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Shuchen Xiang, "Chinese Cosmopolitanism: The History and Philosophy of an Idea" (Princeton UP, 2023)
01:29:30
An interview with Shuchen Xiang
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- [01:37]
Jessica Zhu
Welcome everyone. This is Jessica Zhu. I am an Assistant professor of Religion at University of Southern California at Dornseth and the New Books Network hosting Buddhist Studies Today. We are very lucky to have Professor Xu Chengxiang to talk with us about her new book, Chinese Cosmopolitanism the History and Philosophy of an Idea, published by Princeton University in 2023. So Professor Shu Xunxiang is Mount Hua professor of Philosophy at Xidian University. She's the author of A Philosophical Defense of Culture, Perspectives from Confucianism and Kassiri. And she's also the co editor of the Islamic Confucian Synthesis in China and translator of History of Chinese Philosophy through Its Key Terms. And she also published numerous articles in journals such as Social Dynamics, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, Critical Philosophy of Race, and Sophia. So welcome Shu Chen. Thank you for writing such an amazing and insightful, super readable but extremely engaging book. I want to echo Professor Lia Carmenson's comment on your book, you know, on the blurb that your book actually succinctly connects Eurocentric metaphysics and ontology to the racialized discourses that shaped European imperialism. And this part is just well established in existing scholarship, which you thoroughly referenced throughout your book. It's kind of like a primer for readers interested in critical race philosophy and your book compellingly show how Chinese philosophers, particularly its process of holism, provide meaningful and viable alternative paradigms for thinking about and making and sustaining cosmopolitanism. And this part is built upon.
- [03:27]
Shu Chen
But.
- [03:28]
Jessica Zhu
Expands your previous work, such as the book Compare Confucianism with 20th century German philosopher Ernst Kassier, especially his concept of culture, and your numerous articles on related topics such as why Confucianism doesn't have a concept of race. Equally important, you also critiqued the Sinological method through the lens of critical race theory. For me, your book also sets an outstanding example of how to do comparative philosophy with respect, so listeners interested in comparative philosophy will greatly benefit from reading this book in depth. So, Shu Chen, I'd like to start our interview with the traditional New Books Network question. Could you please tell us a bit more about yourself, how and why you came to write this very unconventional book?
- [04:16]
Shu Chen
Thank you very much Jessica, for your very kind and thorough introduction to my work. So I work generally on world philosophies and this includes Chinese philosophy, Western philosophy, Latin American and Africana philosophies. I also have interest in philosophies in the Islamic tradition too. And because of that kind of background, perhaps the foundational meta question that somebody who, like me, works on world philosophies asks themselves and needs to come to terms with is how humans deal with difference. You know, it's just a given given the kind of things that I work on. And I was very interested in this meta question from the very beginning of my graduate career about 10 years ago. And as I pursued graduate studies in the usa, I was introduced to the discipline of the critical philosophy of race. Essentially, as I understand it, this is an academic discipline that was forced into being. So the experiences of African Americans, but it's not exclusive to them. The perspective that they had on human history is the foundation for a particularly critical reading of the past and the way that certain groups of human beings dealt with intergroup relations. I found this discipline enormously stimulating and very productive way of doing scholarly work. It was very inspiring for me, you know, as a kind of a young person. I found it not a decadent or ivory tower kind of scholarly discipline. It requires a huge amount of intellectual acumen. But this also has very real socio political and existential meaning. So I found it. Reading this Critical Race Theory, Critical Philosophy of Race, I found it enormously meaningful. Discipline and perspective in many ways. My first book, Philosophical Defense of Culture, Perspectives from Confucianism and Casera, was also about thinking about how to deal with difference. I argue that the Chinese Confucian tradition overwhelmingly thought about the defining feature of the human being as cultural. This means that what differences there exist between humans are also cultural and Chinese cosmopolitanism. The book that we're talking about now is a continuation of my interest in the Chinese understanding of culture. However, Chinese Cosmopolitanism is a much more political theory kind of book, whereas A Philosophical Defense of Culture is not explicitly political. Although I think the political implications were always there. I just didn't really expand on it or make explicit. So Chinese cosmopolitanism is an extension of some of the implications of the work that I did in a philosophical defensive culture. But I'm just making the implications explicit. And part of making explicit is to use the discourse of the critical philosophy of race which I encountered during my graduate studies. The Chinese tradition, I think, is very, very vast. And this very characteristic of the Chinese historically that they wrote down everything. This means that there is so much textual tradition that a scholar can appeal to if you know about the Chinese tradition. And so Chinese cosmopolitanism tries to show that there's a huge amount of resources that we can tap into in the Chinese tradition for helping us to think about contemporary issues to do with pluralism. And obviously, I'm using some of the vocabulary and concepts that Critical Philosophy of Race scholars have been able to come up with. So, in fact, arguably, I would say a lot of contemporary hot topics that are debated today were arguably already debated throughout Chinese history. And the dominant Chinese tradition as a whole ultimately settled on a worldview that I attempted to reconstruct in Chinese Cosmopolitanism. So that's a kind of a brief biography of the book. And thank you very much for remarking that my book is unconventional. And I think that it's unconventional because my own experiences are unconventional, since I have been, well, you know, I'm kind of Chinese and I grew up in the UK and then I had lot of graduate studies in lots of different countries. So arguably it's quite an unconventional experience. But I've also been quite authentic to my experiences and perspectives. And I think that because I was authentic to my experiences and perspective, that book ends up being possibly unconventional.
- [08:47]
Jessica Zhu
Thank you, Shuqen, for sharing with us. Experiences inform scholarships so listeners pay attention. There's no such a thing as disinterested objective knowledge production. We all inevitably produce knowledge because we are positioned in a certain way. So, Shu Chen, your book has an introduction and six semantically arranged chapters and a conclusion. I'd like to start our interview with your introduction. So this introduction is important. So I just want to pick up three important themes to ask you to clarify. First, for listeners, your argument is very clear. You said on page one that Chinese philosophy has the conceptual resources to provide alternative paradigms to thinking about pluralism, which has never been more needed than in our current era. For me, this is a powerful argument that we humans already have in our traditional cultures like ancient Confucianism. This necessary resources to imagine and build an anti racial, anti caste world and we don't have to reinvent the wheel. But then mere Confucianism is not enough because on the very next page you made an impassioned call, which I totally agree. You said if we are to think of serious alternatives to racial and colonial order, then Chinese philosophers, well, personally I add Buddhist philosophers, African, indigenous Indians, you know, so on whatever you know, right. Postcolonial scholars, decolonial scholars and critical philosophers of race need to start engaging with each other's works. So I know, for example, in Buddhist philosophy is happening. I'm thinking of Amy Donahue's work on Pramada Vada, that's kind of an ancient Indian tradition epistemology, and then how it helps inform contemporary politics and many other things. She built this Vada project which uses Indian epistemology kind of to do good, to analyze, evaluate contemporary political claims. But back to your point, we first need to clarify three issues. First, the singularity of Western racism, which I take is a historical fact that most of our general listeners do not know or do not want to acknowledge. And second, for those who intuitively reject your arguments or refuse to check your evidence, you mentioned that there are two well known reasons for this kind of knee jerk reaction. What Charles Mills termed the epistemology of ignorance and what Frank Fureti termed the universalization of Western racism that you tackled on page 13 to 27. And then you also include a clarification of terms. And the third issue is what you call. You called for a new model of comparative philosophy, one that allows us to learn from each other's traditions. That's on page 10. So let me start with my first question. What is this singularity of Western racism. What's singular about racism? You mean we humans are not inherently universally throughout history always already racist? If so, why? Where's your evidence?
- [12:11]
Shu Chen
Thanks, Jessica. Thanks for such a thorough synopsis of the some of the first arguments I was making the book by the singularity of Western racism, I'm talking about historical fact almost. It's not really a theoretical argument that I'm making. I'm pointing to just the historical evidence or reality that no other tradition that we know of in human history has put so much destruction onto the human species as what we call the Western tradition. And scare quotes. And relatedly related to that first point about the just the historical fact of this in a more abstract sense, no other culture has dehumanized other human beings in the same way. So I want to quote what I wrote in Chinese Cosmopolitanism about the fact of Western racism. Just the numbers. And this is what I'm speaking to. And I think it's important that I talk about the numbers because otherwise people might not be on the same page as me. You know, when I, as a philosopher I'm trying to deal with human reality and I want to. This is the kind of human reality that I'm struggling to think about how something like this happened. And so I want to provide listeners with the context of what it is that I'm thinking about. So in page in Chinese Cosmopolitanism I write Europe's first encounter with significantly different peoples on a large scale during its age of discovery led to the decimation of 95% of the native American Indian population in what one historian, David Stannard, caused the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world. The European encounter with difference also gave rise to the transatlantic slave trade, which according to demographers estimates may have halved Africa's population through death on the continent and exportation of its population. The United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Rhodesia and South Africa were all founded on extermination, displacement or herding onto reservations of aboriginal populations. By 1914, colonialism had brought 85% of the Earth under European rule as colonies, protectorates, dependencies, dominions and commonwealth. So this is the reality that I'm intellectually trying to. Trying to grapple with. And as a philosopher I would. The argument that I make in Chinese cosmopolitanism is that what accounts for the. For this historical reality and as I argue the arg. The actions and motivations for such. The motivations for such actions as well as the actions themselves are arguably unique and singular. And therefore they bear studying. You know, it's not like everybody would. If everybody did this, then it's possibly less philosophically interesting. But because it's so unprecedented, it really becomes a subject that warrants intellectual scrutiny. So as to what it is I mean by racism, as I wrote in Chinese cosmopolitanism, central to what we understand by racism is the earlier concept of the barbarian. So I, I'm saying that you to, to really understand what racism means, you really have to look at this earlier Greek concept of what the barbarian is. And I provide a chapter on, on what I mean by the barbarian, how it relates to what we mean by racism today. So I think that racial attitudes are rooted in the earlier discourse of barbarism. And then to your point of whether racism is universal. So you know, are humans inherently, throughout history always racist? I argue absolutely not. It was a culturally contingent phenomenon. It's a very specific kind of culture that conditions people to think about the world and about other people in racialized terms. But your point that there's this common tendency to think of human beings as inherently racist. So I want to speak to that briefly. So there tends to be this tendency to understand racism as any kind of intergroup conflict or beef between different groups of people. And in Chinese cosmopolitanism, I really insist that you cannot use that, use the term racism in this way. If we understand racism as maybe bad blood between different gangs or different groups of people, however you construe the different groups, then you really cannot understand or explain the scale of human destruction that Europe brought to the world. You know, I just don't think that this bad blood between people explains the numbers that I just gave a picture of. We have to understand that racism is a worldview that encompasses the nature of the self, her relationship to the phenomenal world nature and other human beings. Racism or this kind of racialized worldview is extremely existential. It's about really about everything. So only if we understand racism in this very existential, existentially, hugely powerful psychological way that we can start clarifying why it was that Europe that was so massively destructive of other peoples of this world.
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Interviewer 2
Many thanks, Shu Chen, for clarifying this very important point for listeners. I mean, personally, I can have beef, I have bad blood with like different kinds of people, but I just don't go out and kill people because number one, I'm Buddhist, I practice in non violence. So I guess there is a very deep philosophical reason that guide or actions, even though in, you know, intro, group conflicts might be kind of a commonplace in, throughout history.
- [18:19]
Jessica Zhu
So I'm just also glad to add that not only Asian Chinese were not racist in the way that you described, but also many other cultures are also non racist or even anti racist. Modern times, that's a totally different matter because we, we seem, actually I, I feel like we got stuck with racism.
- [18:40]
Interviewer 2
Everywhere around the globe.
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Jessica Zhu
But anyways, a really good issue. What is the epistemology of ignorance and what do you mean by the universalization of Western racism? Epistemology sounds of ignorance sounds fancy, but please unpack these two complex notions and concept for us.
- [19:00]
Shu Chen
Yeah, so yeah, just to refer back to your point, I completely agree. I really, in not saying that it was only China that was non racist. I completely agree that many men, you can find many non racist cultures in the world. It just happened that obviously I know about the Chinese tradition, so I can speak about it, you know, systematically. So the epistemology of ignorance. So like you said earlier, this term was coined by the late Charles Mills. And so it refers to how the world, our social world, is epistemically, morally and sociopolitically economically structured according to race or racial hierarchy. But so this, this kind of social reality, the way that the world is organized, obviously the humans do that, but then the people who did that, who organized the world according to race, the architects and beneficiaries of this racialized world. And this kind of racialized world is also a kind of white supremacist world because the world is ordered according to color. And so the architects and beneficiaries of this white racialized world, although they invented the system, they also benefit from obscuring how race, which is the system that they created, actually works. So you can say that the epistemology of ignorance is a self deception that is blind to or denies the reality of how racial hierarchy materially and epistemically shapes our world. So, so it's. The epistemology of ignorance works on many levels. I described it as working on an epistemic level, economic sociopolitical level, but it's also very phenomenological because it's this ignorance is real. People really especially, you can say white people, they're especially completely ignorant of, you could say their privilege, their white privilege. The world is ordered around in a way that leads to their privilege, but they're very, very unaware of it. So that's what the kind of ignorance refers to. And I want to stress that although white people were the ones who invented this system and benefit the most from this system, the epistemology of ignorance, or you could call it white ignorance or white denial, can also apply to non Whites, it's not only white people who are epistemologically ignorant about race, because the epistemology of ignorance can be inculcated into non whites as a result of the power relations and patterns of ideological hegemony involved, such as knowledge production. That's how this. You talk about the universalization of Western racism. That's how this gets universalized. You know, the books that we read that are written according to a particular worldview, and then people in, you know, Peru or in China, they read these books, and then they. They end up learning this particular worldview that is ignorant about race. So I want to give an example of the epistemology of ignorance. So a typical example of this epistemology of ignorance that is taught as part of the colonial education, which, you know, can be universalized and globalized, is the idea that the main cause of the European and settler colonial states, such as the United States, becoming the ascendant power in the world, is due to the strength of the institutions or some other autonomous, autonomous brilliance that they had, as opposed to the exploitation of the non white peoples and their resources in the world. Obviously. So, you know, the white nations, obviously the notion of whiteness changes. It's not a static concept. But the white nations, however it's construed in a particular historical period, then benefit from this skewed account of history. And this is the account, this very skewed account obscures the enormous role that racial exploitation played in leading them to. Leading to the preeminence of the West. So that, that is an example of what I mean by the epistemology of ignorance. And then this kind of account can be universalized. You know, I see it in China so much. The, this is the account of the history of the world that is learned, one that gives no role to racial exploitation, and that this is what is the epistemology of ignorance.
- [23:38]
Interviewer 2
Thank you so much, Shu chen, for your 16th clarification. It's important to recognize that over academia, over knowledge production, is part of the problem of reproducing the epistemology of ignorance. But for the interest of time, let's move on to the third question. It's also my favorite topic. You propose a new model of comparative philosophy as here I quote a company of others. That's on page.
- [24:08]
Shu Chen
Page 10.
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Jessica Zhu
And you laid out four criteria on the same on page 11. First, the uniqueness of each tradition is confirmed and respected. And second, the uniqueness of each tradition enriches other traditions. And third, differences understood as enriching. And fourth, openness to Change through engagement is maintained through an understanding that cultural traditions are dynamic and evolving. So for the benefits of our listeners, please explain how come differences are enriching rather than threatening. And if cultures change, how can we say that the thing we call culture remain the same? You know, the same culture before and after the change.
- [24:54]
Shu Chen
Thanks so much for this great question. It really in some ways gets to the heart of the message that I'm trying to convey more broadly in Chinese cosmopolitanism. But to answer that, to answer both questions, I need to explain the metaphysical framework that I have in mind when I making these claims. So let me just briefly explain Chinese metaphysics. So I think everybody knows that the, the mother of all books in China is called the I Ching, the Book of Change, you know, so you understand that change is very foundational for the Chinese worldview. So what that this idea of the Book of Change it speaks to is this idea that Chinese metaphysics is based on the idea of change. But then more fundamental than that, it's based on the idea of organism. By this I mean that the ancient Chinese saw that organic life is exchanged with one's environment. For example, to live I have to breathe in air and breathe out carbon dioxide. My material body is constantly changing as a result of this interaction with the environment. So interaction means exchange and then change, change as well. So this interaction and change defines the nature of life. If we think of inorganic things such as a stone, that stone does not interact with its environment. It's not internally modified by exchange with, with exchange with its environment. So indeed life is never self identical with its itself. As soon as you stop interacting with the environment and you stop changing, you're dead. This, this is why difference is then understood as enriching. Because the ability to embrace difference and to change, or you could say the ability to grow is a precondition for life and is defining of life. And that's the fundamental reason why Chinese tradition embraces difference and change. Because different equals life. For them, difference is literally life, whereas identity or sameness is death. So in the book I argue that the Greek world, the Greek world picture is very different. So if you look at the Plato's text, he puts a premium on identity because non change is seen in terms of integrity and perfection. The Greek tradition thought of this unmoved mover as not needing to interact with the environment because it's already perfect. You know, if I'm already perfect, I don't need to get anything from the company of others or need to interact with other things. But this idea of Non change, which can be thought of in terms of perfection or integrity. As I said, another way of thinking about this kind of non change is also its death. So another way of describing the ideal of Greek metaphysics is that okay, it puts a premium on being so non change, but another way of thinking about that is that it puts a premium on death. And my point is that the Chinese tradition did not embrace this logic. It embraced really the opposite logic. That is what is the ideal because it's life. So the question of how does culture remain the same before and after it changes because so the culture remains the same. Culture before and after embraces difference in the same way that a human being is the same person. Even though, for example, when I'm 80 years old, I'll be a very different me to when I was an eight year old, I would have changed. So although there's not identity, there's still continuity. Furthermore, I'm not the same. I'm the same not because my substance is the same, because maturity or my cells have been replaced, but instead there's a continuity of narrative. There is still kind of a focal point that's organizing all the different things that I'm embracing. You could say that a more successful person, like a more successful culture is able to artfully embrace, organize in a creative and meaningful way all the things that they encountered. A more successful person is one who experienced more things than someone who never left their village that they were born in and never read anything about the world. You know, further this, this kind of, the person who is successful would not be overwhelmed by all that they encountered, you know, but was able to successfully integrate all their experiences and enrich themselves through, through these experiences. So that's how I, in the book, I think of, of culture as, or Chinese culture as having the Chinese think of their culture has the same. Even though there's so much stuff that happened, it's very, very, you know, Chinese culture today obviously vastly different from, you know, culture from the Tang Dynasty or whatever. But then you can still see continuity. And then there's, there's a thing that's organized. There's a way in which all of these experiences are made coherent. And that's how a culture remain, maintains a kind of continuity, even though it's able to, even though it breaks a huge amount of change.
- [30:08]
Interviewer 2
Thank you so much, Shuchen, for this, for clarifying this very difficult philosophic concept in such a compelling manner. And what strikes me the most, what stands out is like difference equals life, identity, sameness equals death. That just like totally blows my mind. So chapter one, a brief History of Chinese Cosmopolitanism is super rich. You clearly laid out a few fallacies about the very concept of Chineseness and a very important scholarly debates in Sinology.
- [30:44]
Jessica Zhu
So I just want to pick out one tiny issue among all these rich discussions which is related to my previous question of how difference can be enriching. So on page 34, you argue against the fallacy of signification and the fallacy that Chinese has always been one people. Instead, you argue that a Greek substantial metaphysical understanding of identity and continuity does not apply in the case of China. Rather, here's what you said. The Chinese understanding of longevity is premised upon pluralism. Its stability and durability affects found on their heterogeneity. Hence you term harmony out of diversity. Please explain to us this exciting, drastically different paradigm thinking about one and many identity and difference and cosmopolitanism built upon heterogeneity.
- [31:38]
Shu Chen
Thanks, Jessica. Yeah, again you like really hit the sort of the heart of the argument, so I'm really glad to talk about that. So. Well, I think that your question is related to the above question and the above what we were just talking about the difference between the Greek premium on identity and non change and the Chinese premium placed on change or interaction and life. Those things are seen as equivalent or premised upon each other. And we can apply that theoretical discussion to the Chinese who people itself. Under the Chinese view, there is no contradiction in thinking that the Chinese are a continuous group of people, even though historically the actual material constitution of these people changed a lot further. It's not the substance of the, of the people, the genes for example, that counts for what is Chinese. Like the organism is an organizing function that ordered difference into coherence. So in as much as China was able to do so historically, the Chinese people considered all the various peoples that it embraced historically along with their cultures as Chinese. So you know, whatever China was able to embrace and sort of organize into, into itself, they just, they can't become Chinese. That's the logic. If you're able to coherently become a part of China, China, then then that is, that becomes Chinese. So, so I stress that the Chinese tradition always viewed this ability to embrace difference as foundational to Chinese stability. Because sameness means that tradition, that the Chinese tradition will expire and have no vitality. So you know, the, this variability, to embrace difference and to also kind of embrace in a coherent way is always seen as the hallmark of the vitality of the culture, which is why they even today Chinese people think of the Tang Dynasty as really the most glorious dynasty, the most golden age of China civilization. And they think of really the tongue as embodying China, the Chinese tradition, because the tongue embraced, you know, it was very, very open, open state at that time. And it was embraced so much central, Central Asian cultures, you know, and then the Chinese celebrate, they love that because, wow, look, that means, you know, this kind of vitality had this kind of vital vitality to it and that at that time. So that's what is meant by harmony and diversity. So and I want to just explain a bit more what I meant by mean by harmony. In some ways harmony and diversity is a tautology because means ability to have coherence and diversity. So the Chinese conception of harmony is not static. That is, we're not talking about a pre given pattern to which particulars must conform. Instead we're talking about particulars resonating or complementing each other to establish a mutually beneficial relationship to each other. For example. So like the best example you can give to, to what is meant by harmony, the Chinese conception of harmony is this improvisational music when two jazz musicians that when they're riffing against each other and they're improvising, they're not playing according to a given pattern and they're not playing according to sheet music, but there's a harmony between them. And then it's because of this harmony that beautiful music results. And that's really much more what is meant when the Chinese talk about harmony, which is he in Chinese. It's not, it's not a given pattern, it's. It's the ability to complement creatively, find complementarity between things that are constantly changing. And that's real, really seen as really virtuistic sign of great virtue, great competence, great power, great insight, you know, as only the best, most accomplished jazz musicians are able to do. And the ones who can, who are able to also collaborate with somebody else, you know, they're not just playing on their own. So that's what is meant by harmony and also harmony and diversity.
- [36:15]
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- [36:44]
Jessica Zhu
Chin, for shedding light on such an important philosophical paradigm. I really love the jazz musician riffing because in that case you also don't need domination. Also, for listeners interested in the process of paradigm, you can find a totally new way of thinking about what it means to be human, summarized as environments becoming an acculturation on page 54 and agency and difference as emerging phenomenon, not as ontological categories as on page 59. Just to highlight for my listeners, in the interest of time, let's move on to chapter two, the Barbarian in Western Imagination and History. This chapter moves to the West. It's a succinct summary of how the Greek invented this image of the barbarian as the ontological order. So to present itself as the civilized barbarians is the unreason. Greeks embodies its reason. So for modern readers like me, this naive essentialism and rationalization of dominance and violence just for feels so wrong, so insufferable. But in case some listeners think that ancient Greek, so passe, so like 2000 years ago, has no relevance today. In fact, actually this is precisely the logic that motivated many contemporary white terrorist groups. For example, the racist novels as the Turner Diaries is basically a novel about racial wars on steroids in which the white terrorists killed all non white people, black, Chinese, Indian, and including white race traitors, right? You name it. It's total kind of extermination, genocide, maybe holocaust repetition on multiple scales, on much larger scales in this novel. And many of these memes are taken as the Bible right by many white supremacist veteran groups. So interested readers can find these links to studies of this kind of lived tradition of ontological hatred. But for the benefited listeners who are unaware of this dark heart of Greek philosophy and how it continues to influence our thinking and over reasoning because of this epistemological kind of ignorance in academia and your own broader culture. So please, Shu Chen, elaborate a bit more on these ideas.
- [39:10]
Shu Chen
Thanks, Jessica. Yeah, I like what you said about this naive essentialism. How does it, how did it like have a hold on people? I think that's why I find it so fascinating. Like people are just so fascinating. And I think that like I mentioned earlier, I think there's something deeply existential about the need to invent the barbarian. Something deeply existential about the, about the kind of the racial, racialized worldview. And I, I hope it's clear when people read my book that it's not. I'm really trying not to paint racism, racism in kind of a moralistic Term, I think that doesn't really get us anywhere just to denounce it. It's far more complicated than that, which is where I think that the work of philosopher comes in. I'm trying to analyze how these ideas form and how, how they play out. So, so to, to analyze this idea of the barbarian. I think it's a really fascinating idea. So let me talk about it this way. The barbarian is first of all not meant to denote specific peoples and their way of life. It's not, it's not about real people. It's a concept, first of all. What it does is set up a Manichean other that is antithetical to all that is us, such that the destruction of the others realizes the so generous, radically autonomous quracio ex nihilo nature of our civilization. Okay, so what I mean by this is that our civilization is seen as radically autonomous. And then you realize the radically autonomous nature of our civilization through the destruction of this putative barbarian. In that way, our civilization is not related to anything or anybody else. The barbarian barbarian is thus not a relational concept, although it is set up in contrast to that which is civilization and the civilized. The destruction of the barbarian takes precedence to civilization and is the more important element in the civilization barbarism dyad. The destruction of the barbarian realizes this Sudanese singularity of the civilized and the civilized true way of life. Thus, this process of destroying the barbarian, setting up this Manichean dyad, and then the destruction of the. Of the barbarian. This process destroys relations in an attempt to make the civilized exist outside of all relations. Just like the notion of substance that I analyze in my book and I argue is central to the understanding of the ideology of race and racism. Civilization under this view is not a continuum, you know, and it's not caused in the sense of being related to anything else. The Western notion of the barbarian is not problematic simply because it set up a contrast between civilization and other people barbarians. The greater issue is that the destruction of the others who are Parbarians, we realize this, this totalizing and single vision of the world for those who need, for the very people who need it to invent the concept of the barbarian. So the barbarian was invented in order to preserve the idea that those who bear civilization can be out of relations with anything, can have a one way causal efficacy on the world without themselves being affected by the world, like a unconditional creator God or a move mover that I mentioned previously that this Platonic ideal of things, not of this kind of integrity that is not related to anything and then so you have this idea that you can be out of relations with anything. And furthermore that all of this, that you can have civilization and it not being related to anything, not caused by anything, all of this can be achieved simply by destroying some putative people's antithetical civilization, the barbarian. So under this kind of worldview which has this Manichean view of the civilization in barbarian, and those are totally non continuous, totally discrete, radically set apart under that kind of worldly civilization is something that is radically transcendent of this world. Civilization is not derived from the natural world, but it's something that is imposed on the world. Okay, so I want to just provide a bit of context for what how it is I'm getting these ideas about the barbarian. So first of all, this is a lot of Greek stuff. Aristotle talks about this a lot. So when I read Aristotle's theories of natural slavery, this is the kind of thing that I'm thinking of is, is at play here. But then I'm also getting a lot of this from when I read more contemporary philosophers such as Lewis Gordon. So I got a lot of his ideas from, from reading his works, especially his more recent book Fear of Black Consciousness, which I'm quite indebted to. So I feel like I should mention that here and then. Okay. And then I'm also getting a lot of it from James Baldwin. I feel like he's incredibly insightful when he thinks about the black white relations in his time. So I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. So under this. So under this view that you have this kind of Manicheanness, there are exist pre existing forces that embody civilization and that which embodies barbarism. And these two things are completely antithetical to each other. They exist in a Manichean relationship and there is no continuum between them. So I think this idea of the barbarian is really fascinating. It rests on a dialectical. The barbarian rests on a dialectical relationship with the master. The former is matter. So the barbarian is merely matter and wholly conditioned, whereas the latter is form and unconditioned. So in Chinese culture and politicianism and inspired by James Baldwin, I argue that the psychology of racism rests on this very idea that we so the civilized, the master, we are unconditioned like that kind of Platonic ideal. Whereas the racial, racial other come barbarian is wholly conditioned. They're only a matter and completely without reason. And the only way to be rid of this kind of malaise of racism is to admit that we are all conditioned. So given that I'VE understood racism and the idea of the barbarian in this particular way. So the barbarian is wholly conditioned and then the master or the, the civilized, completely unconditioned. The only way to then that's really, I think, the heart of racism. And then therefore the only way to be rid of that this kind of racial ideology, racial malaise, is to admit that we're all conditioned and to realize that as, as living beings, we all suffer the same fate of decay, mortality and loss. We all are related to the world. You know, there's nothing that's unconditioned. And I think of racism as in large part rooted in this existential inability to accept this fact that we are all mortal and biological beings. That's why you then go and invent this idea of the barbarian that kind of carries everything that is conditioned. And then you set up this, a kind of dualistic other, which is the unconditioned civilized master, you know, And I think that's ultimately this very deeply existential at the heart of it. And so like, because I mentioned James Baldwin, I want to read a brief quotation from him that I'm getting a lot of these ideas from. So I this somewhere he writes, the only way that the white person can be released from the black person's tyrannical power over him is to consent in effect to become black himself, to become part of that suffering and darkness arts and country that he what now watches wistfully from the heights of his lonely power and armed with spiritual travelers checks, visits so piteously after dark. So, you know, I read that, I was like, wow, that's so profoundly insightful about what's going on in the psychology of racism. And so a lot of my then reading of some of the Greek texts and the racial, racial ideologies, I sort of reading this very existentialist way that James thought. I'm kind of being inspired from by James Baldwin. And I think he articulates so credibly beautifully. So. Okay, so. Yeah.
- [47:58]
Interviewer 2
Thank you, Shuchen. Well, you find the idea of barbarian fascinating. I actually reading your book, I find it terrifying because the whole idea of Greek civilization rests upon, crucially upon that you have to destruct the other. You have to totally obliterate the barbarians. So to make this Greek civilization so unique, to stand alone, not dependent on anything else, that's just, I don't know, it'll give me nightmares. But many thanks for debunking this kind of untenable philosophical constructions of civilization and barbarians.
- [48:40]
Jessica Zhu
I also want to borrow this renowned historian of science Stephen J. Gould, his points, right, in his classic book the Mismatch of Men, which he debunked the idea that human intelligence can be reduced to one number called iq. And then he scolded the business that are still kind of setting and feeding upon this racist construction and getting fatter every day. And then his whole point is writing this book, right? He agreed that Ms. Mary of Money just destroyed the whole, whole business of iq, debunk this whole idea. But his thinking is that debunking bad series and bad ideas are really very important ways of moving forward and very important ways of producing knowledge. So you're debunking of the whole clarification of the whole barbarian civilization relations and then the destruction at the heart of this Greek civilization, right? You need to distract the other, the ontological other, to make itself independent. That's very important, important for readers to understand. So in the interest of time, we have to move on to chapter three. Chinese Process of Holism and its Attitude toward Barbarians and Non Humans. This is hands down my favorite chapter. Here you open this chapter with this Sentence on page 85. Chinese metaphysics Characteristic attitude toward non humans such as animals and demons is best described as a process of holism. Under this view that all things are constantly in process and form a continuum ontological distinction between species becomes impossible to delimit. So please tell us more about this process of holism. What is it and how does this work? Will help Confucian thinkers to. To avoid the fatal dangers of substance, metaphysical and essentially kind of thinking. Can you give listeners a few evidence? Even though the whole book, the whole chapter lays out the rich evidence? Just pick a few.
- [50:44]
Shu Chen
Okay, thanks, Jessica. So yeah, like you said, there's many ways to instantiate this kind of claim, but I'll pick one that is quite fun. So to understand what I mean by procession holism, I'd like to begin with the story. So the story comes from a very famous collection of horror tales written in the Qing dynasty. It's called which is Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. And so there's a lot of different horror stories about ghosts and demons and strange things in this collection of short stories. And there's a very famous story in this collection called Nie Xiao Qian which is actually made into a movie. So we can go watch that movie. So in the story, what happens is it's in. So Nie is a very beautiful female ghost and she's coerced by a more powerful demon to lure men and, you know, suck their life away. So it's a little bit misogynist, you know. Oh, the fan fatale is going to suck your life away. However, this Nie Xiao Qian that meets the scholar who is very kind and she then falls in love with him. So she then starts to live with his family and becomes acculturated. She by this I mean she eats human food, she does household chores and starts living like a human and around human beings. And in the story at the end, she ultimately becomes human again as she produces children for the scholar. They get married and they have children. So it's this story that typifies what I mean by preceptual holism and what the nature of a human is. Under this view, under ontological view, which I set in contrast to processual view. The ghost is a ghost and can never become human. As what defines her is an essence, you know, that ghost, that's the is she's essentially a ghost and therefore she can never change. So in Chinese metaphysics and under this view of processual philosophy. The reason why each thing has the form it does is not because of a reality antecedent to change an empirical experience. Instead, each thing is the focal point of infinite relationships. As such, no thing has. In that kind of Greek vocabulary, no thing has a form or telos or a strictly delimited way in which it can develop. Because since each particular is related to all that is not itself, Every particular can develop in ways that are unpredictable. As such, it becomes impossible to define a thing absolutely. So that's the thinking of this processual metaphysics, which is very different to the kind of Aristotelian discourse. So this means that it's to bring this kind of theory back, to apply it to the story of Nie Xiaoqiang. And you can see that kind of this kind of worldview at play in this story. So it means that it's Nie Xiaoqian's that ghost interaction with the environment that defines her. When she starts living among human beings and doing human things, that's the thing that becomes the most causally important thing. And then she becomes human. So seeing as her environment change, she also changes. That kind of. This kind of worldview assumes that all things are related. Since my interaction with the environment around me internally changes what I am in the case of New south, so I'm internally related to all that is not I. This accounts for the holism aspect of the term perceptual holism. And then the perceptual part refers to how all things have this capacity to change internally through external interaction with the environment because everything is in process. So this kind of precise holism kind of resonates with the early conversation we were having about harmony and the nature of the organism. The organism is this interaction with the environment. And again you see that kind of thinking at play here as well.
- [54:52]
Interviewer 2
Many thanks Shuchen for such a lucid and fun explanation.
- [54:56]
Jessica Zhu
I want to mention to the listeners the evidence provided in the book is very rich and represent a large body.
- [55:02]
Interviewer 2
Of mainstream Confucian and even not outside confusion. Right. Daoist and then kind of thing is.
- [55:08]
Jessica Zhu
Just like very popular Chinese culture. But it's the philosophical logic that we.
- [55:12]
Interviewer 2
Are talking about is mainstream.
- [55:14]
Jessica Zhu
And of course there are always extreme views that may fall outside the paradigm processual holism. But we are talking about mainstream here and that could be resources for current.
- [55:25]
Interviewer 2
Project of post racial and decolonial work making.
- [55:29]
Jessica Zhu
So of course when it gets to.
- [55:31]
Interviewer 2
The practical level, when rubber hits the ground, you will find failures.
- [55:36]
Jessica Zhu
But the whole book, the project is not about making Confucianism the new supremacy to replace white supremacy. But the whole point of engaging with other cultures with decolonial studies and critical race studies is to is that we need to tear down the system of supremacists in order to do so we need to learn from one another and learn to live in companies with others.
- [56:05]
Shu Chen
Yes, Jesse, just want to jump in there. I absolutely agree and what you were saying and I wanted to stress that in philosophy we compare ideal with ideal and non ideal with non ideal. For example, we can theoretically talk talk about the ideal of democracy. But when we talk about the ideal of democracy, the concrete historical non ideal events for example or the killing that was done in the name of democracy is part of not part of the equation. In my book I talk about the ideal of Chinese cosmopolitanism. This means that you cannot say look, there was this bad thing that happened this one time in Chinese history and therefore my whole theory is disproven. Those are two incommensurables the apples and oranges you come to compare them. It's. You know that it doesn't work like that. My. My argument is that Chinese history is overwhelmingly more embracing of difference compared with Western history. So on the empirical level I'm comparing empirical things and then I also compare the theory to Chinese theory as compared with Western theory is also much more embracing of difference. My claim then I am not comparing the Chinese ideal with the Western non ideal. I'm comparing Chinese ideal with Chinese ideal, Chinese ideal with Western ideal, Chinese history with Western history. The. The argument. What the argument actually is is then that there is a connection between the ideal and the concrete practice, that the ideal influence the practice. And then to your other point about Confucianism being a new kind of supremacy, I really want. I want to stress so that people don't get any wrong ideas, that that's absolutely not what this is about. Because what I'm fundamentally stressing is that the only reason the Chinese tradition enjoyed its longevity. Longevity. And was successful was because it was willing to learn from others and not hold on to this purest understanding of itself. So if somebody was to understand my project as some kind of supremacism, Chinese supremacism is really ultimately to. I just have to be very blunt. You're really missing the point of what I'm saying. So I just want to make that explicit.
- [58:13]
Interviewer 2
Thank you, Shu Chin. So, Chapter four.
- [58:15]
Jessica Zhu
Contrast this process of process, Process roleism with the predominantly Western thinking.
- [58:22]
Interviewer 2
The chapter title is Race, Metaphysical Determinism and the Great Chain of Being. So Great Chain of Being, gcb, in.
- [58:30]
Jessica Zhu
Short, since antiquity, starting from Plato and Aristotle, has been the most potent and.
- [58:38]
Interviewer 2
Persistent Western idea about the general order of things.
- [58:42]
Jessica Zhu
Here you cite a great many of scholarly studies as well as primary materials to expose this dominance of GCB investing culture. For the benefit of our listeners, please tell us what is this Great Chain of Being and what are some of.
- [58:57]
Interviewer 2
The its grave implications?
- [59:01]
Shu Chen
Thanks, Jessica. So I like you said, I note that the Great Chain of Being is the dominant world picture that the west has, understanding the general order of things from antiquity even to the present day, I would say so what do I mean by Great Chain of Being? Let's contrast it with the Chinese processual holism that I was just talking about. So the Great Chain of Being is characterized by several key features. First, that there is a single ontological order in which all finite beings are fixed in an internal order. Second, that the world is completely irrational because it is metaphysically determined with no room for contingency or novelty change basically. Third, that things are different not because of the confluence of various circumstances, but because they have been necessarily so for all eternity. Fourth, that difference is ontological. Not emerging constantly are not emerging constantly from dynamic processes. Fifth, that these ontological differences are also hierarchical. Six, that the only relationship between the different stations of the hierarchy is domination of the lower by the higher and seventh, that violent domination within the hierarchy is ontologically justified. So what all of this ends up meaning is that differences are eternal and cannot change because it's just you have the static Hierarchy in which differences is ranked. And under this kind of view, a rabbit is forever a rabbit. So that a problem for this, this kind of worldview, as you probably all know, is Darwin's, Darwinian, Darwin's theory of evolution. When you look at the natural history of the world, no species stays forever what it is, you know, so the great chain of being becomes very difficult idea to sustain if you look at the natural history of the earth, okay? And another implication of this idea of the great chain of being is that the differences among biological life necessarily denote a value difference. A rabbit is lower on the hierarchy than a tiger, for example. And the relationship between the different stations of difference is one of domination. The tiger eats the rabbit, and that's natural. And you can apply this to the human realm as well when you apply this to the different races. You know, think about that. So the upshot of this is that domination is naturalized. So it's a relationship of domination implies that the hierarchical relationship. When I dominate something, it must prove that I am higher on this great chain of being. And I think it's this kind of metaphysical worldview that then legitimizes just war. And you can see that in the rhetoric of Spanish conquest of, against the indigenous peoples in the, in the Americas, the fact that the conquistadors violently dominated the native Americans proved to them that they were higher on this ladder of perfection. And as I claimed, I think this kind of worldview is not some kind of like historical trinket or some something that's passe. Like he was saying, it's still very much with us. I think the west very much thinks in these terms about the non Western world. It's just so clear when you read any kind of like newspaper articles that that kind of structure is still there. And even also if you look at just a lot of movies too. Further, this kind of thinking is now globalized. So it's becoming more influential even among non western countries. For scholars who work on 20th century philosophy, 20th century China, you can see how powerful this idea of social Darwinism was among intellectuals in China in the 20th century. So these kind of ideas again get globalized. You know, I would say that the lineage comes from the west, but it's, you know, it's not exclusive to. This kind of thinking is not exclusive to them anymore.
- [62:54]
Jessica Zhu
Yeah, I found this whole idea of creation of being and naturalized dominance terrifying as well. And I really see it in lots of popular cultures. Clash of the cultures is actually a new rendition of this kind of racial war narrative that just never goes away. So thank you for helping us unpacking this influential and notorious idea that still stretches many our decision making on the world stage of nations and ambitions, empires in the interest of time. Let's move on to chapter five, the Metaphysics of Harmony and the Metaphysics of Colonialism. This is a comparative chapter, unlike the previous four chapters where you alternate between confusion and widest mainstreams. So it's a different structure. Personally, I'm most interested in the pragmatic consequences of these two incommensurable paradigms. How does each paradigm view the efficacy of war, for example? Please explain for listeners.
- [63:54]
Shu Chen
Thanks, Jessica. Yes, so you're right. In this chapter I'm trying to draw out some of the practical implications of some of these different worldviews that I'm. That I'm contrasting. So to give an example of the Western attitude to war, I want to talk about this. The Some classical classicists work on the Greek and Roman tradition. So I cite this classicist called Miles Lavan. He observes that throughout Roman rule, the image of devastation is the single most common metaphor for empires as a relationship of power. So I found that very interesting when I read his work. So Lavan notes the prominence of verbs such as which means mean. It's the Latin for devastate, tolo, which is the Latin for remove, eliminate, exudo, which is to eradicate, and deleo, which is to erase. You notice the prominence of these verbs in the lexicon of public service and aristocratic achievement. And he especially notes this word deleo, which means to erase, or as he says, means the total obliteration and the sense of creating a blank space to be filled by something else. This term, he argues, is most saliently associated with aristocratic achievement. He says to claim to have erased a people or a city was to inscribe oneself into a long tradition of Roman excellence for desertification of so, for example, one element of the iconography of victory is the image of desertification. He writes, the desertification of Jerusalem's hinterlands during the war seems to have been transformed into a central image of the outcome of the revolt against Rome. So this the classicist Miles Lava, and he finds it paradoxical that many of these terms connote ameliorative actions when the violence they described was so horrific. The term exudo, for example, which means to eradicate, is shared with technical discourses such as medicine, which impart connotations of reasoned and ameliorative actions. So this idea of being in the Roman discourse, this ability to eradicate something, is seen as really noble, really virtuous and related to aristocracy, aristocratic authority, aristocratic virtue and is seen as the single most prominent sign of power, power and efficacy. So the, the aristocrat is powerful and virtuous because he is able to completely wipe something out. And this is also seen as a murative thing, I suppose the negative thing, because it's seen in the discourse of medicine as well. So I think that when I read that I was, I thought, okay, that's really interesting because it fits with what I'm saying about the Great Chain of Being. It seems like a very good example of what I mean about the worldview of the Great Chain of Being, because under the Great Chain of Being, this kind of metaphysics conceives of destruction as a sign of power or efficacy. The greatest demonstration of your power or efficacy is to wipe something clean. And we see this in another instantiation is in western theories of war. And in the book I talk about a German theorist of war, very famous, called Otto von Kauswitz. And for him power is understood as the imposition of your own agency or force. You know, and then the really great sign of that is just to like this kind of physical domination, a physical imposition of your force and destroy comparison. Wiping something clean is, is a really great demonstration of that kind of awesome physical force. But very. If you, if you look at Chinese theories of war and closely related to that idea, Chinese understandings of military efficacy or any kind of efficacy. If you look at the very famous text the Sun Tzu, which I think in America is most famous among like manner managers, that for the sun tz, the most efficacious military strategist doesn't even use physical force. What, what is seen as efficacious isn't this kind of imposition of your force, your ability to impose your force? Instead, what is understood as efficacious or a sign of power or virtue is the ability to read the existing disposition of the situation and profit from it. You know, so efficacy is understood as a hermeneutic understanding of how the existing constraints at play in a situation relate to each other. And then you. And then because you're able to read that really well, you can predict the outcome with this hermeneutic understanding. You then understand how to manipulate the situation to advantage. And then therefore the goal is to do as little as possible and still to win over your enemy. So it's actually very different. The difference is you're not trying to think of everything as just matter. And then you impose your own force onto everything instead in the Chinese understanding, everything is, already has a kind of potency. And then they, they're going to relate to each other in different ways. And then you use that to your advantage. You, you kind of predict how all these different potencies are going to relate to each other and how that's going to play out. And then you kind of insert yourself in, in, in a way, and then you let. Allow the force of the situation to just carry you to your victory. There's completely a different way of thinking about efficacy. So obviously in the two scenarios that I've portrayed, in both the Western kind of metaphysical case and in the Chinese case, both of them want to win. Both the Western strategists and the Chinese strategists want to win against their enemies is not. And I want to again make clear, I'm not saying that the Chinese or saints or somehow morally better people, it's, it's not absolutely not the case. Everybody wants power, The Chinese wanting power, and everybody wants power. But the difference is that arguably the Chinese approach leads to far less ecological human damage than the Western approach. You know, that's the level that I'm arguing on. I'm not arguing that Chinese people, some have a different kind of, ultimately, some have some kind of saintly impulse or something. That's not at all what I, the picture that I'm trying to paint.
- [70:38]
Interviewer 2
Thank you, Shu Chen.
- [70:40]
Jessica Zhu
Thank you so much for such a lucid juxtaposition of these implications of different kind of philosophical paradigms. They really have pragmatic kind of effects that we can feel. So philosophical ideas do not always determine the actions and corrective actions, but they do seriously limit the horizon over ethical.
- [71:02]
Interviewer 2
Thinking in very different ways and thereby.
- [71:04]
Jessica Zhu
Could become a conditioning, very potent conditioning factor to combat and defend the flames of holy wars, just wars. So in the interest of time, I have to move on to chapter six. Chapter six turns into analytic focus back onto Confucian processor holism, the metaphysics of harmony in practice. So efficacy here seems to be the focus. And this conception of efficacy also leads to the mainstream Chinese diplomatic strategy of what you call harmony as confusion, world ordering. That's on page 182. Here you characterize the central center, periphery, imagination as this, as the following, right? The Chinese civilization is here, quote, conceived as a kind of empty center that does not seek to impose itself, but instead sustains the diverse growth of things according to their own particular needs. This empty center that sustains the growth of myriad things around it can be understood in terms of the emptiness of Wu, that Dao de Jing praises as the utmost in virtual efficacy, unquote. So that's a very sophisticated notion. Please explain to our listeners this radical notion of political philosophy and this idea of an empty center that nurtures myriad things.
- [72:29]
Shu Chen
Thanks, Jessica. Again. So I just to resonate with that point you were making. I absolutely agree that the ideas that we have, that we have shape the boundaries of what we consider as reasonable action, which is why I think ideas are so important. You know, they really delimit your horizon of what you consider as just reasonable to do. Okay, so. So to your question of what is this political philosophy of thinking of China or efficacious agent as an empty center that doesn't impose itself but sustains the growth of other things. Things. So again, I want to just stress we're not talking that, you know, I'm not painting China or any kind of Chinese historical agents as historical saints that like wanted to do good things for the sake of somehow doing good things out of sheer altruism. That's not the case, but there's a. So, so let me explain that quote that you gave. So as I explained in Chinese Cosmopolitan, if you look on page 162 to 64, in the Chinese conception, this term duo, which gets translated as virtual morality, is consequent upon an agent's ability to be efficacious and powerful and efficacies in turn indebted to the ability to co empower others, such as the. Such that the agent cultivates empathy and reciprocity with others. So morality rests on a power on political power, which rests on the ability of political leadership to foster the cohesive power of communal attachment and collaboration. I'm reading that off from a philosopher called, who wrote about this term. So, so in the Chinese term which is the du in the Dao de Jing, this is a very, very rich word which connects semantical meanings that are actually completely unconnected in the Western tradition. So in the term, what you're connecting is this idea of power, efficacy, morality, but then also this ability to. To co empower people. So let me explain, unpack that a bit more. It's this, this particular idea of duo of morality as efficacy and co empowerment, which is non coercive. In Chinese you say wu wei. So this kind of duo is wu wei, non coercive and a very beautiful image, a very good image that represents what is meant by this term duo, which is non coercive. Morality, efficacy, co empowerment is in, in the Analects, Confucius talks about the. The person of great virtue. And he compares him to the North Star. The North Star doesn't move, it doesn't do anything. But all the lesser stars revolve around it. So that's the wu wei, the non, non, non coercive action. He's not even doing anything. He's not trying to. He's. The less stars follow him. The stars just do it on its own. And that is seen as truly efficacious action. That you don't even. Again, you're not trying to force anybody to do anything at all. You're not, you're not even seen as acting at all. But then still you kind of, you kind of get your way, you know, you're still the North Star. Everybody's following you. And that's seen as truly efficacious. It succeeds without overtly acting. This, this kind of dual action, virtuous, efficacious action acts without overtly acting in its own interest or imposing itself against the existing disposition of others. Truly efficacious action. So to arrive at that kind of truly efficacious action, to sort of get your way without not getting away, get your interests fulfilled without acting overtly in your interests or coercing people, dominating other people, the only way to sort of achieve that is co empowerment. If you make sure that other people are well, then you yourself, they're gonna be indebted to you and also have this kind of good affection towards you and then you become empowered. So that kind of efficacious action, non coercive wu wei action, ultimately rests in this idea of co empowerment and the creation of positive value. Whereas non virtuous, actually non dual action empowers oneself at the expense of others and is therefore coercive. So if I, you know, if I want your I, if I want to make money and I just like kill you and take your stuff, that's, that's very, very coercive action. That's very, that's not doer action. But, you know, there are ways that maybe I can become, I can enrich myself by enriching others and then, and then in that kind of co empowerment. But then through that kind of empowerment, I'm consolidating my own position. So the Chinese term for virtual morality is law, but this term also means power and efficacy. And it also is related. If you read a lot of the historical texts, such as George Rank, it also means the giving of gifts and the sense of gratitude that results from such gift giving. You know, so the semantic variations of this term demonstrate that the Chinese saw a connection between all these dimensions. Co empowering others leads to the agent having social power. The ability to have this social power is also a sign of virtue or morality. So they have this very naturalistic understanding of morality. So, you know, we have a very completely naturalistic understanding of morality. And I think it's a very insightful and accurate sociological observation about how people get social esteem. If you think about, if I give an example, the most beloved teachers are those who have helped their students and then these teachers that carry a lot of social esteem with them and then they end up having a lot of social authority. And you know, that's just how human beings work. And I think that this, well, one way that human beings work and then that this term doer captures that kind of scenario. And, and I think it's really just a philosophy that's based on that kind of observation about how, how people get power that is sustainable. Because if you just bully people, your power is not going to be sustainable. You know, the bigger bully is going to come and, and then once a bigger bully comes, or the people that you previously valued, they were going to hate you and try to topple you. That's not a sustainable kind of power. This kind of dual power is really trying to be a kind of sustainable power. Okay, so that's my brief attempt at explaining that concept of, you know, how it is that you, you don't do anything, you help others, and then you yourself end up actually being, paradoxically.
- [79:46]
Interviewer 2
Gain.
- [79:46]
Shu Chen
A huge amount of authority and power.
- [79:48]
Interviewer 2
I found this fascinating, Shu Chen, especially under this processual worldview, right, because everything's dynamic, everything just flows, constantly change. And it is possible to think in this mutually beneficial way if you go back to the substance metaphysics paradigm. Pretty much creating of being is like a zero sum game, right? I dominate you. Oh, you dominate me. There's no other choice, Right. And also like hydraulic model, right? If I go down, he goes up, you go up, I go down. Right. So it's just like that's totally different models of how we imagine and accentuate and understand of relationships in a special culturally specific way.
- [80:32]
Jessica Zhu
And that can leads to drastically different social outcomes. So we've taken a lot of your time. Is there anything else in the book that we didn't have time to discuss here, but you'd like to highlight for listeners and readers? I mean, we skipped the conclusion, which is a succinct summary of the main points of your book, but anything else?
- [80:53]
Shu Chen
Yeah, so I guess I'll just stress again how this is like my admiration and awe for James Baldwin because there's like Chinese cosmopolitanism. But it's really. Maybe that title is a little bit misleading, but that's inevitable. You know, you can't. It's just the title. But I just want to stress how I guess my cosmopolitan, my policies are. I'm not just indebted to the. To Chinese sources for understanding our world. A lot of it, a lot of what I wrote comes from my readings of the works of James Baldwin. And I just, again, I just want to stress obviously I'm not as articulate as him. I can't express myself as beautifully as he expresses himself. So I can't sort of can't do justice to how much I gained from the kind of the humanism. But then the incredible acuity he had in understanding social. Social situations. And so I guess. So again, I want to say that he reads kind of racism in this very existentialist terms. Maybe I think he's. Because he went to France and he. I don't know. He. He learned a lot at existentialism. But I think the way he uses that existentialist philosophy is incredibly very, very powerful for understanding kind of racial phenomenon. And so at one point he said what we feel about him. So by which he means the black man is involved with all that we feel about everything, about everyone, about ourselves. And I felt like that simple line is very, very powerful for summarizing racism. He. I think he extreme. He's extremely profound and understood human beings very thoroughly. And I think my book is in part, in part, this is a lot of things. It's in part a demonstration of how correct he was. How we feel about our fellow human beings is related to the profound philosophical issues, as I hope to have demonstrated. How each tradition sees the other, reveals the heart of its worldview. So that's the one that I want to just make a point about. Thanks, Jessica.
- [83:21]
Jessica Zhu
Thank you, Shujin, for sharing with us. And James Baldwin is also one of my favorite writers too. But after listening to you, maybe I should go back read him again. So one last question before we part of our ways. I'd like to ask the last tradition New Books Network question. What are you working on now?
- [83:41]
Shu Chen
That's a great question. Thank you so much. I think that's a great tradition in New Books Network. So the working title of my book is called the Confucian Philosophy of an Alternative to Liberal Capitalist Subjectivity. So now I'm trying to attack this idea of what the understanding of the human is under liberalism and capitalism, which I think are connected. So in this book I want to again use Confucian resources, Chinese resources. Like I said, I think there's so much resources in the Chinese tradition. Now what I want to do is challenge some of the core foundational assumptions about human nature. The capitalist liberal ideology posits. Central among these assumptions is that our desires are constant and universal, which is kind of related to that previous point you're making that people think, oh, racism must be universal. So I'm still kind of again challenging related ideas. So the classical theories of capitalism, such as Bernard Manville's the Fable of the Bees and Adam Smith's wealth of nations assumes that human avariciousness, human greed cannot be changed, but posit that system can neuter the deleterious effects of everybody acting in a self interest and that this, this actually produces great wealth if you're able to productively use people's self interest. In liberal political theories such as Hobbes and Kant, you find that same structure, the human beings unsociable. Sociability cannot be changeable or hate and want to dominate each other. But political system can be instituted such that none of us have to modify our internal dispositions and we can still then end up having social comedy or in consequence, perpetual peace. The Kantian argument, as I argue in this book that I'm working on, I think ultimately he's resting on in crucial ways on a deuce ex machina or a theodician promise that everything's going to work out. But as I point out, what if there is no God or some grand design? He's some kind of grand design that promises a perpetual piece of for the human species. So I, I would say Kant is acting on quite a big assumption that at some point in the future God has envisioned that all our strife is going to lead to some kind of beneficial beneficent peace. So, so what I want to contrast with that, this kind of very, you know, dominant, very, very dominant idea is that the Confucians and Taoists were always supremely skeptical of the kind of egoism that liberal capitalist theory celebrates as a hallmark of humanity. I show that the Confucian program through music and ritual literature, which were very, very important for Confucians, is all about learning to contextualize the self within the wider community. Purely narcissistic desires actually seen as decontextualized at non acculturated desires and therefore not civilized. Likewise, the Taoist uses kind of narcissist, narcissistic desires, the root of all human catastrophe, then the thou hast prescribed recognizing that all these kinds of narcissistic desires are actually very rarefied desires that are produced when a society is not attuned to the actual needs of the human being, but that the society is actually but then this is kind of society that produces these kind of like very selfish, egoistic people is actually very, very decadent society already. So this project I really want to challenge this naturalization of the human being as a Homo capitalisticus. You know, that we were just like the beings that capitalist theory tells us. So that's what I'm trying to work on now. Wow.
- [87:18]
Jessica Zhu
Sounds fascinating. So, Shu Zhen, thank you so much for your time here and for writing this amazing book, Confucian Cosmopolitanism, and for sharing many insights about preceso holism that we have to process further and should review periodically. And I'm definitely looking forward to reading your new book and interviewing on that book soon. So before we leave, just a reminder listeners interest in her arguments but the price by time could start with reading the conclusion first and pick out one or two chapters that you're most interested in. You don't have to read the whole book from beginning to the end in one setting. Rather, I find it much more helpful to zoom into one or two arguments, efficacy of Gany a Great Chain of being, and then follow your own train of investigation to other parts of her arguments. But once you open this book, you enter into company with many great thinkers, past and present, and find many more resources and ideas on how to build a post racial and post casting but also sustainable world. Thank you Shu Qin thank you so.
- [88:24]
Shu Chen
Much Jessica for your time and for asking, you know, giving you such an engaging question that was so super fun to answer. And thank you for everybody who's who's listening.
- [88:47]
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- [89:07]
Shu Chen
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