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Moral Falsity in the Eyes of the Superhuman: The Cases of Socrates and Mozi
Yumi Suzuki
Front. Philos. China. 2017, 12 (4): 515-532.
https://doi.org/10.3868/s030-006-017-0037-1
Both Socrates and Mozi are said in Plato’s dialogues and in the Mozi respectively to have claimed that they are living a sort of life following superhuman “intention”: Socrates according to the Delphic oracle, and Mozi the intention of heaven. Some modern philosophers show discomfort with their “superstitious” attitudes, taking the claims literally as a kind of groundless devotion, while others conjecture “sensible” purposes to understand the mystic elements as providing moral lessons. This paper, by responding to these modern revisions of their doctrines, aims at highlighting the necessity of their (re-)introductions of superhuman perspectives to their inquiries. Through examining the similarities in Plato’s and Mohists’ demonstrations, the suggestion made will be that despite countless incommensurable features, heaven’s intention for Mohists offers a fundamental philosophical basis which enables them to develop arguments by means of sharp dichotomies, what is right or wrong, in the same way that Socrates in the Apology and in the Hippias Minor does for the development of Plato’s constructive endeavour beyond his Socratic a/euporetic legacy. Not only are their practices dependent on the presupposition of the existence of a perspective beyond humans, but also the reality of that perspective is established though their own investigative practices.
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The Face/Facelessness of the Other—A Levinasian Reading of the Ethical of the Zhuangzi
Ellen Y. Zhang
Front. Philos. China. 2017, 12 (4): 533-553.
https://doi.org/10.3868/s030-006-017-0038-8
Emmanuel Levinas’ ethical phenomenology offers a new understanding of what constitutes the core issue of ethics. For Levinas, the word “ethics” becomes a question about the “wholly Other,” the entity that challenges the self-qua-being, thus diverging from the traditional ontological framework of Being in the West, that is, sameness or totality. At first glance, Zhuangzi seems to have little in common with Levinas: The former irreverently mocks all moral principles and ethical norms whereas the latter takes ethics as first philosophy; the former speaks of the faceless as the model of Daoist authenticity whereas the latter speaks of the face as the symbol of moral obligation. Nevertheless, there are plenty of chapters in the Zhuangzi which illustrate how a self-being experiences a profound transfiguration through its encounter with the Other, a constellation which resonates with Levinas’ theme. In this paper, the issue of relationality in the Zhuangzi will be analyzed in light of Levinas’ espousal of alterity, with the purpose of explicating the Daoist appropriation of what I will call “the philosophy of difference.” I will submit the argument that the Zhuangzian notion of freedom and the Daoist conception of a well-lived life are both based upon this philosophy of difference. I will also argue that Daoist ethics, particularly the version expressed by the Zhuangzi, is best understood as a form of “negative ethics.”
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Place as Refuge: Exploring the Poetical Legacy of Matsuo Bashō
Patricia Huntington
Front. Philos. China. 2017, 12 (4): 572-590.
https://doi.org/10.3868/s030-006-017-0040-9
By drawing on phenomenological notions, this paper offers a “middle way” reading of Bashō’s travelogues that accentuates their religious, rather than merely aesthetical purpose, which is to transmit the Buddha Dharma. Two distinctive poetic traditions of Bashō interpretation exist: the Zen-inflected, monologic, and individualist tradition and the intertextual or dialogical interpretation. One way to reconcile these two strains in Bashō’s poetics is to see his haikai through the lens of mind-to-mind transmission of light. This “middle way” interpretation traces a double movement of phenomenological reduction through two travelogues: first, by showing how home departure entails freeing the mind of fixity and, second, by suggesting that mind-to-mind transmission removes the ambition to find refuge in peak experiences, just as it resists being reduced to parodic subversion of reigning cultural values. In the Buddhist lineage, the heart of transmission rests neither upon conservation nor upon rejection of poetic essences but, rather, lies in transforming haikai into medicine, which is efficacious for the process of awakening.
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