ORBIS IDEARUM Appearance, Reality, and Beyond edited by MICHEL HENRI KOWALEWICZ History of Ideas Research Centre at Jagiellonian University in Krakow Volume 1, Issue 1 (2013) !is issue is funded by the "National Program for the Development of the Humanities" of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Poland. © History of Ideas Research Centre at Jagiellonian University in Krakow proofreading: Anna Juraschek desktop publishing: Dawid Kamil Wieczorek editorial assistant: Konrad Szocik TABLE OF CONTENTS Orbis Idearum. History of Ideas NetMag . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Michel Henri Kowalewicz Preamble . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Gunter Scholtz Die Vernunft als Quelle des Scheins. Kants Vernunftkritik und ihre Folgen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Karl Acham Über Schein und Wirklichkeit Ephemeres und Bedeutsames. Zur Aktualität alter Unterscheidungen im Lichte neuer Fragen . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Riccardo Campa Il futurismo come "loso"a del divenire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Hermann Lang Schein und Realität in der Psychoanalyse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Pawe! Dybel Der Körper als Spiegel in der Philosophie der Malerei von Maurice Merleau#Ponty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 Eric S. Nelson Generativities: Western Philosophy, Chinese Painting, and the Yijing . . . . . . 97 Helmut Pulte Science and its Demarcation in the Light of the History of Ideas. A short Outline with apparent and real Implications for 'Appearance and Reality' . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. INTRODUCTION According to the historical de"nition of philosophy among Western philosophers from Hegel to his anti-historical critics Levinas, Derrida, and Rorty, non-Western peoples have many intellectual practices but in a crucial sense they lack "philosophy." !is absence meant for Hegel the want of a non-pictorial and abstract, cognitive, conceptual thinking; for later thinkers such as Levinas, Derrida, and Rorty-following a line of thinking in Heidegger that the "other beginning" can only arise in confrontation with the "rst Greek beginning-it concerns the question of a Greek origin that they seek to question and decenter that nevertheless remains the source of all that can be properly called philosophy. Even the pluralizing of this origin in marking the di$erence between Athens and Jerusalem, by distinguishing Greek rationality and Jewish prophetic justice, deepens the privilege. Levinas could accordingly remark in an interview: "I always say-but under my breath-that the Bible and the Greeks present the only serious issues in human life; everything else is dancing."2 Levinas and Hegel come to an GENERATIVITIES: WESTERN PHILOSOPHY, CHINESE PAINTING, AND THE YIJING Eric S. Nelson University of Massachusetts eric_nelson@uml.edu Orbis Idearum, Vol. 1, Issue 1 (2013), pp. 97–104 Das Vergangene ist nicht tot; es ist nicht einmal vergangen. Wir trennen es von uns ab und stellen uns fremd. Christa Wolf 1 Western philosophy has been de"ned through the exclusion of non-Western forms of thought as non-philosophical. In this paper, I place the notion of what is "properly" philosophy into question by contrasting the essence/appearance paradigm governing Western metaphysics and its deconstructive critics with the more %uid, dynamic, and participatory forms of encountering and performatively enacting the world that are articulated in Chinese thinking and made apparent in Chinese painting. In this hermeneutical contrast, Western and Chinese thinking themselves are interpeted as co-relational rather than as discrete, mutually indi$erent or ethnocentrically nativist traditions. C. Wolf: Kindheitsmuster. Frankfurt am Main: Luchterhand 1979, p. 11. E. Levinas / J. Robbins: Is It Righteous to Be?: Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2001, p. 149. 1 2 Eric S. Nelson98 agreement that what is not properly philosophy, or in Levinas's case the Jewish other of philosophy, remains mere sensuousness and lacks the seriousness of the concept. !e problematic character of metaphysics remains an exclusively philosophical and thus Western concern for the deconstructive critics of the Western philosophical tradition such as Derrida and Rorty whose challenges to the Western canon continue to privilege it.3 !e issue here cannot only be one of transference, inheritance, and lineage, as Arabic and Islamic philosophy deeply relies on and is indebted to the heritage of Plato and Aristotle. Nonetheless, beyond the unphilosophical assertion of the ethnic and racial origins of philosophy,-one might examine the question "philosophically" by inquiring into what intellectual forms would di$erentiate Western and non-Western thought. !e answer, particularly in the context of the contrast between Western philosophy and Chinese thinking, often appeals to (1) the distinction between reality and appearance and (2) the-not unrelated-priority of the logical as the assertion of a form independent of all content. !e formalism of reason ascends beyond all sensuousness and materiality just as reality purportedly transcends the %owing change and inconstancy of appearance and phenomenon. 2. A CHINESE PAINTING In a recent work, T. Minh-Ha Trinh describes the practices of traditional Chinese painting and how they, "rather than seeking resemblance with nature's outward appearance (xing ), involve the movement of its becomingness."4 To take one example, for the poet and painter Wang Wei (699–759), "paintings, in their language of brush, form and symbol, should inscribe the ever-changing processes of nature."5 Wang Wei's %ow of the brush in painting a landscape situated between earth and sky, in which the painter is inevitably a participant, echoes the shifting lines of the Yijing (Classic of Changes) and the interpreter's integral participation in the generative process of meaning-formation.6 I discuss these issues in further detail in E. S. Nelson: "!e Yijing and Philosophy: From Leibniz to Derrida". In: Journal of Chinese Philosophy 38:3, September 2011, pp. 377–396. Levinas and Derrida's Eurocentric vision is extended in R. Gasché: Europe, or the In"nite Task: A Study of a Philosophical Concept. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2009, and P. Nemo: What Is the West? Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press 2006. T. Minh-Ha Trinh: Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event. London: Routledge 2011, p. 69. Ibid.; Mai-mai Sze / Gai Wang, #e Tao of Painting; A Study of the Ritual Disposition of Chinese Painting. London: Routledge & K. Paul 1957, p. 40. Ibid., p. 69. 3 4 5 6 Generativities: Western Philosophy, Chinese Painting, and the Yijing 99 Picture One: An Example of Wang Wei style. Wang Shimin ( , 1592–1680), After Wang Wei's "Clearing of Rivers and Mountains after Snow" ( ). Hanging scroll, ink and colors on paper, 133.7 x 60 cm, National Palace Museum, Taipei.7 Eric S. Nelson100 In this work of ink and color on paper, the painter does not aim at imitatively copying the real and producing "the appearance of reality" as if there could be a reproductive or representational correspondence between the seeing and the seen. Chinese painting does not occur according to the Platonic conception of ideas. Nor does it improperly create a semblance or shadow of the real, a rei"cation of the invisible in the visible, which Levinas depicts-redoubling despite himself the ontological distinction of appearance and essence in a religious-ethical language- as idolatry in his essay "Reality and Its Shadow" (1948).8 Levinas adopts a language that denigrates "appearance" as seductive semblance, as he further warns us of "the charm of sorcery, the appearance in the very heart of the real, the dissolution of reality."9 !e Luciferian play of appearances is a deceptive shadowing of reality that does not recognize itself as deception and precludes the ethical obligation that can only be revealed in the transcendence of the face-to-face encounter.10 !e experience of the natural world in Wang Shimin's painting, which is experientially enacted in creative response to his world and the traditions of response that orient it, is not a mere "landscape" for the detached seer. It does not seek to reproduce "the real" and thus denigrate it in idolatry. !e Chinese painter does not create like God ex nihilo nor recreate what is already predetermined by that creation risking betraying its glory and height. It is neither "Greek" nor "Jewish" -to the extent that these categories can be represented as respectively Platonic and Levinasian-in the sense of detached rational contemplation or a confrontation with the paganism of "nite sensuous nature for the sake of ethical in"nity.11 Instead, the Chinese painter in this case co-mediates and co-creates a world. !e painter participates in the very generativities of natural processes by enacting them for her or himself. !is is not participation in the sense of an irrational absorption in the phenomena without re%ection or criticism. !is participation encompasses re%ection, sensibility, and a$ectivity in being responsive from out of and toward one's environing world and in the creative generative co-formation of self and world. Description and image from: http://www.chinaonlinemuseum.com/painting-wang-shimin-clearingafter-snow.php [accessed 1 May 2013]. E. Lévinas: Collected Philosophical Papers. Dordrecht: M. Nijho$ 1987, pp. 1–13. Id.: Nine Talmudic Readings. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1990, p. 143. Id.: Otherwise #an Being: Or, Beyond Essence. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers 1991, p. 123. I discuss the issue of nature in Levinas further in "Levinas and Adorno: Can there be an Ethics of Nature?" In: Faces of Nature: Levinasian Ethics and Environmental Philosophy, ed. by W. Edelglass / J. Hatley / C. Diehm, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press 2012, pp. 109–133. 7 8 9 10 11 Generativities: Western Philosophy, Chinese Painting, and the Yijing 101 3. THE LOGIC OF APPEARANCE AND REALITY IN CHINESE PHILOSOPHY AND THE YIJING Contemporary proponents of the genuineness of non-Western varieties of philosophy have noted the key role of the distinction between essential reality and shadowy appearance in debates over their possibility. In the case of Chinese thought, Roger Ames has noted that the prevalent traditional "East Asian world view [does] not begin from the dualistic 'two-world' reality/appearance distinction familiar in classical Greek metaphysics."12 Ames is correct to maintain that early Chinese thinking does not involve the otherworldly transcendence typical of the GrecoJudaic-Christian tradition. Nor does early Chinese thought, however, begin in the monistic immanence of a speculative totality that is likewise characteristic of Western philosophy and critiqued by advocates such as Kierkegaard and Levinas of a singularity that escapes the universal. Chinese philosophical thought, particularly the thinking informed by early Daoism and the Confucian reception of the Yijing, is an a$ective and re%ective response to the natural, social, and individual world. !rough individual and social sensibility and dialogical exchange, the world is revealed as immanent yet transformative (internally self-generating and dynamically changing in movement), individual yet contextual (each particular is itself in relation to each other particular being itself ).13 One of the primary paradigms for Chinese cultural and intellectual traditions is a work that began as divination and became a guide to the natural world and cosmos, the Yijing. !e Yijing was, according to the ancient sages, inspired by the processes of nature themselves and imitates them not as a semblance re%ecting a "xed predetermined reality but as changing con"gurations and symbols that participate in the %owing transformative processes of nature. !e ancient sages, it is said, "were able to survey all phenomena under heaven and, considering their forms and appearances, 'symbolized' (xiang ) things and their proper attributes. !ese were called 'symbols' (xiang)."14 !e word xiang here can mean: con"guration, "gure, image, or symbol.15 According to the contemporary Chinese philosopher Chung-ying Cheng, Chinese thought-beginning with the Yijing-does not require a bifurcated division between reality and appearance. Rather, Chinese thought holds that reality simply R. Ames: "East Asian Philosophy". In: Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Vol. 7, ed. by E. Craig, London: Routledge 1998, p. 193. I explore this tendency in early Daoism in relation to Kant's Critique of Judgment. In: E. S. Nelson: "Kant and China: Aesthetics, Race, and Nature". In: Journal of Chinese Philosophy 38 (2011–4), pp. 509–525. R. F. Campany: "Xunzi and Durkheim as !eorists of Ritual Practice". In: Discourse and Practice, ed. by F. Reynolds / D. Tracy, Albany: State University of New York Press 1992, p. 206. Encyclopedia of Taoism, ed. by F. Pregadio, London: Routledge 2005, Vol. 1, p. 1086. 12 13 14 15 Eric S. Nelson102 consists in "the incessant and constant change of all things."16 It does not abstract and reify a form separated from the dynamic logic of the plural relations of particulars for which the Yijing presents multiple-at least sixty four-interpretive models. !is onto-hermeneutics, as Cheng designates the logic of the Yijing-tradition, is a temporal one. Cheng maintains that the di$erence between Western and Chinese philosophy re%ects two distinct experiences of time: "In separating reality from appearance ... the ancient Greeks sought the immutable and unmoved as the essence of the real and the objective. In contrast, the ancient Chinese from the very beginning recognized and accepted change and transformation as irreducible attributes of the world."17 Do the Chinese then have no sense of the distinction between semblance and reality? Does Chinese thought entail drifting along in a "%oating world" of phenomena without form and measure? Of course not; the manifold shifting patterns of reality and multiple hermeneutical paradigms of the Yijing allow for the recognition of deception and of the tension and di$erence between external semblance and internal truth, as in the Mandarin saying bi!o l" bù y& . Accordingly, to mention one example, hexagram 23, Bo (splitting apart or peeling), of the Yijing speaks of separating the essential from the apparent. !is di$erentiation of appearance and reality is, however, only one moment of the generative movement of things that is traced and indicated through the models of the Yijing. !is moment is recognized alongside other moments. !erefore, it cannot establish an unchanging constant essence underlying changing appearances. To this extent, truth and knowledge do not require the rei"cation of this bifurcation provided that they can be distinguished when appropriate. Furthermore, the word xing that is often translated as "appearance," also means shape, form, "gure, and body. In this context, xing should be understood not merely as a becoming visible or the semblance of the real, as an idol or shadow of reality, but as the material manifestation that is reality itself. We can note here once again the variance between the visible as an arena for a detached and independent observer, who seeks to neutrally contemplate and recreate a pregiven reality in art or in ideas, and the visible as an interactive "eld for an involved and moved participant in the %ows and forces of reality. !e qualitative experientially-rooted participant perspective becomes visible in Chinese art and philosophy. Yet just as Chinese art can exist in distinction from Greek art, in a resonating non-identity without exclusion or assimilation, Chinese philosophy can be-to think with and against Heidegger-an "other beginning" Chung-ying Cheng: "Onto-Hermeneutical Vision and Analytic Discourse: Interpretation and Reconstruction in Chinese Philosophy". In: Two Roads to Wisdom?: Chinese and Analytic Philosophical Traditions, ed. by Bo Mou, Chicago: Open Court 2001, p. 94. Id.: "!e Origins of Chinese Philosophy". In: Companion Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy, ed. by B. Carr / I. Mahalingam, London: Routledge 1997, p. 452. 16 17 Generativities: Western Philosophy, Chinese Painting, and the Yijing 103 in confrontation with its ""rst" Greek beginning.18 In the formation of the relation between the two beginnings, there is room for both boundless reversal and a transversal. Based on the correlational transformational thinking of the Yijing, there can be no absolute di$erence between philosophy and non-philosophy or one between West and East. 4. CONCLUSION In his commentary on the Yijing, Wang Bi remarked: !e language twists and turns but hits the mark. (Change and transformation lack any consistency, so no de"nite paradigms can be made for them. !is is why the text says: "!e language twists and turns but hits the mark").19 !ere is no discernible underlying constancy that could serve as the basis of one de"nitive paradigm or model of the myriad things. !oughts and words must twist and turn in how they encounter the myriad things and in that moment respond opportunely and appropriately, as the myriad things themselves twist and turn. Timing, the moments when words and things encounter each other and hit the mark in the midst of their transformations, is more speci"c to reality than its rei"cation through the projection of a "xed and static form or essence. Reality is encountered and experienced in and as change. !e multiple "appearances" of the real call for the ongoing co-relation of multiple orientating perspectives and models, as seen in the forms and images of the Yijing and their numerous variations and combinations. In the philosophy of Wang Bi, these moments can be traced from their incipience to their occurrence. !e Yijing then cannot be described as providing isolated metaphysical truths or basic constitutive elements of a hidden essential reality behind this apparent empirical reality. !ere are not two distinct worlds, nor one unchanging monistic world order. A world-nexus of myriad di$erences in relation is indicated in the dialectical generative logic of the Yijing. In the co-relational approach to transformational reality, the numerous models and examples indicated in the Yijing are opportunities for self-re%ection and self-cultivation. !e Yijing is On Heidegger's "rst and other beginning and early Chinese thinking, see my articles: "Responding to Heaven and Earth: Daoism, Heidegger and Ecology". In: Environmental Philosophy Vol. 1 (2004–2), pp. 65–74; "Heidegger, Misch, and the Origins of Philosophy". In: Journal of Chinese Philosophy 39, Supplemental Issue, 2012. Wang Bi / R. J. Lynn: #e Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as interpreted by Wang Bi. New York: Columbia University Press 2004, p. 87. 18 19 in a sense formally indicative of the concrete empirical multiplicities that are encountered and engaged in one manner or another. !e Tang dynasty poet and philosopher Liu Yuxi (772–84) accordingly commented that: "!e ideal terrain of poetry rises beyond and without images"; and "!e Yijing comes from something beyond appearance, beyond image."20 We have seen in this paper how the non-duality of reality and appearance can become evident though the broader context of reality that immanently generates itself from within. Yet doesn't this leave us tied to the pictorial not purely conceptual thinking that Hegel and Derrida associate with the Chinese language? It is important to note that the painter, the poet, and the interpreter of the Yijing do not prioritize the ocularcentric image that seduces and absorbs pure seeing nor merely rely on the pictorial traces of reality. !e disclosive event of truth is deeply personal as well as cosmological in this Chinese context. It exceeds the pictorial conceptualization of reality, as there is inevitably the spoken word and what is indicated through image and sound in Chinese languages. !e classical Chinese language is not a snapshot or intuition of the real as both its critics and naïve acolytes from Hegel to Ezra Pound have contended. It is a hermeneutics tracing and articulating the mediations of sound, image, materiality, and energy. It does not only passively follow the %ow of things and their dictation; it can responsively and co-generatively participate in the becoming, change, and %ow of the world itself. Translations from Xiaodong Bai: #e Tang Concept of Yijing and the Tang Regulated Verse (dissertation). 20 Eric S. Nelson104 AUTHORS Karl Acham, sociologist, philosopher, and historian of science; professor emeritus at the University of Graz. His research focuses on the history of philosophical and sociological ideas, the history of philosophy, the philosophy of culture, methodology of science, and social anthropology. Riccardo Campa, sociologist; professor at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. His research focuses mainly on science and technology studies, social theory, philosophy and the sociology of science, bioethics, futurism, and the history of ideas. Pawe' Dybel, philosopher; professor at the University of Warsaw, and the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. His research focuses on the history of ideas, hermeneutics, phenomenology, psychoanalytic theories, and political philosophy. Michel Henri Kowalewicz, historian of ideas and philosophy; professor at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, founder and head of the "History of Ideas Research Centre". His research focuses on di$erent models of Enlightenment and circulation of ideas and texts in Eighteenth-Century Europe. Hermann Lang, psychiatrist, and philosopher; professor at the University of Würzburg. His research focuses on psychoanalysis, psychosomatics, psychotherapy, medical psychology, psychiatry, philosophy, and the history of ideas. Eric S. Nelson, philosopher; professor at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. His research focuses on ethics, hermeneutics, Chinese philosophy, the history of ideas, and the philosophy of culture, nature, and religion. Helmut Pulte, philosopher; professor at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. His research focuses on philosophy, the history of ideas, the history of mathematics, philosophical anthropology, and the philosophy and history of science – especially within the "elds of physics and biology. Gunter Scholtz, philosopher; professor emeritus at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. His research focuses on the philosophy of history, religion and art, hermeneutics, Dilthey studies, Schleiermacher's philosophy, the history of ideas, and the history of concepts.