Atman in Advaita Vedanta: Variations on a theme from the Principal Upanishads”
HWANG, Eun Young (University of Chicago)
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- ILIEVA, Evgenia (Ithaca College) “The Place of Exile: Edward Said and Erich Auerbach in Counterpoint”
- INDRACCOLO, Lisa (University of Zurich, Switzerland) “Living the Past: The Confucian Classics as ‘Place’ of Moral Cultivation in Early Imperial China”
- ING, Michael D.K. (Indiana University) “Rethinking the Place of Value Conflicts in Early Confucian Thought”
- JAIN, Pankaj (University of North Texas) “Dharma and Science are Complementary: Himalayan Environmental Studies and Conservation Organization’s Experiments with Himalayan Communities”
- JAKUBCZAK, Marzenna (Pedagogical University of Cracow, Poland)
- JAMES, George Alfred (University of North Texas)
- JANZ, Bruce B. (University of Central Florida) “Creating and Activating Concepts in Place: The Example of African Philosophy”
- JEONG, Boram (Duquesne University/ Universit é de Paris VIII, France) “Place of the Future in the Economy of Melancholia”
- JEONG, Sang-bong (Konkuk University, Korea) “Zhu-Xi’s Metaphysics of Tai-ji ”
- JIANG, Tao (Rutgers University) "Historicist Challenges to Chinese Philosophy in the American Academy"
- JOHNSON, David W. (Boston College) “Watsuji’s Topology of the Self”
HWANG, Eun Young (University of Chicago) “The Paradoxical Place of Self: Augustine and Zhi Yi on the Innermost Place of Nowhere in the Self” In this paper, I will engage with a comparative-philosophical inquiry on the paradoxical place of self in Augustine and Zhi Yi. There has been some history of reading Augustine and the Tendai tradition (Dogen) respectively in light of the paradoxical place of the self, as can been seen from Jean Luc Marion (Marion, the Place of Self, 2008) and Nishida Kitaro (Nishida, The logic of Place and Religious Worldview, 1947). In a similar vein to these interpretations with a comparative philosophical concern, this paper addresses how Augustine and Zhi Yi argues that the self’s experience of valuation and desire in the world is shaped and transformed by the innermost source of the self which is alien to the self but traceable to the nowhere of the religious ultimate. For Augustine, the paradoxical place of eternity, which orients one’s desire and valuation in the soul’s innermost but also above it, is recovered to be the image of God, when the self turns away from one’s disordered self-centricity toward the well-ordered love of eternity. One’s initial reorientation of faith deepens the value of what she seeks and intensifies her desire through this deepening of valuation. For Zhi Yi, the paradoxical place of Buddha-nature, which generates all mental images in its untraceable nowhere, is discovered and actualized when the self discovers the truth of the middle in the inseparability of emptiness and conditioned life, thus having her ordinary valuation, active desire, and existence to be identified with the ultimate wisdom, the ultimate liberation, and the absolute reality. One’s sudden reconfiguration of reality in light of emptiness makes any instance of valuation and desire to be saturated with this radical acceptance of all infinite viewpoints and values as well as some underlying un-defilement, leading to some paradoxical attitude of committed engagement and non-attachment. ILIEVA, Evgenia (Ithaca College) “The Place of Exile: Edward Said and Erich Auerbach in Counterpoint” For some of the most prominent thinkers of the modern period, the characteristic figure of the 20th century was the refugee and exile. Both represented the underside of modernity and the failure of a discourse of human rights. For example, Hannah Arendt wrote evocatively about the experience of rootlessness and metaphysical homelessness – the loss of a sense of place or meaning in the world – and saw these as core elements in the rise of totalitarianism. Others, like Theodor Adorno, sought to transform our thinking on the question of statelessness and exile by insisting that exile was a new and better condition of being, an existence outside the reified world of modern life. Against more recent narratives of the enriching and ultimately redemptive motifs of exile, this paper returns to Edward Said’s reflections on exile as a way of rethinking the notion of place, “the notion by which during a period of displacement someone like Auerbach in Istanbul could feel himself to be out of place, exiled, alienated” (Said 1983, 8). While Said recognized the creativity of exile and brought to light the oppositional politics and secular criticism that an exilic consciousness articulates, he was keen to remind us that the aura of exile could not mask the horrors that enabled it: “that exile is irremediably secular and unbearably historical; that it is produced by human beings for other human beings; and that, like death but without death’s ultimate mercy, it has torn millions of people from the nourishment of tradition, family, and geography” (Said 2000, 174). Since Erich Auerbach is a central figure in Said’s ruminations on exile, this paper endeavors to read together these two thinkers with a view towards using their writings to rethink notions of place. More broadly, the paper seeks to situate their respective work within a broader context that saw the proliferation of discourses of world-history, world-philosophy, and world-literature in the middle decades of the 20th century. INDRACCOLO, Lisa (University of Zurich, Switzerland) “Living the Past: The Confucian Classics as ‘Place’ of Moral Cultivation in Early Imperial China” The early imperial Chinese scholarly tradition has witnessed a lively engagement with its own cultural roots, represented at best in a set of foundational texts, the five “Confucian Classics”. The teachings of the ancients as preserved in this Canon are elected as the personal inner meta-space in which cultural refinement and self-cultivation come together, and complement each other harmoniously. Such goal is proactively achieved through the assiduous, reverential frequentation of these texts, with which an intimate connection is established (Nylan 2001; Lewis 1999). Ideally, through the study of the Classics and the progressive interiorization of their teachings, the heart’s innermost intentions, pulsions, and desires are progressively tamed, and spontaneously modulated in accordance with the values embodied in the words and deeds of the sage kings of antiquity (Kern 2005; Murray 2007). Thus, unravelling the deep, subtle meaning of these texts, and disclosing the ethical teachings that might have been deliberately hidden throughout them through careful exegetical and hermeneutical work are a fundamental task of a true scholar (Schaab-Hanke 2010; Zufferey 2003). However, erudition is not merely a self-referential exercise devoted to the moral and intellectual improvement of the individual. Quite the contrary, it is imbued with a deeper meaning and invested with a broader ethical scope (Knechtges 1976, 2002; Nylan 2014). As the present paper shows, such apparent detachment from the word and bookish immersion into texts is only a temporary necessity, and should be envisioned as a fundamental step in a broader humanistic enterprise involving society at large, and aiming at the establishment of a harmonious society as ultimate goal. A scholar is invested with a duty of crucial importance, since his conduct, molded by the study of the most revered texts, embodies and exudes the values promoted in them. Accordingly, his behavior sets an example for others to follow, igniting a virtuous process that reverberates through all layers of society. The present paper explores the literati’s relationship and interaction with transmitted knowledge, the classical literary tradition and the Confucian Canon in early imperial China, with a specific focus on the role and the value of the corpus of the Classics as ethical and poietico-philosophical “place”. ING, Michael D.K. (Indiana University) “Rethinking the Place of Value Conflicts in Early Confucian Thought” In this presentation I will argue that early Confucians recognized the possibility of irresolvable value conflicts. I will begin the presentation with an overview of the ways in which several contemporary scholars have described Confucianism as a worldview without irresolvable value conflicts. Value conflicts, according to these scholars, are understood as epistemic, not ontological. In other words, many contemporary scholars assert that early Confucians understood the world as a place where tensions between values can be resolved if the skills or other capacities of the moral agent are sufficient to resolve them. Failure to tend to some value signifies a shortcoming of the moral agent, not a problem with the possibilities afforded by the world. I will challenge these narratives by looking at several vignettes that depict irresolvable value conflicts. In constructing my argument I will distinguish between a strong claim and a more moderate claim; the latter of which I wish to emphasize. I will not make the strong claim that Confucians believed that values inherently conflict. Early Confucians did not believe that we live in a fractured world where values are necessarily at odds with each other. Yet they did believe in the reality of value conflicts such that tragic circumstances are possible. In other words, early Confucians recognized the complexities of life such that even the highly skilled moral agent (i.e., a sage) could encounter a situation were the values at stake were fundamentally incapable of being harmonized. As such, early Confucians could see the world as conflictual, although they did not see the world as necessitating conflict. The Confucian conflictual world is one of possible incongruity, where minor value conflicts may even be inevitable given the complexities of life, but values in the abstract sense are not thought to be in conflict in and of themselves. In this light, deep value conflicts such as those I will discuss in this presentation may rarely occur, but the fact that they can occur, and that they can occur for even the most profound people is significant in forecasting the sentiments people have about the world they live in. JAIN, Pankaj (University of North Texas) “Dharma and Science are Complementary: Himalayan Environmental Studies and Conservation Organization’s Experiments with Himalayan Communities” This is a paper about the dharmic-social-scientific work done by Himalayan Environmental Studies and Conservation Organization (hereafter HESCO) in Himalayan villages in Uttarakhand, India. In 2012, supported by the Fulbright Fellowship for Environmental Leadership, I surveyed about a dozen districts in Uttarakhand to learn about HESCO’s projects related to sustainable development and environment. HESCO arose in the 1970s as a new organization led by its founder Dr. Anil Prakash Joshi and some of his doctoral students. As botanists, as he and his students became aware of Himalayan forestry and other ecological issues, their research increasingly became sociocentric and eventually they all gave up their academic careers and became fulltime social workers. In my research, I discovered that HESCO carries out more than social work. Following Weightman and Pandey (1978), I argue that the concept of dharma can be successfully applied as an overarching term for their socio-economic work. Dharma synthesizes their way of life with social work based on dharma’s multidimensional interpretations as I show in their work with the Himalayan communities. JAKUBCZAK, Marzenna (Pedagogical University of Cracow, Poland) “Locating the Self: Between Memory, Attention and Discrimination” The issue of the psychophysical integrity of human beings finds several interesting articulations in the classical Indian philosophical texts, including those of Sāṃkhya-Yoga tradition. A highly debatable question remains, however: where the self, the subject of perception and volition is located, since the principle of consciousness is said to be embedded neither in body nor in mind. To define the epistemic status of the rudimentary self-representation I will discuss in detail how the memory traces of the past deeds (saṃskāra), focused attention (ekāgratā), and the ability to distinguish between ‘I’ and non-‘I’ (vivekakhyāti) mutually condition one another according to Sāṃkhya and Yoga thinkers. While doing so, I will also refer to some contemporary studies of the cognitive, emotional and volitional functions developed thanks to attention regulation and monitoring meditation. JAMES, George Alfred (University of North Texas) "India in Comparative Environmental Philosophy" From the famous essay of 1967 entitled “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis, Lynn White Jr. is often credited with initiating the comparative study of environmental philosophy. His claim was that the dominant religious tradition of the West bears an enormous burden of guilt for the present environmental crisis for removing the sacred from nature, and thereby one of the principal constraints to its mindless exploitation. While White was dubious about the appropriation of non-Western perspectives to address environmental problems his thought did much to stimulate research and reflection upon views of nature both in Western and in non-Western traditions. In this essay I argue that J. Baird Callicott’s Earth’s Insights, represents one of the first scholarly efforts to examine nature in philosophical and religious traditions on a global scale. In terms of his treatment of the traditions of India it represents the first of three distinct phases of scholarship concerning India in this new sub-discipline. I argue that two subsequent phases of scholarship about Indian philosophical and religious attitudes to nature are indebted to his pioneering work. Such scholarship has developed and refined new insights and opened new vistas that have enriched both comparative philosophy and the comparative study of religion. JANZ, Bruce B. (University of Central Florida) “Creating and Activating Concepts in Place: The Example of African Philosophy” There are no simple concepts. Every concept has components and is defined by them. It therefore has a combination [chiffre*]. It is a multiplicity, although not every multiplicity is conceptual. There is no concept with only one component. Even the first concept, the one with which a philosophy "begins," has several components, because it is not obvious that philosophy must have a beginning, and if it does determine one, it must combine it with a point of view or a ground [une raison]. Not only do Descartes, Hegel, and Feuerbach not begin with the same concept, they do not have the same concept of beginning. Every concept is at least double or triple, etc. Neither is there a concept possessing every component, since this would be chaos pure and simple. Even so-called universals as ultimate concepts must escape the chaos by circumscribing a universe that explains them (contemplation, reflection, communication). Every concept has an irregular contour defined by the sum of its components, which is why, from Plato to Bergson, we find the idea of the concept being a matter of articulation, of cutting and cross-cutting. The concept is a whole because it totalizes its components, but it is a fragmentary whole. Only on this condition can it escape the mental chaos constantly threatening it, stalking it, trying to reabsorb it. (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 2004: 15-16) We tend as philosophers to first ask what something is. Definition is in our DNA, and that often takes a specific form, tending to abstraction from particular instances, formative conditions, reception conditions for those concepts by different people, and so forth. We have sometimes tended to leave those other questions to other disciplines. So, psychology, we might think, is concerned with the acquisition and application of concepts rather than their intention, while anthropology might be concerned with the cultural history of concepts and literature is concerned with the rhetorical force of the concepts, and so forth. Cultural philosophy, I want to argue, makes these seemingly easy distinctions much less clear. Historically, at least in the case of Western philosophical attitudes to Africa, the default position has been that the concepts that exist there are either borrowed, unclear or immature, and the very concept of “concept” is undeveloped. This is a view I wish to reject, but not by simply arguing that there is, in fact, a robust theory of concepts in the sense that we might recognize it. I would rather like to see African (and by extension, other non-Western) theories of cognition as bound up with practice and with the creation of concepts, rather than simply the recognition of their existence as fundamental components of thinking. This may seem to simply fall into a pragmatist theory of concepts, one in which their significant lies in what they do rather than what they are, but I think things are more complex than this. And, furthermore, if this argument is successful, I think we will find links to other traditions of concepts in the west, including the phenomenological cognitive sciences and, in a different way, Deleuze and Guattari. African philosophy becomes a useful space in which to think about the creation and activation of concepts. As V. Y. Mudimbe has pointed out, Africa itself is a conceptual geography that has been created by external forces. I have argued elsewhere, though (Janz, Philosophy in an African Place) that the place of thought in Africa has a particular phenomenological character, and tracing the ways in which concepts are both created and activated can tell us much about how they become adequate to African lived reality. This paper will outlines several examples of this kind of conceptual creation in Africa, and argue that the approach that I call “philosophy-in-place” has application elsewhere as well. JEONG, Boram (Duquesne University/ Université de Paris VIII, France) “Place of the Future in the Economy of Melancholia” In antiquity, the concept of time was built around the natural motion of heavenly bodies. Then we began using time as a unit to measure movements, with the introduction of modern technologies. Today, time seems to have become something we ‘spend,’ ‘save,’ ‘waste,’ and ‘manage,’ as we do with money. In this paper I show how time under financial capitalism is largely subordinated to the movement of capital. Drawing upon Deleuze’s remarks on the condition of the contemporary subjects – “[m]an is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt,”– I focus specifically on the temporal structure under which the indebted live. What characterizes the temporality of the indebted, similarly to that of the melancholic, is the feeling of guilt that traps the subject into the circle of an irreversible past and a predetermined future. This paper also reflects on the “temporality of no longer,” exemplified in the terms by which the young generation in Japan and Korea call themselves, such as ‘Three-Give-Up generation’ (or ‘Sam-Po generation’: a generation that gives up courtship, marriage and childbirth) and ‘Satori generation’ (a generation without ambition, or hope). JEONG, Sang-bong (Konkuk University, Korea) “Zhu-Xi’s Metaphysics of Tai-ji” In this paper I will show that tai-ji has several metaphysical meanings. First, tai-ji is the origin of the myriad things in the cosmological sense. Its dong jing 動靜 is not the mechanical movement and quiescence at the empirical level but the cosmological self- unfolding of tai-ji. This is one of metaphysical activities of tai-ji. Second, tai-ji is the universal principle of the myriad things in the world. All the things in the world have the same principle in themselves. It is similar to the one moon becoming the ten thousand moons when reflected in the ten thousand rivers. Finally, human innate nature (ren 仁•yi 義•li 禮•zhi 智) is the manifestation of tai-ji. This constitutes human mind and heart, and thus we can also find a moral dimension in tai-ji. JIANG, Tao (Rutgers University) "Historicist Challenges to Chinese Philosophy in the American Academy" This presentation looks into a particular aspect of Sinological challenge to the modern project of Chinese philosophy within the American academy through the lens of authorship. It explores philosophical implications for texts whose authorship is in doubt and develops a new heuristic model of authorship and textuality so that a more robust intellectual space for the philosophical discourse on Chinese classics can be carved out from the dominant historicist Sinological discourse. JOHNSON, David W. (Boston College) “Watsuji’s Topology of the Self” In this presentation I maintain that the philosophy of WATSUJI Tetsurō is an instance of a certain form of topological thinking. Thinking can be characterized as topological to the extent that it reverses the usual and taken for granted ontological primacy of discrete objects or entities over the places, contexts, structures, fields, and relations in which these are located and by which they are engulfed. Topos and entity, moreover, belong to one another in such a way that one could not exist without the other. The aims of this presentation are first, to show that the two most important philosophical concepts used in Watsuji’s analysis of the self, namely, aidagara, or being-in- relation, and fūdo, or climate, are topological notions in this sense, and second, to indicate some of the wider philosophical implications of approaching Watsuji’s work through this interpretive lens. The first of the concepts in this pair is aidagara , or being-in-relation. This word captures the way in which the self finds itself related to others as a co-worker, as a student, as a member of a family, as a member of a congregation, and so forth. For Watsuji, to be completely outside of any relation to others is not to be human. We live out our lives with and among others, unavoidably and always already related to them; other people, in effect, are the primary setting of human life. The second concept is fūdo, or what we will translate here as ‘climate.’ Fūdo is a term intended to express the way in which the natural and the cultural are interwoven in a setting which is partly constitutive of and partly constituted and opened up by, a group of people inhabiting a particular place. Such metaphysical commitments will mean that we will need to somehow think nature together with culture and the self as what belongs to, emerges from, and shapes this matrix. Taken together, aidagara and fūdo provide the framework for a topological account of the self, one which moves beyond the problematic modern understanding of human beings as individual subjectivities ontologically decoupled both from the other people among whom they live and the natural environment which surrounds them. Instead, Watsuji maintains that the relational network of aidagara is itself situated in a specific fūdo, or spatio-temporal locale characterized by a particular geography, culture, and history. Hence the self also finds itself always already related to an array of meanings in a surrounding environment in which culture and nature are encountered as a unitary phenomenon. The self, in effect, is emplaced in and encompassed by a place and a space which is both geo-cultural and social. But this is not a merely passive relation; the self acts upon and so partly constitutes both other selves and a specific fūdo, on the one side, while both of these, in turn, act upon and help make the self what it is, on the other. The self, then, comes to be what it is through relational contact with others and with a particular climate, while both of these also depend on the self to be what they are. Self, others, and climate belong to one another in and through this relational exchange, with each functioning as a component of the larger experiential whole. Aidagara and fūdo are hence the place and space of the self, but not of a self which would be “in” or “on” these topoi as a cat on a mat or shoe in a box, as if each one were an absolutely distinct entity which would then come into relation with the other. Rather, aidagara and fūdo are dimensions of the basic space and place in and through which the self is able to be continuous with the wider whole to which it is related. Yet this continuity does not mean that the self is simply reducible to that which surrounds it; instead, this is a form of unity constituted by the very difference and distance between self, other, and climate. One difficulty that arises here, and one which we will need to face, is the question of how transcendence, the distance and difference that makes possible freedom and individuation, can be convincingly and rigorously accounted for if the self is so completely identified with its insertion into the topoi of aidagara and fūdo. With this topological understanding of the self not only does Watsuji break convincingly with dualistic accounts of a self detached from, and facing, the world and its places, people, and objects; in the concepts of aidagara and fūdo he explores concrete and quotidian structures of experience which, while neither originating nor culminating in an obviously religious standpoint, nevertheless exemplify the profoundly nondual nature of the self. Furthermore, this close and concrete description of ordinary yet essential features of our nondual way of being in the world also allows Watsuji’s views to be related quite readily to the work of thinkers in the tradition of existential phenomenology such as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty; moreover, there is little doubt that he has something singular and significant to contribute to the project of overcoming of dualism in this tradition. Here we find another ontology in which consciousness and thing, self and world, intertwine and mutually determine one another. Yet what thinkers in this tradition have overlooked, to varying degrees, is the manner in which both other people and the specific locale we find ourselves in are constitutive of the self even as they are also determined or shaped by it. In looking beyond Japanese philosophy to the wider philosophical world in these ways, Watsuji’s work expands and opens up our sense of what being-in-the-world, which has been a phenomenon of the greatest significance for contemporary phenomenology, and nondualism, which has been a concept of the first importance in East Asian philosophy, are and can be. Watsuji’s topological understanding of the human person thus offers a novel, wide-ranging, and complex view of how the self comes to be what it is—one far removed from the naiveté and abstractions required to view the human person in purely individualistic terms. In this vision, we find instead that the self and its consciousness are rooted in a source far greater and more profound than the awareness of a single individual: we are immersed in, and emerge from, the depths of the historical and social world and our lives both shape, and flow from, the vast life of nature. 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