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THE WAY THINGS ARE: The meaning of life is to be found in thinking about what is reality and the beauty of reality is to be found in our DNA's memorization of all forms that have been successfully retained along the four billion years of evolution of the principle of life on Gaia our earth. In the end what I mean to say is that beauty is something objective and what we call ugliness is then simply our unconscientious feel of something evolution did not retain.
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New Left Review - Henry Zhao: Contesting Confucius
Liked it May 13, 2007 3:37pm 1 review •http://newleftreview.org/?page=articl...
CONTESTING CONFUCIUS
via Abiezer / Metafilter, in the New Left Review by Henry Zhao

Contesting Confucius [Single-link book review tour de force] In which a returned exile Chinese scholar uses a literary spat between two Francophone sinologists as a springboard for an exploration of the politics of New Confucianism and the role of the Chinese 'other' in Western philosophical discourse. Isn't globalisation something?

CONTESTING CONFUCIUS


Interesting read. But I should venture that China can't be summarized through Confucianism. Billeter is right that Confucianism has been the ideological driver of the Chinese empire in its successive dynasty sauces and Francois Julien does not imply something different.

For Zhao it seems as if China's traditional philosophy were limited to Confucianism. This is simply not true. The Confucian classics are expanding on the long intellectual evolutionary tree that precedes them. One of Confucius main works is his "Commentaries on the I-Ching". Nobody knows how nor when the I-Ching originated but what is starting to be better known is that the Bagua on which the I-Ching is based appears thousands of years earlier. And the Bagua is also the root of Chinese thinking about everything: from strategy, to painting to medicine to politics to morality and so on. (the bagua is the 8 trigram derivation from the yin-yang polarities)

In my view there is one essential difference between China and the West.

- China's civilization gradually built over its animist background without destroying it. There is a continuity in China's intellectual construct and its animistic origins remain foundational to the later construct.
- The Middle-East and Europe followed another path. Religious foundational stories violently superseded animism. The force of military power erased all visual signs of animism and imposed the signs of the foundational story of the religion as replacement.

It is not difficult to understand that this drastic differentiation in the rooting of the two civilizations leads to radically different interpretations of reality. And it is also not difficult to understand that these radically different interpretations of reality engender radically different attitudes in the shaping of decisions in the present.

One example.
- In the West the treatment of sickness is done by elimination of the symptoms through one or another form of suppression: the knife in surgery, chemicals in chemotherapy or rays in energy therapy. In other words Western doctors cut the symptom.
- In China the cure of sickness is done through the treatment of the underlying causes that provoke the sickness. In other words Chinese Traditional Medicine considers that an initial chemical or energetic imbalance in the body is what causes sickness and so they act to re-establish the chemical and energetic balance of the body.

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