trying to force broadcast understanding to his contemporaries at home who have not made the pilgrimage themselves.

Totally true. I've spent quite a lot of time looking for totalizing and universal theories. It's been a frustrating exercise. Forcing the truth in general usually results in getting dumped on one's ear, playing fun linguistic games or forcing reality to fit the model.

>Eastern philosophical thought also suffers from issues of deeply rooted and explicit cultural predisposition to orthodoxy that impede progress in a way that is most unsavoury to me.

In the West also! How else can you explain the chanting mobs that surround Peterson? The orthodox position today is overidentification with the victim...and all of these victims victimize each other...who's to blame? Who's at fault? How are things to be fixed? It's not pleasant to take a close look at oneself, to see how much one's own desires play a role in one's painful, difficult or embarrassing circumstances...

>The most common misinterpretation / misrepresentation in the East-West dynamic is the conflation of the yin/yang concept with dualism, which draws my ire without exception.

Yes, absolutely. There are no neat and easy distinctions...and the more we talk, the more we write, the more confusion multiplies...to be able to see things, grasp them immediately and in this un-theoretical sense, this workmanlike or craftsmanlike sense is preferable...

>Your confusion about "good" things only appearing when the Tao is lost confuses me in turn.

Of course, negative things also appear as well. But the part I find fascinating is how both the good *and* the bad manifest out of a forgetting - perhaps the same 'forgetting of Being' Heidegger describes. Etiquette, for example, is preferable to crudeness, but inferior to naturalness. Everything manifests through a process of forgetfulness, or departure, from what which is natural, though inhuman; we can do all of the psychological acrobatics we wish or feel compelled to perform, but the Tao reminds us that, prior to this, there is always a more enigmatic process at work.

>Reality as the full multiplicity of possibility and context.
Yes. And perhaps, for the sage, without the constant anxiety w/r/t how to act, what to choose - as Confucius says (the Stoics also), being able to follow these things and not have one's own desires be other than the desires of Nature. To be able to *listen* to creation and not always be mucking it up with one's infinitely desiring, bewildered ego...

Thank you Bruce for getting me interested in Eastern Philosophy.

Good post user.

>Respond intelligently even to unintelligent treatment.
This guy's teachings are like a fragile thread leading me through darkness to the person I'd like to be.

>Confucius say 'just b urself'

That's a good quote and it reminds me why I like Confucius as well.

Maybe because it comes back to virtue, out of the need to be good, to act well, to believe in the idea or necessity of acting well even in a society that appears to have deconstructed all of these things to infinity. Shame and guilt are powerful weapons and nobody is really immune to them. Anybody can be shamed or made to feel guilty, put on the spot by some frothing inquisitor or sneered at by some arrogant bastard. There really isn't a higher ground to take against shame, guilt, or fear.

But it doesn't mean you have to be a prisoner of it. If you act right, if you act according to your conscience, then perhaps you will be able to evolve something stronger than guilt, shame and blame. You will have done the right thing for your own sake, not perhaps for the sake of some (big) Other, where you get caught in some lie or projection or otherwise trapped.

The current landscape is a pretty scathing one. There's no end of scorn or disgust or outrage. And there's also a lot of broadcasting and universalist discourse which seem to me to reveal, rather than hides, the actually subjective nature of these things, the presence of ideology, the need for closure or the successful streaming of the virtue signal.

Of course, you can always get counter-outraged and double down on one form of politics or another. But even Peterson thinks the Alt-Right is basically *unformed...*

Virtue just seems like a good look. Virtue is not ironic; there's no room for shame or guilt if you are - in boring simplicity - doing the thing that just seems right to you, the thing that *cannot be explained in any other terms than what it is.* If you don't want to deal with hysterical, weaponized cynicism or sly inquisitors looking for an agenda, don't try to come back at them with a deeper outrage or a higher, more remote sense of skeptical indifference. It won't work.

Perhaps to be good is to fail for one's ideals, to fuck things up; to have ideals *robust* enough to be able to withstand inevitable disappointment. There may not be a point at which one's desires become transformed into art or political theatre. It's possible that your ideals may outlive you.

Of course, one can be straitjacketed into oppression or totalitarianism in this way, but I feel like we can leave that aside in some sense. I'm more interested in Confucian thought as valid for the contemporary West rather than the East.

Following your heart and making a mistake is okay. Having no heart at all would seem to be much worse. But this isn't Nietzsche and the WtP. Because all of that power becomes very risky later on if you have to *explain* it - which, of course, cannot be done without infinite language, Reasons, mimetics and so on.

Anyways gents I'm just shitposting but that Confucius quote was legit interesting. Anyone else have any thoughts on this? Virtue and guilt and so on?

>Respond intelligently even to unintelligent treatment.
>Confucious
Are you trolling right now?

You wrote so much, so self-importantly, managed to shoehorn in Peterson and alt-right politics, and yet started with a stark misattribution? You speak so confidently about it that you call it out again at the end of your post.

Imagine if you mentioned the Will to Power and someone goes "that's a great quote and it reminds me why I like Voltaire".

Ugh. I can't believe I did something so stupid. That was unbelievably dumb. Thanks for the correction, tho.

I will now go and lightly fry my face in embarrassment.

It's worth having a solid sense of where ideas come from. You need it to develop an appreciation of intertextuality and Eisenstein's montage theory as it applies to ideas.

>It's worth having a solid sense of where ideas come from.

This is true. And when I go on at length about guilt and shame it's certainly instructive to have an example! Being reminded that one does *not* always know what one is talking about is important...

>You need it to develop an appreciation of intertextuality and Eisenstein's montage theory as it applies to ideas.

I have some familiarity with Eisenstein w/r/t cinema, but never considered him with reference to philosophy...care to elaborate on this?

> Are you trolling right now?
What happened here was someone thought "how stange, a natural, intilligent, not too ego heavy thread" and unwittingly created a troll with their desires

I've not heard of Eisenstein being explicitly applied to ideas, but there's not much to elaborate on.

If the ordering and juxtaposition of two shots within a sequence can create new meaning, then the ordering and juxtaposition of two ideas can similarly create new meaning.

Context relevant to ideas can include school, era, works, corpus of specific authors, rivalries, etc.

> the ordering and juxtaposition of two ideas within a context
Not sure why the words I typed disappeared on hitting 'Post'.

And yet an interesting conversation resulted in spite of it all. A testament to this thread and the people in it.

Well, as the guy who wrote the post with the misattribution, I really don't have a problem with being called out when I say something dumb or incorrect. That other user wasn't accusing me of being a deliberate troll, he was just noticing the misattribution and pointing it out.

And besides:
>then I remembered that the first chapter of the zhuangzi is partially about how to deal with getting laughed at

The Tao is generous indeed! Anyways.

Okay, I understand.

One other thing I've been thinking about that's come up with relation to this thread is the idea of *competence.* Peterson talks about it a lot, this idea of strengthening the individual and so on. I find there's a kind of synergy there with these ideals of practice and ritual and discipline that you find in Eastern thought. Not being an academic and having no plans to be one, most of the stuff I read winds up usually dealing with psychology, work, capital and desire et al as a way of just dealing with life, which to me seems bent on this impossible quest to Produce More Happiness. I follow from Zizek on this, that capital has this insane superegoic injunction to enjoy. And whenever I watch Gordon Ramsay berating somebody on Masterchef I feel as though this is really being confirmed: someone's failure to produce a satisfying apple pie isn't just a failure for cooking, it becomes their total failure as a human being. It's really excruciating to watch but I'm fascinated with Ramsay for this reason, because he has all of this justified rage that is based in the end on some random guy's enjoyment of a beef Wellington. The society of enjoyment is fucked up but I think that's how it works.

I get, of course, that this is a TV show and not 'reality,' but...

Peterson's been on a crusade of late about postmodern nihilism and maybe that's why I find Eastern thought attractive: firstly, because on the one hand there is this ethics of disavowal, of separation, of letting the world be, with the Tao; and then, on the other, this notion of conformity, of taking up responsibilities, the responsibilities of being virtuous, pious, and so on. I don't know if this is interesting or not, but I find in the era of hyper-deconstruction (who the fuck *isn't* a Nietzschean anymore? and so on) that trying to deal with society in this incredibly basic and non-subversive sense, by just being, or trying to be, a good virtuous dude rather than a perpetual victim or existential sufferer...I don't know, I find it appealing.

The virtuous life is not necessarily the *happy* life, but it might be an anodyne or alternative to a life of *fake unhappiness* - that is to say, a life lived in a kind of misery that one does not really understand the sources of...

Amen to that. I love this board.

As the guy who called you out, thanks for not taking it as a hostile attack. I sort of regret bringing that language into this conversation and am thankful something fruitful came from it.

I should probably add that I believe less that is a scathing condemnation of my actions and more a humorous reference to the strong "evils arising from desire" theme in many Eastern traditions. Even if that wasn't the intent, I certainly found it amusing.

I'll continue that thought a little bit further - and not only for the obvious reason that in a story about Cook Ting we can also talk about Chef Ramsay!

Ramsay is, and certainly the TV shows present him in this light, a tyrannically competent individual. This is why there's no room for talk, debate, or argument with him: his cooking skill resolves all arguments and all debates. Even his television shows play up this interesting aspect of his personality, where he is not only master-cook but also master-therapist and marriage counsellor too. Restaurants fail because, invariably, one of the owners or chefs has some personality disorder or needs some kind of Ego Check that Ramsay provides, usually painfully. This established, he can then renovate the restaurant and restore it to order, the customers enjoy themselves, and all is right under Heaven. It's kind of a fascinating process to watch.

But we watch him and the show for the rage, for the outbursts and the explosions, not to learn how to cook. To me at least Ramsay is - among other things - kind of a fascinating illustration of stuff that Zizek talks about, about the society of enjoyment and the superego. What justifies all of this anger? The fact that customers *are not satisfied.* They are not Enjoying themselves. This is all the justification that he needs.

And you can see this again and again in the shows, how he goes in to these failing restaurants and resolves psychological issues as capitalist problems and capitalist problems as psychological issues. It's pure ideology, of course, but it also works. The functioning, pleasure-producing restaurant is restored to order by a kind of combination master-psychologist and master-craftsman, the Guy Who Knows What To Do. And of course this is massively popular for television audiences. Joe Bastianich seems to have picked up on these tricks as well, the art of completely shaming someone who has made a boring salad. It would be interesting to ask if customers actually *could* enjoy their meals if they knew how much contestants had been tortured to make them...I don't know if I would relish eating a piece of steak that only came to be on my plate after the Red Team was reduced to tears making it!

No room for Taoism in there, I suppose, but it does teach one how to 'care for life' in interesting ways. I also worked in kitchens for a bit, so I have some familiarity with all of that stuff...and it reminds me of times I spent in those places. Everything I needed to learn about Marxism I learned there...even though I'm a boring hikiko now who prefers to read and drink and shitpost and generally avoid the world as much as possible.

Anyways, just some random thoughts, I suppose.

>deconstruction
I just want to put the thought out there that the end fate and maybe even the point of successful Deconstruction is Reconstruction. For one reason or another this idea is absent or ignored in the putative zeitgeist you described.

All good my man, no worries. These things are necessary, and there's no progress without errors...

God help us if we start getting triggered here and derailing interesting threads over small things. People are thin-skinned enough these days anyways.

>Bruce "took an unknown pill from his mistress because he had a headache and died" Lee

Funny you should mention the notoriously thin skin you see these days. It's simultaneously amusing and terrifying watching the narrative surrounding the rise and fall of trigger warnings being bent every which way.

There are people who derogate the idea of getting triggered in lockstep with an aim to discredit and ridicule the ordered and productive process of criticism, accountability, and response recently seen here. But as anyone who can appreciate the utility of that process can agree, extending basic courtesy to other participants in a discussion isn't a censure on the marketplace of ideas, but an affirmation of it. In the other direction lies demagoguery and political echo chambers.

>I just want to put the thought out there that the end fate and maybe even the point of successful Deconstruction is Reconstruction.
Couldn't possibly agree more with you there. So where to start? With the society, the individual?

My background is shaped by readings of those postmodernists Peterson is always complaining about. I sensed that, indeed, things on the Left had gone too far. Like a dumbass, I switched over to the Right. Predictable, but ultimately disappointing.

Now I find Peterson compelling because your individuality is all one has to work with, perhaps. It can be conjectured an infinite number of ways, which is a blessing as well as a curse...a lot of alt-right stuff deals with this idea of Reconstructing society palingenetically, but is this is only so much more ideology? The alt-right has, perhaps, a claim to victim status but I guess for myself I'm trying to resist the temptations of victim-based or dualistic thinking. Hence the usual recourse to mysticism and nondualism, among other writers and so on who are good at dealing with questions of desire, self and other, and so on. For what it's worth.

>For one reason or another this idea is absent or ignored in the putative zeitgeist you described.

Yep. No doubt. I'm fucking perplexed about it! Where *does* that Reconstruction begin? With the society, with the individual? I honestly *don't* know how to begin fixing things or contributing to the groundwork of anything that could be a Reconstruction...but this shit does bother me, which is why I come here and shitpost about it...

Not knowing what to do with society, and feeling sometimes as though we have indeed hit the limits of what can be deconstructed w/r/t the self and subjectivity, I'm interested in these questions of desire and virtue and so on, as perhaps something that can be done, that is worth thinking about. I manifestly do *not* have any answers, but I'm super-interested in the possibility that there may be some questions worth asking or philosophers worth thinking about.

So I like psychoanalysis, for instance, because I have found that when people have a chance to talk about shit you have no idea what's going to come out of their mouths. I do believe Heidegger is right when he talks about the metaphysics of production. Nick Land linked today to an article about the real problem not even being tyranny but just chaos and bloat and entropy. That makes total sense to me. And all of this is the result of insane production, excess production for excessive desires.

I don't know if society itself can be fixed, but maybe it's possible to comport ourselves to the kinds of problems that are eventually, perhaps, going to need fixing...and I attribute these problems to the inevitability of chaotic human desires and the world this subsequently produces...and the need to live with other humans...but those are just my own weird thoughts...

Yeah. Like a Mexican standoff. Maybe with some of the participants pointing the guns at their own heads as well.

Ther's all this guilt, all this shame, all this fear. Maybe it's the horror of history or the sheer dread of the future or the overwhelming amount of information we suddenly have about how atrociously unforgiving nature is and the sheer magnitude of world debt and so on. Maybe all of it. Maybe it's people just realizing that infinite ice cream can't fill the existential stuff that's missing for peace, order, happiness, those old cliches - and those can't be crowbarred back into existence no matter what Bannon thinks.

If you talk to Boomers they really believed that by the year 2000 we would be living in a Jetsons universe and things would just be wonderful. We're dealing with the fallout from a lot of naiveté that things would just get better. Because they were so good after the war (well, for some...not for everyone...) They really believed it. People today, and coming, are going to be the ones who have to deal with a much less sunny possibility horizon, I can't blame anyone for feeling angry or fucked-out about it. I'm resigned to it too.

>There are people who derogate the idea of getting triggered in lockstep with an aim to discredit and ridicule the ordered and productive process of criticism, accountability, and response recently seen here. But as anyone who can appreciate the utility of that process can agree, extending basic courtesy to other participants in a discussion isn't a censure on the marketplace of ideas, but an affirmation of it. In the other direction lies demagoguery and political echo chambers.

Yep. That's *completely* it. Echo chambers. What's rare to find is...empathy, courtesy, all this. Manners are patrician! Chivalry is a good look, and it's not supposed to offend anyone, it might just be a thing that *men feel the need to do...* Maybe we learned this trick form the French, that the person who cares the least in an argument always has the higher hand...but the loser in the end is the argument itself.

Too much ugliness, too much cynicism. You can hear in people's voices, you can see it in their faces, the self-loathing of *people who have everything and don't know what to do with it.* It happens. People feel guilty about their success...

The stakes just seem so high. Maybe they are. But it's not making a very robust kind of individual who is capable of dealing with adversity, hardship, disappointment, with not getting what one wants. And maybe there's a kind of nihilism underneath it that says, if I can't get what I want, then life has no meaning or purpose, it's all worthless...

And then you put social media into the mix and give everyone a personal and private echo chamber, like Facebook, that touches on a million other echo chambers, and eventually that comes to feel more real than the real thing...

Anyways, all this to say I agree.

Conjure bravery and eloquence and present an explicit criticism and justify it. That, or resign yourself to calling a dead guy out for having what seems to have been unexpected pharmaceutical reaction.

Are there many thoughtful people really treat Bannon as a legitimate source of useful thought? What brought them to that conclusion?

I've looked into his body of work a fair bit and never found anything that compelled me to delve deeper and really study him the way one might study other names of note.

No, you're right. And the longer this presidency goes the way it has so far the less likely it becomes that anybody will take Bannon seriously. He's inscribed on a lot of that process.

I only invoke the name because of the inherent nostalgia for the past and so on that was a part of Trump's campaign, and which, although I am no professional scholar of fascism, is arguably a part of all such movements. Roger Griffin called it palingenetic ultranationalism, this idea that the state has fallen and now has to be restored. While it is an admittedly far cry to call Trump or Bannon fascists outright, and that not every movement which aims to resuscitate a body of people through charismatic leadership is necessarily fascist, I think there are enough crossover points in Bannon's rhetoric to warrant at least a minimal comparison.

He's definitely something as a phenomenon. Time will tell how much. I suppose for me he's relevant because the language he uses really is ideology in full and living color. I spent a lot of time thinking about Bannon and Trump last year as well (no doubt as many did) and in general falling for the charm of fixing one's own personal problems by projecting onto politics. Prior to that I hadn't really given a damn about politics at all, really only philosophy...and now I'm wondering if that's not where I want to go back to because culture-war politics are exhausting and depressing as fuck.

He is interesting. Right-wing politics are, if only because they're so new and are presenting such a challenge to the postmodern thinking that really does inform, I think, much of the present age. It's the stuff I cut my own philosophical teeth on. Jung, for instance, is sometimes described as an 'avant-garde conservative.' I find that interesting, and perhaps more psychologically helpful than, say, Julius Evola or the Bhagavad Gita - both favourites of Bannon, from what I understand.

Peterson has his flaws, no doubt, but I sympathize with his project in the same way I sympathize with Zizek's: trying to help people with their illusions and fantasies and perhaps avoiding the pitfalls of a world replete with them as capitalism. Peterson probably wouldn't care much about Chinese notions of virtue, as they might perhaps be too conformist to him...and it's not like the Chinese didn't massacre more than a few people in their time.

Man, all I want is total enlightenment so I can just go back to playing video games and wasting my life without feeling guilt.

But of course, the Chinese were massacred in their time by the Japanese during the war (and they did a number on the Koreans too). And this is all stuff JP talks about, the dangers of modernist political experimentation...which might also be called revolutionary gnostic warfare.

It's possible that a lot of this goes back to Hegel, originally, seeing the World Spirit made incarnate as a man on horseback in 1806. The French and the Germans have both been obsessed with Napoleon ever since, the guy they could both agree on. One of the interesting things about romanticism is how (I forget where I read this) that romanticism for the French goes in this direction towards the noble savage of Rousseau (and you can see this referenced, I think, in Baudrillard, Bataille, others) while for the Germans it implies a fantasy of order and a return to kingship, sovereignty, and so on. And in that friction a great deal of thought emerges.

A guy like Deleuze loathes Hegel, and perhaps this is how one can understand why...Deleuze's nomad begins the journey by *departing* from power, by leaving it, by avoiding the inevitable temptation towards despotism. It's actually kind of a wonderful thought to have percolate in your head, to think that power is something that, as desirable as it is, ultimately requires these terrible reasons, manufactures all this repression and projection...the most liberating thing is in a sense to get out from this awful space of power, of being The Subject Supposed To Know - which is, if you ask me, the place where the tortured modern consumer is most of the time, fretting about happiness and given this impossible mission of keeping up with the Joneses.

It was Deleuze who actually got me into reading the Chinese, originally, because he was the guy who 'sploded Lacan to pieces (or maybe just carried on his work in a really novel new way). But I don't really have the temperament to be a true nomad or BwO, I think. I'd prefer to be a riverboat captain or mysterious lighthouse keeper somewhere instead. Far away from all this madness (with wi-fi, however, for shitposting on Veeky Forums, of course).

Where is that text from?

So basically, this. Hence perhaps the need for civility, good manners and dialogue and so on.

>fascism
>fascist
>fascists
Why are people so focused on fearing or criticizing facism? I get that fascism is an undesirable outcome, but populism is how we get there.

See here.
genius.com/Nick-land-meltdown-annotated

Not so much a question of fear as whether or not it's a phenomenon that can be psychologically or philosophically understood. I believe it can be; read Klaus Theweleit's books for more details. Or Deleuze.

The other thing is that a great deal of continental philosophy after the Second World War is highly interested in this question - not just the Holocaust itself, but the fact that Heidegger was this massively important philosopher and a huge influence on virtually everyone (Nietzsche also) who have these...complicated links to that event. And so now with Bannon fascism appears once again, but in the United States. However you choose to look at this phenomenon it's hard to take your eyes off of it.

Or it *was,* for a while, anyways. Seems as though the Trump Train has stalled somewhat in the past few weeks.

Anyways, that populism does seem to be increasing, or at least has spiked considerably in the past few years or so (since GamerGate? I don't know). And it's emerging as a response to perhaps a critical mass of postmodernity, stagnant world economies, fears of automation and AI, Islam, lots of other stuff...problems that *appear* to be worsening and deepening. I have that word in asterisks because, of course, in many ways life is getting better...but people certainly seem to feel more afraid, more triggered, less civic-minded and so on.

Anyways, I should shut up about this. What do you think?

> I should probably add that I believe less that (You) # is a scathing condemnation of my actions and more a humorous reference to the strong "evils arising from desire" theme in many Eastern traditions.
Yes that's how I meant it (humorously), glad it was recieved that way.

>doesn't matter how slow you go, as long as you don't stop
That quote does not come from the Analects, or or any ancient Chinese writing, even from Chinese.

So that post is even more Awesome than I thought. First with a misattributed reference to Confucius, and then featuring an image quote that apparently Confucius never actually said!

I've seen that quote so many times it never occurred to me that it actually wasn't in the Analects...and it seems that you're right, it isn't. TIL.

Well, thanks for pointing that out, anyways. I'll have to be more careful with lazy meme quotes...

>All this unrepentant schizophrenic wank
"The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity."

What profit hath you? Decorated with fine ornamentation - robes, garland, and jewelry - you stand back satisfied that you had actually gotten at something. "Ah Yes, but what about the Marxist critique of Capital?" A million adumbrations swelling. THE ZEITGEIST!

what a bunch of stuff

If you want something better, produce it. If it is meet, it will flourish.

idgi

A part of my response that I neglected to say in is that dualism as a concept upon which traditional Western thinking is founded is that it is critically useful and distinctly untrue at the same time. It provides incredible analytical and syncretic impetus and yet hinders understanding if we forget that it is a convention to be put aside when discussing what actually is. A W's ladder that we have forgotten is a ladder

>I'll call it 'skepticism about the will.'
What is 'it', and how does it connect with the stream of consciousness that comes after in your post? I find myself disagreeing with your observations and interpretations quite a bit, but in a fairly innocuous way. I find myself wishing you had put a finer point on the comings and goings of your music with relation to what you have called the skepticism of the will. Being clear about the nature of your focus and the climate in which it arises is a good first step to conveying your thoughts and eliciting a useful reaction. My response is going to be similarly dissociative, but I prefer that to registering a complaint and saying "try again".

Something to keep in mind is that while I have claimed to "get" Taoism on one or more levels, that I am not a Taoist in aggregate. Like any other philosophy, you take what is useful, and put the rest on the backburner to soften in the pressure cooker to see if it ever softens enough to become useful. I agree it makes no sense to say "Tao is Dead" or anything similar; the Tao is unassailable.

I don't really find much traction with the implicit sense that Taoism distances itself from the search for the heroic. Especially when you temper a reading of Taoist teachings with a feel for what the cultural context was at the moment of entry into Chinese thinking. Maybe this is my bias showing, or perhaps my ignorance.

A culture of grievances is no way for a society to operate in the long term. A grievance by its nature is an ephemeral moral impetus that should seek its own obsolescence, and the idea of legitimate and transitory grievances is essential to meaningful human coexistence. I just hope that the pendulum doesn't swing too far in the other direction in overcompensation for past and current madness.

America belongs to whoever is busiest embodying America. Your question should probably be "Who SHOULD America belong to?" The failure to distinguish in casual speech between when we are discussing what is and what should be is a strong marker for the kind of disconnect or conflation between conventions and reality that underlies the shakiness which often heralds the imminent challenge and possible collapse of a dominant framework of thought in society.

I don't think Chinese thought displays a skepticism of how much we can know in an absolute sense. To me it reads more as "all things may be knowable, but in this life you will not know everything before you are done; take this to heart and live accordingly."

This is a very thoughtful and considered response, user. There are a lot of things in what you've written that I agree with. I'm not sure if I have the cognitive wherewithal at the moment to respond properly but I just wanted to thanks for elaborating on this and articulating well.

No worries. I myself have been responding when I can, where I can, which means I my mental state is suspect too. So I understand. Do well in your endeavours.

I approve of this thread