Shaolin for Philosophy

[GeneChing]

This is really "Kung Fu for Philosophers" but I'm poaching it for our Shaolin forum here. It's an intriguing read from the NYT.


December 8, 2010, 9:30 pm
Kung Fu for Philosophers (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/kung-fu-for-philosophers/?partner=rss&emc=rss)
By PEIMIN NI

In a 2005 news report about the Shaolin Temple, the Buddhist monastery in China well-known for its martial arts, a monk addressed a common misunderstanding: “Many people have a misconception that martial arts is about fighting and killing,” the monk was quoted as saying, “It is actually about improving your wisdom and intelligence.”[1]

Indeed, the concept of kung fu (or gongfu) is known to many in the West only through martial arts fighting films like “Enter the Dragon,” “Drunken Master” or more recently, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” In the cinematic realm, skilled, acrobatic fighters like Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan and Jet Li are seen as “kung fu masters.”

But as the Shaolin monk pointed out, kung fu embodies much more than fighting. In fact any ability resulting from practice and cultivation could accurately be said to embody kung fu. There is a kung fu of dancing, painting, cooking, writing, acting, making good judgments, dealing with people, even governing. During the Song and Ming dynasties in China, the term kung fu was widely used by the neo-Confucians, the Daoists and Buddhists alike for the art of living one’s life in general, and they all unequivocally spoke of their teachings as different schools of kung fu.

This broad understanding of kung fu is a key (though by no means the only key) through which we can begin to understand traditional Chinese philosophy and the places in which it meets and departs from philosophical traditions of the West. As many scholars have pointed out, the predominant orientation of traditional Chinese philosophy is the concern about how to live one’s life, rather than finding out the truth about reality.

The well-known question posed by Zhuangzi in the 4th century B.C. — was he Zhuangzi who had dreamt of being a butterfly or was he a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi? — which pre-dated virtual reality and “The Matrix” by a couple of thousand years, was as much a kung fu inspiration as it was an epistemological query. Instead of leading to a search for certainty, as Descartes’s dream did, Zhuangzi came to the realization that he had perceived “the transformation of things,” indicating that one should go along with this transformation rather than trying in vain to search for what is real.

Confucius’s call for “rectification of names” — one must use words appropriately — is more a kung fu method for securing sociopolitical order than for capturing the essence of things, as “names,” or words, are placeholders for expectations of how the bearer of the names should behave and be treated. This points to a realization of what J. L. Austin calls the “performative” function of language. Similarly, the views of Mencius and his later opponent Xunzi’s views about human nature are more recommendations of how one should view oneself in order to become a better person than metaphysical assertions about whether humans are by nature good or bad. Though each man’s assertions about human nature are incompatible with each other, they may still function inside the Confucian tradition as alternative ways of cultivation.
continued next post

[GeneChing]

The Buddhist doctrine of no-self surely looks metaphysical, but its real aim is to free one from suffering, since according to Buddhism suffering comes ultimately from attachment to the self. Buddhist meditations are kung fu practices to shake off one’s attachment, and not just intellectual inquiries for getting propositional truth.

Mistaking the language of Chinese philosophy for, in Richard Rorty’s phrase, a “mirror of nature” is like mistaking the menu for the food. The essence of kung fu — various arts and instructions about how to cultivate the person and conduct one’s life — is often hard to digest for those who are used to the flavor and texture of mainstream Western philosophy. It is understandable that, even after sincere willingness to try, one is often still turned away by the lack of clear definitions of key terms and the absence of linear arguments in classic Chinese texts. This, however, is not a weakness, but rather a requirement of the kung fu orientation — not unlike the way that learning how to swim requires one to focus on practice and not on conceptual understanding. Only by going beyond conceptual descriptions of reality can one open up to the intelligence that is best exemplified through arts like dancing and performing.

This sensitivity to the style, subtle tendencies and holistic vision requires an insight similar to that needed to overcome what Jacques Derrida identified as the problem of Western logocentrism. It even expands epistemology into the non-conceptual realm in which the accessibility of knowledge is dependent on the cultivation of cognitive abilities, and not simply on whatever is “publicly observable” to everyone. It also shows that cultivation of the person is not confined to “knowing how.” An exemplary person may well have the great charisma to affect others but does not necessarily know how to affect others. In the art of kung fu, there is what Herbert Fingarette calls “the magical,” but “distinctively human” dimension of our practicality, a dimension that “always involves great effects produced effortlessly, marvelously, with an irresistible power that is itself intangible, invisible, unmanifest.”[2]

Pierre Hadot and Martha Nussbaum, partially as a result of the world-historical dialogue of philosophy in our time, have both tried to “rectify the name” of “philosophy” by showing that ancient Western philosophers such as Socrates, the Stoics and the Epicurians were mainly concerned with virtue, with spiritual exercises and practices for the sake of living a good life rather than with pure theoretical endeavors.[3] In this regard, Western philosophy at its origin is similar to classic Chinese philosophy. The significance of this point is not merely in revealing historical facts. It calls our attention to a dimension that has been eclipsed by the obsession with the search for eternal, universal truth and the way it is practiced, namely through rational arguments. Even when philosophers take their ideas as pure theoretical discourse aimed at finding the Truth, their ideas have never stopped functioning as guides to human life. The power of modern enlightenment ideas have been demonstrated fully both in the form of great achievements we have witnessed since the modern era and in the form of profound problems we are facing today. Our modes of behavior are very much shaped by philosophical ideas that looked innocent enough to be taken for granted. It is both ironic and alarming that when Richard Rorty launched full-scale attacks on modern rationalistic philosophy, he took for granted that philosophy can only take the form of seeking for objective Truth. His rejection of philosophy falls into the same trap that he cautions people about — taking philosophical ideas merely as “mirrors” and not as “levers.”

One might well consider the Chinese kung fu perspective a form of pragmatism. The proximity between the two is probably why the latter was well received in China early last century when John Dewey toured the country. What the kung fu perspective adds to the pragmatic approach, however, is its clear emphasis on the cultivation and transformation of the person, a dimension that is already in Dewey and William James but that often gets neglected. A kung fu master does not simply make good choices and use effective instruments to satisfy whatever preferences a person happens to have. In fact the subject is never simply accepted as a given. While an efficacious action may be the result of a sound rational decision, a good action that demonstrates kung fu has to be rooted in the entire person, including one’s bodily dispositions and sentiments, and its goodness is displayed not only through its consequences but also in the artistic style one does it. It also brings forward what Charles Taylor calls the “background” — elements such as tradition and community — in our understanding of the formation of a person’s beliefs and attitudes. Through the kung fu approach, classic Chinese philosophy displays a holistic vision that brings together these marginalized dimensions and thereby forces one to pay close attention to the ways they affect each other.

This kung fu approach shares a lot of insights with the Aristotelian virtue ethics, which focuses on the cultivation of the agent instead of on the formulation of rules of conduct. Yet unlike Aristotelian ethics, the kung fu approach to ethics does not rely on any metaphysics for justification. One does not have to believe in a pre-determined telos for humans in order to appreciate the excellence that kung fu brings. This approach does lead to recognition of the important guiding function of metaphysical outlooks though. For instance a person who follows the Aristotelian metaphysics will clearly place more effort in cultivating her intelligence, whereas a person who follows the Confucian relational metaphysics will pay more attention to learning rituals that would harmonize interpersonal relations. This approach opens up the possibility of allowing multiple competing visions of excellence, including the metaphysics or religious beliefs by which they are understood and guided, and justification of these beliefs is then left to the concrete human experiences.

The kung fu approach does not entail that might is right. This is one reason why it is more appropriate to consider kung fu as a form of art. Art is not ultimately measured by its dominance of the market. In addition, the function of art is not accurate reflection of the real world; its expression is not constrained to the form of universal principles and logical reasoning, and it requires cultivation of the artist, embodiment of virtues/virtuosities, and imagination and creativity. If philosophy is “a way of life,” as Pierre Hadot puts it, the kung fu approach suggests that we take philosophy as the pursuit of the art of living well, and not just as a narrowly defined rational way of life.

REFERENCES

[1] York, Geoffrey, “Battling Clichés in Birthplace of Kung Fu,” in The Globe and Mail Nov. 3, 2005.

[2] Herbert Fingarette (1972): “Confucius —The Secular as Sacred,” New York: Harper & Row, 4-6.

[3] See Pierre Hadot (1995): “Philosophy as a Way of Life,” Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, and Martha Nussbaum (1994): “The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics,” Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Peimin Ni

Peimin Ni is professor of philosophy at Grand Valley State University. He currently serves as the president of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy and is editor-in-chief of a book series on Chinese and comparative philosophy. His most recent book is “Confucius: Making the Way Great.”
I'll have a parallel comment on this later today with a new ezine article I've just finished.

[richard sloan]

interesting read, thanks for posting this gene.

[wenshu]

I've always been fascinated by the parallells between the Pre-socratics and so called eastern philosophy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empedocles



Schopenhauer based his entire system on the Vedas.

The World as Will and Representation

Nietzsche, despite being outwardly polemical towards buddhism, is strikingly compatible with eastern thought.

"Become who you are."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return

[ShaolinDan]

Great reading here. Makes me feel like I'm back in school. :) Always enjoyed drawing parallels.

[PalmStriker]

Great read! EXACTAMUNDO! :)

[curenado]

Nice article.
There has been so much focus on the combat styles over the last few years, that it is good to see some balancing affirmation on the truer nature of Kung Fu. We would say "There is a kung fu of wu shu" but many people get them intetwined these days.

[GeneChing]

Peimin Ni just published a follow-up.

December 21, 2010, 4:20 pm
Philosophers for Kung Fu: A Response (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/21/philosophers-for-kung-fu-a-response/)
By PEIMIN NI

Thanks to all the readers who have commented on my previous article in the Stone “Kung Fu for Philosophers.” I found many comments thoughtful and inspiring, for which I am deeply grateful. Instead of trying to respond to all, as it is obviously impractical, I would like to offer some additional remarks to supplement my previous article as my response.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/12/21/opinion/stone_kungfucalligraphy/stone_kungfucalligraphy-articleInline.jpg
Peimin Ni “Kung Fu”

Several years ago, I was invited for lunch by a man named Wu Bing, who was the former martial arts coach of the kung fu movie star Jet Li. Mr. Wu and I did not know each other, and I had no idea why he invited me for lunch. I was more puzzled when I got there — Mr. Wu insisted that I be seated in the most prominent spot, and placed himself and all his associates at the table in lesser positions. With the ritual setting in order, he then humbly presented me a classic martial arts manual, and asked if I could explain the introduction of the book for him. “It is full of philosophical terms,” he said. “I have trouble understanding it.”

I looked at the manual. It was on a martial arts style called xingyi quan. While the main body of the book was about postures and movements of the body and energy, which Mr. Wu had no trouble interpreting, the introduction was basically a treatise about metaphysics. It contained views derived from the Song dynasty neo-Confucian scholar Zhou Dunyi, in which an abstract concept, called wuji, the ultimate non-being, takes a central role as ontologically prior to taiji (t’ai chi), or “the primordial ultimate.” Oddly enough, the author offered no indication about how the ideas should be translated into the martial arts, as if it were all self-evident.

Thanks to Mr. Wu’s practical background and drawing on my own philosophical training and experience in the practice of Chinese calligraphy art — a form of kung fu which is deeply influenced by traditional Chinese philosophy — it did not take me long to convey the basic ideas to him and help him see the intellectual connection between the metaphysics and the martial arts, though we both aware perfectly well that it would take lots of cultivation for the connection to be embodied and manifested in the practice. The point is basically to empty oneself (including the metaphysical idea), so that, paradoxically, one can achieve unification of the self and the world! Mr. Wu sighed, regretfully, “Today’s martial arts practitioners focus too much on the surface performances. That is not real kung fu!”

I share this story here is because a few commenters raised the question of whether my original post was denouncing the practical significance of the theoretical pursuit for truth, despite the fact that I wrote, “Philosophers’ ideas, even when theoretical, have never stopped functioning as guides to human life.” The misreading, however, made me aware that I need to give the other side of the practical-theoretical coin the weight that it deserves.

Even though, as I wrote in the first post, a menu should not be mistaken for food, this does not mean that the menu is worthless for getting food, nor does it entail the demand that everything that can serve as a menu must be created for the sake of getting food. What is “alarming” is not that some people like to think for thinking’s sake or purely for the search of truth; it is rather that when this way of doing philosophy becomes dominant, we tend to forget that there can be other ways of thinking and other values or implications of philosophizing. Just as Zhou Dunyi’s metaphysics can be taken as a guiding principle for xingyi quan, calligraphy, or any other kung fu defined in the broad way and not merely as a mirror of reality, virtually all philosophical ideas can inform human practice and have practical implications. Hence the relationship between kung fu and philosophy goes both ways: As much as we philosophers need to open our vision for the kung fu perspective, all forms of kung fu depend on philosophical ideas, one way or another. Whether good or bad, theories mold our patterns of behavior and even transform us. While attachment to conceptual truth will block one’s path toward higher levels of kung fu, so will a kung fu practitioner have trouble reaching higher stages of perfection if they lack good philosophical guidance, including proper conceptual resources.

Trying to obtain the truth and yet frustrated by the postmodern deconstruction of the project, many people today find themselves facing the dilemma of either embracing relativism or falling back to dogmatic absolutism. The kung fu approach helps us to see the instructional value of our apparently endless philosophical disputes. This is exactly why I propose the term “kung fu,” understood properly, as not only a guide toward more fruitful reading of traditional Chinese philosophy but also as an approach (though obviously not as the only approach) through which we can evaluate philosophies of all traditions.

We philosophers are proud of discovering hidden assumptions and often feel that we have beaten every bush and asked all the perennial questions that philosophers care to ask. But it does not take much reflection to realize that we devote a lot of attention to the pursuit of propositional truth and very little toward exploring the the transformation of the human subject. We have fields of study that bare some proximity to the subject, such as action theory and praxiology, but one thing that may push these fields of study further is for us to move our focus from mere actions or praxis to kung fu — namely to the transformation and enabling of the human subject. Could the concept of “kung fu” link the practitioner to action in such a way that actions would no longer be treated merely as the result of rational choices or impulses or technical/managerial procedures, but also as the result of cultivation? Could it lead to a shift in our study of human actions and praxis similar to the one in ethics that resulted in a renewed interest in the moral agent? There is a lot of work to do.

Perhaps I did a fine job in helping Mr. Wu, but I can’t help feeling uneasy about the prominent seat that Mr. Wu had me sit in. We philosophers are wise more in the sense of knowing that we don’t know, but on the other hand, people like Mr. Wu look up to us for our guidance, and they have a good reason for that — because our philosophical ideas do matter.
I love his menu analogy.

[r.(shaolin)]

http://www.schroederinc.net/stone_kungfucalligraphy-articleInline.jpg

That is one amazing piece of calligraphy- the Professor has gung-fu.
Love the article and the comments as well.
r.

[TaichiMantis]

This is my classmate's professor! She just facebooked me the article and follow-up ;)

[WildBill]

The philosophy Phenomenology, as described by Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl is ideal for communicating Shaolin and Buddhist concepts.

Husserl states that the ego's transcendence of the world, leaves the world spread out and completely transparent before the conscious. In phenomenology, it is Wesensschau (the intuition of essences), that one reaches the invariant nature of things

‘Husserl made some key conceptual elaborations which led him to assert that in order to study the structure of consciousness, one would have to distinguish between the act of consciousness (noesis) and the phenomena at which it is directed (the noemata). Knowledge of essences would only be possible by "bracketing" all assumptions about the existence of an external world.
…
Husserl proposed a radical new phenomenological way of looking at objects by examining how we, in our many ways of being intentionally directed toward them, actually "constitute" them (to be distinguished from materially creating objects or objects merely being figments of the imagination); in the Phenomenological attitude, the object ceases to be something simply "external" and ceases to be seen as providing indicators about what it is (a way of looking that is most explicitly delineated by the natural sciences), and becomes a grouping of perceptual and functional aspects that imply one another under the idea of a particular object or "type". The notion of objects as real is not expelled by phenomenology, but "bracketed" as a way in which we regard objects instead of a feature that inheres in an object's essence founded in the relation between the object and the perceiver. In order to better understand the world of appearances and objects, Phenomenology attempts to identify the invariant features of how objects are perceived and pushes attributions of reality into their role as an attribution about the things we perceive (or an assumption underlying how we perceive objects).’

From: http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/Edmund_Husserl_-_Life_and_works/id/1352218

Buddhist meditation also deals with the separation of an object from the viewer, and rather becomes one with it.

‘For many Buddhists, the Dharma most often means the body of teachings expounded by the Buddha. The word is also used in Buddhist phenomenology as a term roughly equivalent to phenomenon, a basic unit of existence and/or experience …

At the heart of Buddhism is the understanding of all phenomena as dependently originated.

Later, Buddhist philosophers like Nāgārjuna would question whether the dharmas (momentary elements of consciousness) truly have a separate existence of their own. (i.e. Do they exist apart from anything else?) Rejecting any inherent reality to the dharmas, he asked (rhetorically)’
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharma

‘In this article, I wish to sketch an additional comparison -- in this instance, between the ālayavijñāna of Buddhist idealism and the "flux" of Husserlian idealism, a structure also termed inner-time consciousness. In particular I will show the extent to which one phase of Husserl's notion of consciousness can illuminate some of the theoretical problems which emerge from the doctrine of the ālaya. As we shall see, the similarities between the flux and the ālaya may stem, in part, from attempts on the part of both philosophies to ground the particularity of the ego-experienced spatio-temporal realm in a primordial consciousness of some sort.

The article will take the following course: I will first outline the important points of the Yogācāra system, with emphasis on the doctrine of the ālaya and its mode of operation. Next, I will discuss the Husserlian notion of the flux and compare it with the ālaya in a preliminary way. The final section will be an effort at extending the metaphysical implications of the comparison to its furthest point; hopefully, some additional insight into the problems inherent in the doctrine of the ālaya will result.
M. J. Larrabee is Assistant Professor of Philosophy, et De Paul University, Chicago, Illinios. Philosophy East and West 31, no. 1 ( January, 1981 ). © by The University Press of Hawaii. All rights reserved. ‘

From: http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=B5AF0DE9741CB8B173D60 23CE01B7901.inst3_2a?docId=95207593

****
December 21, 2010, 4:20 pm
Philosophers for Kung Fu: A Response
By PEIMIN NI

What is “alarming” is not that some people like to think for thinking’s sake or purely for the search of truth; it is rather that when this way of doing philosophy becomes dominant, we tend to forget that there can be other ways of thinking and other values or implications of philosophizing. Just as Zhou Dunyi’s metaphysics can be taken as a guiding principle for xingyi quan, calligraphy, or any other kung fu defined in the broad way and not merely as a mirror of reality, virtually all philosophical ideas can inform human practice and have practical implications. Hence the relationship between kung fu and philosophy goes both ways: As much as we philosophers need to open our vision for the kung fu perspective, all forms of kung fu depend on philosophical ideas, one way or another.

[Wildwoo]

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/kung-fu-for-philosophers/

[Lucas]

"the art of living one’s life"

I like that.

[Wildwoo]

The "kung fu" stuff is a bit trite and cringe-worthy, but i thought the comparative part was interesting.

[Hebrew Hammer]

Enjoyed that thoroughly...keep em coming.

[Wildwoo]

Great plug in Gene thanks.