> TLDR; Monkey Goes East restarted as ‘Sinosophy; expect monthly essays.
There's a very famous definition of philosophy by Wilfrid Sellers, where he says that it aims ‘to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.’ And if you're a philosopher in this sense, you have a theory of how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. That's a positive conception of philosophy, philosophy that leads to doctrines and theories and systems. Maybe Sellers’ version is closest to a system?
But there's also an alternative approach to philosophy, which makes it look more like art or poetry. It's philosophy that's channeled as a mood or as an atmosphere. And in the last couple of hundred years, that is the way moderners have often experienced non-Western philosophy. When we talk about Oriental philosophy - and I'm using that somewhat pejorative term deliberately - we often encounter it in spiritualist terms, or as a way of life, and not a specific theory of how the world hangs together.
The spiritualist-way of life label was eagerly embraced by many traditionalists themselves, who were colonial subjects demeaned and dominated by Western intellectual and scientific traditions. In response, they said: "Oh, well, those guys are better about the nature of matter, but we still have monopoly over the spiritual life, and our philosophy is way better as lived philosophy than anything these scientized and alienated westerners are offering." I don't want to get into whether this is the right way to position yourself against a dominant tradition, but I see these attempts at casting Indian or Chinese or Japanese philosophy as a way of life or a spiritual philosophy - say, in the way we consume Talks with Ramana Maharshi, I am That, or the way Alan Watts wrote as a western interpreter of East Asian traditions, or Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind as an example of the East coming West - as conveying a mood or an atmosphere generated by a tradition rather than an exposition of its doctrines. The rebels against this cause were the professors - people like Bimal Matilal who wanted to teach Indian philosophy at Oxford or Harvard in the philosophy department, and that required some penance to show how rigorous and rational Indian philosophy has been over the ages.
But rigor has the stench of rigor mortis; after enormous labor, you are allowed to give a talk in some minor section of the American Philosophical Association’s annual conference, but most people don’t care. The woke have left you behind as too brahminical for the cooler parts of campus, and the philosophers reading Kripke for the 35th time weren’t going to let you teach logic to their students were they? And don’t even talk to me about those stuck making outlandish claims about spaceships and plastic surgery in the Vedas.
In contrast, the atmosphere generated by these traditions has a lot of staying power; their influence continues much after the end of decolonization. It’s now shading into Chinamaxxing as the Middle Kingdom becomes the Middle Kingdom once again. Which small town in New England or California doesn’t have a Yoga Studio? If you own an iPhone you hold an object congealed from that atmosphere. And, in that sense, the mood has traveled a lot further than any doctrine with a linear, identifiable connection to Asian philosophical traditions. Its air has seeped into homes and offices across the world.
> Hypothesis: for traditions that don’t have a clear historical connection to the modern world, it’s better to evoke them as a mood or an atmosphere than as defensible theory.
All of this is to say that my reading of Chinese thinkers and traditions is going to evoke a mood (a bouquet of ‘ways’ if you will) and not make truth claims about what those philosophers, writers and texts are saying. I’m not going to read them that way at all. I’m going to read them in the way that an artist would, the way Joyce read Homer or even as how Nolan has brought Homer to our screens than how Emily Wilson has chosen to translate the Iliad or the Odyssey.
Reading Chuang Tzu creatively isn’t a license to make things up arbitrarily. Joyce was not accountable to Homeric philology, but he was ferociously accountable to something, and that something was the atmosphere of the Odyssey: the shape of a day, the way a wanderer’s mind keeps arriving in rooms he has already left. You can get a mood wrong. A person who lives inside that mood feels the wrongness immediately, even if they can’t point to the line where you went off. Suspension of disbelief is the standard I want to be held to.
The Atmosphere of Habitability
In January I called this “The Monkey Goes East.” Confucian Asia - Japan first, then South Korea and Taiwan, then China, with Singapore and Hong Kong as instructive cousins - has produced a form of modern existence that we keep describing in borrowed terms. We club Meiji with Hiroshima and then with the American security umbrella. We file China under the communist revolution and its aftermath. That carving up worked while we all lived inside the Liberal International Order and it works badly now that we don't. I wanted to look at the period from Meiji onward as though it had its own logic, its own drivers, its own principles, and to do it with the metabology I stumbled into last year while reading Machiavelli in a planetary frame.
Kaiser Kuo and Adam Tooze supplied the provocation that China is the master key to understanding the future of modernity. But these days I am a one-trick pony, and everything I think and write about has to do with the planet in some fashion. China may not be the master key to understanding Planetarity, but it’s an essential key nevertheless, and Sinosophy is the atmospheric counterpart to the analytic investigation of Habitability I restarted a couple of weeks.
> Sinosophy: Planetarity with Chinese Characteristics.
The phrase is a borrowed joke, obviously. “With Chinese characteristics” is Deng’s formula for swallowing a foreign universal without asking the original owners for permission, and then daring anyone to say the result isn’t the real thing. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics.” It’s ideological metabolism: something comes in from outside, gets broken down, and comes out as fresh conceptual muscle. Planetarity is my reigning universal, and I want to see what happens when it’s digested by China.
Habitability, as I set it up a couple of weeks ago, asks three questions. Who maintains the metabolic order, across what durations, and in the face of what otherness. Those are engineering questions and I want them answered in protocols. But each of them has an atmospheric background, which is the question of what it feels like to live inside a planetary order. Sinosophy is going to work in that background.
There’s an ancient precedent. Qi 氣 gets translated as vital energy, which is how it ends up in wellness brochures next to yoga mats, but the character also connotes steam, breath, air, weather. Qi is atmosphere in the literal sense before its atmosphere in the figurative one. And the vernacular art built on it, Feng Shui, wind and water, is a body of practice about where to put a house given the slope of the land, the direction the cold comes from, the way water moves and where it pools. A pattern language for habitability, roughly two thousand years older than Christopher Alexander’s (though if you read his “Timeless Way of Building,” you will see the Chinese inspiration). ‘Prana’ in Sanskrit has some of the same resonances, connecting breath, atmosphere, animality and life.
I'm not going to claim Feng Shui works, no more so than I am going to claim Vastu works or Ayurveda is better than Allopathy. I don't know whether it works and I'm not equipped to find out. I am quite fine with admitting that Ayurvedic remedies often haven't been validated in clinical trials. What interests me is that a civilization built a transmissible, quasi-technical practice whose whole subject is the habitability of a site, and built it without a concept of nature standing in contrast to a concept of society. The house, the hill, the prevailing wind and the dead ancestors sit in one system.
Journey to the West is a road story in which the road is populated by beings who are not human, sometimes demonic, and mostly indifferent to the monk’s errand. Mountains that object to being crossed. Rivers with residents. A landscape you negotiate with rather than traverse. Spivak says the planet is in the species of alterity and we inhabit it on loan. The Monkey knows that in his bones, and keeps reminding the monk about it.
The Yang of Habitability has many patterns - instruments for making a concept executable, such as the Field Note, the Institutional Prototype, the Draft Protocol and the Speculative World. The Yin of Sinosophy approaches the same problems of Governance, Time and Space, and Alterity without adding atmospheric patterns. I’m suspicious of my urge to invent them, because the moment I do, I’ve turned a mood back into a system, but I am open to the possibility that a Sisyphean task is part of the deal.
I don't know whether this atmosphere will convince; I might end up assembling a flattering mood, call it a Confucian Planetarity, and end up with a pitiful version of Chinamaxxing. The test: a person born and brought up in China should be able to read this without wincing, even while thinking I’ve got every detail wrong. Suspension of disbelief with a grimace.
Monthly, then, alternating with habitability. An essay that engineers followed by an essay that evokes. Xuanzang went west and came back with sutras that took the rest of his life to translate. I'm going the other way without the Tang emperor paying for my travels. Instead of packing sutras in my return luggage, I'll settle for a few weather reports.