Barry Allen

In this monograph-length article, which inaugurates a multipart symposium titled “Fuzzy Studies,” the significance and virtues of blur are investigated through the whole history of Chinese intellectual tradition. In the Western tradition, the blur of becoming seems to disqualify an object for knowledge; nothing can be an object of knowledge until the blur is resolved and clarity attained. Chinese tradition offers suggestive examples of the thought that blur, so far from being incompatible with knowledge, might be its condition of possibility and the explanation of its value. This article traces the development of this thought (the compatibility of knowledge and original becoming) in the work of the classical Confucian and Daoist thinkers, the art-of-war literature, Chan Buddhism, and medieval Neoconfucianism, with an eye to its usefulness for Western philosophy of knowledge

The field of study we call Classics is an ideological construction. It assumes that the Greece and Rome of antiquity belong to the modern West in some singular, privileged way, as our antiquity, their works our classics, and that these civilizations were largely self-invented. In this antiquity there are no diaspora, no hybrids, no minorities, often no women or slaves. Democratic, philosophical Athens is the antitype of a cosmopolis: hermetic, autochthonous, owing nothing to the civilizations of Africa, India, or the Near East. But the classical lines of demarcation and exclusion have eroded under globalization. We are beginning to understand how antiquity was everywhere mixed and riven by difference. DuBois envisions a new classical studies, less insular, engaged with larger debates in the humanities. She brings a classical scholar’s expert knowledge on Alexander, Epimenides, Oedipus, Sparticus, and St. Paul to bear on questions in the work of Agamben, Badiou, Butler, Negri, and Rancière. She reads Sapho, and exposes the impulse of scholarship to efface the traces of the past, transfixed by an imaginary original. They might better study the forces of fragmentation and the genealogy of canons. She studies the politics and religion of dramatic tragedy in Athens, and finds resources to undermine a neoconservative account of the stability, superiority, and homogeneity of Western civilization.

Introducing the sixth and final installment of the Common Knowledge symposium “Apology for Quietism,” Allen looks at the symposium retrospectively and concludes that it has mainly concerned “sage knowledge,” defined as foresight into the development of situations. The sagacious knower sees the disposition of things in an early, incipient form and knows how to intervene with nearly effortless and undetectable (quiet) effectiveness. Whatever the circumstance, the sage handles it with finesse, never doing too much but also never leaving anything undone that must be accomplished. Quiet, when it is knowingly and effectively quiet (not pusillanimous or poor in spirit), is about what not to do, how not to approach a problem, what not to decide, what is not known, what will not work. Allen explains these principles in terms of traditional Chinese thought, Daoist and Confucian: wei we wei, or “doing-not-doing,” means effective inaction. What makes such wisdom possible is not mystical insight, he argues, but discipline in a certain kind of art. The sage has no need of reasons (let alone doctrines), only effectiveness; and he does not need truth or justice, only subtlety. The detachment of a quietist has little, if anything, to do with transcending perspectives. Detachment is good as a means to flexibility, and instead of transcending perspectives, a sage is skilled in the quiet art of never getting stuck in one. To be effectively quiet is not so much to be silent as to be inaudible, invisible; the sage “vanishes into things.”

This work by an accomplished and respected comparative philosopher criticizes the Western ideology of individualism from the perspective of a Confucian morality of the family. Individualism is a name for the Enlightenment era ideology of the autonomous individual. The philosophical pillars of this ideology are Locke and especially Kant, and it runs through practically all modern moral philosophy. It is the moral psychology of classical liberalism, no less than of its libertarian and communitarian critics. They are different politically, but ontologically of a piece. Individual selves—rational, calculating, selfish, autonomous—are what we are. Rosemont thinks this ideology is philosophically wrong, morally, politically, and ecologically destructive, but also optional. We sometimes feel painted into a corner where the only alternatives seem to be unrestrained freedom or totalitarian dictatorship. Moral philosophy still awaits the end of the Cold War. It would be good for people to understand that there are more options. Rosemont thinks Confucianism is one of them—a Confucianism for post-modern or even post-Western Westerners, with an ideology of the family that Rosemont thinks is more amenable than indigenous alternatives to our moral and ecological crises. “The vision of classical Confucianism can be reclaimed today with its integrity basically intact.” Rosemont advances two points. First, Confucian moral psychology conceives of the person as the bearer of roles. We are our roles as the onion is its leaves, without a an essential core self. Placing roles at the center of moral psychology eliminates the value of impersonal rules or universal principles. There are many ways to be a good father, teacher, friend, or son. Moral decency acquires an almost aesthetic quality, as our approach to roles (our own and those of others) expresses such qualities as zest, grace, or tenderness. His second point is that the moral center of Confucian philosophy is the family. The family is largely ignored in Western ethical tradition. Plato wanted to eliminate family life for his guardians. Kant, Bentham, and Mill have nothing useful to say about the family. For Rosemont the family is the first and best school for morality. It is there, if at all, that we learn to love, trust, cooperate, and obey. Rosemont’s best pages describe the important Confucian concept of family reverence (xiao). The gist is unswerving loyalty to parents, obligations extending even beyond death. It is easy for Western people to misunderstand that. Confucian tradition has a carefully worked out idea of filial reverence, and it should not be dismissed with a label (paternalistic, dogmatic, Asiatic). Obedience is expected, but not servility. In the inter-generational family, the child obeys the parents, but also sees parents obeying grandparents. Remonstrance is expected when appropriate. Deference motivated by gratitude can be genuinely appreciative without fawning, and dissent can remain respectful and polite. Rosemont believes that filial reverence is a way of life as open to anyone today as it was to Chinese two thousand years ago. Confucianism is a relentlessly secular philosophy. It entails practically no theological or metaphysical commitments, and contains little if anything to offend modern scientific sensibilities. This moral philosophy is at once remote (from individualism) and close, familiar, a fairly straightforward account of how we actually live our lives. Rosemont carefully argues that Confucian ideas of family are flexible enough to accommodate progressive ideals, and may even be our best hope against sexism, racism, homophobia, and other anti-humanistic altitudes and behaviors. He urges this version of Confucianism as a human-centered spirituality for a global civilization suspicious of discredited universalism. All cultures are made of families. How alien can they be? Respect for and accommodation with diversity begins in the family, when people learn from infancy to enjoy contributing to the well-being of others. While it would be wrong to expect Western people to abandon their Greek or Abrahamic heritage, those values might be reordered in light of Confucian thought, which deserves to be better understood in the West. A traditional Confucian might be baffled and dismayed by things that pass for normal in modern families, but our families could be better at what they have to be anyway by absorbing Confucian wisdom. There is a growing body of literature on Confucianism and virtue ethics. It is worth noting that Rosemont’s thought is probably the leading alternative to this paradigm in comparative moral philosophy. He takes an uncompromisingly critical attitude toward this particular effort to build a bridge from West to East by attributing to the Confucians a Western virtue ethics, which is, he thinks, objectionably individualistic in all its usual forms.

The now-global phenomenon of Asian martial arts traces back to something that began in China. The idea the Chinese communicated was the dual cultivation of the spiritual and the martial, each perfected in the other, with the proof of perfection being an effortless mastery of violence. I look at one phase of the interaction between Asian martial arts and Chinese thought, with a reading of the Zhuangzi 莊子 and the Daodejing 道德經 from a martial arts perspective. I do not claim that the authors knew about martial arts. It was not Daoist masters who took up martial arts, but martial arts masters who, at a specific time, turned to Daoism to explain the significance of their art. Today, though, Daoist concepts are ubiquitous in martial arts literature, and a reading of these classics from a martial arts perspective shows how they lend themselves to philosophical thinking about this practice

Craft work (for example, ceramics and furniture) poses a dilemma for modern thinking about beauty and the arts. Because of its beauty, craft has more than mere functionality, yet because of its functionality it cannot be fine art. What should craftmakers do? Claim their work to be fine art and forget about functionality? Or remain loyal to functionality (you can eat noodles from the finest ceramic bowl) and face extinction competing with machine-made products of industrial design? Apparently, the tendency is to abandon functionality, though Risatti thinks that is a mistake. Craft is not craft without functionality; bowls too large to lift have become the useless art of sculpture. Function is important because it implies a relation to the hands that make and use the work, guaranteeing human scale and meaning. How much fine art can you say that about? The real threat to craft is not assimilation to fine art, however. The effect of industrial design and machine production is to divorce the way a thing looks from how it is made. Never has so little of our artifactual environment actually been made by hand, and it’s a loss. A loss of connection. A thing made by and for the hands has a sense that transcends our differences and when beautifully made is an eloquent reminder of where ingenuity ultimately comes from.

Scholars have detected hostility to technology in Daoist thought. But is this a problem with any machine or only some applications of some machines by some people? I show that the problem is not with machines per se but with the people who introduce them, or more exactly with their knowledge. It is not knowledge as such that causes the disorder Laozi and Zhuangzi associate with machines; it is confused, disordered knowledge—superficial, inadequate, unsubtle, and artless. In other words the problem is not with machines but with the ethics of engineering and the government of technology. The Daoist argument does not devalue machines or knowledge of them; instead, it sets a new goal, defining an alternative ideal—alternative to techniques held hostage to despotic ideas about efficiency and profit.